Bow a metal plate covered in sand and the sand runs to the lines that don’t move. Change the note and it draws a new picture. Here’s why that happens, and a Commodore 64 version where the SID sings and the sand dances.

Well here we are, halfway through now. 50 Celery

Of the things a folding phone can pretend to be, a notebook might be the most immediately satisfying. A cover on the outside, pages when it opens, and room for a sentence beside a sketch. TypeDraw understands why that is a good fit for the iPhone Duo.This is the sort of app that brings back the fun of the early iPhone for me. The old beer apps made the device into a glass you could tip. TypeDraw uses a different physical action, opening the phone, to make the object on screen feel at home in…

August 2026 The tension of four weeks of Arctic sailing lifted when we arrived in Labrador: no more ice, accurate charts, multiple anchoring options and weatherproof harbours with solid quays. Nothing threatening on arrival in Labrador We had time to digest the transition, though. After a five-day crossing from Greenland in almost no wind, we had to wait another five hours on board in Cartwright before the customs officers finally arrived to clear us into Canada. A reminder that while less icy,…

Michael Lynch wrote a post called "Why I Stopped 'Creating Content'," and the author over at unattributed.cc wrote a great response to it, RE: Why I Stopped 'Creating Content'. So consider this a reply to a reply, which is about as small-web as it gets. The core of that piece is the difference between an audience and "traffic," and it's been rattling around my head ever since. What bugs me is that I already knew this. I've known it for over forty years, and somehow I managed to forget it the…

Part of the Big Tech's War on Users series and the Insert Coin gaming arc. GamesRadar ran a piece on Monday with a headline that's doing a lot of heavy lifting: Valve "played capitalism so well they broke it" and now Steam can never be replaced. The quote comes from Kiaran Ritchie, a former principal animation engineer at Epic, who spent the past week and a half arguing that Steam's 30% cut is a tax siphoned out of the industry, that you could vibe code a Steam alternative in a week, and — the…

forty-four, can't wait for more. i had an eventful youth. i didn't think i would make it through my twenties. i nearly didn't, but the universe had other plans for me. nothing special, but it disagreed with my youth-driven nihilism and penchant for self-sabotage. i wish i could say that my forties have brought me more wisdom, and maybe they have? but the reality is that we live in a time where wisdom is no longer valued. when folk of my class are consistently pushed into survival mode year…

"You have to go around that tree."The boy was telling a friend how to run the obstacle course he and the other kids had created. After running around the tree, there were some stairs to climb, a clamber through the sand pit row boat, a scamper up and a slide down the concrete slide, a stop in the garden to pick a ripe berry ("or something else to eat"), a jump off of something, a balance across something else, and so on until you arrived back at the starting point. It was even more elaborate…

2026 has been a warm-up lap for 2027.

As cliche as it sounds: Remember, remember the fifth of November. I must say, the quote feels even more poignant now, as we are witnessing the electric joy all the way from the USA when the country engulfed in Blue as the mid-term voting result rolled in. Perhaps “destroy a government” would be not entirely true (also, considering V’s belief in anarchism), but we can’t deny there are waves of hope for a better change. How about Indonesia? As Indonesian netizens looked at their phone screens,…

I am going to upset a lot of pet lovers today, but here it is: not everybody who gets a pet actually wants one. Some of them are the most hypocritical people you will ever meet. And while we are at it, a lot of dogs are useless. I have nothing against dogs. I love them. But be honest. What is the point of so many breeds when most of them cannot even protect your house from a burglar? I often joke that some breeds are so useless, yet so fancy and expensive, that a burglar would walk out with the…

I have written music for as long as I can remember. Within my first year of piano lessons, my teacher Mrs Topper was encouraging me to compose my own pieces and setting it as weekly homework. Those early compositions were beyond simple, but it didn't matter. I was routinely creating something that wasn't there before. It was like a magic trick. Over time, Mrs Topper pushed me to perform my own music at her annual concerts, instead of pieces that I had learned. Again, they were not showy or…

I avoided macOS 26 entirely, but I just upgraded to 27.2. Coupled with Tinycast and some customised hotkeys, it's actually super-nice.

Such is the world we live in that anyone who writes a book nowadays is going to get bombarded with AI-generated scam fan mail, aimed at extracting money for non-existent services. Everyone, that is, except me. I've had plenty of offers to work wonders for my blog (which of course I ignore), but nothing for either of my books. Until today. In my inbox this morning was a mail from someone (or rather something) called Gloria J. Villegas. 'Dear Andrew', it began – not a great start – then 'I'll…

A week or so to go before I fly out to Nepal for this year’s Big Trek. Time for a Prep update. Itinerary Val’s already in the Khumbu (Everest area) and has been sending back updates about the weather and trail conditions. Cyclone Arnab was threatening heavy rainfall / snowfall but it looks to have eased off. It’s got cold though and there is a LOT of snow. MaryR’s photos show that too. I’m still hoping to be able to trek up to the Tashi Labsta and back with Mingmi, even if I don’t get to cross…

Postcard From The Past #3: Orient Line’s 1948 liner RMS Orcades carried migrants to Australia, served as a 1956 Olympic hotel ship, and was scrapped in Taiwan in 1973.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that this blog holds the miniseries Pride and Prejudice

David Pierce at The Verge: I keep forgetting the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display has a touchscreen. I’ve been testing this new laptop, one of the most impressive Apple has ever created, for the better part of a week. I can’t stop noticing some of its other features: the slimmer design, the improved display, the Dynamic Island that somehow catches my eye more than the notch ever did. But I keep forgetting that as I go about my day, I can now reach out and poke the screen. Come to think of…

The crew over at ShortCircuit have a video up featuring the new MacBook Pro, and how touch on macOS stacks up to touch on Windows 11. LTT is primarily a Windows shop, but I was surprised at how many times they said Apple had done things in an easier and more obvious way.

A webloc file is essentially a website bookmark. You can create a webloc file by dragging a URL from the Safari address bar and dropping into Finder. The file format is very simple, a URL wrapped in a binary property list. % plutil -p Example\ Domain.webloc { "URL" => "https://example.org/" } Opening a webloc file, for example by double-clicking in Finder, now triggers a Gatekeeper alert in the latest versions of macOS Golden Gate and Tahoe, 27.2 and 26.7.2 respectively, though oddly not in…

I'd planned to take my usual Thursday off from politics, but changed my mind after stopping by electoral-vote.com, which presents its first updates after the election on its blog. Keeping in mind that the site is center-left, you mileage will vary from the comprehensive news roundup, through the humorous look at Republican reaction (Don Bacon (R-Blue Dot) was a funny touch.), to a post possibly exemplifying the very hubris the roundup warned against (Nationalize SpaceX and deport Musk? Voters…

After 20 some odd years, the Duvall family has Farm Day down to a science, juggling and distributing tasks so the yearly celebration unfolds with as few hitches as possible. I spent a small chunk on the press, helping folks print this year’s shirt designed by Neko, an homage to the new residents of the pond at the edge of the farm. Shortly after my shift ended, the potluck lines opened. I spent the rest of the evening flitting between the mains and dessert tables, catching up with friends, and…

Christian Donlan with my favorite review of the brand new remake. It's an absolute treat to read. I have a friend who first played The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time back in the day, when the game was only just released and he was home from university for Christmas. This is objectively the best of all times to play any video game: not Christmas specifically, but dropped out of the regular world and faced with a few weeks filled with nothing pressing to do whatsoever. Years later, though, my…

The old saw “Rain before seven, clear by eleven” might describe this morning, if the holes in the clouds ever stop closing again. It’s humid. The oaks still hold at least half of their leaves, but nearly everything else is down.

We will have two volumes this year! Source

FediWriMo TrackBear Leader Board: 26-11-04 So, for today’s update I thought I’d bring you the current standings on the TrackBear Leaderboard. I think it’s awesome to see that none of us have fallen behind. Personally, I was, in fact, concerned that I wasn’t going to be able to keep up. My taking time away for the last few days really had slowed down my progress a bit: Graph of my word counts over the first four days of FediWriMo. As you can see, my totals for 11-02 and 11-03 were well below…

I’m not sure if this will be a regular monthly feature, but this month happens to have a bunch of fun things going on, and I’d have liked to share more about the Haunted Shelf Shenanigans last month… so let’s have a chat about my reading plans for the month! First up, there’s a readathon on Dreamwidth’s readingtogether community designed to focus on unread and half-read books in November. I have a plethora of those, so here are my targets: Finish five books from my “paused” pile on StoryGraph…

Donny catches up with James to discuss an exciting new project that's launching. The post James Arnold’s Long Thought Lost Thought Art Deco Tarot appeared first on Hipsters of the Coast.

These large apples, oblate and wide, wear a striped red blush over the usual green-inflected yellow. On some examples the green is more pronounced than on others. ¶ The blush includes saturated streaks, and lenticels that are more tactile than visual: tiny raised bumps.

Trey Stone has entered the microbrand arena with Experience ($1,399), an attractive, Swiss-made automatic designed to be your ideal everyday companion. Go anywhere, do anything (GADA) watches are highly prized… The post Trey Stone Experience appeared first on The Time Bum.