We’re nearly always told that January is a time for renewal, but for many of us, autumn marks the start of the new year, so it was with this in mind that I put together my list of the Top 10 perfumes for autumn 2026: scents that encourage a quiet, inward-looking rejuvenation. Here’s a link […] The post Top 10 Perfumes For Autumn 2026 – A Sense Of Renewal appeared first on .

Porridge und Avocado-Toast im T35 Breakfast Club in Kalamaja Mein Favorit zum Frühstücken in Kalamaja: Im T35 Breakfast Club gibt es Porridge, Frittata, Avocado-Toast, Kuchen und Gebäck. Ein schöner, kleiner Laden in meinem Lieblingsviertel der estnischen Hauptstadt. Ich war während meiner Tallinn-Reise mehrfach dort und verrate euch, was sich lohnt. Wenn ich auf meine Woche in Tallinn zurückblicke, gibt es ein paar Orte, bei denen ich nicht nur einmal vorbeigeschaut habe. Der T35 Breakfast…

I'm living in the mountains in a cabin situated just so that one can call it Germany. Of course, since it actually is very much in Germany, also if it's a mere 10 minutes on foot to the Austrian border, everything about this place can be very much considered German. Most of the visitors are German, all of my co-workers are German, the cabin belongs to the German Alpenverein, visitors speak all kinds of German dialects and yet: I can see home from up here. My Austrian German seems powerless in…

A fucking album that sounds exactly like an album should sound. GREAT songs, sharp sounds, defined, clean. Honesty and beauty. When things are done this well, interpretation almost becomes pointless. Any comment feels unnecessary, including these few lines. But I like it so much that I want to write them anyway. It’s a beautiful album. All of it. Sometimes — increasingly rarely — you hear something and its identity is immediately there, clear and unmistakable from the very beginning. Empty…

I’ve been revisiting some of my small Rust utilities this week, and I wanted to improve the test suite. There’s a lot of repetition, and I wanted to switch to parametrised tests, a pattern I use a lot in Python and Go. (These are also called “table-driven tests”.) Parameterised tests allow you to write the test logic once, then run it with many different inputs and expected results. This reduces repetition, highlights variation, and simplifies adding new cases. For example, in my thumbnail…

“Microsoft has ended 40 years of single-occupancy for Excel cells and is now allowing multiple values to inhabit the same home. For the time being, this capability is only available in Microsoft Excel for Windows and Mac Beta Channels. And it is opt-in.” Which is exactly what Microsoft was accused of doing many years ago when they brought out their OOXML standard and punted it as a global standard. Very few fell for that as ODF was already the open document standard, and not owned by any…

Everyone in the UK has their doctor and Tom Baker was mine. When he took on the role of Doctor Who, I was nine years old. I already loved the show but his appearance as the doctor took my appreciation to another level – one that would last for many years and still has its moments. My parents did not have a colour TV (they were not badly off by any means, but having been brought up in the war, they made do with things until they fell apart). My brother and I would ultimately pour enough water…

The Jardines de la Rambla de Sants starts at Plaça de Sants and goes roughly 760 metres south-west over the Mercat Nou and Santa Eulàlia metro stations. Unlike most metro stations here in Barcelona, Mercat Nou and Santa Eulàlia aren’t undergoround which means the park is actually elevated. Beside the metro line is also the Rodalies train tracks carrying commuters on the R1, R2, R3, R4, R13, R15 and R16 services. Essentailly any train starting at Barcelona and headed towards the Bellvitge-Gornal…

Mentally I get jammed up all the time, every day I feel overwhelmed by work and tasks. Whenever I want to do a deep work, I find my mind wondering. I could not concentrate on the task and sometimes I do not even know what task that I should focus on. Step 1: Write it all down Whenever I feel stuck with work or life, I would do a brain dump onto a piece of paper. I write whatever that comes into my head. I do not care whether it is important or not important. I just write it all down. While…

The train is late. Not problematically so,For whilst I am going somewhere it is nowhere fast.Huddled in my coat as thousands have done on this platform I reflect,On journeys I have made starting here,And coming home from adventures.The rails are singing,A train is approaching.Until next time, more soon…

Today’s Daily Create - Make a dramatic photo at sunrise or sunset.

Food labels can be misleading. A product that looks healthy may not be. Learn how to read food labels and understand the sugar to fiber ratio.Carbohydrates to Fiber ratio in Name Carbohydrates to Fiber ratio (lower is better) Apple 6:1 Green Peas 3:1 Spinach 1.5:1 Lemon 3:1 Overpriced “organic goodness” consisting of “organic apple purée”, “organic pea purée”, “organic spinach purée”, and “organic lemon juice concentrate.” 9:1 Organic Goodness does not contain added sugar from sugarcane or…

I heard the phrase “experience rich, theory poor” on a podcast interview between New Yorker editor David Remnick and writer Malcolm Gladwell. The phrase immediately triggered memories of my returning to graduate school at Stanford University in the early 1970s after spending 16 years as first a high school history teacher in Cleveland (OH) and then as a teacher and administrator in the Washington, D.C. schools. That phrase captured my thoughts about the courses I took the first year on…

1911 collection of 1910-1911 short stories, first of the Father Brown anthologies. Father Brown is an unassuming priest with a solid understanding of human nature.

We made a short trip down to Wexford for my birthday this year. Thanks to some slightly adjusted routing, I was able to drive us the whole way there and back with my provisional licence. I think it went relatively well - there were a couple of strange moments such as someone driving on the wrong side of the road and another car pulling out dangerously in front of me from an Aldi but I reacted well. It was probably the best driving practice I've had so far and also my first time being able to…

As is typical for stories on here, through a long series of events I ended up in kind of the perfect position to build APRS infrastructure supporting Northern California. On the APRS side, I had (more than a freaking decade ago now!) put together my Masters thesis on APRS and the protocol design of it. While working on that, I played around with a few different Terminal Node Controllers, which are essentially APRS’ version of external modem (plus optionally a lot of the network protocol…

I thought in this post I’d show how beautiful some of the more common plants can be in the fall. They appear, they flourish, and then they return to where they came from, often in a blaze of color. I like pickerel weeds with their beautiful blue flowers, but I also like how the leaves appear as if they have had color painted on them when they begin to change. I can’t think of another plant’s leaves that do this. They’re very beautiful for just a short time. Poison ivy can go from green to…

Desert Brat 2026-09-26 sarah = dog girl

Power Cat 2026-09-26 in fighting game culture a money match is where you and your opponent both bet money on who is going to win the match and winner takes all. maybe they have this in other competitive 1 on 1 games, but this is about fighting games okay goodbye.

There is something slightly ridiculous about a restaurant wanting Michelin gravitas and Jason Momoa glamour at the same time. One is looking for immaculate technique, consistency and a sauce reduced to within an inch of its life; the other is six foot whatever of Hollywood muscle and hair. Cylla wants both. It wants Grace Dent to tell us the cooking is serious so that the solo men in suits pay attention while also being delighted that Jason Momoa has been through the door. It is the restaurant…

When it comes to video games, if there is one era that I missed out on (besides the one before my birth) it is the 32-bit era. Much about that period I could only glean from magazines, which I read rather frequently. My brother had a friend that came over once with a PlayStation and played Grand Turismo and a little Metal Gear Solid. I also once played Twisted Metal at a friend's house.Even without firsthand experience with that generation of games and consoles, as soon as I launched BIRDCAGE I…

I’ve been blogging about row polymorphism since 2013 (a life wasted?) but I only learned about presence polymorphism, which is a very related concept, recently. For types with labels like records and variants, row polymorphism allows adding more labels, presence polymorphism allows removing labels. Similar to row type variables, presence type variables have their own kinds. In this post we’ll use p prefixed type variables for presence variables, r prefixed types variables for row variables.…

Two sessions in to the IM City26 game I have been having a go at conveying the atmosphere with physical printout for some of the things they find during their investigation - partly to reflect the grinding bureaucracy of the Warhammer 40k Imperium but also to convey some of the voices of the factions through vox-log transcripts. Engagement seems ok, getting everyone to read a handout is a bit of a time sink but when there is a handful of them in play that people can rotate between them it seems…

An end of week recap “Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.” – Jack London (The Editor, March 1903) Another literary deluge awaits as we fall into the final few days of September. Today is European Day of Languages, celebrated by countries across the continent, then in Canada, the UK and America it is…

Who's ready for a trip to sunny Knott's Berry Farm? Let's go! These are from September, 1970, which is right around the time when I was lucky enough to go to KBF relatively often. It was close to Huntington Beach, it was affordable (compared to Disneyland, which was a once-a-year or MAYBE twice park), and we loved it.Let's start with this picture of the Calico Log Ride (later the "Timber Mountain Log Ride"), which had debuted just over a year earlier, on July 11th, 1969. Famously, John Wayne…

Dante's Peak (1997)

An interactive emoji search demo runs here in the web version of this post. There's been a lot of Jev hype lately, and for good reason. It's largely novel (to most developers, at least), super cheap, and there's a lot of cool use cases for it. The issue I see is a lot of people are seeing Jev as a hammer, and lots of classification tasks as nails. You want to use Jev when you need some LLM reasoning behind the decision. For example, take this tweet: View this post on X To be clear, I don't…

This is the final chapter in from the excellent Netflix show Final Space. We got 3 seasons on Netflix, and then the show was cancelled unfinished. Olan Rogers was able to get the rights to finis the story in a graphic novel, and I'm very glad he did. Was the story good...absolutely. I teared up a few times during it, and laughed many times and Gary's absurd sense of humour. I highly recommend watching the show, and then getting your hands on a copy of the book to finish out the series. Purchase…

Chatting with Harry and Jennifer in early 2024, I asked why they thought differently about the connection between environmentalism and living out their faith. “Wendell Berry opened my eyes,” Harry replied immediately. “Mine too,” Jennifer said. “Mine too.” “I mean, we owe a lot to that man,” Harry reflected. In the face of messages that farming sustainably was irrelevant to their faith, or even anti-Christian, Berry stood out as a voice validating their efforts. Several farmers of faith in my…

The Grounds is a small chain of coffee shops in Sydney with over-the-top, very Instagrammable decor. Since it’s not too far from Sydney’s airport I like going there for a “bye Emma, see you next time” breakfast with my Mum before I hop on a plane back to Tokyo. Their original store in Alexandria opened in 2012, while their Coffee Factory is a more recent addition, having opened in 2024. It reminds me a little of the Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Tokyo which integrates all the coffee roasting…