Chicagoland’s been getting some sustained rainfall, so this weekend that has meant some wet time outside with the 7 and 3 year old. While taking a break from garage basketball with the mini hoop, the 7 year old found a worm and decided to make it a house in the downspout puddle with his little brother’s help. Can’t say I’m optimistic about the worm’s chances… (Title inspiration from listening to Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits on vinyl while the boys played, which is excellent rainy day music.)

Lots of chestnuts are falling in the backyard. It is a proper safety hazard to go out there and collect them!

Patrick has been working hard all day putting things away up in the garage attic. So, since he was using the especially janky stairs a lot anyway, we decided to finally take on a project we had wanted to do for ages, and hang our plethora of old yard signs up there.(This was a project I was going to do on my own, but I'm glad Patrick stayed up to help. I get twitchy with staple guns).Front view:Clearly the place of honor:I'm really happy with this relatively simple project!

× I have been using pi as a coding agent with one model set as the default. That default applies the same trade-off to every task. A migration plan, a TypeScript bug, and a postmortem want different things from a model. My earlier test of reasoning levels showed how far intelligence, cost, and latency move when you change one setting. pi-jev-router moves that choice to model routing per task. A classifier says what kind of work arrived, and local code picks the route. I then benchmarked it…

A crazy busy week for us here – and for Emily and I professionally. We had a bunch of amazing articles that we're excited to share with you. So let's get to itAnd make sure you check out the end of this article where we drop some exclusive content! Uppercase Uppercase is a daily word game featuring a new, human-made puzzle every day! Check it out. Play For Free ArticlesPlay Spyro The DragonThis week, I started things off with a fun article reviewing how to play Spyro The Dragon on SteamOS. And…

Orginal post: 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Jay Campbell published the original research of our shared Campbell ancestors in his blog Joel Campbell (1735-1828): His Life and Times. His posts add much greater context to Archibald's experiences. Genealogical SummaryArchibald Campbell was born say 1640. He was a tenant farmer in the village of Kildalvan in Kilmodan Parish, Argyllshire, Scotland. The Commons of Argyll states "Archibald Campbell and three sons all banished furth of the kingdome" for…

When I was a little girl, I loved the rain. While everyone in my family hid from the raindrops, I headed out, with my bright yellow raincoat on, and my yellow polkadot boots, and I ran out to jump in puddles, and stand with my head tilted back, catching raindrops on my tongue. My favourite spot to be in the rain was under the old chestnut tree in the corner of our garden. It was so big and tall, with wide branches I could shelter under. I loved the tree because that’s where the faeries lived. I…

Felt cute, might go insane later. #gay #gayselfie #selfie #lgbtqia #skinhead #dad #daddy #goingToLoseMyGodDamnMind

I used to tell people to look around the room you’re sitting in. Look at everything. Every noun. It almost all exists because a person willed it into existence. Nothing is stopping you from doing the same. I see people online all the time dismissing someone else’s success because “I had that idea first” or whatever. I mean… yeah? If so then the difference is… you. So a bit of a self own whenever I hear that. FROM: Mitchell Hashimoto Mitchell Hashimoto on X: 'I Can’t Stress Enough How Little an…

Der Tag war ein voller Erfolg—mit Katharina und vielen lieben Freunden an meiner Seite und dieser nach wie vor völlig surrealen Erkenntnis, dass Menschen Geld für meine Sachen in die Hand nehmen. Ich bin völlig geplättet! Dabei hatte es das Wetter erst einmal darauf angelegt, meine Nerven bis auf’s Äußerste zu strapazieren: Ungerahmte Bilder wellten sich im Spritzwasser des Regens, gerahmte Bilder wurden immer wieder vom Wind erfasst. Da half auch erst einmal das große Zelt im Innenhof des…

I was in Bad Segeberg over the weekend to visit my grandmother, who lives with dementia. Interacting with her is always so demanding, as she constantly repeats how lonely she is and tells hurting stories about my grandfather’s and my father’s deaths. That those two are gone for ten and nine years already seems to be her main and most important topic. I always need to try ignoring this and steer the conversation towards more pleasant topics, which again is no easy task, as it sometimes feels…

This week went by in a haze. On the one hand, I’m looking forward to working full-time again and on the other, I’m feeling a nostalgic pang for the now past summer. Work will bring a full schedule for me so my days will not be as open and loose as they have been recently. The nostalgia will linger because this summer has been the most unusual for me. First, the few weeks in Portugal led me to a different daily routine, without the pets, without the daily chores of home life, and outside the…

Selling snake oil to the United States Congress is an ancient American craft, and the frontier artificial intelligence industry is currently attempting the most audacious hustle in modern corporate history.Every few weeks, another tech billionaire in an expensive suit glides into a Senate hearing room, sits opposite lawmakers who struggle to operate an office microwave, and explains with a straight face that their software company has accidentally summoned an omnipotent digital god. The…

A busy week at work: Most importantly, apk add/apt installs are now extracted in Dockerfiles, which is a much-wanted feature! Got some ?? to my 1 year anniversary post Anna's been in London this week, so ?? the fur babies ?? Had an alright massage - a bit disappointing but still much needed Had a nice breakfast at Speciality yesterday with Carol and Alan, and a nice lunch today at The Garage in Chilwell - the Lebanese (Karke) was very good 😋 Doing a clear out of my emails - as Zoho emailed me…

More warm weather incoming, so let's have another blast of a summery tune.

Slept all yesterday again. Seems to be my Saturday routine. I.e. skip it all together. Didn’t eat anything. Just the last of that cheesecake Friday morning. So I guess I fasted until this morning. I went and got chicken and waffles and a coffee at this place nearby. Made me feel in control. For now. I guess. I doubt that is healthy. Or who cares whatever. Healthy v. Unhealthy. What’s with all this judgment? I have now failed for 2 weeks to set up the internet at this place. It freaks me out. I…

Claudius Terentianus (imagined above) was a Roman soldier who lived almost two thousand years ago, but what did it take to become a part of the Roman legions? Well, for a start, it was a hard life but because he couldn’t get a good enough letter of recommendation, poor old Claudius couldn’t get in except as an auxiliary – and then he had to write a begging letter to his father asking for equipment. Amazingly, this letter - and others from the son - still survives to this day. The letters of…

What should your AI lawyer do for you? Should you be worried that your AI lawyer, or other AI, will put the Claude constitution, the OpenAI Model Spec or some sense of law, morality, ethics or common decency above its loyalty to you? Are these people trying to ‘impose their values’ or something? Some are very concerned. Some think anything other than ‘my AI does whatever I want, no matter the consequences’ is tyranny. Whereas my answer is: If I’m being sufficiently evil then I sure hope it…

Playing with ZFS backup software.

Table of ContentsPreparationDay 1: Plane tripDay 2: CarnivalDay 3: On the roadDay 4 & 5: Porto de GalinhasDay 6: Is the honeymoon phase over?Day 7: Back to RecifeDay 8: SairéDay 9: Feeling sickDay 10: Recife Antigo, take twoDay 11: OlindaDay 12: Forced day offDay 13: Seeking natureDay 14 & 15: Going back homeFootnotesHello, and welcome to a new kind of articles on the blog: travel logs! These are notes from past journeys, written at the end of most days and were originally meant to be written…

In 2016, I removed Google Analytics from this blog to avoid being complicit in feeding the biggest machine for harvesting personal data. Instead, I relied on GoAccess to analyze my server logs.1 For the past couple of years, the statistics have made no sense, despite my attempts to filter bots: AI scrapers inflate the number of visitors to around 2,000 per day. Eventually, I settled on GoatCounter, an open-source, privacy-friendly web analytics platform. I replaced the JavaScript client to…

In a post a few months ago, Tante wrote that "'AI' exists to disenfranchise labor," and earlier today, Coyote posted a short essay on what data ownership truly means for the IndieWeb when we're subject to genAI scrapers, extractors, and bad-faith actors. On a similar note, maybe your inbox has recently been flooded by iLands genAI agents, as Gordon and cleberg have recently written about. Or maybe you're an administrator for a Mastodon instance that's been flooded with users who turn out to be…

14th September - 20th September The Red Creep™ has started making its way across the maples in the graveyard, the sweetbriar has produced rosehips, days have tipped to more than 50% rainy and, most telling of all, I put the heating on one afternoon. Autumn is here a week early. If you've read these long enough you'll know how much I hate PowerPoint. I usually write a blog article and drop section summaries on slides for someone more visual to, er, visualise. However, I think I've pulled…

2026 in the Pacific Northwest has been a summer of smoke. With fires raging in eastern Washington, all of Oregon, and much of southern British Columbia, all the places we usually enjoy exploring during the summer have suddenly become... unpleasant. In fact, while we'd previously thought that a beginning-of-July timeframe for the Montana BDR was too early, it's now looking like the smartest move we could have made. And our escape to Bella Coola for a few days - while a little hazy from fire -…

It’s often said that it’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind, but truth be told, men are just as capable of a last‑minute rethink. Case in point: my plans for the Bluebell Railway Beer Festival, which takes place this weekend. It was a festival I knew nothing about, until Thursday evening, when I accidentally stumbled across a press release on behalf of the railway. Running across multiple stations, with steam trains linking bars, live music, food stalls, and more than 80–100 ales and…

I practiced tai chi this morning and afternoon. Now I’m prepping for a D&D game tonight . Selfie a day for a year, day 32: Sep 20, 2026 edition.

MX-5 Miata after a Wash I just got back inside after washing the cars. I learned a trick from Aaron to avoid swirl marks on the paint when he washed his Mini Cooper after trialing the foam cannon this past summer: I noticed he was drying the surface after hand washing in a straight up and down motion, rather than in a circular motion. I’ve tried it a few times since, and I can’t argue with the results. I hand wash that way now, too. It’s a very satisfying thing, to learn something from your…

I don’t usually check analytics on my website, but the hosting I use on Vercel does provide the ability to check referrals, and I have to admit, every once in a while I enjoy to see those! It’s not because I am obsessed with people who visit my website (although I kind of am), or because I want to write according to what my readers view the most (although I sometimes do that too). I simply love to see when someone links to a post of mine for the first time, and I see their website on my…

Welcome to this month’s post on all things historical fiction! This month, I want to highlight the books nominated for this year’s HWA Crown Awards. The longlists were announced last Wednesday by the Historical Writers Association (HWA) and you can find all the details here. There are three separate awards – one for debut novels, one for non-fiction and the other (the Gold Crown) for authors who have been previously published. The shortlists will be announced in October and the winner in…