8693/21612The positive thing about ending the main RHLSTP show is I will have a bit more time to work on other projects. Maybe.But I don't know which projects I am going to focus on - there are a few things that I want to do. Also most days just thinking of something to write about in Warming Up and choosing a news story to riff on in Newsround seems to take up most of the day.Have I made a mistake ending my one project that actually makes me some money in order to concentrate on esoteric stuff…

At Ask a Manager, Alison Green pays tribute to her mother on the second anniversary of her medically-assisted death.I recommend reading the whole thing because it's about an important issue, but perhaps in a private setting, because it is touching, especially if you have experienced or are experiencing a similar situation.For now, I leave you with two excerpts, the first of which makes it clear that this was a very good person:My mom had always lived life on her own terms, so it wasn't…

Wassup, Traipser! Welcome to my newsletter about creativity, travel and living an intentional life. I started it writing online years ago when people still liked getting email; I didn’t use AI to write blogs (or emails) then, and I still don’t.Speaking of AI, this week this newsletter dives into:Memory dividendsAcquired tasteBook recsIt’s been an excellent six weeks on Vancouver Island!To kick things off, I dig this Time take on good phone hygiene:Open your most-used social-media app. Ask…

Only just over a month away! I hope I know all the words of my new songs off by heart by then!Support is from songwriter extraordinaire Lorraine LucasTickets here: https://wegottickets.com/f/26674

Intro My solution of a Network challenge Follow the Sequence on the CTF site 247CTF.com. Instructions We are trying to improve resource utilisation by spreading data across several subflows. We needed to install a new kernel module, but the speed upgrade is worth it! Can you combine requests and recover the flag? Exploit # 1. Pull raw MPTCP data sequence numbers and payloads from each capture for f in chall-i1.pcap chall-i2.pcap chall-i3.pcap; do tshark -r "$f" -Y 'tcp.len > 0 && mptcp.dss.dsn'…

I am currently reading this book as part of the NRK podcast Leseklubben. More to come when I've finished reading it.

Bruce J. Krajewski Under Review:The End of Modern Literature: On Permanent Revolution. Kojin Karatani. Edited by Hiroki Yoshikuni, Jonathan E. Abel, and Yoshiki Tajiri. Verso, August 2026. Known best for his notions of “the will to architecture” and “transcritique,” the philosopher and former literary critic Kojin Karatani is a bit sheepish about announcing the end of modern literature, which he says was “born by accident at the end of the last century,” when a “former student I wanted to help”…

I wanted a Journaling app for myself for a very long time but I couldn’t find something with which I resonated. For such things I prefer them as web app, they enable you to use them from anywhere, they can even be installed on your phone like an app. The main requirement for such an app was to be completely secure, all user contents must be end-to-end encrypted. The encryption method I chose was AES-256-GCM-SIV. I have used LLM-assisted coding from time to time, but this is the first time that…

Since contributing to his Ghostletters Vienna book and collaborating on When Better Letters Met Josef Samuel, I have never ceased to be impressed by Tom Koch’s dedication to initiatives outside of his paid projects.I have been equally impressed by the tenacity and commitment shown to the crafts of sign painting and gilding by Sayumi Mizukoshi in Japan, who I had the pleasure of meeting at Tokyo Letterheads.It was therefore a pleasure to learn that the two recently met each other in Tokyo, and…

My palm, my eye, the light serendipitously aligned and, in a flash, palmistry made all the sense in the world.

Back in 2020, I posted the first "Locked and Loaded" blog-post reviewing five, or six, randomly picked, usually uncollected short stories of the impossible variety and covered a 118 year period of short locked room mystery stories in the previous seven reviews – stretching from 1905 all the way up to 2023. So, as to be expected, the quality varies from story to story. However, the stories reviewed in the last two "Locked and Loaded" posts only had one really good short story, James H. Cobb's…

(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Bluesky. And her latest book, The Atropine Tree, is now available!)The Opus 88 Mini Pocket Pen has been in my daily rotation for several months now, and it has really impressed me with how many of my favorite pen features it fits on its tiny lil body. For one, it's pocket-sized. I love a pocket pen. Pocket pens are so practical for carrying around, and I'm constantly on the…

[walking into spotlight][striking dramatic pose] Poo bee... ... or NOT poo bee? That is the question.[raising fist to the heavens]Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortunes, Or to take arms against a sea of tribbles! ["Meep?"]and by opposing...END THEM. ["MEEP!"] [raising both arms and bellowing]Tie dye!! To seep no more!And by a sheep, today we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks... ... is that a hair?! EW![Ahem.]'Tis a consummation…

Session 330 was played on 7/26/26Morgana, wizard 10 (Rob)Borumar, Triton Thief 11 (Josh)Blotto, Goblin Fighter 8 (Lanse)Nick, Fighter 8 (Me)Koltic, Cleric 9 (Cindy)Aroon, Fighter 8 (NPC)Jameth, Fighter 8 (NPC)Lor’Koth, Dwarf 8 (NPC)After getting Nick’s eyes taken care of, the party gears up and heads to Stonehell, straight for Rocky. As usual, the inhabitants of the top level of the dungeon gave the party a wide berth… almost as if there was an early warning system set up. Rocky was happy to…

Cross-posted from my SecureBio Notebook. This is a lightly-edited version of a memo that I presented at the Summer 2026 Biosecurity Summit outside of DC. While others at SecureBio often see things similarly, I'm attempting to present my view and not a SecureBio "house view". The Goal We need to be robust to adversaries who want to cause very large-scale harm with biology. This includes actors (human or AI) who want to kill all humans, cause short-term incapacitation or long-term civilizational…

2026-09-24Hello! Font time.I've talked about fonts as anecdotal stories before, and at the recommendation of an email I received back in May, I'm going to start posting sketches of my font work. I'll have to tiptoe on the right side of the line between simple inspiration and copyright infringement, but here's hoping I get it right... I'm not terrified, you are.This is just a simple block font I learned in an elementary school class. It's one of those fun facts I learned along with the knowledge…

The temple complete and dwellings as well, now Lady of Rain was pleased. With shelter secured and food aplenty survival became less fraught. Her People could learn the important skills of art to nourish their souls. She taught them to write and paper was born to collect their deeds and tales. She taught them to paint on stone, walls and more. Their past and present were seen. She taught them to sculpt, so figures were made of her likeness and theirs too. She taught them music, chants and…

There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom. ~Friedrich Nietzsche The stereotypical argument used to exclude women from business, science, politics, the military, or indeed just about any category of public life is that they are "too emotional." Emotions, the theory goes, renders them incapable of making rational decisions. Most of us, of course, instinctively recognize this as a baseless patriarchal assertion, one that is disproven every day as we find women succeeding in every…

Today my white, conservative evangelical Christian husband was accused of being a communist with wild and twisted fantasies. All because he asked this man, on a Christian Facebook page, further questions to find out his assumptions. My husband is a kind hearted, levelheaded man who leans right. I fell in love with him while bickering different politics with him. It terrifies me that these people are calling him a communist without even attempting to answer his questions. Not because I consider…

Editor’s Note: Article originally published on January 5th, 2021. Hate is not truly the opposite of love. It’s actually indifference. At least with hate you are invested in the subject, person, or thing you despise. There exists a relationship. Granted the relationship is bad. But a relationship still. Indifference involves complete detachment from a person, … Continue reading A Reflection on Fulton Sheen and How Indifference Halts Love The post A Reflection on Fulton Sheen and How Indifference…

MCR and their associated advisors and consultants have submitted their planning application for the conversion of the BT Tower into a luxury hotel. The esteemed Dan Hill and I discussed it at length on YouTube.One of the things we talked about is the likely effect LLMs etc will have on the planning process. They obviously will, for instance, and probably are, being used to gum up the process through the lodging of an enormous amount of objections.They will also, probably, be used as a plaster…

I discussed in my last post on the topic from April 2026 my agentic workflow using Superset, Fork and Zed. I’m now completely off Superset and almost entirely off Fork and Zed by (vibe) building my own tool: AgentIDE. It’s an “agentic IDE” built by me just for my workflows and it has made me more productive and happy working with agents. 🎄 Agents and Worktrees Unfortunately, I’m fairly obsessed with continually improving my workflow to be more efficient. I submitted a few PRs to Superset to try…

with autumn officially starting yesterday, i'm happy to say that over the next few days be retreating from the world and will watch over the garden wall

So, you want honesty?Okay, Let’s take it from hereShall we? And you know too. You know all about it. You know about the ground beneath you and how it disappears. You know why everything you held dearly is gone and you know why the bottom lost hold and the fall is going to be far greater than any fall you’ve ever taken before.You know.You know all about it. Maybe you have one or two options. Maybe there are a few choices.Maybe.But whatever the choices are, neither of them are attractive. None of…

Clear and cold, with an inversion layer bringing quarry and highway sounds out of the east. A female Carolina wren ticks quietly from the thick shrubbery around the springhouse. Cold as I am, I luxuriate in the absense of mosquitoes.

We wrote a toot on an old mastodon server that’s gone and can’t find any online reference to it. We’re re-posting it here and expanding on it. (Do you have a backup/data dump of your social media?) We were recently traveling and when we pulled out our cables, people asked about the tags. Here’s how we organize our cables. Get a knife and some plastic melting beads used for kids’ art projects. Using the knife, cut the bead length-wise to create a break and wrap it around the cable. Use different…

by Scott Jenson Fantastic talk from a UX designer about why desktop UX seems stagnated and what can be done to move it forward. The prototypes he presents around the 30-minute mark are amazing and make me really excited to try something similar in the future. He does bring up a fair point, though: no innovation is gonna come from Windows or Mac.

Now that Forest Shuffle: Smoky Mountains has been available as a beta release on Board Game Arena for a week or so, here are my initial thoughts on strategy. This is based on ~30 plays (of which I’ve won ~20). This only applies to two-player games. Just one 30-point card – a Bald Eagle – yet still a victory. Main strategies I think Rivers + Fish is the main strategy here. Birds are also strong. I can see how Paws might work, but I haven’t seen that so far, and when I’ve tried it, it has failed.…

There’s been a little chill in the air, and while I’m sad to see summer in the rearview mirror, I couldn’t be happier that soup, stew, and curry season is beginning! And we’re kicking it off with a bang: Nok Suntaranon’s Green Curry with Beef Shanks (Gaeng Kiew Waan Osso Buco). Beef shanks are pricey, but I learned while making Ina’s osso buco that they nearly always deliver. The long, slow cooking transforms the tough cut into something incredibly tender. This definitely isn’t a weeknight…