For its size, I would classify Brute Fort as maximalist. Which perhaps sounds contradictory, given it’s a microgame that runs on only 18 cards and comes in a plastic cassette case. But each of those details unfurls into something more. The cassette case is double-wide, necessary for holding the synth soundtrack alongside the cards. And the included dice, concealed under the tuckbox, can be used to generate the rooms of a haunted fort in a TTRPG. What’s more, the microgame within is hand-drawn…

A Productive Conversation | PM Talks S3E9: What Problem Does This Actually Solve? What in your life is still there mostly because you never stopped to ask what it was for? I always enjoy my monthly chats with Mike.

Scribed by Sandre the Giant Released: August 1996 One of the most underappreciated bands, in my mind, from the Florida death metal scene in the mid to late 90s was Monstrosity, probably most famous for being the band that George ‘Corpsegrinder’ Fisher left to join Cannibal Corpse in 1996, just as this record was coming out. But that should not be the band’s only claim to fame, given they were created by former Malevolent Creation and Cynic members as well as from George’s eponymous band. Their…

There aren't a ton of comic-focused news sites--like, with a staff and such besides us bloggers. Popverse has been around for four years but is, in essence, shutting down. As Comics Beat observed, "So by my reckoning, that leaves The Beat, AIPT, Comic Book Club, Comicon, Graphic Policy, ICv2," and they sigh when they mention good ol' tabloid, Bleeding Cool. Popverse is going to fire anyone who works in editorial/reporting and shift into being a platform for the owner, Reedpop, to broadcast…

I'm sitting here in front of my desktop PC to type this, fresh from grocery store-bought dinner; beside me is my mid-2012 MacBook Pro, booted to Linux Mint from USB (it hasn't been installed yet, it's just the live drive). I have some tinkering to do; apparently you need to install a WiFi driver for this thing. Hmm. Today I drove from my in-laws and had a couple of funny things happen: I encountered a driver who was driving extremely fast (probably 115-120 kmh in a 90 kmh zone), and eventually…

TL;DR: Five free Mac utilities worth a look this week: a menu-bar fix for notification banners landing on the wrong monitor, a drag-and-drop media compressor, a keyboard-backlight scheduler, an unusually hard-to-skip screen-break app, a notch utility with AI-agent alerts, and a local-only document search tool that cites its sources. The apps I have been testing this week include a couple of entries from someone whose Mac was doing X when they wanted it to do Y, so they built an app to make it…

TL;DR: Five free Mac utilities worth a look this week: a menu-bar fix for notification banners landing on the wrong monitor, a drag-and-drop media compressor, a keyboard-backlight scheduler, an unusually hard-to-skip screen-break app, a notch utility with AI-agent alerts, and a local-only document search tool that cites its sources. The apps I have been testing this week include a couple of entries from someone whose Mac was doing X when they wanted it to do Y, so they built an app to make it…

What’s a song that helps you focus or concentrate? I have a full playlist of tracks like this, it’s called ElectroBurbleWorkTime. This artist features heavily and whilst I tend to lay the full album whenevr I can, this track is one I find great for focus work. “Emerald Rush” by Jon Hopkins Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Listen to Gordon McLean's Apple Music playlist View original post on Crucial Tracks Thanks for reading and keeping RSS alive. Visit my…

Suppose you want to solve a triangle. You know two sides and the angle between them. Then you can solve for the third side using the law of cosines. Now suppose you want to solve a big triangle, a triangle on the surface of the earth so large that the curvature of the earth matters. You can still use the law of cosines, but you’ll need the spherical law of cosines: cos(c) = cos(a) cos(b) + sin(a) sin(b) cos(C). If you know the (angular) lengths of sides a and b, and (tangential) angle C between…

# On This Day reminds me that, on this day in 2021, I rebuilt the On This Day page for the new site. 😅

Hyperlinked is a collaborative book that Raaghav Pandya and I are writing at hyperlinked.us. Each chapter starts with something from the culture, usually a film or a book, and follows it to see what it can tell us about learning, teaching, and technology. This chapter took me longer to write than most. For some time […] Source

As AI continues to become adopted and change job functions, the authors of this article propose the new role of the agent manager. As autonomous AI agents move from experimentation to execution, companies are discovering they need a new kind of leader to manage them. Drawing on examples from Salesforce and other large organizations, this article introduces the role of the agent manager—leaders responsible for orchestrating how AI agents learn, collaborate, perform, and work safely alongside…

Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours of Spitalfields, Whitechapel & The City By coincidence, two readers – Christine Osborne & Janice Oliver – both sent me photographs of their ancestors who produced and sold soft drinks in the East End – Brandon’s Mineral Waters of Virginia Rd, Bethnal Green, and Moody’s Sarsaparilla of Rathbone St Market, Canning Town William Brandon and his mineral water business, 112 Virginia Rd, Bethnal Green c.1887 “William Brandon is my great-great-great…

One of the films I was most interested to see at Cinecon last Labor Day was WOMAN OF THE NORTH COUNTRY (1952).This Republic Pictures film was another real rarity. To my knowledge, it's never had an authorized release for home viewing.Going into the movie "cold," I expected a film with actors like Rod Cameron, Jim Davis, and John Agar to be a Western, but while it had a "Western" setting, WOMAN OF THE NORTH COUNTRY proved to be more of a melodrama, centered around the title character.Ruth Hussey…

Typhoon 25 (Dujuan) finally passed We had been staying indoors since Sunday.There were times when our tv antenna went out, but at least we didn't lose power and only had lots of rainChiba on the other hand had major flooding and power outagesI feel so bad for Chiba they had bands of rain last month which caused flooding and power outages and two weeks later it happened to them again and now

tl;dr btrix is a bring-your-own-model chat interface for web archiving I’ve been experimenting recently with a chat interface to the browsertrix-crawler software. If you haven’t seen it before, browsertrix-crawler is an excellent tool for creating high-fidelity archival snapshots of web pages and websites. It has many, many options, and the browsertrix service provides a full user interface to managing one or many browsertrix-crawler jobs. So why would you ever want to operate…

Prompt 7: When was the last time you said yes, when you would have preferred to say no? Ugh! I hate saying no. I love projects that inspire me. Helping people out energises me. I hate missing out on opportunities. So, saying no is hard. I don’t know when I said yes when I really wanted to say no. I guess I’ve been spoilt that way. And I am too selfish to say no to an opportunity I know I’d love to explore. I get tired though. I’m not as young as I used to be. And I can’t be everywhere all at…

In a culture obsessed with optimisation and presentation, where everything has to be extraordinary and flashy to have a change of being noticed, the mundane image serves as quiet resistance. It suggests that unoptimised life, imperfect spaces, and unguarded moments have value worth documenting.—- Photoni.st

An exploration of every facet of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s life, from his meteoric rise to fame with his parody songs to his torrid celebrity love affairs and famously depraved lifestyle. In classic Weird Al fashion, this movie is totally not a serious biopic, but it does a great job at telling a good story. Filled with good actors in small roles, the cake is taken by Daniel Radcliffe in the role of Weird Al. The writing is also gread, although it’s made to look like a serious movie, it’s actually…

Water cascades around concrete aggregate steps in the Active Pool at the Philip Johnson-designed Fort Worth Water Gardens in the south end of Downtown Fort Worth, Texas. The post Rush Around appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

The London they knew is gone, long goneA pub crawl inspired by a rather wonderful book (available for free on the Internet Archive) about a pub that named an area. The Fitzroy Tavern.It documents the glory days of London's drinking dens - from the 1920s to 1940s - when the artists, poets, bohemians, knighted lords and politicians had to earn their booze. Most of the action takes place in the Fitzroy Tavern but a pub crawl is detailed. Lengthy, it dips into Soho to make the most of an extra 30…

John Joseph Adams and I have edited at least six books together. Is it more? I can’t remember. There was the Apocalypse Triptych from 2014. And the Dystopia Triptych from 2020. Both trilogies gathered dozens of our favorite authors and humans to tell three stories about the before, during, and after of some calamity. The Apocalypse Triptych was a huge success. My favorite thing about publishing that series was that these traditionally published authors with great careers made more from the…

Not going to wait to post this. Just sent a text to friends and fam: Personal Health Update — My bloodwork numbers were super off last month during a routine physical with my family doc. Just met with a new oncologist after the previous retired some years ago (and I’d been putting things off). Those numbers were nowhere near the amount of off that warrants treatment. In fact, other indicators suggest I’m doing pretty good! I’ll get a CT scan and come back for more bloodwork in 2 months — just…

I want to thank everyone for a successful 13th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon. Provided no unforeseen circumstances occur between now and next September, I can guarantee the blogathon will return next September!

Updated September 2026: added the free route for MH2p (MIB2+) units, a straight answer on MIB3, corrected the model table, and a new section on what is and is not possible for CarPlay in the Virtual Cockpit. Following on from my first post on Audi MMI where I walked through installing the maps update and speed cameras overlay, this post covers how to enable CarPlay and Android Auto on your Audi MMI without paying anyone for it. Which method you use depends entirely on which head unit is in the…

Well hello there! The levity with which I’ve introduced this post, and the delighted manner in which I’m currently writing it (sitting next to a computer that has recently been re-transplanted back into its original case) both may seem to run counter to the topic at hand. Namely, that as a retrocomputer tragic, I’ve had to forfeit my dream of having a beige NAS case in favour of something more practical for what we need. But I have a far better solution now, and am relieved to have recognised…

View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run: A fine last day of summer for 2026. My watch warned me I might feel more tired and irritable today and it was right on both counts! After spending most of the morning being irritated, I finally headed to the lake to do a run, intending on a more mild effort to start the week. It turns out I didn’t even need to plan for this, it just happened, because I was very low energy. I picked up the pace to break the six-minute mark in the final km, but overall felt…

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Two things happened to Siri this week that have nothing to do with each other on paper and everything to do with each other in practice. Siri AI — the "new" Siri that shipped with iOS 27 — is rolling out wider, still labeled beta, still gated behind a waitlist. And this same week, notices started going out for the $250 million settlement over the Apple Intelligence promises made back in June 2024. Apple is now simultaneously shipping the thing…

It's taken a while to get around to it, but I've finally painted this 1:144 scale Fokker Eindekker.Now it's ready to go out and shoot down that BE12. Or maybe get shot down by it. It could happen. It's FDM printed on my Ender 3, and the undercarriage needed substantial post-printing repairs.