As I’ve mentioned many times, I am a heavy Magit user. Pretty often I do code reviews from within Magit. There was one thing that has bothered me for a long time.

Web Novel Review: Ten Day Ultimatum by Member of Insect Killing SquadronThe StoryTen people awaken to find themselves sitting around a circular table in a sealed room. There are grids on the walls and everyone is fixed in place unable to leave their seats. As if that wasn’t weird enough there’s a man wearing a suit and a goat head mask. Not a plastic mask, no that would be too normal for this place. The man is wearing what appears to be the head of a real goat. The man wastes no time and…

Saint Etienne and The Pastels at the Barrowland was an enticing prospect to warm the hearts of fans of independent pop music. It showed, the famous ballroom was sold out and packed out. Saint Etienne are on their final UK tour, but have highlighted that they will continue to play festivals and one-off events. So, who knows when they will be back in Scotland?Has The Pastels ever played the Barrowland before? That was the question on the lips of music fans climbing the stairs to the hallowed…

Here’s some comics I’ve read over the past week. This is the second biiig collection of Michel Fiffe’s Copra — this one is over 400 pages long. And this one has a lot of issues I can’t remember reading — distribution of the original self-published Copra was always pretty spotty, so I think I’ve got about half of them? So it was great finally reading these issues, and also seeing how it ties together with the ones I have read. I just love Fiffe’s artwork, and his storytelling is incredible —…

Daily Pook-Emu Bee links ceased being daily for the last week and change, but perhaps it is back with two straight editions to start the new week. 1 | Calibre 9.15 E-Book Manager Introduces “Create Your Own Adventure” Writing Game (Marcus Nestor for 9 To 5 Linux. Sep. 28, 2026.) While I disable (or don’t enable) AI functionality in Calibre, I opined last year that some of the integrations were relatively inoffensive and in line with Calibre’s purpose. I’d say I fear Calibre is losing the plot…

The towers of The Pinnacle at City Park South are obscured by a late-Spring snowstorm in Denver, Colorado. The post Foreboding appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

In January 2025, I had a fun hypothesis for a blog post: can LLMs write better code if you keep asking them to “write better code”? That was prior to the advent of robust agentic coding, but Claude Sonnet 3.5 was still able to iteratively improve on algorithmic Python code. The “better” instruction turned out to be underspecified: Sonnet abused that ambiguity to instead add a ton of useless features but the code was indeed faster. Even with the rise of agentic LLMs specifically RLHFed to handle…

Up there with animals called "lesser" or "least" but with a twist As I've mentioned before on the blog, I get a certain amount of enjoyment from following the hourly bats account on Mastodon; it provides incredible pictures of our winged friends and teaches me just how much fucking biodiversity exists in the bat world. If you've never given much thought to bats, first of all what the hell, but secondly I want you to imagine how many different species of bat you think there are, then like double…

I think most people go into Solaris expecting it to be an emotionally deep story about meeting people from your memories brought to life in an isolated station on a planet with a living ocean. That is what I expected when I began reading, and I soon found it difficult to match up my expectations for the story with the reality of the text before me. The book, really is less about the planet Solaris and the strange things it is able to do, but moreso is obsessed with relaying the story of…

A hands-on review of TypeSafe AI’s Jev using fraud detection, sales qualification and patent screening prototypes built in one weekend.

RE: @manton.org's comment on @sixcolors.com's review of the M6 Mac Mini: Maybe there’s a missing product in Apple’s lineup: a Mac with the guts of the $699 MacBook Neo. Call it a Mac nano. When the redesigned Mac Mini was announced I had hoped for it to be USB-C powered. But a Mac Nano (or Mac Neo) would be an even better fit for a USB-C powered Mac that could be used in all the ways you can use a Raspberry Pi. I bet they could beat the old Mac Mini pricing for a device like this, and ship it…

Nootka Fossil Field Trip. Photo: John FamThe rugged west coast of Vancouver Island offers spectacular views of a wild British Columbia. Here the seas heave along the shores slowly eroding the magnificent deposits that often contain fossils. Just off the shores of Vancouver Island, east of Gold River and south of Tahsis is the picturesque and remote Nootka Island.This is the land of the proud

VENOM SPIDER-MAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES (TOY BIZ) “Eddie Brock, former newspaper reporter, has joined with an evil, alien symbiote, giving him spider-like powers greater than those of Spider-Man himself! Driven by a twisted sense of justice, Brock has become Venom, humanity’s Lethal Protector…and he’s decided that humanity needs protection from Spider-Man!” For a character only introduced in 1988, by 1994, Venom had a surprising amount of action figure coverage. Toy Biz had added him to their run…

When he actually spoke up, I could understand him perfectly, but he insisted on whispering even though the place was pretty noisy and I obviously couldn’t make out what he was saying. The interaction was somehow even more absurd in real life than it is in this comic.

There's someone I know, probably a lot of people we all know, who is always wishing away whole tranches of time. "I've just got to get through the week," they say. Like it can't come soon enough, they just want it over and done with. And I do sympathise. We've all had times like that. But it's every week. Sometimes whole months are wanting to be skipped. So I was thinking about little weekly things I love. my Spotify Discover Weekly on Mondays pizza on Fridays taking my niece to violin class…

Just a heads up that you have only until this Friday – Sept. 25, 2026 – to get Christopher Schwarz’s revised “Build a Stick Chair Video” for the introductory price of $37.50 (50-percent off). The price then goes up to $79. In this video, Chris teaches you to build using common woodworking tools and machines, plus kiln-dried wood from the lumberyard. This video, which clocks in at more than four hours long, has 18 separate chapters that cover all aspects of stick chair construction, from…

Successful Siri AI today (on Mac): add this event to my calendar [with ticket shown in Safari] add another event “Walk to [event]” with enough time to walk from my hotel Result: two calendar events at the correct times. (Yes, I know Calendar and Fantastical have “Time to Leave” features.)

🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 A year ago on Thursday, I logged on for my first day joining Mend to work on Renovate full-time. Similar to what I did after my first 100 days, I thought now would be a good time to recap how this last year has gone. This is also a fun way of doing a public mini performance review! I'd planned to try and land this on my actual anniversary, but I know this is going to be a busy week - as they all seem to be, nowadays - so thought I'd pre-publish it…

In our new house, many appliances still get their power through a travel adapter. Eight years in China was long enough not only to put down roots and settle in, but also for everything we owned to end in a Chinese plug: my MacBook, the coffee machine, the rice cooker, the baby monitor. The appliances […] The post Travel plugs appeared first on Jaap Grolleman.

The six radically different chapters of Rosalind Belben’s Dreaming of Dead People constitute a kind of Cubist self-portrait. Belben’s narrative is often headed ostensibly elsewhere—on what her imaginary daughter might be like, on her fantasy Robin Hood and his 13th century gang (really!), on the dreams she has about her dead mother, on delicious trips alone to the highlands of Scotland, or on explorations among old ruins on the island of Torcello in the Venetian lagoon. But it never takes her…

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 138-139: The introduction of the star brought back the life-and-death question of who counted as a Jew. Some mixed families, temporarily protected by a “privileged” status, lived peculiar double lives. Marlene Herzfeld was five when the war began. I spoke to her in her house in Steglitz where she was bedridden. She was still living at home but was facing an operation—“my last chance, perhaps.” Hers was a story of great…

Market Place This and more Northern Folk in Wigan in 2016 https://northernfolkarchive.pagecord.com/wigan-town-centre-06-june-2016

Coming out in December is a facsimile edition of Detective Comics issue 500, the big thick issue-versary release from 1981. Detective Comics is a series that began in 1937, although it really picked up steam in 1939, when issue 27 introduced a little character called “The Batman”. Reaching issue 500 is an achievement for any monthly, and a thick comic with seven short stories — including one written by the creator of The Shadow — seemed just what was called for. I bought this one off of the…

Hideo Kojima spoke with IGN in his first interview after dropping support for PHYSINT. "So in June, SIE said they wanted to have a Zoom call. I was so busy at that time — I had just gone to New York for a Prada event and then to LA right after. But anyway, I came back and we had this Zoom call. They said they can no longer fund development for Physint. I was shocked and I said, 'What did you say?' I couldn’t quite process what they had said. I wasn’t sure because I was in shock.... ...So I was…

t’s been a lovely summery day in Maynooth so far, despite the summer having definitely ended and therefore having to return to teaching at the start of my penultimate academic year as a university teacher. The campus was very full this morning, and I was stopped many times on my walk into the office by new students trying to find their lecture theatres. A common (understandable) mistake for the uninitiated of Maynooth is to think that the Science Lecture Theatre is actually in the Science…

Dear Constant Reader, This is one of the first books I acquired about burlesque and it’s been sitting on the shelf, unreviewed. Get ready for a trip back to the early days of the burlesque revival. New Burlesque by Katharina Bosse, 2003. This is a collection of 38 portraits of neo-burlesque performers taken when the burlesque revival was heating up. In all of them the performers are in costume, but the settings are not performance venues. The dancers are posed mostly outdoors. I recognized some…

Lieutenant Troy Brennan’s reconnaissance mission over Soviet territory goes awry, forcing him to crash-land and survive in Russian wilderness while evading capture or rescue. When an American spyplane crashes in Soviet Russia, an unlikely alliance forms between two unlikely individuals. Ryan Reynolds is naturally funny, while Kenneth Branagh is stellar as always. A light, easy movie set at the end of the 80s that entertains properly. Five popcorns. To see all 15 photos, visit the article page.…

It’s a little surreal watching Kevin recap the current CSS-Tricks situation. It’s been rollercoastery after DigitalOcean’s acquisition. Thoughts: DigitalOcean bought the site. They can do whatever they want with it. At the very least, I hope it stays online. Aside from a general distaste for bitrot, a lot of people have bylines on that site, and they deserve to have those online to benefit them in perpetuity. DigitalOcean should be clear and honest in their communications about the site,…

Boris Artzybasheff’s art was rediscovered in the 1980s by a new generation of American cartoonists who were delighted by his illustrations of anthropomorphic machinery and other technological artefacts. These were the illustrations which made Artzybasheff popular with advertisers and the commissioners of magazine covers in the 1940s and 50s, and their continued popularity today has tended to overshadow his earlier book illustrations, in the same way that W. Heath Robinson’s drawings of…

On the blog this week, I am considering the possible benefits of arranged marriages, of the connubial kind and otherwise. Add your thoughts here. My therapeutic riding barn has kindly included the first nine Lord Julian mysteries as a single item in its charity auction. I will sign these books to the person of the highest bidder’s choice, and–contrary to the stated auction terms–I will send them anywhere in the world. If you’d like to bid (scroll down past all the lovely pony portraits), that…