The Interloper by E Phillips Oppenheim aka The Ex-Duke published1927 For clarity: I would say that I am the Queen of writing about Tosh, leaving room for others to take their own Royal roles. E Phillips Oppenheim has a pretty good claim. He has featured on the blog before. He was a hugely successful author in the first half of the 20th Century, writing dozens of racy adventure or romantic thriller books. When I read a few I could see exactly why they were so successful: they keep you reading…

I don't think there was any official announcement, but I'm pretty sure Microsoft is secretly trying to trick you into using Edge. Well, it has always been trying to trick us, but this time it's even more aggressive. You can no longer tell Edge from Chrome. Just go ahead and try. Just last week, I wrote about Edge trying to get users to launch it automatically at boot time. Shortly after, I noticed that Chrome was asking for the exact same thing. Today, I clicked on the weather app on my Windows…

Looking back at the stats for this site over the past month and comparing them with last month is a little discouraging and somewhat fascinating. My overall visitor traffic has dropped. A lot.Ballpark 1,000 visitors, down 40% from the previous month My top 5 viewed posts did not even contain any of my photography. Yipes. My biggest audience is…..China. Followed by the US. I would be lying to say that these stats don’t even bother me…you know… Im just doing this for the love of it (which I am,…

How's that view?! With NDC Oslo now done, it's a little bit of sightseeing before heading to Denmark for GOTO in Copenhagen for Scott's and my "Cyber-broken" talk. In the meantime, this week is mostly about the ShinyHunters trajectory targeting both Cl0p and the FBI, which does feel a little like a crescendo in their activities. Time will tell, but poking the feds in this way doesn't seem great for your longevity.In my disorganised travel state, I also forgot to touch on a brand new sponsor for…

September 28, 2026 I’ve been seeing a lot of black with brown in my neighborhood, and I’ve been meaning to share it with you… And then I stumbled across this painting! I’ve been having quite the run of good luck with paintings corresponding with my “real life” sightings; I think that’s a good sign. The first brown and black sightings I made were of women wearing a brown skirt or pair of pants with pretty much everything else in black. A scarf with the two colors, or a pair of earrings in onyx…

First there were four houses in this pretty colonnade row, with matching dentilled cornices, long slender windows, and thick columns in front of the facades that suggested grandeur—though the columns were made of wood, not marble. They were likely built in the 1840s when Greek Revival, colonnade-style houses were in vogue in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Easily accessible to the ferries that plowed the East River to Manhattan, the single-family dwellings at 42-48 Willow Place in Brooklyn Heights were…

Some close, others open, but more and more, bookshops are becoming venues for live events, and thereby contributing to the knitting together of communities of literacy and ideas. What’s happening where you are? Read more: Bookshops in Sydney: how’s it going? #BookShops #Sydney

Sweden's Brewski is one of those breweries whose beer is imported en masse to Ireland. Their neat, slim, white-label cans are always in my eyeline when I'm browsing in Craft Central. Occasionally, I give in to the tempatation to bring some of them home.I don't know what's behind the name Oaked Pavel. Is it a pun on "oaked panel"? It's an oaked pilsner, anyway, a style I only really know from DOT Brew's takes on it, which are generally enjoyable. This one is a pale golden colour and lightly…

Unexpected? Check. Interesting? Check. Confusing? Check. Recommended? Check. Rating: 🫨Hey, thanks for reading my blog via the RSS feed! Feel welcome to get in touch!

How Is This Even Possible!?

Imagine a virtual grid of squares over a map. Each of these is a “tile” that’s roughly one mile square. Tiles can be collected by entering the space a tile covers using a GPS device to record the journey. The GPS file is uploaded to one site, the activity is picked up by another and your collection of tiles is calculated and displayed. The largest contiguous area of visited tiles. The largest square in which all tiles had been collected. It was an activity that led me to going to places I’d not…

One of the great pleasures of autumn in Bristol is the return of Opera Project to Tobacco Factory Theatres. It has quietly become one of the city’s most reliable cultural fixtures, delivering opera of remarkable quality in a space where audiences sit close enough to catch every glance, every gesture and every intake of breath. Opera is often sold on scale. Huge choruses, vast orchestras and gilded auditoriums. Yet there is something equally thrilling about hearing Mozart in a room this…

Before I get into the main “trying your patience” portion of this post, let me note a couple of things: First, pal Tegan celebrates installment #1000 of her “Tegan Reads a Comic Book” video series, where she looks at that anniversary issue of Fantastic Four I discussed not too long ago. She was kind enough to acknowledge my efforts here researching the origins of that comic, and she has, as she always does, interesting things to say about the book. Second, I just discovered a few days ago that…

Let's use up some RANDOS! Oddball slides that might be orphans or leftuggies. Beginning with this July, 1962 photo of Skull Rock. It's a nice 3/4 profile, really showing off the series of waterfalls that looked so great and made such a pleasant sound. I often think that a pool feature like this would be fun at one of my many mansions!Next is this scan from June, 1962 featuring the Motorized Firetruck as it rounded the Plaza, where I assume that it dropped off some passengers, and took on a new…

Funny Face (1957)

Back in January I shared my thoughts about a wonderful book which I’d received as a Christmas gift from lovely Jacqui – “Souvenir” by Michael Bracewell. The book was basically catnip for me, transporting me back into the London of the late 1970s and 1980s. It was a beautifully written and evocative work which really spoke to me, and I was happy to discover Bracewell’s writing. He’s produced a healthy number of books which I could obviously go out and explore, but when I discovered recently that…

Some Dungeons & Dragons games are complex tactical treasures. Others are intricately designed RPGs so reactive every new run feels as fresh as the first. A few toss me in a trap-laden labyrinth and throw away the key. And then there’s Demon Stone. Demon Stone takes the popular tabletop RPG and reimagines it as a blockbuster action movie, three unlikely heroes—all a little sassy, all haunted by their pasts in some way—forced to work together against a common foe. It’s perfect. Exhilarating.…

Geological puddingEnjoying coffee one morning at the Cock and Rabbit, by the village green at The Lee, my eye caught what looked like some sort of prehistoric standing stone. A little later I stepped outside to have a look. It’s clearly not a menhir, but in fact three chunky stones piled one on top of the other, and a further stone on the ground in front of the three. The Resident Wise Woman, a quick hand with online maps, has already identified them as ‘the Pudding Stones’ and was busily…

Over the last two articles we went through everything needed to run a model: an SDK that runs inference, and a management layer that downloads models, sizes them for your hardware and loads them. You can use the SDK directly from your Go code, but one of the most popular ways of consuming LLMs is through an HTTP API, and that’s what’s left: the server that lets your existing OpenAI client talk to all of it.

This is our October 2026 book club book. Join us. Bogost asks us to slow down and enjoy the little experiences around use. Maybe it's the feeling of the ridges on a cup, or the bubbles in a soda as they invade our senses. Whatever it is for you, enjoy the small stuff. While I found the book a good read, it likely could have been about half the length and still got it's point across. Many chapters seemed to say pretty much the same thing preceding ones had but tackled a slightly different angle.…

What we all need now and then is a good Baroque style Renaissance themed confrontation of some sort or other. Coming soon to a pub, club, street corner or even in your very own front room. All good people need to just lose their shit a bit, every now and then. Inspired by Caravaggio of course. There can be no one else. Here's some suggestions for things that you can "lose your shit" over right now - in no particular order:The futureNot giving a toss about Ed SheeranHolidays in the sunAndy…

Over the Labor Day holiday I made use of my zoo membership and went to the downtown San Diego Zoo. I don’t think I’ve ever gone to the zoo by myself so I was kinda nice being able to spend my time wherever I wanted. Naturally I spent more time in the aviaries than anywhere else. So I’ve compiled my favorite bird pics. I had a lot of fun taking pictures with my zoom lens. Not all were in focus but it was enough to scratch my photography itch. The limited capabilities of my camera help keep me…

When I SSH to a VPS I just spun up, there's no guarantee whatever godforsaken LTS version of Ubuntu it's running has Node.js or Ruby on it, let alone some fancy-schmancy version manager. Python? Don't make me laugh—nobody in the last 20 years has been able to successfully install Python. So I use the language that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time: awk, which is the standard general-purpose programming language. Some of you may be skeptical. Some of you may be asking "what standard". I'll tell you…

This is exciting! I have loved building this commission and have been itching to share the finished result with you all since it left for its new home a week or two ago…This is Dawson Creek. Not quite the Dawson Creek I sketched out last October, nearly a year ago now, but nevertheless inspired by and in tribute to that scheme.The layout you see before you has been moved from Northern Canada’s Yukon to the banks of the river Tees… as a result we’ve swapped desolation, pine trees and tin shacks…

I’ve never really got on with a full moon, fishing-wise. Some anglers apparently see a great big glowing orb in the sky and think it’s going to improve their chances, whereas I see it and start wondering whether I should have stayed at home and alphabetised the tackle box.I’ve actually got the evidence to prove it, because whenever I look back through the blog my full-moon sessions have produced roughly the same result as putting a baited hook in the garden pond and waiting for next door’s…

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism (2021) Amanda Montell [R by Bigpurplehatguy] whom we've met "Wordslut" before. Like, most recently, other Blobs about words, their use and derivation, Cultish gets deep in the weeds of etymology. For Montell, 'cults' cover a wide spectrum towards extremes of malignant narcissism, Jonestown, Guyana and Reichsparteitag Nürnburg. Der Triumph des Kults is partly achieved by repeating a subset of the lexicon together. If you say something often enough it becomes,…

First time putting in proper hilly miles since the op. Seven miles round trip to the cafe in the country park. And the sun shows up: last turn of summer as autumn rushes in. I’m sweating by the top of hill 1. There are five by the end. All the gulleys carved by centuries of streaming, meeting the weather of the channel. A buzzard joins me through the first hour of it, sporadically looping round, seeing what I flush out. I am not quiet. I huff with the walk and feel the muscles get to work. I’m…

BL Type — A found alphabet Build an alphabet from historic British Library book images. Match styles, normalize ink, and export your found typography. [ 📌kenneth ] Note: You may wanna read the “How it works” overlay for information on exporting options. The Museum of Time Based Art Celebrating artists who commit to long-duration and daily creative practices. [ 📌arnicas ]

I’ve never regarded IBM PCs or their clones as something to get particularly excited about. The modular architecture being its defining feature, they were always just beige or black uninventive boxes that needed extra hardware, such as keyboards or audio cards, to even be able to play music, a demo, or a game. My MSX computers’ architecture was just as modular, and they did play games out of the box. My new IBM ThinkCenter S50 (front). I already know where the stickers will be going. As time…