The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here. Today the amount information that we get using various information streams is at massive overload. Thus one needs to focus only on what is important without the need to grep(1) the Internet everyday. Hence the idea of providing such…

Source Susaki and the Jumantsubo Plain (Eagle Over Fukagawa) by Utagawa Hiroshige, circa 1856-1857. His work is as Japanese as it gets and great..

Cyprus vibes.

Perfume PosseTauer Perfumes Au Coeur du Desert We’re now post the autumn equinox and we’ve decidedly tipped towards autumn here. The middle of the day can still get quite warm but that’s sandwiched between cool mornings, sometimes misty, and evenings that darken earlier, which means cooler too.… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseTauer Perfumes Au Coeur du Desert

The horizontal strips measure aproximately 2 scale feet wide in 1/87 scale. Since the spring house is ready for a roof I thought I might try shingles this time. Individual shingles at this scale would be too tedious for me today. so I cut them into strips from a left over Bristol board and delinated each shingle by cutting a notch between each shingle. I varied the width and the height of the shingles on the horizontal strips.

A timeless crowd-pleaser downsized to feed a smaller family, this is a delicious dish that brings big, bold flavours to the table -- hearty, smoky, a little bit sweet and a whole lot comforting. A scratch-made version which layers tender beans, with smoky bacon, ground beef, some aromatics and a tangy barbeque sauce that tied everything together.Oven braised slowly until the beans are soft and delicious and the meat practically melts into the pot, this is real comfort food with a touch of…

Christine Spengler’s first camera wasn’t hers. It was her brother Éric’s. A Nikon with a 28mm wide-angle, the kit of a fashion photographer, and in 1970 she borrowed it in Chad and took her first photograph. She had never looked through a lens before. Chad, Toubou fighters, © Christine Spengler/Sygma/Corbis, courtesy the artist The picture is simple: Toubou fighters armed with Kalashnikovs going to the front hand in hand. It was taken in Bardaï, in the Tibesti, during the Toubou revolt. She was…

LONDON A-Z T is for Tokyngton For my 20th unsung suburb I'm off to a classic of the genre, a true "where on earth is that it sounds ridiculous why have I not heard of it before?" And yet it's a substantial neighbourhood in a world famous location, as a large white arch attests, also real enough to appear on official yellow fingerposts so it definitely exists, QED. Tokyngton is essentially the area due south of Wembley Stadium, which residents can't easily get to because there's a railway in the…

“At least I have a job,” he said. “There’s a lot of unemployment these days.” “That’s true, but it doesn’t mean you have to pretend that your job is perfect,” the therapist replied. Her name was Dr. Weston, and she’d had her own practice for just over eleven years. She helped patients from all walks of life with any number of issues, including substance abuse, grief, marriage counselling, emotional trauma, stress and depression, and considerably more. Her approach was always bespoke, making no…

Preorder Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster! Find a simple stat block you can reuse and reskin into just about any monster you want. Keep the stat block handy to help you improvise monsters during your game. I first ran into the quote and idea behind "just use bears" in Knock issue 1 by the Merry Mushmen – a fantastic zine for OSR RPGs. First written by Jack Shear in 2016 as far as I can tell, the concept of “Just Use Bears” is simple. When you need a monster and don't have one handy, use the stat…

Republicans Are in Panic Mode With early voting already started in many states and Election Day only 5 weeks away, Republican PACs are facing a reckoning. It's triage time. Some Republican candidates will make the cut and others will be cut loose, to sink or swim on their own. Also, desperate times call for desperate measures and these are desperate times (for Republicans). Click here for full story

my new shelf of words (wish I’d bought the thesaurus in hardcover) Although I’m looking up more words than ever, I don’t find myself adopting many of those new words for my own use. (This realization is part of why I want to revamp my vocabulary page — I’m hoping that having a list I can look through easily might help me pick up some of them.) Feeling comfortable with the meaning of words A fair number of these words were ones I was already familiar with but wasn’t confident about — perhaps an…

Shin honkaku is a sub-genre of Japanese detection fiction — and my new obsession!I’ve even designed my own book cover, scroll down to see…An intro to the genre“Shin honkaku” translates to “new orthodox” and pays homage to classic western authors of the early 20th century such as Poe, Queen, Van Dine, Carr, Christie, and Conan Doyle. All of whom are often referenced by the fictional detectives within shin honkaku books.The genre began in the 1980’s. As the name implies, it’s a return to the…

Quick note before we begin: this is the first of two posts I’m publishing today. You’re welcome to skip ahead to: Shin honkaku — it’s far more fun!I’ve waited long enough! I’ve entertained one “wait six months” too many!The TL;DR for my updated AI policy has changed:- I do not currently use AI for professional work. + I do not and will not use AI.The absolute vileness of the AI industrial complex knows no bounds.Beyond morality — because let’s be honest few care — it’s very simple:There is no…

One of my pastimes is making up a straw-man arguing against whatever I do to relax. This time it’s for my recently acquired hobby of drawing and getting back into Origami. “Why are you doing this? They’ll end up in the trash anyway.” — Nobody It’s true that this is most likely the ultimate resting place of all my Origami creatures and probably also my drawings. I’m neither a well-known artist, nor are the things I create particularly good. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing! So I…

In lace knitting, markers and yarn-overs just don't play very nice together. Yarn-overs make markers slide around. The marked column wanders away, trailing after the sliding marker. As knitters frequently complain, it's a very common problem.A sliding marker and the column it marks, wandering off togetherSo, the problem is, how to keep the marker in a fixed location, so it

What is a song that feels like home to you? Physically, home to me is the house I grew up in, the place of my childhood. Emotionally, right now, home to me is sitting in the chair opposite me drinking coffee. This one is for her. “Northern Sky” by Nick Drake Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Listen to Gordon McLean's Apple Music playlist View original post on Crucial Tracks Thanks for reading and keeping RSS alive. Visit my site for more.

Well I've finally worn through my fishing boots - it took 13 years and thousands of miles! Berghaus Hillmaster II Gtx - at £124 that works out at less than £10 per year - hell yeah I got some more!!

The very entertaining Warner Bros. film TORRID ZONE (1940) has just been released on Blu-ray by the Warner Archive Collection.I first reviewed TORRID ZONE here nearly two decades ago, in 2007. I very much enjoyed it then, but I don't think I'd seen it again in the years since.What a treat to finally revisit the movie on this new Blu-ray, which looks absolutely terrific. Thanks to this release, TORRID ZONE is more enjoyable than ever.Pat O'Brien plays Steve Case, the hard-edged manager of a…

This spread was supposed to be about the double leaving the bed. It turned out to be about the difference between what I make and what I'm given, and how long I've been confusing the two.

This is for… this is for my girlfriend, Beverly… I got the, I got the frozen food blues… I would drive a truck for *Aslesen’s (get it)… I got the hey dad! (get down, man)… I’m down… Yeah! I got the blues… I just better make sure that I got something to sing here… Make sure that you guys aren’t malingering… Hey, what ya say that we hit Dakota and get out? Com’on… It’s dead, it’s dead, let it,

Over the weekend I read a book review full of enthusiastic approval that was so poorly written, anything the critic had to say was immediately nullified by his own incompetence. Why take the word of a critic who can’t write? This was a matter of fundamental things like noun-verb agreement, spelling and the refusal to resist a cliché. There’s nothing new about this, of course. In the issue of The Tatler published on September 28, 1710, Jonathan Swift sets up his essay with a letter he received…

Taken 15 minutes before the previous photo, this image shows the dissipating clouds just before sunset, at 2nd St. in Hermosa Beach. 前の写真より15分前に撮影されたこの写真は、日没直前のハーモサビーチの2nd St.で、雲が散りつつある様子を捉えている。

Hey friend! Welcome to a new week. It's great to have you back. Stuff I've WrittenWhose definition. You are progressing quickly towards something you cannot remember choosing.From the Archive: What are you ACTUALLY building?. You don't build a reputation in the future. You build it today.Stuff I'm ReadingHow to pay attention and care deeply in a chaotic world. Excellent interview with Brad Stulberg. Slightly abstract, but worth your time. How to read the signal of your life.Stop Pleasing…

Another morning out with some ESNG members, taking in two Kentish exhibitions. Having gone around the Folkstone show, Allan suggested dropping into Headcorn on the way home. Two very different locations and venues, but both rather different. The Folkstone show is held in the Leas Cliff Hall, right by the beach. It’s a bit of a warren, with exhibits on three levels, and one could pub-crawl your way around the show – there seemed to be a bar on each level! But this was the view from the walkway…

Moving through the body, softly, organically. Waves of softness.

An interview with Zach on what influenced my indieweb carnival theme in April 2024.

Morning headlines:another ration of grief.I turn off the screen.The world will keep spinning roundwithout me watching it bleed. Stoical Geezer

Dating back to 1824 when it was a free library founded specifically for tradesmen, the Brooklyn Museum is a magnificent repository of 140,000 pieces of art spanning ancient Egypt to contemporary America. But beneath the museum at the grimy subway stop that takes you directly in front of the Beaux Arts building (which took 29 years to finally complete in 1926) are intentionally placed relics of another kind. Inside the station is an underground mini-museum of salvaged relics—from corbels to…

Marcin Wichary, in the latest post, talked about apps throwing up a splash screen while the rest of the software loads, versus making things fast enough that no splash screen is necessary. Which reminds me something I don’t quite enjoy on iOS. Some apps will launch with an image of the last screen while loading. I’ll start reading what is shown in the image when all of a sudden, boom, a splash screen is shown or a different user interface takes up the screen, surprising me and, sometimes, make…