Part of a recreated street of Ballycultra, the town area of of the UlsterFolk Museum. With a trip to London planned, I decided to fly to the U.K. a few days early last month to visit Belfast in Northern Ireland to meet Heritage Carpenter Peter Sloan and Curator of History Fiona Byrne at the Ulster Folk Museum. They are working together to document and photograph all the many chairs and other seating in the museum’s collection, and kindly pulled some for me from storage so that I could take a…

Unrelatedly, this morning I finally got to take my splint off! I’m cooling my heels in a patient room waiting for the OT to come in and show me how to have a bad time. (And craft a reduced safety splint for the next leg.) There’s a sink in here, and as soon as they left me alone I spent like ten minutes washing my hands to try and get the splint stank off. So much dead skin sloughing off, too. And there’s these nasty creases? That shit better not split on me, say no to trench foot. comments

Downtown Dallas’ Univision Tower and the Plaza of the Americas rise into the North Texas sky. The post What’s Up? appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

I legit did not think this was going to be possible. I was so sure the fix was in! Now comes the really annoying part. But I didn’t really believe I was gonna live to see the annoying part, so I welcome it with open arms. Let’s all stomp some spine into these democrats and not let up for a millisecond. Shout out to everyone who had the faith I couldn’t muster. comments

I have never liked roses. Do not get me wrong, they are beautiful and come in all sorts of colours, but there is something extremely... pristine about them. There is something too beautiful, too nice. I have always been more in favour of wildflowers, flowers that look like they grow in a field, or a forest, or like smoke rising from a burning chimney, I think I like the chaos more, the texture, the colour, the vivacity. My favourite flowers are snowdrops. I know they are nothing like…

Have you ever thought of giving your garden a “second life”? Flowers are great while they fresh, but you can also enjoy their dry seedheads in the fall and winter. Leave them standing in the yard or use them indoors as decorative seedpods. Here you will see the most striking seedpods alongside their fresh flower pictures. I hope this will help you choose the flowers that look best in both their “first” and “second” life! Note: before choosing a plant please research whether it is native to your…

One of the most discussed problems in philosophy is the nature of consciousness, and perhaps the most popular tool for analyzing it is something called the hard problem of consciousness. It asks why there is something it is like to be you. The worry is that a brain could, in principle, do everything it does in the dark, with nobody home. Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel? David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness (1995)The…

Apple opens Siri AI to developers starting today with the iOS 27.3, iPadOS 27.3, macOS 27.3, and visionOS 27.3 betas. The consumer AI agent arms race will probably be won by the company with the best personal context solution. After all, agents are only as helpful as the context we give them. So much of our personal contact lives in apps. This could play to Apple's App Store advantage, but only if developers buy in. That makes these OS 27.3 releases particularly interesting. 🍿

Qobuz Theme v1.5 Despite making Jacket app for myself, I'm still tinkering with my custom Qobuz theme, and for version 1.5 I'm presenting it a little differently. First of all, the changes Qobuz were testing are now public, so the theme is no longer Beta only. I've cut back some of the styles, as Qobuz is using less and less semantic markup, which makes targeting style changes harder/impossible. It also replaces Qobuz Sans with a new custom font, Jacket Sans, which is based on Inter. As the…

I went 37 years without ever thinking about wanting larger bottles of shower gel. And then, suddenly, I came to the conclusion that it just doesn't make sense to keep buying those tiny ones. Why don't they sell 2-liter bottles at the store? Turns out, they do. Well, they're only 750 ml, but that's still a huge improvement over the absurd situation I was putting up with before.

Over the past week, I've tried to share something, but I just couldn't find the appropriate words. Having been online long enough to know that you're usually better off not posting something when you're emotional, I decided to keep my mouth shut. Instead, I moved each post I wrote into my private journal and just kept moving forward. Today, though, I think I'm finally at a good point where I can get this out, along with a few other things. Last Monday, my wife was in a really bad car accident.…

The Last March of the Ents does feel fitting for this midterm moment: survivors of a destructive, marauding force survey the charred ruins of what used to be their country and decide Enough. There is indeed no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of Men for the treachery Trump has wrought. But I’m proud to have cast not a rock or stone but a vote in favor of the mighty blue wave that will wash out all the orcs and dark wizards responsible for it.

Looking back, I’m surprised it took me so long to get around to sharing Kyoto’s ヨツドメノディ (aka Yotsudomenoddy) because going back and listening to their slim catalog now, particularly their debut 2025 EP 追憶, their brand of emotive, anthemic shoegaze hits so good. The timing of this realization is good, however, because their second EP […] The post ヨツドメノディ-『眩暈』 appeared first on Space Echo.

Five machines live in my house, and every one of them runs Debian. Between them they handle my music, my movies, my files, my notes, my search engine, a couple of local AI models and a BBS running on a computer that doesn't physically exist. The public stuff lives on rented servers: the blogs, the Mastodon instance, the BBSes people actually call. This post is about what stays home. How traffic gets in The ISP's modem sits in bridge mode and does nothing else. An EdgeRouter-X handles the real…

Rusty Epstein runs the Reverse Caption Contest and is a cartoonist published in The New Yorker, Times Luxury, Private Eye, and others.

Integrity… hmmm… Sometimes I have integrity. A lot of the times I do not. I’ve been wanting to have it more but I often abandon whatever values I have for whatever the values are of the room I am standing in. It is a good strategy for social survival; but it is a bad strategy for being able to look yourself in a mirror. I have a friend who I would categorize as high integrity. Actually, I have a lot of friends who I would categorize as high integrity. I am writing this today because I feel like…

I talked last week about buying a new phone, and I pulled the trigger Saturday afternoon. Once the order was confirmed, the order confirmation advised me the expected arrival date would be Thursday November 5. That's OK, I can wait, I have a perfectly serviceable phone that allows me to log into my work applications. But it arrived yesterday! That was a nice surprise. As a bonus, a case I ordered from Amazon arrived yesterday as well, around the same time. So I've got everything I need so far1.…

When the Clay Mathematics Institute announced the Millennium Prize Problems back in 2000, we joked that if you proved P = NP, you wouldn't only get the $1 million prize for solving P v NP, but you would get $7 million since you could use P = NP to solve the rest.In theory, if P = NP, then you could efficiently find the proof of any theorem, provided its formal proof was not too long. In practice, we don't have P = NP, and back then we didn't even have a good way to formalize a proof. Fast…

Domains were never going to work1. And Siri was, unfortunately, always going to remain Siri. Nobody wanted that, especially developers. Before 27.3, unless your app fit into a blessed domain, there weren’t many opportunities we could take advantage of in our apps. Why? It’s simple: Apps do not fit into pretty little boxes. Before iOS 27.3 Predefined Siri Domains Mail Photos Calendar A few actions fit.The rest were left outside. Apple tried to do two things. They wanted a Siri that understood…

There’s that famous video of Steve Jobs explaining why they don’t didn’t make touchscreen MacBooks: We thought about [a touch screen MacBook] years ago. We’ve done tons of user testing on this and it turns out it doesn’t work! Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives great demo. But after a short period of time, you start to fatigue. And after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. It doesn’t work. It’s ergonomically terrible. Touch surfaces want to be horizontal […]…

Currently listening to Mr. Blue Sky by ELO. What a wild day. A lot of pain the last few days but things are looking up in many ways.

Virgil Widrich is an Austrian film-maker with a very inventive approach to the materials of cinema. There’s some crossover in the two films here with animation, although I don’t think Widrich would consider himself an animator as such. The technique is one of many he draws upon. Copy Shop (2001) is a simple scenario in which a man who works at an establishment named “Copy Shop” ends up populating his world with copies of himself as a result of some magical action (or malfunction) of his…

This was my second book of the month of Octoer (even if I actually started it earlier than Left Hand of Darkness) and the spookiest of the three. It’s all about cosmic horror, existential dread, fear of the unknown and all of that mumbo jumbo that is often attributed to H.P. Lovecraft but well, it actually comes from here! This is an earlier work by William Hope Hodgson, published in 1908 and doing a lot of heavy-lifting for the genre already! A novel that starts out with two rather unimportant…

Last year around this time I wrote about my 5-month experience with MdDS (Mal de débarquement syndrome or “I’m stuck on an ocean buoy in a storm” syndrome). From October 2025 to June 2026, I was pretty much back to normal. I weaned off of Paxil (Paroxetine) in January and felt great. In those ~8 months, the only symptom I still experienced was instant dizziness when walking on a treadmill or moving sidewalk. Easy enough to avoid. I took roundtrip flights to San Diego and Hawaii without issue. I…

What happens when companies can grow without hiring as many people? And what happens when the tools driving that change become available to the people trying to understand it?I have followed Dror Poleg for his writing on technology, work and the economy. For Factory Life, Hugo and I invited him to share both his view of what is changing and the AI tools he has built to support his research.Dror showed us a personal system that collects information, helps him find patterns and keeps track of his…

A thought and recommendation on jobs and work: Focus on Problems instead of Companies.I spend a lot of time thinking about what people should be doing right now given all this change in the world. Especially kids, but really everyone, and definitely people who are struggling to become or remain employed.I think we should start shifting, as quickly as practically possible, from thinking about companies and jobs to thinking about problems and solutions.Let me explain.Companies are scrambling…

I recently bought a 2018 Honda HR-V as our family car. It has a 7” touchscreen running Android 4.0.4, a version so old it predates Android Auto by about three years. It runs Android Auto now anyway, thanks to a small app I built over the course of a week. The big clock is the head unit’s own. I’ve since turned it off. The Honda is great. Its head unit isn’t. It has no Play Store, and Honda’s own app store has very few apps. The usual routes to Android Auto are swapping in the head unit from a…