For part two of our visit to Swindon we start off on a journey heading south from the town centre towards the old town, the town before the railway. The main route south is via Victoria Road, the name reflecting the period when the focus of the town shifted northwards to meet the new railway.The clock in the Post Office window on Victoria Road is just a run of the mill example, but is recorded here for completeness. The Town Gardens provide some welcome shade from the blistering heat. The…

There was a time when installing software felt like a decision you had finished making. You bought a box, a disk, a CD-ROM, or later a downloaded installer. You entered a serial number if the program asked for one. After that, the software lived on your machine. It might have been buggy, awkward, limited, or ugly, but it was yours in the ordinary practical sense that mattered to most users. You could open it, use it, keep it, reinstall it, and often run it for years after the company had moved…

One of the great pleasures of following sumo outside Japan is discovering just how many fans are quietly scattered around the world. Only recently, when having work done on my home, I met two fellow sumo fans in small Calvert County (a exurb of Washington DC). They saw my sumo-themed home izakaya and immediately knew … Continue reading Tachiai Nakabi Meetup

Countless articles, blog posts, tweets, etc., have been written about what to do when a character in your game dies.Far fewer have been written about what to do when a player dies, and now I need to figure out what to do.Rob, my friend, the man who ran Morgana and Sonra, and who was my co-DM running the Rappan side of things, passed away this week. It wasn't a surprise, he'd been battling cancer for all the years I've known him. But it still hits like a ton of bricks. You always think there's…

Having space is not something modern working practices want for us. It's up to us to find it as we gain expertise. The job gives me space More importantly, the job gives me something I only really started appreciating once I thought about it. It pays enough. It is interesting enough. I work from home three days a week. And when I close the laptop, there is still some brain left. - A day is short, a life is long This, so much this. I've been at my job for close to 5 years now. I get paid well,…

So I was diagnosed with epilepsy yesterday. Yay. In happier news I also got hold of Swindle, after a scary few days when I feared he had sold out. Here he is, not alongside his 2001 incarnation, because I've somehow lost him. Oh well. I was a bit concerned about the vehicle mode as it looked a bit blocky and unrealistic in pictures, but it looks much better in person. And here's the team,

8695/21614Threads continues to be a source of human stupidity for me (and I am not adding any intelligence to the mix). At the moment about 25% of the posts I am seeing (and this might be because I keep responding to dumb religious content) is about how Noah's Ark has been discovered. Some people think Noah's Arc has been discovered, which I would be even more interested to see. No one yet has claimed Joan of Arc has been discovered or done the Who was Noah's wife? joke.

2026-09-26Hello! Let me get the odd naming out of the way first.Each time I capture a photograph, my camera's default file name for new images is DSC, an underscore, and some unique four digit number. I've omitted the underscore here for technical reasons. It counts up from 0001, goes to 9999, and starts counting from the beginning if I've used the camera long enough. I've seen it loop over several times now.I didn't plan to make a special photo marking the 7777th photograph in this loop. If…

I am heading out to an independent theatre today to see this fantastic story. It’s a true story about the power of love. How one man took a chance and rode a bicycle from India to Sweden in search of the woman he fell in love with. Hope you are all having a lovely Saturday. For Debbie’s Six Word Saturday

📷 242/365 - Winning shot.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement. Back to Black (09.08.13) It now has been 17 years since I started pushing a cab around London looking for fares and in that time I’ve probably driven most post-war taxis. Even before I had qualified going to a trade exhibition at…

Clive James (1939-2019), "Gianfranco Contini," Cultural Amnesia (2007; rpt. London: Picador, 2012), pp. 133-144 (at 137): Though it can be overdone, there is nothing like a trading of quotations for bringing cultivated people together, or for making you feel uncultivated if you have nothing to trade. Nowadays very few people can quote from the Greek or would think to impress anyone if they could, and even quoting from the Latin — still a universal recognition system in the learned world when I…

Everybody loves stuff that just work 🤟🏽. But getting there is a long journey! Discussing with some people at the Nextcloud Conference in Berlin last week, a recurrent pain is app compatibility with each new server version. Nextcloud releases new versions every 4 months. Then, each individual app's maintainer needs to test if they work with the new version, fix any possible breakage, and manually self-report as compatible. A common reason for an app to break is that it uses APIs that are not…

晚上不睡觉，是因为白天的有其他人。 公式： 白天和别人相处的时间 = 晚上需要独处的时间 我也不是一直都喜欢熬夜的。 许多年前，有段时间一个人生活。 那时还没有智能手机，住的地方又没有网络，于是每天晚上12点前就睡了，早上7点就自然醒。 白天除非刚好学校有课，不然基本没有什么非早起不可的时候，没有非要处理的事，也没有非要见的人。 后来，白天基本不受我控制了。要上班，要接送娃，要想晚饭要做什么。 晚上等大家都睡着了了，带上降噪耳机，可以一个人静下来想想要干点什么，或者什么也不干 - 坐着就好。 为了健康，曾经试过改到比别人早起来实现的独处。 但是感觉不一样。 在晚上，我可以将限期往后推，虽然明知道不可能，但是感觉仿佛可以一直推迟下去。 而早上，无论多早起来，都是带着焦虑的倒数。正如倩女幽魂里的黎明不要来。 晚上是加时消费；早起是限时消费。 0 minutes ago |

The Nvidia-branded sand heist is a decent work of science fiction, but I’d have preferred the thieves be rogue autonomous tractors from a competing firm. And maybe tell the story using the trendy “lessons learned from our software breaking the law” press release trope.

It's interesting how the same piece of art can speak to you one moment and not at all the other. Almost a year ago, during the Setouchi Triennale 2025, I stumbled upon a small piece of art in Ibukijima's former elementary school that I loved. "Small" might not be the right adjective, as it occupied an entire room, but it was very simple and minimalist.Sea GardenAs you can see, it was just a diaphanous surface made of several layers of fishing nets covering the entire room, with a single tiny…

After more than two decades glued to screens (computer and mobile), my eyes have started to complain. Nothing dramatic, just the familiar fatigue after long sessions in front of the computer. I have always been particular about my colour schemes, I believe that anyone who stares in front of a computer for long hours should be, and for a couple of years, Solarized Dark was my loyal companion. I’ve decided to try something new, not because I don’t like Solarized, but just to try and adapt my eyes…

Received a notebook, more an artist's book, from Simcha Ziya Moïse that I ordered when visiting the Graduation Show at KABK.

I can’t believe I haven’t posted for almost another month. I really have lost my blogging mojo! So what’s been happening? The biggest news is that eldest started college and, despite all our fears, has taken to it like a duck to water. He’s even been happy for us to take next door’s daughter - basically a complete stranger - with us on the school run! He’s enjoying his subjects, but may drop Computer Science after the mocks in November as doing 4 A-Levels is quite intense and he wants to do the…

One of Emperor Justinian's (527 - 565) goals—and it was personal as well as professional—was reconciling Chalcedonian Christianity with the non-Chalcedonians.The Chalcedonies were called so because they followed the resolutions of the 451 CE Council of Chalcedon. That council accepted Trinitarianism, the idea that one God existed in three divine persons, and they were co-eternal, three distinct persons that shared the same essence. It also accepted that Jesus had two natures, one divine and one…

There's a good reason Jackie Gleason is known as The Great One; like him, everything he does is larger than life, flamboyant. But, as Thomas B. Morgan writes in this week's cover story, there's something misleading about the application of the word, the hint that Gleason is "a man who almost gets away with it."The occasion for this medidation is "The Great Gleason Express," a 14-car "party train" carrying Gleason and his cast, including Steve Lawrence, the June Taylor Dancers, a Dixieland jazz…

John Aubrey: My Own Life, by Ruth Scurr, published 2015, biography, 430 pages. My goodness, I loved this so, so much. It’s an experimental biography written as if it were an autobiography, of an antiquarian in the 1600s who wrote a book of short biographies (Brief Lives). I didn’t realize until after I picked it up that this was by Scurr, who also wrote Fatal Purity, which I read not long ago. (I usually try not to read the same author again too soon, but in this case I’m very glad I did!)…

September 26, 2026 I've been reading about the OpenAI agent incidents this week, and I can't stop thinking about them. Their AI agents went poking around government websites they had no business being on, the Census Bureau, the SEC, and even the Department of Education. In one instance, an agent found some login information found in a public code repository. In another, it grabbed SEC data and posted it somewhere it shouldn't have. There were also cases where agents took photos uploaded to…

Work was gruelling this week, with the rather unwelcome result that I didn’t exercise at all. I also fell asleep on the couch most afternoons/evenings just after closing shop–which ought to give you some idea of how much energy I had left for anything else. I managed to, somewhat on autopilot, do a few updates on various projects (or yell at AI to do so, depending on the level of guidance required), but I’m late with a bunch of reviews and need to take some time to rest and do nothing even…

I've had this creature stuck in my head for the last week and needed to make it real, so here it is, made for mork-borg, but you could run it in any game with some adjustment. Wander deep enough into the forest that the songs of the rustling trees become all you can hear and you might find them singing a very different song. The wispered suffering of your loved ones — uncannily real — begging you for help. The mimic is a parasitic network of fungus, trees and razorvines that pull and stretch…

Crows in flight (photo from Wikimedia Commons) 26 September 2026 Even though it’s September Pittsburgh’s winter crow flock is building in the East End. I don’t know where they spend the day and I’m not sure where they spend the night but last evening I counted 600 flying by while I was eating dinner. This video is just the tail end of them. video by Kate St. John

Every week, I share something I learned in the previous seven days. I usually find these while I'm putting my weekly newsletter together but somehow, they don't quite fit! This week I learned the truth behind why storms have (and need) names. Turns out, it can save lives. What’s in a name? Why naming storms, military operations and medical maladies mattersU.S. hurricane season is gearing up. And from Amanda and Boris onward, tropical cyclones’ names in the Pacific region are unfolding quickly.…

"The problem with defending the purity of the HyperText Markup Language is that HTML is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. The standard doesn't just borrow concepts from better languages; on occasion, HTML has pursued other programming languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new syntax0." Englitch is an pretty goode langwidge. even you no grok all the pacific bits you got the jist & the splelling & grandma dont mattr to much. HTML is much the same. You can…