One of my grandmothers lamps I fixed up. Last week was an exceptionally busy one for me, unfortunately ending in sickness. Hopefully this coming week will be a little more laid-back though. It's all kind of a blur to recall, but I took a bunch of ibuprofen and helped out at the farmers market again. It was cooler than last time, but still sweltering. Right after that I cleaned up and went to an evening dinner which I forgot about earlier in the week, causing me to also cram in a birthday party…

Later today, I will stop by my favorite apple orchard on the way home. I will be buying apples today and then again later in October--all for the sake of writing projects for my classes. Tomorrow my Nonfiction Writing will have 3 kinds of apples, and we'll discuss the kinds of reviews we could write. Then on Friday, we'll write those reviews.I have a memory from a past autumn of driving to my favorite orchard and seeing a farm for sale.This morning, I went back through my blog to find the…

The upcoming 2026 Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse game made me realise I have yet to explore many of the great and less great Classicvania games—the “subgenre” group of Castlevania games before Koji Igarashi pivoted to what could be called Igavania but Jeremy Parish coined metroidvania. Confusing semantics aside, getting hold of this particular instance, Rondo of Blood, without relying on the PSP remake, is a big challenge as well. The game, released in 1993, never made it to the west since Hudson…

I just received this email from my oldest son's school, and as the parent of adopted kids, for whom we constantly strive to be as private as possible, I really appreciate this. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology mean that images shared on websites, social media platforms and other publicly accessible sources can potentially be downloaded and manipulated without consent. While we have always taken care when using student images, we have been advised that the growing availability…

Detail of a classic Chevrolet Impala, spotted at the 2026 Sundance Square Car & Culture Show in Fort Worth, Texas. The post Goldeneye appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Post trip and LED admin continued. A mow!!!! A day making chutneys and jams. To Essex and back over the weekend. Damson Jam: Four Medium Jars Woke up early on Tuesday to rain. Sat in the conservatory with Pippa, coffee and toast. More LED Admin then off to the gym for PT. Home to collect / rake apples. Not many left on the old garden railway trees. Lunch, nap, then Walton admin and catching up on TMR Weeknotes. Washed apples, cleaned / nikwaxed walking boots, caught up on email, did some money…

As soon as the iPhone Duo got announced, we were all waiting for an iPhone Duo Simulator inside Xcode. We eventually got it with the first beta of Xcode 27.1. This Simulator is unlike any other and a lot of fun to explore, allowing you to fold the device into different angles while watching your … → The post iPhone Duo Simulator: Testing and optimizing your SwiftUI app appeared first on SwiftLee.

For 50 minutes at Wigmore Hall last night, the bassist Linda May Han Oh and the tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana delivered a lesson in how to take the finest material from the past and weave it into something that belongs firmly to the present. The Australian (born in Malaysia, of Chinese heritage) is the current answer to any question about which bassist you would choose to add energy and invention to your contemporary jazz group. The Chilean specialises in an unstoppable flow of creativity,…

A short Staffordshire/Worcestershire post, taking in Black Country Ales, Bathams and a magnificent cob.The large village of Kinver is home to just over 7,000 folk at the bottom of the narrow strip of Staffordshire which runs alongside the West Midlands. Those 7,000 residents get to enjoy a miniature railway (closed) 'til Sunday, rock houses (closed 'til Friday), and a Constitution Club which scores the three-pint-pot score on the CAMRA website (closed 'til 4pm). I suspect I may not have visited…

We kill people based on metadata. – General Michael Hayden Vulture Watching (#1527) The only way to stop this evil is to bury politicians in lawsuits: The family of a woman who died after she could not get an abortion in Texas is suing doctors and [politician]s including [psychopath-] General Ken Paxton. It is the first lawsuit over a death [caused by] an abortion ban…and the…first to directly sue Paxton, who has taken a leading role in…[using nuisance lawsuits to persecute “culture war”…

This is the eighth post in the series: Exploring the .NET 11 preview. Part 1 - Running background tasks in Blazor with Web WorkersPart 2 - .NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types🎉Part 3 - Avoiding ToString() allocations with StringBuilder.MoveChunksPart 4 - Closed class hierarchiesPart 5 - Improvements to reading Process outputsPart 6 - Automatic CSRF protection based on Fetch Metadata headersPart 7 - The pain of serializing unions and closed class hierarchies with System.Text.JsonPart 8 -…

My job is typing. It doesn't matter if it's sentences or code. I type. A lot. I don't understand people spending the majority of their time in front of a desk and not upgrading to a nicer keyboard. There are three essentials in my eyes: a good chair, a good mouse, and a good keyboard. I understand not everyone wants to spend a couple hundred eurodollars to get something like the Mode Envoy (it is a beautiful keyboard, though). But nowadays, you have budget-friendly brands making great keyboards…

I am writing this at 9.30 on a Monday morning, sitting in the garden. Mrs Accumulator has just waved to me through the window and I can scarcely believe she’s there. The past year has been strange, full of awkward trials and tiny tribulations, but the moment that’s just passed between us – well, it doesn’t get better than that. 1 About five years ago, 2 I’d have been desperately fighting bin-fires at the office, with no Mrs TA within a country mile. Work would have felt like one of those mad…

8692/21611My second day of filming on Zak The Ripper, though the crew and some of the cast have been working pretty solidly since our first day on the 7th September. They were in good spirits, not quite as perky and excited as day one, with a few people suffering with exhaustion and bugs. But still laughing together and it sounds like filming has been going really well.

What is mathematics? Over the years I devoted a few dozen posts to the question “What is mathematics?”. Some posts in this category bring tears to my eyes like Christine Bjorner’s beautiful post: The Golden Room and the Golden Mountain, and Rodica Simion’s poem Immigrant Complex. In one post, I presented my own views about mathematics; another asks the question “Is mathematics a science?” (My short answer is “yes.”) The famous controversy between Hilbert and Brouwer is discussed in yet another…

My Christmas collection Twisted Presents goes like on Kickstarter today! All backers get a free copy of The Last Hour of Hogswatch immediately upon backing (yes, before paying). The Most Wonderful Time of the Year? Bah Humbug! Does your Christmas magic have more Satan than Santa? Does picking a place to spend Christmas morning feel like choosing between colic and cholera? Has stabbing someone over the turkey ever made perfect sense? You are not alone. These eight tales from critically acclaimed…

Day Ten in Tokyo. Apologies for the abbreviated coverage today. I overslept and only caught the second half of today’s action live. Today’s NHK videos include a five-minute feature on Aki 1986 which is really worth checking-out. That tournament featured two brothers who both earned special prizes that tournament for their performance, Terao and Sakahoko. … Continue reading Aki 2026: Day Ten

Call me a cheapskate, but I don’t believe in overpaying for camera gear. And in this economy, with inflation and technology prices still rising, it makes sense to save money wherever you can. This is especially true if you’re a hobbyist like I am. Are you pro? Then yes, go ahead and buy the latest […]

You've probably already seen this common pattern in action: blurry versions of the images of a site appear immediately and, moments later, their full versions replace them. This pattern has become so common that many image CDNs, frameworks, and libraries support it out of the box. But every implementation has to do the same thing: Fetch both the preview and the final images. Display the preview while the final image loads. Swap the preview and final images. Clean up after the transition. Below…

Books I grew up in a house stuffed full of books, with no television, and electricity for only an hour or two per day (while the generator was running). There were shelves full of old science fiction (Asimov and Heinlein), as well as books on history, some good old fantasy, and other smatterings collected from second-hand bookstores over the years. My mother read to us each night when we were children, starting with Dr Seuss, all the way to Harry Potter, where she did the spooky voices during…

Back to my usual haunts – went on a short run and then a quick sketch of my favourite barista. Barista sketch Stillman an Birn pocket beta, Windsor and Newton 0.5 fineliner and Schmincke and Daniel Smith watercolours. Line work

A new AI model called Jev launched last week and went viral. It's not an LLM. It doesn't generate text or pictures, but could be very useful for a number of use cases. The creators call it “the first System One model”, tout its performance (193x faster, 444x cheaper) and promise it can't hallucinate. So, what is it? How it (probably) works Behind the impressive marketing is a very interesting model. Jev is a close relative of LLMs like GPT, Claude, or DeepSeek, but is actually more similar to…

It’d been a year since I put any film through my Nikon 35Ti, so I loaded some of that expired Fujifilm Neopan 400 I’ve been shooting a lot of lately and took her out. My particular 35Ti works only in Program mode, and the dials up top don’t all work properly. (I knew that when I bought it, and the price reflected it.) But so what? Program mode will take you a long way with this camera. Honestly, if the camera’s other modes and features worked properly, I’d probably still shoot it in Program…

Gaining momentum again on the Wheel of the Year, we approach autumn and its opposite: the moment of genuine balance, called Mabon in modern pagan practice, but which is only very recently named as such — this is in fact a twentieth-century innovation. I will try to consider what makes this point on the cycle special and why it is invested with meaning. A moment of genuine, measurable balanceUnlike all the other points on the Wheel, the equinoxes are the only ones marking a genuine moment of…

aka the Mystery of Memory I know every word to “Boom Shake the Room” by Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, a song that was on high rotation in the pub/club we frequented in … checks notes … 1993! God, I’m old. Yo back up now and give a brother room The fuse is lit and I’m about to go boom! Mercy mercy, mercy me My life is a cage but on stage I’m free The lyrics aren’t noteworthy and certainly aren’t the type of thing that could, by any measure, be considered useful information, and the fact that…

Coding agents will happily turn an unverified ticket into a plausible PR for the wrong problem. Before anyone writes code, a ticket should reproduce what it can, separate evidence from guesses, and ask one useful question.

I’m not entirely sure when it happened exactly, but at some point a few years ago Social Media stopped being social media. The logic of person-to-person, one-to-one connection was replaced by a one-to-many model. Social became parasocial. That was the first change. A parasocial relationship describes a one-sided, psychological connection where a person feels a deep sense of intimacy or familiarity with someone they do not know in real life. The other person, the creator, most likely isn’t even…

Daily Drawing 996

Since January 2025, the United States has deported at least 25,447 people to countries that are not their own. According to The Guardian those deported 'include those who spent most of their lives in the US, parents detained on the school run, (and) the adult children of elderly relatives who depend on them for care.'The Deportation Project Map lets you explore the Trump administration's global network of deportations. Click on a country on the map and you can see the number of people who have…

Reading Ed Sheeran’s speech when he opened his Philadelphia concert gave me a bit of a pause, that immediately followed by, “huh. Anywayyyy…” This part, particularly: I don’t want to disappoint fans, and I’ve never wanted to be an activist musician, but this has put me in the middle of an important and passionate argument about freedom of speech and the most complex political issue on the planet. There has always been that voice: “But I just want to make music/play music/draw/create!” Hell yea,…