War is bad, but fighter planes are cool. I’ve known this since I was a small child, badly gluing a plastic model of an F/A-18 Hornet together (it was the ’80s; gunpla really weren’t something I could just go out and buy back then). The Ace Combat series knows this too, which is why it consistently juxtaposes its thrilling sci-fi tinged aerial action with sobering tales of greed, loss, and cynically manufactured conflict. Skies of Deception, the series’ first sortie on Sony’s PSP, is no…

When you delegate, you hope to save time. But the win you actually feel is a different one: you hand something over and stop thinking about it. No checking back, no low hum of worry, no drama. That only happens when the person you delegate to does it well, does it on time and does it without fuss. Delegating to competence is the one kind of delegating that empties your head; every other kind moves the work from your hands to your attention. Few people know that feeling. Until recently it was…

Summer in the UK was brutal this year, with heatwave after heatwave after heatwave. Although somewhat self-inflicted, it didn't help that my office was routinely about 5°C warmer than outside (a combination of having kit running, and having a south facing gable wall). About five years ago, I bought a portable AC unit but it's uncomfortably loud - my office is only 6 square meters - and can be very distracting if I'm on a call. Emptying the condensate is also a pain: in the peak of summer, it…

In the previous article we followed a packet all the way in from the wire and all the way back out. At every step something was reading or writing memory — the page the driver handed the card, the skb wrapped around it, the buffer the bytes were finally copied into. We never once asked which memory. A page was a page. That’s been the quiet assumption under this whole series. On a laptop it’s a fine one. On a two-socket server it falls apart, because there the RAM isn’t wired to the machine —…

The Tetris effect is one of psychology’s most easy to reproduce experiments. Simply spend a bit of time playing the eponymous game every day for a few weeks. After a little while, you’ll start recognizing familiar Tetromino shapes in clouds, buildings, and everyday objects. You might even see them appear before your eyes when you start falling asleep. Photo by Tom Tang Attention hijacking There’s one lesson the Tetris effect teaches us: whatever you focus on long enough will end up shaping your…

After defeating the darkness, or what they thought was the darkness, Bea and Cad have to brave death and return the light they lost as the world is plunged into darkness and the Mire is spreading further. I enjoyed this installment in the story and it I like participating in the stories my children are reading. It's an easy way for a parent to join them in something they love. I'm looking forward to the next one, and if my youngest ages out of the stories, I'll still get them from the library…

What does AI think of me? OK it's not really thinking, it's drawing data maps but, once upon a time it was a rainy day and ... I was flipping across the internet's rugged and dreary landscapes and for no obvious reasons I thought I'd ask AI (aka Chat GPT) what it thought about me and what kind of person I am. Obviously it's answer is based on whatever rubbish I've fed into the data centric beating heart of Chat over the last few months. To be clear I use it mostly as a spell checker and format…

August was another fabulous summer month in the UK. The lack of rain became a nasty drought, with hosepipe bans across much of the country – including my Coastal Folly’s Wessex Water supplier (for the first time in over 50 years). But lawns aside it made for an enjoyable month. I spent quite a bit of time on the south coast. I finally ticked off the Isle of Wight’s Osborne House from my bucket list, and also made it down to Portland’s lighthouse – Dorset’s southerly point. Markets in August…

Been working on a listing post type so you can sell your stuff via your website. When I mean sell I mean advertise as that’s literally all it does, with an index, with search engines collecting all the products. Also building in rsvp replies, so I can reply to an indieweb event on zoom held in London on the 23rd. Might go or not. The above also led to not having built a contact form in the last x years, I guess by the independent web spirits I should build in a /contact page with a form. One…

The third part of a Rio Tinto inspired collection of commissions, this latest follows the Victory and Ruston. A more involved project in many ways, the donor was a Rapido RSC-14 undecorated that arrived as little more than a kit of body details in poly bags and a shell and chassis…Having dismantled enough North American models for a lifetime I had a pretty good idea of what went where - but decided, like the Chinese, to paint many of the parts before final assembly. The overall model was…

I recently had family in town, and one of the things they came to see, besides me, was a ukelele festival in Torrance. At that festival, I saw the guy in this video play this arrangement of Billy Jean - the same preposterous one-ukelele version he plays in the video - live. It was extremely nuts. Feng E can actually make the ukelele make these sounds with his hands??? I don't even know too much about ukelele limitations, but I've absorbed enough from friends in college and from my…

Life has no inherent meaning. Give it whatever meaning you want. Start today. Death is an interesting subject, and we should talk about it more openly. We’re all going to experience it, and most of us are afraid of it. Sometimes we think we’re the only ones struggling with something. Then we talk about it and realize that other people have the same problems, sometimes even the people closest to us. Sharing what we’re going through has a strange way of making us feel closer to each other. Take…

A cartoon coded in CSS from comiCSS.

Is it smirking at me? Pareidolia (noun): the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern; not be confused with paranoia Also on: Bluesky

In the core rules, combat is an opposed 2D6 roll where players add their Skill Total (Skill+Adv.Skill) and enemies add their Skill. Being numerically challenged, I feel this could be streamlined. Players: Roll 2D6 and only add your relevant fighting skill. Potentially make this less (or more?) confusing by changing fighting skills to a new kind of stat: Combat Bonus, represented with a + before the integer. COMBAT BONUSES knives: +1 tunnels: +2 Enemies: No longer have a Skill score. Instead…

The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here. Today the amount information that we get using various information streams is at massive overload. Thus one needs to focus only on what is important without the need to grep(1) the Internet everyday. Hence the idea of providing such…

The Vagabond and The Princess: Paddy Leigh Fermor in Romania (2017) by Alan OgdenQ. Can I walk?I can!Q. Have I walked?I have!Q. Have I gone on and On and ON about my walks?But I am The Page to Wenceslas when compared to Laurie Lee, Eric Newby, Peter Fleming or Patrick Leigh Fermor and their earlier long-distance treks. I had indeed read all their walkie-books before I ever put one foot in front of the other.Travel books are more, and better, than journals or diaries; because travel broadens the…

At a field day at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland that featured walking robots and self-driving trailers, Savanna Institute researcher Lily Hislop was equally impressed by a low-tech innovation: kites designed to look like birds of prey to frighten away birds, rodents, and other farm pests. You can hear more about Lily’s recent trip to Europe in our latest podcast episode. She sounds just like Helen MacDonald.

What’s your favorite collaboration between artists? My actual favourite is only on YouTube — the cover of While My Guitar Gently Weeps performed by Rock n Roll Hall of Famers and includes THAT guitar solo by Prince — so in lieu of that, the answer is obvious. I was heavy into rock music as a young boy, discovering Iron Maiden before most of my friends, and so one of these bands were on my radar already. I’ve mentioned it before but the local library record department was excellent, providing me…

Fremantle2026 September 21 (Monday), 2:08PM· Buffalo Club · oral history · Know Thy Neighbour Residency: Cara Teusner-Gartland with Vessel and Fremantle Buffalo Club #2, 2026-09-16: The club would mean nothing without these people, and their stories. This project we’re doing, I’d like to think, is an acknowledgement of that. It’s as much about the building as the people, because the building is a reflection of everyone’s labour of love. Over the last few months Anna Farrant and I have…

Well, there’s a blast from the past: Remove safely! Actually, last time I mounted floppies with KDE, I don’t think free storage sizes were indicated in KiB. I wonder why the K in KiB is capitalised, by the way. Kilo’s symbol is a lower case k. Anyway, yes, I’ve bought a floppy drive for my PC. It connects over USB of course, so it’s a bit lighter and smaller than the one I bought last time. Actually, except for this one and that one, all floppy drives I ever owned came with the machines they…

Perfume PosseLorenzo Villoresi Sandalo I am having the front of the house painted. I can’t recall how many years it’s been since the last rodeo, but at least 10, I think. Definitely a fair few. It’s going to be silver blue. All the other… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseLorenzo Villoresi Sandalo

Out of print for the greater part of the 20th century, Hopkins’ Of One Blood looks a lot like Afro-futurism, using ancient Ethiopian technology and the new science of mesmerism to think about racial politics. But it’s actually a bit stranger than that—Garret Bridger Gilmore returns to walk us through some of the novel’s contexts and theories. Credits: Guest: Garret Bridger Gilmore Title: Of One Blood, or, The Hidden Self by Pauline E. Hopkins Host: Jake Casella Brookins Music by Giselle…

There is something really comforting about a homemade bake, especially one that fill the kitchen with warmth and familiar scents. This recipe is one of those simple, dependable favourites . . . the kind you can pull together with everyday ingredients ad end up with something truly delicious.Whether you are baking for yourself, sharing with a friend or someone you love, or just craving a cozy moment in the middle of the day, this is the kind of treat that always hits the spot. Easy, reliable and…

I’ve spent a lot of words arguing that the ordinary is enough. To me, documenting your own life is the most interesting thing you can do for your own future self. And as I mentioned before, I see Japanese photography as the centre of that approach. So when a Substack note appeared on my feed the other day about a teenager in Tokyo who’d won a million yen with a photocopied zine of her own life, I knew who they were talking about, of course. Who is interested in photography and hasn’t heard of…

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“Is anyone familiar with the concept of the Dao?” The man stood at the front of the makeshift classroom, its high windows looking out on a grey afternoon somewhere in the city, transparent from within but opaque from the outside. His face was constantly pensive — distracted, almost — but he was clearly focusing on what he was saying. Anwen knew him only as Faine, and she had met him just that morning. He was one of those men with a vaguely academic air; dark eyes, and darker hair that was a…

Let's round off Open House with yesterday's final four visits. Apologies, it might take me a while to finish these off. Open House: Richmond Lock Building (Surrey Side) (Richmond) The Weired One Open House: The Lock House, Richmond Lock & Weir (Twickenham) The Thin One Sometimes spaces on heavily booked tours suddenly appear overnight, even on the day of the opening, thus I grabbed this one and changed my plans for the day. Richmond is the last lock on the Thames if heading downstream, and the…

Preorder Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster! There are lots of ways to handle initiative in different RPGs. D&D has a variant which many of us use — roll a d20, add your dex mod, and go in order from highest to lowest. Shadowdark has an around-the-table initiative that's always on. It's hard to beat for its simplicity. Dragonbane has an easy system we can port over to other RPGs. You deal out numbered cards for each of the characters and each monster or group of monsters. Flip them over and you know…

The White House Media Ban Is Real When Donald Trump announced that he was banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, the move was not immediate, in that staffers from the three outlets were allowed to remain in their executive mansion workspaces for the remainder of the day after Trump made his announcement. However, the next time staffers from CNN, MS NOW and Politico showed up for work, they were advised that their White House press badges were no longer valid, and must be…