Clouds seem to have a mind of their own in autumn. I love to watch them rush by my window, and imagine what they do to the earth below if they get a chance. That grey one over there looks mean, it looks like it could just drop rain at any second. And that fluffy white one… ooh I feel some mixed emotions from that one. It feels almost… mad? Why would a cloud be mad? I take a sip of my tea, and walk to the kitchen to replenish it. When I return, the cloudscape has changed, except… Is that the…

Content warning: Mention of suicide, grooming methods, child sexual abuse. In between all the social media bans and age-verification discussions, I think back to my online time as a child. My parents' household got internet when I was about 9 years old, and we had a family computer everyone used. At age 12, I got my own PC in my room. What the internet gave me was important and definitely shaped who I am today, for the better even. It offered me a way to journal that was inaccessible to my…

★★★★: Another delightful outing from FLEB. Pint sized, clever, and beautifully put together as always. Can't beat the price either! (free) Has great Steam Controller support, too! FYI: My reviews are scored out of 4. Also, thanks for subscribing to my RSS feed and supporting the indie web!

At long last, I now have a physical film library again. In a way. Going the DVD route is simply not an option for me, as I don't have the space to store that shit. Plus, the constant moving over the past 12 years has put me in the state of mind of thinking twice before adding to my physical possessions (I still maintain a storage unit back in Houston filled with books, comics, zines, records, and I don't even remember what else). So, with leaning on anything like DVDs or videotapes being out of…

Recently I saw a post on Hacker News: I used to be excited about new tech, but I rarely am anymore. The author, Andreas, talks about how he’s just not excited about new technology the way he used to be when he was younger. He poses the question of whether getting older just makes it seem more boring. I’ve had similar thoughts about new technology, but I don’t think it’s a question of age specifically. A lot of modern tech just feels very mundane. But I recently got an old school calculator, an…

Last Saturday we headed into London to see a trio of Canadian bands under the billing of the All The Feelings tour. We were staying in Camberwell, which is not an area of London that I know, so we took the opportunity to walk around — found a cute little park where we saw a guy repair a lamppost whilst a surprisingly inept spaniel failed to find and retrieve a tennis ball. We browsed at Lala Books, got pretty darn good pizza at Theo’s (where the chilli sauce is not to be underestimated), and…

Overcast and quiet. A few drops of rain patter in the grass and dead bracken. The enthusiasm of a Carolina wren up by the garage seems wholly unwarranted.

IIn the era which we call B.C.—that is, Before Cable—movies on television were a Big Deal. A Very Big Deal, in fact. They were, and had been for years, a staple of local television, and in the late 1950s ABC had experimented with a couple of movie packages consisting of pre-1950 movies or movies from England, but when NBC's Saturday Night at the Movies debuted in 1961, it represented a masssive change. Now, for the first time, movies that had been in theaters after 1950 could be seen in the…

Circling back to smartphones, the main problem is not that it removed the intention of certain activities, it’s the fact that it just provides easy alternative activities to fill our day, a lazy cop-out instead of being creative. Why write something when you can doomscroll endlessly for that sweet sweet micro-dose of dopamine? Why listen to an album and find that great song that no one is talking about when you can jump on Spotify and listen to whatever slop A$AP Rocky released that is pushed…

Like most others, I also discovered Pixel Area today and have claimed my spot. It’s called “Rambler’s Rest” and given this is another indie project, any traffic that I can send is worth it. That said, it feels like once every generation, someone comes up with the idea of a pixel project. I remember the very first one. Woof, I am old.

Messages Storage Saver is a free Mac app that does for Messages what “Optimize Mac Storage” does for Photos. Messages was taking up 190 GB on my Mac. With Messages in iCloud, Apple keeps the master copy of every attachment in iCloud, but the Mac downloads each one and never lets go, so every photo and video anyone has sent me is stored twice, forever. iPhones quietly clear old attachments when they run low on space; the same code is on the Mac, but it’s switched off. And Apple’s only built-in…

Retreat of Sheridan Glacier and expansion of Sheridan Lake from 2002-2026 in Landsat images. Lake has expanded from 3.8 to 13.5 km2, due to 2.25 km retreat. .Sheridan Glacier in the Chugach Mountains of Alaska flows southwest out of the mountains onto a terminus plain where it has gouged out a lake basin that expands as the glacier retreats. Sheridan Lake is a proglacial lake at the terminus that drains into the Sheridan River that 12 km later reaches tidewater. From 1950 to 2000 Sheridan…

Stop making dashboards!!!

Up before 6:00, glassy calm morning on a favorite creek. Straighten up the boat, tuck away sleeping gear, break down the boom tent. I motor over to Rich on KELLY RAE, thank him for pointing out the free mooring. He asks where I am headed today, laughs when I tell him that I am not sure. I expect to head north, but don't have a specific destination in mind.Outside of Pulpit Harbor I am surprised to find a light southwest wind. Sailing at 2.2, headed north and aiming for the south end of…

I take public transport to work three days a week, which means I need to remember to pay for parking each morning. One day I forgot, and found a ticket waiting at the end of the day. What struck me was that it was marked as a first warning. It wasn’t a fine, just a nudge. I appreciated it because it assumes good intent, and I love that a system was designed that way. It got me thinking about how compliance systems could get even smarter. If they looked up my plate, they’d see I pay every single…

Drink Hey everyone, something of quandary. Whenever you don't have time to blog, should you write an entry to say that you don't have time to blog, who simply not blog? Either way, I'm going out to the pub, and so well ... you'll have to look elsewhere for your enlightenment. Try one from the list of 'happenings' to the bottom right, or take a chance with the webrings on the bottom left ... I'm sure you'll find something at least a bit funny...

Every week, I share something I learned in the previous seven days. I usually find these while I'm putting my weekly newsletter together but somehow, they don't quite fit! This week I learned how a Vinyl Record player works - I'll confess that I knew much of this already, but this is an excellent explanation, and it's very on-brand!How The Heck Do Record Players Work? (An Interactive Exploration)An interactive exploration of how record players work: from a stylus, grooves, and magnets to the…

Fantastique Unfettered #3 (Prolefeed) What Works Well? What Works…Less Well? Opportunities What’s Adaptable? Six Years Hence: Book Dash Coming Attractions This week, our Free Culture Book Club reads Fantastique Unfettered #3. To give this series some sense of organization, check out some basic facts without much in the way of context. For Clarity : You can best think of these posts like their titles suggest, as the seed of a discussion group (“book club”) to spark conversation about a Free…

At first, I thought Epomaker only made keyboards (their TH99 Pro and Carbon60 continue to serve me well) but they have expanded into making other gaming-related devices including mice and more recently, audio. I’m personally a very picky person when it comes to mice – when I first went multi-monitor, I had a Logitech MX1000 laser rechargeable cordless mouse and absolutely loved its accurate tracking capabilities to swiftly move between screens using a small amount of desk-space. From there,…

I have often wondered how Apple uses MacOS to develop MacOS. How restricted are they from using third party apps? Why does it often feel that Apple is unable to fix problems that feel obvious to other developers. Today’s random thought is regarding status bar apps. Surveying My Usage In most MacOS screenshots, it seems like there are only a few default status bar icons: volume, wifi, date. For many users, they likely never have more than a few apps open, and those few stay open in the dock.…

Fremantle2026 September 19 (Saturday), 7:13PM· exiftool · photography · Not sure why I find it hard to remember how to remove the GPSLatitude and GPSLongitude tags from images: $ exiftool -gps:all= -xmp:geotag= -overwrite_original ./lorem.jpg ← Previous My main RSS news feed: https://samwilson.id.au/news.rss(or Wikimedia.rss, Fremantle.rss, OpenStreetMap.rss, etc. for topic feeds). Email me at sam@samwilson.id.au or leave a comment below…

LixuLixuni GamingOSELevels 1-6 (ha!) Centuries ago, a mortal Myrenean queen named Nimuanne used forbidden rites at a sacred menhir field to transcend death, splitting her essence into three fragments upon her final death: Body, Mind, and Spirit. Grave robbers broke open the funerary urn containing these fragments, plunging the region into a desperate crisis. This 79 page adventure presents four or five dungeons with ten to twenty locations each, plus a few small towns in a small region that is…

😴 Good sleep can do wonders. I feel back amongst the living.

📷 235/365 - Prague waking up

The north side of the Manhattan approach to the Brooklyn Bridge: From the cable anchorage to the end, most of the roadway is carried on this masonry arcade, with steel bridges at the streets. John Roebling’s original idea, back when the bridge was a private company, was to rent the vaults as warehsoue space. I don’t know if that ever happened. Some were used by the city government for dead storage, although I believe they’re now all empty.[1] So the granite arcade is original as are the brick…

I went to the Transformers shop in London yesterday. In mostly unrelated news, it was my birthday on the 10th, and I got the new version of Onslaught, and the fourth part of Bruticus. Here he is with his 2001 version: The original Onslaught was one of the first Transformers I owned as a boy; he may have even been the second, after Optimus Prime, so I've always had a fondness for him. There's

In recent years, Archive and the Riverdale gang have crossed paths with The Punisher, Predator, Jay and Silent Bob, and now Ashley J. Williams and the Necronomicon. I just finished reading Archie vs. The Army of Darkness, an unexpected crossover that ended up being a lot of fun. Last year, I was a little disappointed in the Archie Meets Jay and Silent Bob one shot. It ust didn't have enough space to tell a memorable story, so I'm glad Archie x The Army of Darkness was a six issue arc. It gives…

I hold a newly banded ovenbird at Bird Lab’s Hays Woods banding station, 15 September 2026 (photo by Shaina Kenny). All banding is conducted under a federally authorized Bird Banding permit issued by the U.S. Geological Survey. 19 September 2026 “The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” — Robert Louis Stevenson On Tuesday 15 September I visited Bird Lab’s banding station at Hays Woods. Migration had been intense the night before and they were…

I joined Mastodon in 2019, and right off the bat, I was very intrigued by the possibility of running your own instance under your own domain. I originally wanted to setup an instance for A Possible Space, similar to what Panic or Tapbots have done. This didn’t happen for a variety of reasons, and soon enough I found an instance after my own heart: Merveilles, a wonderful community of thoughtful and creative people. Merveilles has been my social media home for the following seven years, but, as…