I like RSS, I’ve advocated for it in the past. I even have a roster of websites I reed via RSS. But it’s getting to a point where the open web isn’t as open as we’d like due to ai taking over and solpifying everything online. The fight is with bots scraping data to sell back to us in the form of a subscription (not that I have one), but also stealing our work for the same reason.

For Day 5 of Noirvember 2026, we’re serving up Favorite Noir Quote for our Daily Dish. Film noir movies are chockful of great lines and memorable bits of dialogue, and on any given day, any 12 quotes could easily qualify for my favorite. Today, though, I’m choosing one that I’ve actually said more than once in real life: “My old man always said, ‘Liquor doesn’t drown your troubles – just teaches ‘em how to swim.’” – Gene Lockhart in Red Light (1950) Words to live by. What quote would you pick…

When I said I had no problems copying the e1000 module sources tarball using a floppy, I wasn’t completely honest. I had to format the floppy using KFloppy first, and that failed with a permission denied message on /dev/fd0h1440. That particular file was owned by root and group disk, but I wasn’t a member of that group. I think this was a bug, but it was easily solved: $ su - root Password: # gpasswd -a diederic disk Then I had to log out and in again. The e1000 module, however, didn’t seem to…

Final Fantasy Resonance Odin comes for thee. Did a couple Colosseum rounds and then found a sidequest to get Bahamut. He...kicked my ass. I'll have to come back to that one. I assume it's doable now but I'd have to figure out the loadout and everything and I don't quite want to bother just now. Bahamut too tough for me right now. So, skipping that, I finished off a couple side quests for Charlotte and Lasswell's personal. His personal quest was a nice button on the end of chapter 6 events. I…

I really enjoyed A Link Between Worlds. It's fun, it's not too long, and it has some moments of real genius. It offers two very unique primary mechanics to the game, one of which is very good and makes me wish the other was better. The two mechanics, for those who don't know, are Link's ability to merge with walls and Ravio's shop. Let's start with the worse one, Ravio's rental system. It's not all bad, it does a good job in making rupees feel actually valuable, something that isn't really the…

Few restaurant sauces have earned the loyal following of Winger's Sticky Fingers Sauce. With it's irresistible combination of sweet brown sugar and tangy hot sauce, this simple copycat recipe creates the perfect sticky glaze for crispy chicken strips, wings and more. Best of all it comes together with only three simple ingredients, making it an easy way to bring restaurant flavour to your own kitchen.Whether you are serving it for game day, family movie night, or a casual dinner, this…

October was a special month for me as my latest publication (The Golden Age of Classic Crime Quiz Book) was released by the British Library. There are many places you can buy it including Waterstones and Blackwells (great for international customers). If you are in the UK your local independent bookshop should also be able to order it in, and there may be the odd copy lurking in your library. If you happen to be passing the British Library there additionally may still be some signed copies…

A couple of days ago, while I was walking between listed buildings in Grange Hill and Chigwell Row, I spotted a old bus stop. This is Lambourne Road, a road that no longer has any buses, so that immediately made me stop and look. But what really piqued my interest was the flag on the bus stop because that still had the symbol for the National Bus Company on it, and they disappeared about forty years ago. Alongside was the name of the local bus company at the time, Eastern National, and they…

This is a list of Scott Berkun's rules for living a life of purpose. He asks readers to wake up, and then spends a the rest of the book using his rule framework to help jog us into being awake to the world around us. I like reading one or two books like this every year. There are always different things that speak to me based on how life is going at the moment. One poignant part was near the end where Berkun asks us to notice what we're afraid of missing if we die, then says we should spend…

9733/21652My eldest seems to have made a realisation about Christmas. I won't say what that realisation in case anyone else has yet to make it. Last year she had her suspicions, but this year when she'd completed her list and I told her who I would send it to I was greeted by a sarcastic sneer. Fair enough. She is 28 years old.She didn't seem too dispirited. Or dispirited at all. Though I know she will go along with it all for the sake of her brother (until he gets annoying - so about five…

It was Sunday, and I decided to follow my newly found freedom of the mind to just float on binaural beats for a while. So, I put on Tom Campbell's 32-64-128 track. After the session, I decided 32 is too low a carrier for me. 64 is okay, but I'm noticing something: over the years my preference has drifted from super deep and low toward higher. I'll have to experiment with higher carrier frequencies again.

I can barely make sense of the IELTS exam. Sure, I could turn this post into an average LinkedIn flex about a random achievement essay, but I want to highlight how stupid the IELTS exam is and how it works in the big 2026. Last weekend I had to take an IELTS test for certain reasons, something that I did not know I had to do because I have been studying in an English-taught program for the last 2 years, and I did the same thing around 4 years ago too, but I guess we need to make rich brats…

Apart from the result itself, my biggest takeaway from this US election was the pleasant surprise that the polling itself seemed largely uneventful, and candidates didn’t dispute or fight the results in any big, systematic ways. Makes me cautiously hopeful for 2028. Peaceful transition of power, indeed.

I got up ridiculously early today so I went to the pool and swam under a skinny moon until 08:30 when I went back to my apartment to prepare for the Opening of Airwaves ceremony at Grund, the senior residence. The President of Iceland, Halla Tómasdóttir, was there to start the festivities: Rakel (and Lon) played some music: After which President Halla joined in a group picture of the

“It happened to me last year to lose my home with all contents in a night of that phenomenon that we oddly called blitz, though why we should use the German for lightning for attack by bombs I do not know, unless to appease by euphemism, like calling the Furies Eumenides.” Perhaps it’s that Churchillian obstinance of the people of England during World War II. More than bravery it’s defiance, a quality summed up in such words as spunk and grit – tough little monosyllables, hard as rocks. The…

This year’s Fountain Pen Day Swag! This year’s Fountain Pen Day Swag! Happy Fountain Pen Day! Well, technically Fountain Pen Day isn’t until Friday, but we always run our Fountain Pen Day Weekend Specials from Thursday through Sunday. The following promotions are active through 11:59pm Sunday, November 9. Most items in the shop are eligible for a 10% discount using the “FPDAY10” promo code at checkout. Some brands cannot be discounted per manufacturer’s restrictions, including TWSBI,…

Thursday 5th November 2026 Arriva has introduced a new bus route linking Southend’s town centre with the city’s Airport. Routes 62A/B began last week, on Sunday 25th October, running half hourly between 05:45 and 20:37 on Mondays to Fridays with an 06:45-19:37 span on Saturdays and 08:45-18:37 on Sundays. As well as the Airport the route restores a service in the North Avenue and Hamstel Road area of of the city lost when a route was withdrawn more than three years ago. Funded by Southend…

I've crunched the numbers from my time tracking system again, so here is October 2026 in numbers. If you missed it, here's September in Numbers. October at a glance Metric October September Change Reading 18h 52m 17h 18m +1h 34m Gaming 33h 00m 15h 17m +17h 43m Steps/day 5,460 5,899 −439 Driving 499 mi 254 mi +245 mi Mood (out of 10) 5.9 5.3 +0.6 Sleep 7h 28m 7h 33m −5m Week by week Week Reading Gaming Driving Steps/day Mood 1–4 Oct (4 days) 2h 51m 4h 54m 1h 44m 5,566 6.0 5–11 Oct 5h 21m 8h 59m…

The End of an Era Harold Wilson was wrong. He said: "A week is a long time in politics." The new slogan should be: "A day is a long time in politics." And what a day it was. If back in January 2026, anyone had openly said: "Democrats will capture the House, the Senate, a majority of governorships, and will romp up and down the ballot in Texas," observers would have gotten on their phones to call for the men in white coats to come pick up a new patient. Click here for full story

There are tasks which aren’t literally superhuman in that humans can do them, but so few it hardly matters. Using an SMT solver is soft superhuman. Separation logic is soft superhuman. Theorem proving is soft superhuman. Using Haskell too. Rust is not. All these tools are just too hard for most programmers/people to learn. But they are very powerful and most of all, an AI can do any of them. There used to be a debate between automated and interactive theorem proving. In short, automated means…

Quoted Sumo: 33-yr-old Churanoumi becomes 1st komusubi from Okinawa Pref. by Mainichi (The Mainichi) Of Japan's 47 prefectures, Okinawa was the only one to have never produced a sanyaku wrestler, although there have been six top-tier makuuchi-division wrestlers to date. On October 28, 2026, I published Churanoumi Becomes First Sumo Wrestler From Okinawa to Reach Sanyaku. I cited to a news report in Mainichi as my source. While I discussed now-Komusubi Churanoumi and his “career year” to date, I…

Replying to A couple of opinions about the iPhone Duo I forgot to mention how much I love the outer screen, too. I was a huge fan of the iPhone 12 mini, but I think the iPhone Duo’s form factor is even better. There’s something about that little screen that feels so cozy. Almost cute, even.

1995 continues to be a peak of pinball. Every Bally/Williams game this episode is an absolute banger, and there's still more to come in the remaining half of the year. Theatre of Magic is a beloved game, maybe not for the depth of its ruleset, but for fun mechanisms, callouts, and general vibes. It might be the most quotable pinball game, especially for a game with an original theme. Indianapolis 500 one-ups this with callouts that are commentary from actual Indy 500 commentators, and No Fear…

It's the December issue, even though it appears at the start of November, I feel there should be some festive content, which is why my first practical in this issue is a 7mm scale Christmas tree. It's a bit of fun, and I'm quite pleased with the baubles. I head outdoors for the main piece, and build a greenhouse with its surrounding garden. The greenhouse is a WWS kit, and the rest stuff I picked up at shows or had in the stash. I took this scene to the GBMRS show, and it was much admired;…

I’m happy to announce that neocaml 0.11 is out! I never got around to writing about 0.10, which was mostly about neocaml-utop (a utop backend that talks to utop via its native editor protocol), but 0.11 is a different story. Its changelog is twice as long as that of any release before it, and by now I’ve stopped pretending that a grand 1.0 is just around the corner.1 There’s a lot in there, but three things stand out for me - OxCaml support, indentation styles, and much better support for…

Commando issues 6007-6010 are out today, Thursday November 5th with a duo of weird World War One issues alongside some good old-fashioned classic Commando action! 6007: The Burning LightThe Western Front, 1915. As his unit attempts to silently circumvent the British lines, the troubled Feldwebel Karl Heinz lets out a sudden scream of terror before falling to the ground, stone dead. Their

Sure, maybe you’re cruising way below the speed limit, but those other guys ain’t even moving. Yes, now’s the time to smile and enjoy your few fleeting moments as the fastest game in town. AWESOME! Each day I write a brand-new awesome thing just for my newsletter. Join here: Photo from: here The post #556 When you’re in the fastest moving lane in a traffic jam appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Perfume PosseJoy Forever by Jean Patou Heya Posse! In the wake of the new L’Heure Bleue 2026 release by Guerlain I thought we could take a look at Patou’s Joy Forever. When it first came out in 2013 I sneered wholeheartedly at its usurpation of the… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseJoy Forever by Jean Patou