💬 “Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.” – Annie Dillard, ‘Write Till You Drop’. New York Times, 28 May, 1989. I’ve mentioned Annie…

In the morning, our alarm when off at 5:00, and we were back on the rocks before first light. Not being a morning person it was a bit of a struggle and the fishing was so poor, that I wish we hadn’t bothered. Switching to soft plastics fished on a jighead, saw them get bitten in half by the super aggressive yellow spotted puffer and when I tried isome on a drop shot rig, they were the only species I caught. Lillian taking a few photos of me as I fished before sunrise would turn out to be the…

In an uncertain environment, standard advice is to be adaptable. Jobs in the technology, media, and telecom sectors are experiencing the fastest pace of skill turnover, according to a June 2026 report on the effects of AI from the professional services network PwC. And the World Economic Forum’s most recent Future of Jobs Report, published in 2025, found that employers across all sectors expect 39 percent of workers’ core skills to change by 2030. What It Takes to Be an Adaptable Engineer, by…

After I posted “Confessions of an Unrepentant Slop Snob” on LinkedIn last week, with links to the Honeycomb AI norms and values docs, I got this question from Niklas Lochschmidt:I am curious if you could share more light on the process? Any guidance you would give people in companies that have the friction and internal debates, but maybe haven’t arrived at shared norms and values yet?That’s a great question, and I will answer in just a minute.I feel like this is a great way to kick off…

Blackeyed Theatre excels at bringing classic literature to the stage, breathing new life into various books such as Frankenstein, The Great Gatsby and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – this time they have turned their attention to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. This adaptation was written by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm (Emilia) and is directed by Nicky Allpress; it begins its life at Dalston’s Arcola Theatre, before heading out on a nationwide tour which lasts well into 2027. The story…

Kev Quirk, Do you use :visited on links?: I’ve always made the :visited attribute for hyperlinks look the same as links that haven’t been visited, and it seems that it’s the default behaviour across the web. I was getting ready to draft a response saying how I do… but it looks like I don’t! A few weeks ago I redesigned my blog to use the green sidebar as the main navigation point and on every new design I scrap my old CSS file and start a new one from scratch. And it looks like I missed the…

In the late 1990s I created a website for my Dad who was an actor, writer and director. As well as a media instructor. To promote him as a voice talent and gain students for his different classes. The early days of using Yahoo site builder eventually lead to a poor man’s Frontpage called Namo. Then in the early 2000s a friend of ours taught me about WordPress.

For a year or so I have been struggling with my relationship with my phone. I am on it far too much, doing far too much of nothing. Hours have passed, and I have achieved nothing. I have learned nothing. A Slippery Slope It starts with a notification; a message, an email, a shipping alert. Then, I notice that I have other notifications that need my attention. Finally, I open Reddit, or YouTube, and I am sucked into the rapids of mindless endless scrolling. Why did I open my phone? Where did the…

Considering I launched a podcast this past Tuesday, I figured I could use Lyteforce Writes as a platform to share the episodes published over the course of each week.A little shameless cross-promotion.Tuesday, September 15https://share.transistor.fm/s/ddf0dafbAfter reading how Chris Enns was going to create a podcast episode every day of the year (for the most part, which makes the title of the show - Daily(ish) - all sorts of cool), on a "whim" I decided to do something similar. Consider this…

Read the full article at https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2026/09/21/new-in-edge-for-developers-create-better-components-and-make-your-site-agent-ready/

ldstephens: I often find a site I want to follow, only to discover that its RSS feed is hard to find. With RSS Lookup, you paste in the site’s URL and it searches for available feeds. There’s also a bookmarklet you can add to your bookmarks bar and use while you’re on a site. This is a feature I use a lot! On Vivaldi this is a built-in feature and probably the one I miss the most since moving to Firefox, where I use this extension. I like that it finds multiple feeds on a site (e.g. one for…

John Wyver writes: I have been away, on an excellent trip to Warsaw, Tallinn and Helsinki, and so have neglected the links for the past two Sundays. Here is a catch-up selection of stuff that has recently caught my eye, with the intention that I will return to a proper Sunday column next weekend; I may also add a handful of extra links here. The image above is from the fascinating Neon Museum in Warsaw, which I will discuss more in a future post. • The 100 best TV shows of the 21st century: The…

It’s hard to believe that it’s been eighteen years since we brought this little tater tot home from the hospital. It’s been a confusing mixture of rewarding, challenging, maddening and invigorating, but the amount of love I have for this goofy nerd I made with Jen knows no bounds.

“Oh dear, the book club is meeting again on Thursday,’ Dina groans, ‘and I haven’t even read a third of Sarah Hall’s ‘Helm’. I don’t find it particularly gripping.”‘Do you think it’s great to read a book that’s been set for you?’ asks Siri. It’s like in German lessons – though I often didn’t find ...

Both of my Chinese and English names are given to me by my parents. (The English name is a transliteration of my Chinese name, pronounced in Cantonese.) I never thought of giving myself a name. Not even a nickname. Perhaps it is not too late in my life to do so… ~ Link: Speaking of Names, by 振康 (Zhen-Kang), Taiwan Quest

Hey, Bear. These news just freaking suck. The announced Vivaldi offensive did such a bad thing for my direction. We hit very hard their most advanced and strong drones unit there and they run to my area. Now they hit all our logistics routes and we return to 10 km walks. I hate it. It just extremely hard for me to go so much with all the equipment. Oh fuck. I hoped that the Vivaldi will hit them in a way, which will make my area more chill, but it turned out worse for now. Wishful thinking. I…

The basic patterns of US manufacturing jobs are fairly well-known. Here’s a figure showing total US manufacturing jobs over the last half-century or so: more-or-less flat from the 1970s up through 2000, then a decline from 2000 to about 2010, and more-or-less flat since then. Part of what happened in the early 2000s was a surge of imports from China, after China became a member of the World Trade Organization. Another part was that US workers who might otherwise have been in manufacturing jobs…

Based on this article from The Telegraph, I should walk more, eat more fruits and vegetables, and go play football at my void deck. (Two out of three is probably not that bad?) ~ Link: The Longevity Lessons Britain Can Learn from Singapore, by Ella Nunn, The Telgraph

Tickets purchased for when we are NYC in October: Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen The final musical with music and lyrics by Duncan Sheik.

[This is a guest post by the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] We would like to use this guest post to announce the creation of the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence hosted at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and online at agmai.org. The rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) present both opportunities and challenges for mathematical…

The last few weeks have been a bit of a journey of learning how my body works, and generally not being happy about it. I have managed to have far less pain overall than in a long time. I was pain-free and able to watch multiple hours of TV without twitching and and hurting in the evening for the first time in a long time. I’ve gotten some of the additive elements — the risk factors like barometric pressure, and stress that increase the odds that I’ll be in pain — documented and even under…

Raspberry Pi added a feature in their firmware that restricts users from swapping RAM chips, sometimes even RAM chips of the same capacity from other Raspberry Pi boards. Apparently there were people buying cheap 1 or 2 gig Pi 5s, soldering in some cheap and sometimes unreliable 8 gig RAM chips, and selling them as new 8 gig Pi 5s. Now I totally understand where Raspberry Pi's coming from. They don't wanna support Pis being sold like this, because flaky RAM and dodgy resellers are a huge…

What is this?Every week I (try to) look back at the previous seven-or-so days – and forwards to the next week. Running and health, culture, home improvements, work and adjacent things. You can read none, some or all. Sharing in case it helps someone else out there.Three in a row. Getting back into the swing of it.tldrA short midweek post; three slow 5ks; Freo into a grand final; a night and morning in Knaresborough; Town win again and fish and chips in Cleethorpes; a tomato harvest;…

We are now the proud owners of two burial plots in our town’s historic cemetery. Through a series of events, we actually got them for free. The cemetery holds some of my favorite examples of limestone carving. It was definitely the place we wanted to go. Bonus: the Owenses are there.

My literature search for recent work on composing self-stabilizing systems didn't yield anything useful. The layered stabilization idea was already in place by the early 2000s, and nothing fundamental seems to have been added since. Frustrating.So I decided to attack the problem using the concrete example I have. I had composed a rely-guarantee TLA+ model of a retry storm as two components with contracts. That model reproduces metastable failure because the composition that workded from good…

A screensaver that displays, in giant numbers, the temperature and/or the hour against a black background. There are 30 fonts to choose from, many combinations, and an option that moves the pixels a little bit once in a while to avoid to “burn” OLED screens. Free, for macOS and Windows.

Die deutsprachigen Blogwochen sind wieder gestartet. Eine Initiative von Robert Lender, Benedikt Müller und Dirk Deimeke, deren Blogs sich schon lange in meinem Feedreader befinden. Die Idee ist: Blogger schreiben während 3 Monate über eine kleine Liste von Themen, und werden so gegenseitig sichtbarer. So verknüpfen sich die Blogger, entstehen neue Gespräche, und bereichert man seinen Feedreader. Robert baut eine öffentliche Liste von Blogwochen-Beiträgen auf, damit man sehen kann wer da so…

NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio The Earth’s center of mass drifts by millimeters over the years. Where is Earth’s center of mass? The answer seems trivially obvious. It’s right in the middle of the planet. Ah, but that kind of thinking won’t get you a paper in the Geophysical Journal International.1 It’s also not a trivial question. Knowing Earth’s center of mass down to the order of millimeters reveals some interesting facts about our planet. To measure Earth’s center of mass…

Ahhh, yes. Haven’t seen this in a long time. That’s a mistake. So good from start to finish.👍 Recommended!

The …one likes to take a longer look Flickr group is pretty great.