It's that time again for my weekly update, which includes a short collection of noteworthy finds, posts that inspire, as well as a few reflections from the past week or two. I'll aim to land these in your inbox by the weekend, in time to pair with your morning coffee (or your preferred cup of inspiration).The Latest Drippings ☕️There Is No Epidemic of Loneliness, But There Is an Epidemic of Scurvy. I thought this was an interesting companion piece to an article I shared a few weeks back,…

Here's a simple framework I use for improving the performance of your fav agent on (semi-)complex tasks.

There’s an old line about internet businesses: if the product is free, you’re the product. It’s catchy, but not quite right. The simpler way to understand consumer internet systems is to look at advertiser incentives. You’re not the product. But you are who the advertiser is trying to reach, and that’s where the money comes from and that’s the outcome the product is architected for. On a feed, the goal is to keep you scrolling, because more scrolling means more views, and more views means more…

This book, by The Times' former Architecture Correspondent, stands in direct opposition to A City on Mars. Whereas that book presented a (perhaps too) sceptical look at the realities of living on other planets, Jonathan Morrison's book goes (perhaps too far) in the opposite direction. How to Build a Space Station is a beautiful examination of just how important architecture will be to our colonisation of other worlds. Not just in terms of physical safety - but psychological safety as well. It…

Dreams I remembered my dream for the first time in a long while the other night. I had gone to the old cinema which features in many of my dreams, a cinema which doesn't exist. I'd gone to see a French film which as far as can gather doesn't exist. I was the only one there (which is unusual, as the place is usually filled with everyone I've ever met). At the end I visited the box office to buy a ticket for the next showing to find the actress Laura Fraser working behind the counter (recent star…

OverviewThe common thread this week is control-plane risk. Cisco confirmed active attacks against email-security and network-access appliances, CISA flagged exploitation of ScreenConnect and GitLab, ransomware crews moved onto a vCenter flaw, and attackers used Artifactory and Conductor weaknesses to turn trusted automation into durable access.Brevo shows the same problem without a product CVE: a long-lived Cloudflare key let an attacker alter scripts embedded across customer sites. The…

the Yongle Emperor /ˈjɒŋgəl/

Maybe you were always meant to write long lines—” and he keeps laughing, he seems to find this hilarious— link here Thank you again to Sabrina Orah Mark

More rain, more cool air. So far I’m absolutely loving the autumn, although I’m conscious we’re still getting plenty of daylight at this early stage. Three gyms. I finished Redemption Ark as predicted, despite various technical difficulties which made the audiobook run slightly past the end of Friday’s gym session. I mopped up the last few minutes sat on the sofa yesterday for the sake of starting next week with a clean slate and, well, not undermining my prediction. Despite my initial…

Some books I’ve read recently. I didn’t take detailed notes, so you don’t get detailed reviews. The Evolution of Imperfection: The Science of Why We Aren’t and Can’t Be Perfect – Laurence D. Hurst – 2025 If you had the idea that humanity is the pinnacle of evolution, or that evolution makes masterful, near-perfect machines… well, this book will make you wonder why we don’t collapse in a pile of pink goo. Evolution is a far worse engineer than you probably thought. Nor are other animals really…

During my Digital Declutter (which is still on as I'm writing this), I've reintroduced the Social Hour to my life. The idea: Instead of picking up my phone dozens of times every single day to check my messages, I check them twice a day, half an hour at a time. This is a more deliberate approach to my digital social life. I've been living with my phone's notifications turned off for well over two years now. When I first did this, I wondered: if I allow none of the apps on my phone to send me…

I am in a courtyard restaurant in Sarria, at a long table with a man from Argentina and eight women from all over the world. We are drinking Rioja and talking about how much we love Wikipedia, we are talking about the gorillas in Rwanda’s mountains, we are talking about God. It is Sunday. We are 111km from Santiago de Compostela. We will walk for six days along the Camino Frances to the Cathedral. One woman says that people have been walking this way since Before Christ (BC). The paths run over…

"You come here to live, you don't come here to pass away." A documentary looking at a few residents of ‘The Villages’, the world’s largest retirement community over in Florida. It’s a weird sort of Disneyland for older people, that since its inception in the 80s has grown to a huge population. Oppenheim resists the temptation to do a surface level piece on this, which is admirable because I would totally have droned on about it for hours. A fairy land for old people where you never have to…

“The Greatest Benefit to Mankind – A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present” by Roy Porter was published in 1999. It’s a magnificent 848-page book that I’ve now read. Many people, I’ve discovered, own a copy but have dipped into it rather than read it through. I hope that I might do medical history, the world at large, students of medicine (surely all of us), and Roy, whom I knew and who died suddenly aged 55 in 2002, in a service by posting extracts of his book on my…

first setI had to replace the two outside slats, #1 and #5. I had to replace them due to gaps and fit them again. 80 and 120 gritI sanded the rough side of the ten slats needed for the night stand.extrasSanded these for back ups in case I have to say oops.first side dry fittedI clamped it to ensure that the aprons got closed up tight to the legs. Washed, rinsed, and repeated for the other side.hmm......This shelf fit yesterday, I have photographic proof. stinky mind fart me-steakI sized it for…

Drafting in public ideaMaybe?Kudos if you can understand my handwriting. Transcription:PUBLIC DRAFTS (idea)Snapshots archiveBlock Bots↳ automated traffic↳ login with random keydrafts.Marisabel.nl?↳ marisabel.nl/public/drafts?BOTH?Obsidian/Documentationsimple styleUse snapshots to record/display changes? #ideasThank you for following my feed! ♥ Leave a reply here.

Stickers on the lid so far. I’m leaving room to add more.Since installing NixOS on a little Minisforum PC, I’ve been a full-time NixOS user at home (I use a MacBook Pro at work). I’m going to be finishing work next Autumn, so I will probably put some form of Linux on the MacBook at that point. However, as it is an Apple Silicon machine and it has a T-whatever-it-is security chip in it, my options may be practically limited to installing Asahi Linux rather than NixOS. I may also dual-boot with…

Small milestones, near and far, from this week. Next to me on the bench is an older lady. She is clearly a grandma and her job this afternoon is to watch over her grandson as he goes on the biggest slide in the playground. The slide is so steep that my son refused to go on it for years. But this small kid slides fiercely and every time time the boy lands in sand grandma sends cheers and claps from the bench A two-hour fight from me, is my brother. His daughter, my lovely 18-months-old niece, is…

The attic of an early 1900s church tower, with plaster-on-expanded-metal-lath partitions around the structural frame: Nice column built up of four angles and web plate. See that bare cable next to the flange on the left? That’s part of a lightning-arrestor system. Church towers badly needed those when they were built of wood or masonry, to carry the massive change from a lightning hit down to ground. Without the system, a hit would either blow the tower up or set fire to it. But here’s the…

When most people think about a movie about ants, I'm sure they think back to DreamWorks' 1998 Antz about a young ant having an existential crisis, or maybe they think of the 1950s monster movie Them! about nuclear-radiated ants. But when I think about ants, my mind always goes back to 1977's Ants (also known as It Happened at Lakewood Manor), a TV movie about guests at a mountain resort that is taken over by killer ants. Okay, let's get the awkward part of this discussion out of the way first.…

Sunday Asides #113 (Instead of writing this directly in the omg.lol interface, I'm writing this in iA Writer and saving it there before I publish. I'm testing to see if last week's Sunday Asides snafu was due to platform censorship instead of user error. Now on with the show!) The biggest tech news over the past week or so is that AI is going to kill us all. This harbinger of doom about AI isn't new — most of the white men accelerating this have said this over a decade ago — but the media blitz…

Please click on this link for my YouTube and Substack reviews of: Guerlain L’Heure Bleue (2026), Tom Ford Ombre Leather Reserve, Byredo Future Memories and Le Labo Shiu 25 reviews. The post is not behind a paywall and you shouldn’t have to subscribe to be able to read it. Persolaise The post ‘New’ Guerlain L’Heure Bleue, Byredo Future Memories, Tom Ford Ombre Leather Reserve and Le Labo Shiu 25 reviews – 2026 appeared first on .

Still very much in line with the overall return to work mood of the past few weeks, I thought I’d post some notes about work gear. You see, I have been using a “Surface Laptop for Business 13in 1st Ed with Snapdragon” (I kid you not, that is what it is called) for a couple of months now. And it might be the best Windows laptop I’ve ever used–at least in summer. Doesn’t look like a MacBook, or… does it? Disclaimer: This is a work machine–a loaner, alas, not a permanent replacement–but I’m…

Almost everyone can eat vegan food—yet vegans can’t count on getting any. Thoughts on why that’s backwards, and the obvious fix.

It has been a week-end of restocking supply shelves and catching up on maintenance tasks. Even after 2 trips to the grocery store on Friday, I woke up yesterday and realized we had forgotten to get toilet paper. So it was off to Walmart, and if I go to Walmart, why not stock up on other items, like baking supplies?I've spent the last two week-ends at retreats, and we've been doing more repair/restoration work at the fixer-upper house in S'burg, so it's not surprising that the pantry had become…

I recently caught a screening of Jane Schoenbrun’s latest film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026), and I’m happy to report that they remain an interesting filmmaker making interesting films. The first of those, 2021’s We're All Going to the World's Fair, didn’t really work for me but was at least formally and visually inventive. I thought a better balance was struck with I Saw the TV Glow (2024), which was funny and tender as well as looking great (and calling on both 90s nostalgia…

12:28 - I'm getting better! But pancakes take me over an hour to cook... Maybe I should cook on medium heat instead of low heat.

A barbed wire fence stretches towards the southern Davis Mountains in the Trans-Pecos region of West Texas, north of Marfa. The post Trans-Pecos Fenceline appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

NervesConf is coming up and I'm very excited On the wind-whipped, rain-beaten shores of Sweden's west coast we took a stand. As the respite of summer fades back into the wet, cold misery and on into the snow-forlorn winter of this miserable coast we saw a moment. The summer crowds scattered. The sun not quite gone yet. And we seized it. -- Unnamed Goatmire organiser At long last, the time has come to start packing for my trip to Varberg, Sweden. I'm going to Goatmire aka NervesConf EU! This is…

Same week as every week, except yesterday I went to a small comedy show with my brother-in-law. It was okay, I guess – four comedians. One was good, one was very obviously at the very beginning of their career, one was okay-ish and one was an ex-cop who joked about bullying teenagers when he was in uniform because he didn’t like their music. Turns out, sometimes the C in ACAB can mean comedian. Also I found a place where I can get banh-mi without having to travel so that’s something that I’ll…