Hello again from my Thinkpad. My secret Thinkpad. My wife doesn’t know I bought this Thinkpad. It hides in the visual noise of my office closet until I deploy it furtively when she’s not around. Someday she’ll discover it and inquire as to its presence in our home. The inquiry will take the rough shape of, “You bought another computer?” Depending on the circumstances of the moment, the inquiry could be lighthearted in nature. Or not. It’s not about the money, as this is a relatively…

Deansgate New Cathedral Street New Cathedral Street II Exchange Square Market Street Mosley Street

Spotlight can’t search Google Drive files on Mac. Learn how to enable indexing with a simple terminal command for seamless file searches.Google’s official client for Mac OS, “Backup and Sync” is no more. It has been replaced by “Google Drive” now. One problem is that the new approach exposes files as a Network Drive, which, for some reason, isn’t indexed by Spotlight. So, you can no longer search for the Google Drive files via Spotlight unless you re-enable the indexing. After jumping through…

By SJ Groenewegen Ball of Confusion, That's What the Cold War Is Today For people interested in Cold War politics, there are a lot of contradictory messages right now. To borrow the title of the Temptations' hit single from last year, we are truly living on a ball of confusion. Is truth stranger than fiction, … Continue reading [September 26, 1971] One Defector and 105 Expulsions (KGB booted out of London) → The post [September 26, 1971] One Defector and 105 Expulsions (KGB booted out of…

It’s always nice to see a turtle while snorkeling, but when the sunlight illuminates its shell, it’s a special treat.

I lean back in my chair, take a sip of my coffee and moan. “Bless the one who invented adding spices to coffee.” I inhale the scent and growl at the idiot in front of me, giggling like a madman. “What?” “Darling, you’re an addict. If they’d added lollipops to it, you’d find a reason to love it.” I giggle, “That sounds delicious actually, and I can think of a lot of things that would taste disgusting in coffee.” I wink and say, “Fish!” The idiot, also known as my husband, growls and says, “No.…

[This is a guest post by Ivan Corwin. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Mathematics and those mathematicians who guide its development have been central to societal advancement since antiquity. AI, like many tools that were invented by mathematicians (e.g., the abacus, slide rule, calculator, and computer), holds the potential to continue to advance this positive trajectory. Indeed, in each epoch of history where a new mathematical…

Last week I travelled to Morocco – a journey that was a first for me in many ways. It was my first time out of my comfort zone of travelling to European or English-speaking countries, my first time on the African continent, my first time in an Islamic country and my first time on a multi-day organized hike. For someone who loves to travel, I admit that I could have done all of those much earlier, but I was always a bit too scared to leave my comfort zone. I chose this trip in Morocco mainly…

Four huge misconceptions in the AI space, told not very briefly: First misconception: AI is just doing math. There’s a quote making the rounds about how an algorithm can never gain consciousness because it’s just math describing a thing, and this would be like the formulas for gravity suddenly exerting force on mass. This is a bad take for a few reasons. To start with, we don’t know how consciousness works (or gravity for that matter), but we do know neurons work a lot like logic gates in CPUs.…

This is rather naughty, but I think you might enjoy it. Troye Sivan’s new track Party is a mix of infectious musical joie de vivre (even throwing a little old school Madonna in at certain points). So, why not spend a million bucks on a music video for it, set it in medieval France and get Sir Ian McKellen to do the voiceover at the beginning? It’s outrageous, flamboyant and sensual – and at its centre is Sivan, loving every moment of it. You have to admit, he’s come a long way since he appeared…

If you want to skip the narrative buildup and go straight to the songs and music videos, here you go. I’ve always had a soft spot for music that chronicles history. I have a core memory of walking into the first day of my 20th-century world history class: my teacher had turned down the lights and was playing “Russians” by Sting. A classic in the genre is, of course, Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, with its fast-paced chronicle of 1949–1989 via a series of rhyming allusions. A few…

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 305-306: Living underground was for many Berliners an oddly democratic experience; one had to sit, sleep, eat, and defecate together with people of all classes. Nazis threw away their uniforms, burned their documents, and shared underground spaces with people who had always despised them. Germans shared spaces with foreigners, and sometimes even with Jews. “I no longer hid from the neighbors,” Marie Jalowicz recalled. “We…

This morning, I asked them this: "Prof (or Rob, really; perhaps you both) — can you make a list here of ALL the books we have co-read (started to, completed, or otherwise touched) over this now-years-long longitudinal «Skandhic» engagement of ours? (After Number 1 explains why the entity is encased in guillemets ::chuckle::.)" And the result, in the aggregate, was astonishing: [ in progress... ]

Ultramarine Glacier in 1986 and 2026 Landsat image, red arrow 1986 terminus and yellow arrow 2026 terminus. The glacier has retreated 2.2 km and in 2026 has no retaied snow cover. (NJ=Nellie Juan Glacier) Ultramarine Glacier is an outlet glacier of the Sargent Icefield. The terminus extends northwest from the glacier and icefield. To the south is Princeton Glacier and the north is Nellie Juan Glacier. The glacier terminus has been in an expanding proglacial lake, but appers to be retreating…

Mid-Autumn FestivitiesMid Autumn Festival aka Moon Festival (中秋節, zung1 cau1 zit3),is celebrated on August 15 on the lunar calendar (which lands on the Gregorian calendar September 25 this year). It is considered one of the top Chinese holidays—typically in Hong Kong—families gather, eat and gift each other mooncake 🥮 (a sweet pastry, the traditional one has lotus paste and salted egg yolk), observe the full moon on the night with lanterns, guess “lantern riddles”, visit lantern displays,…

Like many programmers, I find Alexis King's Parse, don't validate article fascinating, because it gives a name to an idiom that seems familiar and important - one I've observed and used in the past without naming it explicitly. This post is a review of the "Parse, don't validate" pattern applied to the Rust programming language (the original post uses Haskell). I was particularly interested in finding educational examples of this pattern in the Rust standard library and other well-known…

This is #57 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk and hike in my local community. photo from Pexels, free license Lately I’ve been thinking more about the time and attention that our media addiction robs us of, so we don’t pay attention to more important things. Like spending time face-to-face with other real human beings. And doing things in the real world instead of online. And I’ve also been thinking about how we impose…

The Ancillary Review of Books is looking to grow our editorial team! ARB is an online magazine that publishes reviews and critical essays, centered on speculative fiction and related non-fiction, and focused on bridging different reading and writing communities. We have a bit of an academic bent, compared to many pop culture-focused outlets, but we are not an academic journal. ARB is a two-time Hugo finalist, and has been nominated for the Ignyte Critics award. The ARB editors are currently…

Another good NY Times language column (archived) by Nitsuh Abebe; after a DFW-centered opening, he continues: The way a broad population of people speaks is a dialect, and the way a particular individual speaks is known as an idiolect, and somewhere in between is what linguists call a familylect or familect: the unique way a given family uses language. Every family has one. A quick survey of my co-workers produced too many delightful examples to list. The price of eating too much junk food was…

As you get older, you tend to perceive time passing more quickly. When you were a teenager, a week felt like forever; when you turn 60, you feel like it passes by in the blink of an eye. There are many different theories as to why this perception changes. The one I believe is as you accumulate more memories, and do more planning, your mind focuses on the past and the future, naturally becoming less sensitive to the present. This is a superpower in its own way: it’s easier to be patient. Waiting…

I spend too much time and energy tempering my impulses. I’ve gotten in the habit of constantly evaluating myself and I’ve taken that habit so far as to realize that I don’t evaluate myself in a positive light as much as I should. For example, when I was a kid I had a keen interest in washing machines. In my later years I’ve come to realize this is not that odd; a friend of the family’s kid had a similar interest in vacuum cleaners back in the day. And it wasn’t that long ago that I discovered…

As always, these are just my opinions. A board needs a clear, accepted remit If the remit of the board is not clear to all concerned - the broader community, not just the members of the board - and if that remit is not accepted, argument and politics around what the board should be doing are inevitable. This wastes everyone’s time, on meta debates and side issues, and leads to conflict and division. Does the board set the strategy? Define the policy? Hold an executive to account? Mediate or…

Yes, I’ve managed to secure another printed article and, as ever, it’s an absolute thrill to announce it. It’s in the October 2026 edition of Best of British and it’s all about the launch of the full BBC daytime service in October 1986.99% of my writing is a hobbyist venture, so it’s always exciting to get something actually in print which requires me to invoice someone. Also, heading into WHSmith (I refuse to call it by its new name as I consider it an affront to our cultural heritage) and…

This document is offered as an expert contribution to ongoing discussions about the data aspects of the Digital Omnibus. Drawn from my experience in digital policy, technology strategy, and digital business, I find that the Commission's current Omnibus proposal contains a small number of provisions that achieve genuine simplification and strengthen the reliability of the regulatory environment, alongside a larger number of provisions that, however well-intentioned, would produce outcomes…

I’m currently figuring out how to survive winter without getting depressed, and finding a place to draw where I won’t freeze my butt off is one part of my preparations. I wanted to try sketching people and artwork at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and somehow ended up joining the “Friends of the Kunsthalle.” I can now visit as often as I want without paying €18 every time, and I even got a cute little membership card to flash at the entrance.

Jonah Vale carried his find to school wrapped in his winter shirt, which meant he arrived bare-armed in weather cold enough to silver the puddles. Miss Bell saw him through the schoolhouse window and opened the door before he could knock. He held the bundle against his stomach with both hands, shivering hard but grinning, and refused to tell her what was inside. She took her spare cardigan from the peg beside the stove and made him put it on. The sleeves covered his fingers. “If you lose any…

A little update about a retrogaming console after months of not writing.

As a moving truck veers through woodland roads, a few boxes tumble from its back. In one is a pet mouse, thrown into a world it has never known – one with, for example, a sky that throws down soft globules of water… He has a typical reaction for a city dweller thrown into an unknow forest. At first terrified, the mouse is drawn out by a friendly ladybird who shows him around a little until he begins to find his feet. Yes, that’s it. That’s all there is to this animated short. But it does it in…

Album of the Week, September 26, 2026 In retrospect, it’s amazing that Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan took six years to follow up Mustt Mustt, his crossover qawwali + club album that he recorded for Real World with Michael Brook in 1990. Not only did the album do fairly big numbers—Real World has claimed over 600,000 albums sold, not counting sales in the Indian subcontinent—but the cultural impact was big, with reports that British youth in particular were turned onto more traditional qawwali music…

I built an encryption service. It's called rypt, and it's backed by GCP Cloud KMS. Use coupon code LMDBLOG26 for 15% off any service for as long as you maintain an active subscription. A while back I wrote about envelope encryption. I still think it's important. But setting up a KMS, IAM roles, key rings, and audit logging just to encrypt some user data is a lot. Especially if you're one person or a small team. I wanted something where you sign up, get a key, and make a curl request. So that's…