Ratanga Junction – While Your Heart Flickers On It Today, a few unexpected turns in the realm where electronica and jazz meet. I’m skeptical of music that casts jazz in new lights. As someone whose childhood was soundtracked largely by 50s and 60s bop, I have a hard to enjoying any modern jazz — especially when it lacks the textural qualities of old recordings, and pretends skillful playing is enough alone to communicate emotion. But the skeptic in me also needs to recognize that part of what…

The Steam Machine is good hardware. It works remarkably well as an appliance, not a fussy PC. Gaming is great on it. It just feels like a gaming console. And compared to PS5 or Xbox, Steam has access to a huge variety of interesting little games, the whole indie gaming scene. The important thing is that the Steam Machine just works. I’d feel entirely comfortable giving an ordinary person one to use, there’s no need for any Linux hackery. I’ve been using Linux in earnest for awhile now,…

tag(s): #overblown-minor-annoyances #emacs At work I have instances of Claude running in different repositories, many times for the same overarching task. For example: "load info from flat file in DB1, run transformation and store in DB2, update output step to include new data, enable output feed for a client". These happen in 3 or 4 different repos, depending on specifics. But the branch names are all the same, since they tie to the same user story. I have a keymap for agent-shell commands, in…

We played the twenty-seventh session of our Dungeon Module B1: In Search of Unknown AD&D 2e game last night. You can read past play reports here.The roster for this session was as follows:Llombaerth, CG elf thief 4 (Adam)Mirkle, N human fighter 3 (Maya)Egbert, human necromancer 1 (NPC)Brazile, halfling hound master, his dog, Ripper, and the party's two war dogs, Dewey, and Phooey (NPC)Bilodeau, man-at-arms (NPC)Graves, man-at-arms (NPC)Lendeborg, human porter (NPC)Last we played, the party…

by Stu Robson Stu goes over a CSS reset focused on getting typography to play nice out-of-the-box, with textbox trimming, fluid typography, text balancing, hyphenation, and all that stuff that greatly affects the end result but is often hard to remember when building. And if you don’t know what those words mean, don’t worry! The article gives explanations and demos of what everything is ;)

In this edition Chorus quarterly update highli9ghts increasing data demand Industry support for testing service One NZ completed work on 28 mobile network sites in quarter Fibre uptake now 78.2 percentChorus added 5,000 net fibre connections in the September quarter, partly offsetting the loss of 4,000 copper lines. Total fixed-line connections increased by 1000 to 1.192 million.The network operator ended September with 1.152 million fibre connections. Fibre uptake across its network footprint…

♫ You Can’t Always Get What You Want by Rolling StonesBut if you try sometimes, you’ll find you get what you need.

“Remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder treason and plot” we would chant as we hauled our guy around town in a little cart, soliciting donations so we could buy more fireworks. This procedure was named “guyzing”. The guy would be an old pair of trousers and a shirt stuffed with hay or straw, representing Guy Fawkes with an old hat jammed on top. After his fund-raising journey Guy would be put on top of a bonfire on the evening of November the fifth, and set alight, to the…

So Deno, I still really align with it. I had a blast customizing the crap out of an artisanally rolled server rendered blog I built on it but… They were acquired by Cloudflare and Deno Deploy was set to shut down. I took this as a good time to get off the SSR + cache system I'd created on Deno + KV, and get closer to what my site actually was, a mostly static site. I picked Astro + Cloudflare. It's done, and you're reading this on it. I've always liked Cloudflare, and I knew exactly which…

Over the last week, I managed to read two short books: Peter Handke’s The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1970) and James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society (2026). First, I get that Handke is a controversial figure and I do regret vaguely being interested in his novel. I would not assign it in class or read it again, but I do think that it is a book worth reading. Handke’s narrative style in this novel is deadpan and creates an…

Here we go again. This week, I've attempted a new bedtime routine.V1.0 began late in the summer when I started my vinyl collection. I think I did this for a month until I got that stupid job, which threw me for a loop. Suddenly, I didn't want to lie down and listen to music anymore. My mental health declined again and by the end of October I was thinking, "What's the point." The brain is weird. Ever since I started V2.0, I've been waking up feeling more rested and am generally in a better mood.…

TL;DR - On the last two trips, the ARB compressor hasn't held pressure on cold mornings, but once the engine bay warms up, it starts to work again. I'm hoping that replacing the seals will solve the problem. Hope this works. Once on each of our recent trips to Canada - first to Bella Coola, and then further north - we woke up to a completely flat rear passenger tire on the Tacoma. It was a slow leak - unnoticeable while we were out on the trail during the day - and should have been easily…

Leica M11-P · Summicron-M 35 f/2 ASPH. · 35 mm · f/2.8 · 1/2000 s · ISO 125

For a long time I have whined to anyone who will listen about poor hand dryers. A terrible hand dryer tells me a lot about your business, and I will judge you for it. Single Purpose Now, many people think that I take hand dryers too seriously, but I find nothing more annoying than a single purpose appliance that cannot perform its single purpose. Take a toaster for example: if that toaster failed to toast bread, what would you do? You’d take that nonfunctional crap back to the shop and demand a…

’Tis But Some Quick News for November 5, 2026 After the staggering results of the U.S. midterm elections which has resulted in a “blue-nami” and a total repudiation of the Trump Regime, the fallout is spreading to tech firms who have been materially benefiting from a wretched lack of regulation and oversight over the past two years. Take Andreesen Horowitz for example, also known as a16z. In January 2026, Ben Horowitz blogged about raising $15 billion in funds in order to “build generational…

I think my lessons from the 2020 election need to be revised. In the 2026 election the Republican lone strategy of fear was overcome by the realities people face every day. Everything in the United States is more expensive and the party in power is to blame. Further, many people have lost or will lose healthcare, adding more stress to already stressful lives, and the only reason why is to make rich people richer.

Recently, I set out to read and reread, watch and rewatch, and view and review The Porn Library archives. This time, I reread Martin Amis’s “A Rough Trade,” which was published in Talk magazine in 2001.Here’s an excerpt:“If you’re going to be a porno star, what do you need? It’s pretty clear by now. You need to be an exhibitionist. You need to have a ferocious sex drive. You need to suffer from nostalgie de la boue (literally ‘mud nostalgia’: a childish, even babyish delight in bodily functions…

At one point or another, we all feel lonely. But this tendency has gotten so bad recently that it’s described as a “loneliness epidemic.” Imagine this: you want to meet with a friend, but don’t want to be a bother because you know they’ve got a lot of commitments, you might talk yourself out of it. There’s a good chance that they’re worried about not wanting to bother you, and so they won’t ask. Or, you attend an event where you don’t know anyone, but don’t want to bother people in and…

Science fiction has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Come to think of it, my first exposure to sci-fi was I believe in books that I briefly found interesting in elementary school. However, that was short-lived as I didn’t enjoy reading at the time nor did I understand how it was a wealth of knowledge and entertainment. What truly caught my attention was when Star Trek: The Next Generation (STNG) premiered in 1987. It’s a show that feed my endless curiosity of science and…

When things are going well. They go really well. When things are going poorly. They go really poorly. Anyone found a way to smooth this cycle out? Or is that just life?

Welcome to the Café Pelagic! Please, have a seat at the counter. I see you’ve reserved the carriage for a solo tour, so let’s get started. Can I get you a coffee? We have a great variety of beans to choose from, but for this first stage of our journey I recommend a bright and nutty arabica. It’s a simple flavor, lightly roasted to a gentle finish, guaranteed to warm your bones and invigorate you for the journey ahead.Is the coffee to your taste? Very good! Now be sure to take your pressure…

View from the fourth tee with the third tee (left) and the second hole visible (right).Just off the A1, south of Alnwick, I played a nine-hole course on the cliffs above Warkworth Beach. I’ll be honest up front: I have mixed feelings about even discussing this course, so I plan to keep this one short. Warkworth Golf Club came recommended, and to be fair, it had the best views of any course in the area. I just worry that the recommendation was based on the course’s beauty, not the golf.I found…

String boards are used to organized information in The Roottrees are Dead (Evil Trout Inc., 2025). ▲ The Roottrees are Dead (Evil Trout Inc., 2025) ▲ The Roottrees are Dead (Evil Trout Inc., 2025) ▲ The Roottrees are Dead (Evil Trout Inc., 2025) ▲ The Roottrees are Dead (Evil Trout Inc., 2025)

I fell in love with the musical film The Greatest Showman when I watched it on a flight a couple years ago (so much so, I made a sticker sheet inspired by it). I sat in the center seat on the plane bawling my eyes out as Keala Settle belted out “This is Me” that I think speaks to anyone who has ever felt unseen, ridiculed, belittled or worse. This quote is for everyone out there who needs to be seen, to brave and to be accepted just as they are. It was hard to pick part of this song so please…

From The Last Terrace Day. by Leo Umilio:Observe the population of a café terrace in the last week of October, because it is not the summer crowd in warmer clothes; it is a different institution entirely. The fair-weather sitters went indoors weeks ago, correctly, comfortably, and nobody blames them. The ones still out here, gloved around their cups, breath visible over the espresso, blanket across the knees like passengers on some slow northern crossing, have all made the same calculation and…

the broken economic system that has enabled the Epstein Class to emerge, thrive, and create such massive cruelty, suffering and lawlessness; from Barry Ferns’ video series It just didn’t make sense: Why would the tech bro oligarchy be spending trillions of dollars on AI, when there is zero business case for it ever returning any profit on that staggering investment? Why are they buying up and destroying land all over the planet and wasting a huge chunk of the world’s water and electricity to…

What will be AIs impact on the shape of multidisciplinary product teams? Giuseppe has just published this interesting post about mapping AI outcomes/activities against the goals of each point of the Service Standard. Which particularly piqued my interest as just yesterday I was catching up with Ollie and when I wasn’t bemoaning my existence and requirement to still work for a living (my default these days) I was pondering what I might be doing if I was 10/15 years younger – mid career and still…

What is the shape of story? In an early talk that became “On Stories“–published as an essay for the first time together with J.R.R. Tolkien‘s classic “On Fairy-Stories,” C.S. Lewis wants us to think about the lost art of atmosphere … Continue reading →

Sullivan Summer Under Review:The Unhaunting. Micaiah Johnson. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, September 2026. “This novel is both allegorical and deeply personal,” Micaiah Johnson tells us in the letter to readers that begins her latest novel, The Unhaunting. Personal like a Rorschach test, similar to that invoked by the book’s blood-red cover, with its black-and-white image of a plantation home mirroring an open-mouthed profile, screaming in silhouette. But maybe that’s just what I see. For the promise of…

neorepl 0.5 is out! When I announced neorepl last month, I wrote that I’d always wanted a terminal REPL that felt like CIDER, without the Emacs part. A few releases later I think neorepl is mostly there, so this one went out with “CIDER in a terminal” for a tagline. It also has everything from the “What’s next” list in the 0.4 post, which almost never happens with my plans. A line editor that knows Clojure That’s where you spend most of your time in a REPL, so that’s where most of the work…