📷 243/365 - Red berries.

Last weekend was busy with birthday parties, so here's a double weeknote covering 2 weeks. Getting ready for autumn/winter In general, the focus of the wider team has been getting ready for the autumn/winter vaccination season to kick off in October. There have been multiple releases focusing on technical improvements, especially important as we're expecting more users this year. Showing appointments design history Our content designer shared a design history post about how we're planning to…

AIDid I understand you right? Opusfived Escaping a VM: VMs won't contain cyber-capable agents - The Trail of Bits Blog Virtual OS's: Cua: Scale computer fleets for computer-use agents Knowledge graph for AI: Postgram - Self-hosted productivity and private knowledge Retrieve knowledge: Finding the Best Chunking Strategy for Accurate AI Responses | NVIDIA Technical Blog Retrieve text: summarize — Link → clean text → sharp summary. Scrape by screenshots: The end of web parsing. The beginning of…

Photo of The Neighbourhood from their Facebook account After spending three weeks at #2, “Private” by The Neighbourhood finally dislodges “Rein Me In” to take over the top spot on my latest chart. The captivating song is from their fifth studio album (((((ultraSOUND))))), released last November, although the track itself was actually released at the end of October but didn’t begin charting until June. Formed in Ventura County west of Los Angeles in 2011, the band consists of four of the five…

I was talking to someone recently and they brought up the golf course that used to be in what is now extremely prime real estate by the river in Chicago.My friend's claim was that this happened because people wanted to protect their views of the lake, and that building tall towers there (which is eventually what happened, of course) would impact others' views. I'm not here to litigate whether this is actually the reason (though it seems plausible to me). Rather, I want to talk a little bit…

Here are a hundred Minor Magical Wonders that didn’t quite fit nicely into lists of their own. The intention was to provide some ideas for stocking the shelves in your typical “Magic Shop” or some trinkets to represent an Itinerant Alchemist or Medicine Show's Wares. Most of these are intended to be single-use and not too terribly expensive. They fall under the framing of permitting the Player Characters to spend some of their hard-earned money in order to potentially improve their chances of…

A slight frost first thing but a lovely day. Washed T car. Did office and T. Brushed leaves from round lab door. Tied a shrub up on the library wall. New leather. L.

From 12 years ago. Large puppet (ballerina) Photo Dull Tool Dim Bulb Archives. Now in a Private Collection

I was listening to a podcast the other day and one of the hosts is Jewish. They said that support of Palestinians is antisemitic. There’s the source of my confusion. To me it would be like saying all Americans are racists because the KKK is a hate group, right? In my mind there is a big difference between Hamas and Palestinians, or are they inseparable? I cannot imagine the answer being “Yes, they’re inseparable.” The way I see things right now is the Palestinians are being exterminated. How in…

Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 09-20-2026 There were 2 links posted this week. 09/25/2026 @19:26 Dolly Parton Day declared in various cities and states across the US on 9/25 | Dolly Parton | The GuardianCities and states across the country are declaring 25 September Dolly Parton Day, month after the Queen of Country died at age 80.The date, 9/25, is a tribute to Parton’s popular single, 9 to 5.Happy Dolly Parton Day. 09/22/2026 @11:33 ‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are…

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades. There are few websites that have blown themselves up as often as The Escapist. They were once a respected market for insightful games writing, but between going all-in on Gamergate and alienating their video content creation arm, I’m surprised their domain name doesn’t 404 by this point. I don’t mean this as speaking ill of anyone currently working there, as someone who’s almost…

Another eclectic Delia happening last night. Things kicked off with songs from Pete Hollingsworth, followed by captivating piano improv from Alucidnation. After the break, I really enjoyed Memotone’s loops and textures. His set rewarded patience, with the seemingly formless middle leading us to beautiful renditions of Catherine on Fire and Time Is Away Theme. I took the opportunity to test my new iPhone 18 Pro. I’ve struggled with a deteriorating iPhone 13 for five years, so this new phone…

maplibre-gl-lanes v1.0.0 Lanes Rendering Example The old (outdated) print RAMBA map was the inspiration for the parallel lines/lanes (public transit-style) maps on trailmaps.app. They functioned, but I wasn’t super happy with how they looked. It worked by using the built-in line-offset and bolting on a bunch of fixes at map generation time. This looked… mostly okay… but fell apart at complex intersections and had lots of back-and-forth transitions. I realized that a better way to do this would…

Before GNU Autoconf generated configure scripts, there was a DOS program called Autoconf. It let you keep one CONFIG.SYS and one AUTOEXEC.BAT, then choose among boot configurations by pressing a key. You did not have to wait for a menu. The PC BIOS kept early keystrokes in its keyboard queue, so you could press a configuration letter before AUTOCONF.SYS had even loaded. When the driver finally ran, it found the key and continued immediately. I did not write the original. I copied its x86…

Fall is underway as the leaves begin to change color. I had my annual dermatology appointment the other day, and Maps had me take kind of a back way for the return trip. I often find that annoying, but in this case it was wonderful. Quiet country roads, and beautiful scenery. One biopsy on my right calf, some liquid nitrogen to my left cheek, and if the biopsy is clear, I'm good for another year. In an interesting coincidence, this appointment was from a cancellation, otherwise I wouldn't have…

The company stage a two-pronged assault on the hobgoblins encampment, slaughter them all and close the portal to the elven lands. Party Members Tina the Titanic - Level 7 Fighter Telperion Desh - Level 7 Lich Tobias Little, a.k.a. Lil Toby - Level 6 Cleric Huntsman - Level 5 Martial Artist FollowersZorrel "Captain Nasty" Gnast (Fighter 7), Tiny Tina (Cleric 7) and Princess Pizzabones (Thief 4) Session RecapWith the ability to work tirelessly due to his new found undeath, Telperion spends a…

At some point after I got my new screen, I gave up on the native Mail app on my Mac. With the new resolution the text became too small to read and I got fed up that something as basic as zoom wasn’t available on one of Mac’s classic apps1. Even 40-something-year-old Emacs has a built-in zoom function. Thunderbird on macOS sounds out of place, especially with so many other options. I picked it up because it’s one of the clear options on Linux (my desktop), and I know it to be a free and…

All the feedback I’ve gotten from readers about recent camera launches, particularly Nikon’s Z5IIC one, made me realize that the camera makers haven’t figured something out yet. Basically, it’s this: there have been so few new camera launches this year that each one stands out in isolation. All the various brand loyalists have nothing to do until their maker finally announces something, so they pile on to announcements of products that they have no interest in. What this produces is viral…

This is the current favourite birthday cake in the house from bromabakery.com, I like to use the 9" pans. The recipe below isn't exactly the same, its what I have been using based on the ingredients that I have around the house. I do make a few changes to the frosting recipe, but I don't really have a recipe for it. Sometimes we use vanilla and other times chocolate, but pretty much always buttercream. The cake uses both baking powder and baking soda. Recipe for Chocolate Cake Chocolate Cake…

Breezy and cool, with occasional outbreaks of sunshine. It takes me two hours to work out that the soft clucking sound I’d thought was a hen turkey is actually a branch rubbing against the gutter for the back roof. A chipmunk rummages under my chair, then scuttles back under the small woodpile next to me.

If you want to take a risk, you have to make peace with the volatility that comes with it. Riskier bets have more volatility with bigger highs and bigger lows. Safer bets stay flatter, and the returns stay flatter too. This holds for all kinds of bets – from bets on investments to careers to relationships. There’s no guarantee high risk pays off, but, at the same time, it’s typically the only way to give yourself a shot at a high return. And that road isn’t for the faint of heart. When you pick…

Hello! Recently I needed bike lights for my bike. And I remembered that I already had rechargeable bike lights that I bought ten years ago, that I hadn’t tried in a long time. I tried to recharge them, but after fully charging them, they only worked for maybe 5 minutes before they turned off again. I don’t know much about electronics, but I’ve been curious about whether it’s possible to fix old electronics for a long time, and this seemed like the perfect repair project because I might just…

These notes are a little raw, I'll come back to clean things up after the conference. On this page As I mentioned in my post on swap, zram, zswap and hibernate, I went to NixCon2026 at Jagiellonian University in Krakow! I thought I didn't have an open weekend to do a conference like PyCon and NeurIPS last year. Then about two weeks ago I had some plans fall through and work was able to fast track the trip approvals. This was the first time the conference was for days long. They added Friday and…

It's not the King's bounty, it's mine.

Last night, roaming among the more remote and obscure outlying TV channels, I happened upon that greatest of all the Ealing comedies, Kind Hearts and Coronets, which I happily watched to the end – it never palls. Next up after that was another fine Ealing comedy, The Ladykillers, featuring another extraordinary performance by Alec Guinness, with the young Peter Sellers, still plump and rather sweaty, in his first major film role. As it got under way, I felt there was something wrong – why was…

“Just self-host it” is blinded techie advice that ignores reality, most people don’t want to spend their lives patching servers, managing certificates and worrying about whether they accidentally opened a security hole. But the alternative doesn’t have to be handing everything to a commercial platform. There is a third path: community self-hosting. And this is actually how much of the #Fediverse has worked for the last decade. A local group, cooperative, union, neighbourhood or affinity group…

This silver week I got the full week off, making a perfect opportunity to travel, right? Wrong! Three forces conspired to keep me in Tokyo, one of them being a high study load. The weather was also, well, not great? Perhaps this is why my motivation has wavered. Several days of heavy typhoon rain and different levels of weather alert. Still manage to run a lot though. On Wednesday the lads go to see Spiral, Spiral, which was very guruguru, followed by dinner at afuri. I learn a few things but…

Andy rounds up yesterday’s meeting with some photos. A mainly Sci-Fi and Fantasy day today, although there was a large historical game as well. We’ll lead with Alan’s Star Wars X-Wing game, featuring a couple of large(ish) ships and several fighters (above) The big ships join battle TIE Defender getting close X-Wings and Y-Wings on patrol C-Roc Gazanti Class (I think) Imperial Gozanti-class Assault Carrier Tony and Phil continued their Glacial Quest of the Ringbearer campaign, including the…

The big 3-9. Friday was my birthday.I woke up that morning free of new mosquito bites. Perhaps Ms. Mosquito decided to give me a break; or she's just so FULL from 2 days of drinking our blood that she's hidden herself somewhere and is now laying eggs. (The hunt continues...) Despite my previous reservations about this particular year, I was excited to celebrate ME. The sky is clear and blue; the air crisp and slightly cold, just how I like it. A really long timeline 8:30 ⇣Wake up, receive…

elevator meetingbeautiful, Black womansmelled of jasmine, lilac, coconut, and patchouli.we rode the floors, silent yet observant.I exited, but turned around and uttered,“You smell good”and watched her facelight the dark, enclosed space.“THANK YOU!”in my head, she’s“Lady Smellgood”, subtlylacing our buildingwith her scent without trying. effortless victory.