I started lightly coding when I was like 14 - modifying HTML & CSS on myspace. My first real language was Java when I learned to develop Android when I was probably 19. I have since become extremely proficient in PHP and Javascript, decently proficient in Bash, and I've quite frankly forgotten all things Java. I'm 34 now. Not long ago, I listened to a 2 hour long interview with the creator of Zig, a modern low-level programming language. It is still under-development. I guess it aims to do the…

I just took the self-hosting survey 2026 and got graded on my hobby – and it was as bad as I feared.

In the latest episode of Mushoku Tensei, a warrior named Nina shares some gossip regarding the story’s protagonist: Rudeus Greyrat. She begins by dropping a few great feats the man has accomplished, but shortly after, she gets into the slanderous stuff; he’s the kind of guy who sleeps with a woman once, then moves on. It’s not accurate, but that is Rudy’s reputation, and I want you to keep in mind. Some arguments persist for far too long. One could say that, rather than persistent, they’re…

Tuesday I was Edinburgh-bound ahead of three days at the Service Design in Government conference. The journey north was a smooth four hours by train along the scenic East Coast route, followed by dinner with former colleagues. From there, it was a short bus ride to my hotel on the waterfront in Leith. Wednesday and Thursday were spent attending a range of talks across the conference's multiple tracks. I also took time out between sessions to walk in nearby Holyrood Park and prepare for my…

I got through all of my SIgnal messages tonight! Yay! Tomorrow it's texts and fediverse and if I have time, the site where I'm selling/giving away a few things. But getting Signal down to zero unread messages feels like an accomplishment!

Jonny Pappas is a professional photographer based in South Australia. I have recently discovered his YouTube channel, which I can highly recommend for amateur photographers such as myself, as well as for people thinking about picking up a camera (non-smartphone) for the first time. Rating: Rating: 4 out of 5. Some good solid pointers presented in the Aussie way.Aussie way? I have no idea what that means…perhaps Australian laidback cultural vibe1 is a better take. Er….anyways, his channel has…

We’re back in London, it’s warm down here! Hello again city. The flat is too small / too full of stuff, I want to prioritise moving the spare furniture up north. Lots of D&D this week! On Tuesday I ran a shorter session with my group because there were only three players and I didn’t want them to get too far ahead without the whole group. I enjoyed a bit of trickery. On Thursday I headed over to Luke’s, he’s starting a campaign that I get to be a player in and was running a Session 0. It was a…

TL;DR: Arguing over whether LLMs "truly understand" or have an inner spark misses what's actually useful when sitting in front of one. Treating an AI as a competent collaborator isn't magical thinking or naive anthropomorphism—it's pragmatic navigation of a vast latent space. Sometimes you have to suspend disbelief, show some objective respect, and let the alien eat its own spilled guts in peace. Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) This post captures a train of thought I've been putting…

So there I am reading Unsung when I come across this quote from Jef Raskin: An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties. This articulation perfectly captures why I recoil at modern “growth tactics” in user interfaces and experiences: they are designed to exploit human frailties, not be considerate of them. Stated again: a humane interface — or a humane system, even a humane technology — is considerate of human frailties. It acknowledges they…

Although horizontal extent is a common term in the icing literature, it has not been defined anywhere. Therefore, it is defined here in a way that is compatible with conventional usage. Public Domain figure and text from DOT/FAA/AR-07/4, which are similar to one of the Notes. 1 Summary Dr. Richard Jeck, retired from the FAA, passed away in January 2026. 2 I am putting together a series on Dr. Jeck's works (He had over 60 technical publications, so this may take a while). Circa 1997, Jeck…

Charlotte and I went for a walk when we went to the supermarket. Got pretty lucky here.66 words · 1 image

Donald Drakeman’s impressive historical research in his new book, The Free Exercise Clause and the Rights of Conscience, poses a formidable challenge to the idea that the original meaning of the Free Exercise Clause mandates religious exemptions from generally applicable laws. He has uncovered important and surprising new evidence of that meaning. This book will pose a sharp test of whether the Supreme Court’s self-styled originalists, who favor such exemptions, actually care about evidence.…

Friday evening, the Folsom Street Fair web site finally published the map of the fair. (This is not unusual for them: many years they don't publish the map or schedule until after the fair has begun.) And lo what do we see? That for the first time in over twenty-five years they have decided that our block of 11th Street is outside of the fair. This has, to put it mildly, massive financial consequences. So we mail them, and: From: Angel Adeyoha <angel@folsomstreet.org> Date: Fri, Sep 25, 2026 at…

Struggled through this week. Felt nowhere near 100% for most of it. Longer working hours probably didn't help either. Resulted in a very uneventful week. Not feeling great meant I skipped basketball practice. I'd been looking forward to it since there was a higher than usual attendance, but there was no way I was going to cope with the physical demands. With no club football to enjoy, Saturday was spent playing Marvel's Wolverine on the PlayStation. Played for 4 hours and hadn't appreciated…

A few weeks ago I wrote about browsers removing XSLT, the feature that makes XML sitemaps look pretty. I built a small Chrome extension to keep them readable. Then I started adding checks. The extension is now called Sitemap Inspector, and it has taught me something I did not expect: almost nobody gets XML sitemaps right. From pretty view to bug finder The first version only showed sitemaps as a table you could search and sort. But once you look at sitemaps in a table, the problems jump out.…

The endoscopy went well! There's nothing major to worry about. I'll have to be on medication for the foreseeable future, but that's no big deal. I'm also waiting a couple of weeks for biopsy results to come back, but my doctor is optimistic and everything looks benign. Much of my time over the past three days has been taken up by Silent Hill: Townfall. I'm sad to see mixed reviews on Steam because I'm loving it so far. Critic reviews were really good, though, and my guess is that a lot of…

For a long time I enjoyed Black Metal Bathory as my primary theme, and I used it just about everywhere. Eventually I just couldn't deal with the #000000 black background and wanted something more subtle. Out of this a new theme was born, which I called Darkmatter. Over time I built ports for all the apps I used, and shared a few as dedicated personal repos. I had enough people ask me for the theme that I decided it was time to create a formal GitHub org with a website that I could point others…

Some cars look better without wheels. Prototipo di Fiat Topolino senza ruote This Fiat Topolino is a prototype for a wheel-less car. The car model year is late-1940s to mid-1950s.

Importance: 5 | # | acx Scott: There’s a taboo on using nukes in war. If someone uses a tiny nuke, which produces an explosion no bigger than a conventional bomb, then in some sense this doesn’t matter, because it’s no worse than a conventional bomb would have been. But in another sense, it matters a lot, because you’ve broken the taboo, and now there’s only a weaker, fuzzier taboo preventing you from using a very big nuke. So if we want a taboo on recurrence, there needs to be some specific…

Last week my town held the third vote on my municipal library’s budget. It passed, but it was touch and go there for a while. I got a big raise which I am grateful for but also won’t affect my life that much since I am a super part-timer and have been during my whole twenty years working here. The library director got a 40% raise which seems shockingly large but only because she was terribly underpaid before then. She has a Masters degree and nearly 25 years of experience running this…

I've been sick for the last week. While that's been miserable, it has given be an excuse and the free time to finally sit down and play one of the Switch Pokémon titles finally, this time Legends Z-A. In the last week I've played to credits roll (but not post game) in the base game and DLC (Mega Dimensions), as well as obtained the Shiny Charm, which is functionally the Pokedex completion goal (with some fuzz). I've enjoyed the game more than expected actually, and while it has major flaws, I…

Living is easy with eyes closed,Misunderstanding all you see.It's getting hard to be someone,But it all works out;It doesn't matter much to me.There are songs that seem to acquire new meanings as we get older. Words that once floated past unnoticed can, decades later, suddenly land with uncomfortable precision.That opening verse feels rather close to home at the moment. Sixty years after John Lennon wrote it, I find myself in much the same territory of heavy introspection and personal turmoil —…

Words: Chris ArnsbyCountdown to Year Zero revamp: 1 week. Gary Davies: “Hello. Very good evening to you. Welcome to Top of the Pops. Well it’s the end of an era tonight on Top of the Pops, next week a totally different look to the show. We’ll tell you a little bit more about that a little later on. We’ve got some great dance music in the studio tonight, we start off with PJB featuring Hannah and Her Sisters.” Housekeeping first. Several years ago I was delighted to learn of an early entry on…

For the Bear Blog Carnival James ask us to write about music memories. I recently wrote about how my kids playing music affect me, but this will be on the effect from nostalgia musical memories can have. I think the scientific term is Music-evoked autobiographical memory. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug and for me, specific pieces of music attached to memories decades ago are something that really can pull on my emotional strings. A 90s pop song can be almost devastating - not the song itself as…

Source Astronomers have successfully captured a photograph of the Sun while looking straight through the solid mass of the Earth at night. This extraordinary feat was accomplished by detecting elusive, ghost-like subatomic particles known as neutrinos rather than capturing standard light. ​Deep within the Sun’s core, an ongoing nuclear fusion process produces these particles in unimaginable quantities. While ordinary light takes thousands of years to escape the dense solar interior, neutrinos…

A better week. I gave myself a break from the office by working from home and took Tuesday & Wednesday off entirely. I’ve thus recharged a little bit. Three gyms. The scales aren’t looking good (see below). Whatever. I started Absolution Gap. Of course nothing’s happened yet but fortunately I already know some of the characters’ names so the table-setting isn’t quite as punishing as in the previous two volumes. I’d like for the plot to get up to speed soon but know in my heart that it won’t.…

Wear the fancy dress. Get your hair done. Go out, even alone. Don’t wait for an especial occasion. Because maybe there won’t be one. Make every day an especial occasion.

The idea was that I am running an elfgame forest campaign for my young son and his friends, teaching them how to GM. They find a portal in the city, a la Ultan's Door, that takes them to a magical wood. But what is special about the woods? I wanted something that invoked wonder, fear, or awe; that invites them in to spend time there. Coming up with one coherent, fully realized idea seemed daunting, and I have less than a week to the game. But a good blog told me that coming up with a bunch of…

We got the very last of the available Pokémon product at the Edina Target today — and got our picture with Pikachu!

I am sure I have mentioned over the years that Goethe pops up in the most surprising places. Just the other evening, transiting with a friend the many corridors linking the various city subway lines, we encountered on the walls of the corridor a recognition of Goethe's wisdom: The unnatural -- that too is natural. Goethe, 1749-1832.Goethe is not the only author who is memorialized along this long corridor. Among others are James Joyce, Ovid, and Mother Goose.Joyce: “Beside the rivering waters…