When will the hot weather end? It’s beginning to feel like never but inevitably the earth spins, seasons change and before we know it, autumn will be here. What will the cooler months have in store? More extremes, more storms, biblical rain? What mugs we are! Anyway, hot weather doesn’t motivate me to fish any more than freezing cold. I had one recent trip which was a short evening session on a rising tide at ‘Sandy lane’ with the purple queen as company. We sat facing the sea, there was an off…
Desert Brat 2026-08-06
Power Cat 2026-08-06
Blaugust has a bunch of gamers taking part and it has encouraged me to talk about gaming on here. So, here's an overview of what I play videogames on, the state of my backlog, and what I am currently playing
In the latest Running Track release, I added far more stats to Goal Insights. I also added a custom font and 7 new colour schemes, which happily satisfies my need for snazzy colours and novelty. I’ve added a page to the Running Track website showing off all the themes. Magenta and Teal, in Dark mode, are my current favourites.
Really second guessing myself with these photos recently. What is the point? I need to find time to make more photographs. I have often talked about intentionality, but recently it has been mostly just capturing anything that looks vaguely interesting and hoping that I at least have something at the end of the day. That is not why I created this blog. So I guess, I'll either manage to carve out more time for taking photographs or I'll drag something out of the archive that I am proud of. (I am…
I was reading today the news that Devolver wants to delist itself from the stock market, and it made me smile. For years I've been saying, when rambling about it with friends, that having an IPO was a death sentence because, yeah, you can get a large injection of cash to keep things going, but then a lot of "investors" that don't understand the market will start demanding things that make no sense just so "the line keeps going up". That's why we end up with decisions only a lunatic would make,…
I finally got the chance to sit down and watch this Wes Anderson movie tonight. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it because it was a stop-motion film but I can honestly say it made me feel happy. It might be one of my favourite Wes films I’ve seen so far! Most of all it reminded me how much I love my brother Loki (pronounced law•key) and I can’t wait to see him again tomorrow. TICK The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) Isle of Dogs (2018) The French Dispatch (2021) Asteroid City (2023) The Phonetian…
My eldest son got me this for my birthday. I raised them right 😊
About a month ago, I pointed out an "equine vine" wire-frame garden ornament thingy in Golden Gate Park. I dunno if it's worth seeking out, but if you do want to seek it out, then my location description "Kezar Stadium" wasn't so helpful—Kezar is a stadium-sized stadium, and is 99.9+% not this wire-frame garden ornament thingy. So I took some photos of Kezar Stadium and then scribbled annotations on them to help folks find this thing. View from near the Willard/Polytechnic stadium entrance. I…
The political strategy of establishment Democrats is really confusing to me right now. The strong rebuke of progressive candidates is baffling. There are some corporate or establishment Dems calling for those with more progressive ideals to leave the party completely. Which feels insane to me, because from where I'm sitting we need way more political engagement, not less. As someone organizing within my local Democratic party who identifies as a leftist, it's almost laughable. Dems in my area…
It's weird how hotel breakfasts cause you to eat the most random of foods. I started my travels round the M2 full of a combination of cocktail sausages, frittata, and fried peppers, a combination that I wouldn't eat under any circumstances back in the UK. Somehow if you put it in a breakfast buffet I work my way along the row of cloches and shove a heap of everything on my plate. (Although I did draw the line on the Thursday when I opened one up and found peas underneath. Peas are not a…
Disclaimer Previously… The Siege Conclusions The Good The Bad The Weird Stay Tuned… Disclaimer In these posts, we discuss a non-“Free as in Freedom” popular culture franchise property, including occasional references to part of that franchise behind a paywall. My discussion and conclusions carry a Free Culture license, but nothing about the discussion or conclusions should imply any attack on the ownership of the properties. All the big names serve as trademarks of the owners, and so forth, and…
Unknown location (probably inside)
Irish novelist Edna O’Brien passed away two years ago. When I read of her death I didn’t know anything about her writing except that her first novel, Country Girls, had been banned in Ireland. That made me decide to read some of her work. As it happens the first book by her that I came across was the last she wrote, in 2019, which I bought over a year ago and has been sitting on my coffee table ever since. I started reading it this evening and found it so compelling that I couldn’t put it down…
I'm so grateful for my time at OpenAI, where I led alignment safety for the official ChatGPT basketball. I gained so much valuable experience building Altman's armageddon engines, and I'm taking it to the next level with my new startup: Jurassic Park. At Jurassic Park, we're resurrecting the ultimate apex predators to defend humanity against misaligned AI. Cyberdefense Capabilities Further reading: OpenAI incident report, Anthropic incident report. According to the fossil record, dinosaurs…
This is my entry for AuguStory, a blogging challenge from Robert Birming to tell the story of your blog. Once upon a time, Newsonaut was called Newsloops. The name was a mashup of news and Kamloops, reflecting my frequent commentary on local news for the newspaper where I worked. The internet was still new-ish back in 2010, but we could see it was coming for our lunch. One of our strategies was to embrace it, doing anything we could think of that would bring us into the digital age. And for me,…
We missed the sadly short-lived stage adaptation of the 1985 time-travel escapade movie Back to the Future (BTTF), during its brief Australian run, in late 2025. I did however catch A Future on Stage, trailer, a documentary about bringing the original film to the stage as a musical. The words “we didn’t think we could do this”, and “we had no idea what we were doing”, and similar such, may have been uttered a few times too many throughout — since we know the show eventually succeeded — but…
From On Library Holds by Parker Adey:Holds appear on a special shelf in the library with their spines turned away. Each book wears a printed band showing who it is being held for. Elastic bands hold the printed slips on the books. When you put pick up your hold, you put the elsatic band in a little recycling bin so it can be reused for other holds. The whole setup is daintily anonymous.My holds are labelled 8466 GL. There is another patron whose label is 8466 HU. Our books rub shoulders all the…
Lost poem: Looking for lost owner.
So, you’re a person who has decided to embark on a creative journey of self-expression — to make art, in other words. First off, this is awesome! The universe needs more people making art, whether that art is writing, painting, music or any other form that humans are capable of creating. You have the drive, now all you need is to find an instrument. Will it be a guitar? A pen? A paint brush? A camera? Yarn for fiber art? What will you choose to take those first steps into a larger creative…
With judicious application of ice-packs, tiger balm, ibuprofen, walking up and down the garden and lying on my side, my bad back has slowly gotten less bad. I can now sit upright for more minutes than previously and occasionally forget to take my walking stick with me to the bathroom. I have a doctors appointment (more accurately a musculoskeletal specialist) tomorrow so I’m sure it’ll have totally cleared up by then. The text message with the appointment reminder called them “The MSK” which…
This week on the podcast: Stephen and Myke are joined by Jason Snell to talk about CarPlay on boats and the new version of Pastebot, before useful consumer advice is given about weather stations and network-attached storage.
We’ve been a bit busy lately and the heat has made it unbearable to do much outside. This evening was cooler and the boys were itching to go for a walk, so we headed towards a footpath that had been blocked by nettles a month or so ago. Thankfully, the nettles were gone and we enjoyed a lovely stroll into a valley and back up the other side before retracing our steps. The sky was beautiful - a warm orange sunset on the way out and a moody blue twilight as we headed home. Too many lovely photos…
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine asked me if we wanted to exchange mixtapes. I was actually deeply afraid. Despite working with music, I'm very self conscious about my taste, probably due to some bullying during my formative years and my brother going "still listening to your Japanese stuff?". Others like me, who listen to a lot of different genres, are often at loss against "What kind of music do you listen to?" and risk answering "You know, all sort of things...". I had this…
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