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…

When it comes to making things, or doing most things in general, Fable 5.1 and especially GPT-6 Astra raised my ambition level. They should have raised yours, too. Claude Opus 5.5 should raise your ambition levels again. It just works, and it persists, like Astra does. It does the things. And it is highly pleasant to talk to, and its writing is pleasant to read, while you are at it. The game has been changed, again. Feedback is almost universally positive. Claude was never gone, but also is so…

Fantastique Unfettered #4 (Ralewing) What Works Well? What Works…Less Well? Opportunities What’s Adaptable? Six Years Hence: Where Are the Joneses? Coming Attractions This week, our Free Culture Book Club reads Fantastique Unfettered #4. To give this series some sense of organization, check out some basic facts without much in the way of context. For Clarity : You can best think of these posts like their titles suggest, as the seed of a discussion group (“book club”) to spark conversation about…

via Mary Ruefle

Totally Not a Fighting Cock, Paniqui Philippines. Today, I am going on an adventure. I'm taking a bus to Houston. Not a nasty Greyhound bus; I did that once back in the early 1980s, never again. A guy two rows back brought a fucking chicken on board. No, this is a classy bus with assigned seats that recline, and wifi. I'm looking forward to not having to concentrate for two long drives in a weekend. I'm going to Houston for a photowalk of downtown. Houston is a funky place. Lots of people who…

This mini-book provides a brief overview of many concurrency topics in Go. Each topic comes with interactive examples — feel free to experiment with them by changing the code and clicking Run. There's also a PDF version with static examples. This is a quick refresher on Go concurrency, not a beginner's guide. If you want to learn concurrency from the ground up with practical exercises, check out my other book — Gist of Go: Concurrency. The book is AI-free. Goroutines • Channels • Select •…

This is a comedy, but not a spoof. Spy, that I watched last week, was a spoof. It was character-driven — really just an excuse for Melissa McCarthy to be (very) funny. You could have dropped her into anything else and it would have work.But The Man with One Red Shoe is a comedy, driven far more by story than characters. The spy angle of the plot is what makes it work.It’s an early role for Tom Hanks. He plays a violinist from Washington DC who’s mistakenly identified as a witness who will…

While in the previous sequence of posts, I covered my time seeing the various sights in and around London, this is a bonus installment which I had hoped to bring before my recent trip to Singapore, which was delayed due to an SSD failing on me. Why only survey the sights and sounds of London on foot, when we can also do so by radio? As it turns out, I was travelling with my trusty TBS 5520SE multi-standard TV tuner, not simply because I was interested in seeing what free-to-air Freeview TV was…

It has been a good week overall, yet I still arrive at this Saturday feeling a bit fragmented. Let me capture a few fragments:--I am still trying to decide if my apple comparing review exercise in my Nonfiction Writing class was effective. In some ways, it was: we had a great conversation about the apples, but we're still in the process of translating that experience to the writing of reviews.--I haven't done as much walking this week--we've had several very rainy mornings, and while I don't…

Three days out from my last chemo cocktail and I ain't feeling so good. Not any of the nasty side effects but just feeling blah. Woke up a wee bit on the nauseous side but a pill knocked that down into the dirt. Glad that I didn't have a lot going in the shop. Slapping shellac on projects is slow going so that is working in my favor. Looking forward to feeling better in the AM.hmm......Both of them passed with flying colors. After dinner I had checked them and there was zero raised grain…

The bicycle is one of the best inventions humanity has ever created. A mobility tool which the average person can learn to maintain, with a wide range of possibilities for modification. Now I’ve spent enough time on the roads on all sorts of bikes. You see a bit more of the country than you would otherwise. You can stop at more places like cafes, rivers, and the like. But damn is it lonely! It’s hard enough to find a friend, let alone someone who shares the same hobby as you. And the…

Like Kev, Sal, and Colin's sites, my new blog theme also differentiates between regular and :visited links. The only difference is that I'm using CSS hue-rotation to generate my :visited colour; basically like this: a:visited { color: hsl(from var(--q-pri) calc(h + 30) calc(s - 15) l); } That's a 30° clockwise hue rotation coupled with a 15% reduction in saturation. Why those numbers? Because that transformation is approximately equivalent to the difference between the "traditional" HTML link…

There are stretches when, for a mix of reasons, I notice myself operating from a place of confidence. And there are stretches when I’m walking around with a knot in my stomach, tuned into everything that could go wrong. Over time I’ve noticed these states are never caused by one thing. It’s always a confluence, some of it in my control, most of it not. An unexpected argument, a couple of customers having a bad week, and suddenly I’m in a more nervous place. I used to think the useful move was…

In September 2025 I wrote a satirical proposal to rewrite Rails in Rust, and picked Rust because it was the one language David would never touch. On September 23, 2026 he told Rails World he hates Rust with a passion and is rebuilding HEY's backend in it. The satire got one line wrong, and it stopped one language too early.

Autumn Equinox and MichaelmasTwo dates very close to each other on the Pilgrimage calendar.The Autumn Equinox marks the point when day and night are approximately equal, a moment of balance before the long slide towards winter. It sits neatly alongside Michaelmas, celebrated on 29 September in honour of St Michael the Archangel, traditionally seen as a protector and a figure of strength and courage. Michaelmas was one of the four quarter days of the English year, marking the end of the…

Thariq: Overall, increasing effort tends to reduce failures due to missing edgecases (purple blocks), but does not fix when the model has the wrong approach (blue blocks). Low: for when I want quick responses that are in the loop, e.g. brainstorming, sketching, easy changes Medium: for most of my regular software engineering work, e.g. new feature implementation. High: for work where verification is important or there are edge cases, e.g. fixing a bug in a brownfield codebase. Max: When I want…

In honor of the nor’easter that yesterday, today, and tomorrow will give NYC about 2 inches of rain, here’s a few pictures of another storm: snow on December 16, 2020: The beginning of the snowfall in Battery Park. Heavy snow fall across the World Trade Center site. The next day, wet snow in the trees.

Rose Tremain, The Guardian: To those who might imagine me in “retirement” tending my garden in Norfolk, existing only through this and through the lives of my daughter and my grandchildren, I need to explain that ideas for novels and stories still arrive in my head all the time, like supplicants at the gate. They beg to be let in. Where would all this clamour go if I shut them out? ~ Link: ‘My Generation of Novelists is Dying’: Rose Tremain On 70 Years of Writing, And Late-Life Inspiration, by…

I will confess upfront that I’m not a fan of this cover, though I’m the first to admit my tastes are, in a word, pedestrian. I requested the ARC due to name recognition and a desire to read more non-white authors. Beware: internalized homophobia/queerphobia as backstory; one of the protagonists is a struggling genre romance author; DNF review. Love Is a Contact Sport, by Frederick Smith To get this out of the way quickly, let me be unoriginal and state that all art is political, period.…

Over the past few months, most of my writing here has been about working at Blockbuster, watching horror movies, or reading Phillip K Dick novellas. To be honest, these types of posts are not all that popular, but it’s the type of things I like to share and explore, so I lean into it. Today, I figure I'll check with some random thoughts about what has been going on the last few months. Back in June, I talked a little about Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder and how the hot weather really…

Library door in The Minories My visit to the BOS convention in Nottingham reminded me of the convention in Colchester in 2024, during which I had the opportunity to visit the society’s library. With the permission of Adam Woodhouse, who was my guide in the library at the time, I’m presenting a summary of the visit to this treasure trove. Located behind an unimposing door in The Minories, a historical building in Colchester, UK, the library consists of a single large room split into smaller…

Silent movie fans note: we will be among those contributing to the Silentology blogathon on National Silent Movie Day on Tuesday, September 29. CMB award winner Lea Stans and splendid classic film aficionados will cover a slew of cinematic topics on the Silent Movie Day Blogathon. We'll be posting mass quantities of silent comedy short subjects from Internet Archive for the occasion. Talented scribes, terrific silent film experts and ridiculously knowledgeable cinephiles will be celebrating…

Oof, I’m so glad it’s the weekend! It’s been a busy week, but this weekend should be a pretty good one for staying in to read, crochet, play video games and recharge. Books acquired this week Last week I wrote that I was heading out to bookshops in York over the weekend, and hoping to pick up some spooky-themed reads to fit in with the Haunted Shelf readathon. It was really fun last year, but I didn’t read a lot of seasonal/spooky/creepy books… so I decided to fix that. I had some success, so…

This quarter 158,122 votes were cast in 82 local authority contests. All percentages are rounded to the nearest single decimal place. 44 council seats changed hands. For comparison you can view Quarter Two's results here. Party Number of Candidates Total Vote % +/- Q2 +/- Q3 25 Avge/ Contest +/- Seats Conservative 81 28,039 17.7% +0.1 +1.1 346 -3 Labour 69 30,666 19.4% +5.5 +2.3 444 -3 Lib Dem 70 22,932 14.5% -4.6 -2.4 328 +5 Reform 8235,832 22.7% -4.6 -4.2 437 +7 Green 67 21,776 13.8% -2.1…

AI-generated science content is super prone to factual errors. Here’s how to spot it… Why spot AI slop? Lots of typos and grammatical errors used to signal that something wasn’t checked carefully. Now, it’s AI slop signs. LLM-based chatbots (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) are prone to particular accuracy issues, and it’s unclear if these can be fixed People tend to believe ... Read more Source

I’ve just spent the last 1000 days practising drawing and painting. While I can’t say I’ve made a lot of art I’m proud of, or even like all that much, I am quite chuffed with having done what I set out to do a couple of years ago. It was a simple goal: learn to draw better, by committing to making a mark every day, no matter the medium, time, or skill used. There aren’t many things in life I’ve done literally every day for 1000 days in a row. I’ve tried many times to build habits over the…

There are certain ideas that keep popping up. Like websites where you can reserve/buy/bid for pixels on a more or less large area. Alex Tew probably started this back in 2005 with his Million Dollar Homepage. Oleh Providnyk is a little more modest in this regard and recently made Pixel Area available to the net community – a 100x100 grid on which anyone can claim a pixel (for free!) as a link to their own website. A kind of two-dimensional webring for browsing and exploring. Each pixel belongs…

Daily Drawing 1000

Howdy y’all, we’re back to the latest iteration of the newest recurring bit: indie games that were on my Steam personal calendar! As before, I’m only giving glimpses at the games that Steam diagnosed me with. And as before, I will omit games that plainly aren’t indie or use AI. On that note, do let me know if previous games I held up include AI. And for a correction, Intergalactic Puzzle Touchdown from the last post is actually coming out on the 28th of October. I don’t know if I was just…