When was the last time you were standing somewhere public, took the phone out of your pocket, scrolled on some app for a while, and then left it, and moved on? When was the last time you did that while still walking? perhaps almost crashing on someone in front of you? Even if you haven’t done that yourself—I’m very sure you have seen some other people staring at those phone screens, even when others are present, without really thinking much about it. It is normalized behavior. At the end of the…

I've been getting more email from agents lately and it's all both formulaic and irritating. My favorites (sarcasm) are the ones that cite a post where I explain a problem I'd already solved and then offer me a solution. They all read the same: polite, bland, slop. Agent email lives at the intersection of slop and spam. Nobody wants to read or receive either. I have a running sieve rule that I expect to grow and it looks like this: if address :domain :matches "from" ["ilands.app",…

It depends!

Ivy in flower- the last abundant source of pollen and nectar as summer turns to autumn.

Board games aren’t always very good at themes. Actual themes, as in underlying messages, not “themes,” the settings that appear in a game’s artwork. One of the hobby’s essential exceptions was Sol: Last Days of a Star. Set in some distant future, players were asked to harvest their dying star’s last embers to propel an ark into the great beyond, only to realize that their efforts were hastening the same solar death they were striving to outrun. Part climate change parable, part meditation on…

📷 The Illawarra coast at dusk #photography

When we first moved to Las Vegas, there was a considerable amount to learn about living in the desert environment. Not so different, I guess, than learning to live on the ocean in a sailboat, but definitely different and sometimes counterintuitive to what we thought we knew. Living in the desert has made us much more aware of a lot of things… water conservation, the difficulties of growing a garden in arid climates, the effects of the sun on everything from our house paint, the paint finish on…

Trying to recover my health as a 60 year old man is not easy. In fact, it seems hopeless. I was never the skinny kid, but I was never the "fatty" either. Then came the military, I lost a lot of weight and was in pretty good shape... right up until I decided I was going to end my military time. The weight started creeping back, slowly at first, then gaining speed... like I reached the crest of a hill and then started barreling down the other side. I lost a lot of weight in my early to mid…

When I was in junior high, we were the Cubs, and the school motto, horribly enough, was “Grin and Bear It.” What the hell were we supposed to learn from that? Anyway, some free advice to you DJs out there. I’ve been doing some platterless gigs where I use the MixTour Pro, this and that. But people love to see the platters, and they love to make the wiki-wiki motion while holding one hand against their head like they have headphones on. They love it. They love to make the joke, just like people…

The cruise ship Carnival Breeze sails the Gulf of Mexico towards Progreso, Yucatán. The post En Route appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Absolutely smashed. Yesterdays move was the absolute in brutality. Then today I had to finish off closing out the previous house. The cherry on top? Definitely the cold that Ryan has dragged into the house and gifted everyone in the family. Sooo annoying.

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Isabelle Correa’s poetry collection Portrait of a Person Who Pushes Love Away in Fear of Losing It is dark, funny, and moving. David Gate wrote of the book: “This is a collection that…

Sakura pens are great, but they’re hard to tell apart from one another, especially in a stuffed pencil case at the bottom of a messenger bag. The pens have faint size markings, but some have worn off after a week. I have marked mine with coloured tape on which I wrote their size. Now it’s easier to fish the right one out of my pencil case. I mostly use my plastic nib pen and my brush pen, so I made them a little different. I added an extra tape loop on the brush pen to help me find it by touch.…

My wife collects vintage fashion pieces. She's amazing at buying and selling items at a profit. She finds items, cleans them up, takes great photos and writes romance language about them. What is romance language? Practially it's marketing. Or it's telling the best version of the truth. It's how you'd describe yourself on a first date. Romance increases the value of the object. But not just for my wife, the seller, but also for the buyer. It adds something real to the item. It makes some normal…

The latest news in the AI hype cycle is that Dario is convincing all the frontier labs to slow down because AI is too dangerous to release. The Playstation 2 was export-controlled because it was a super computer that could be used to make nuclear weapons. All technology is dangerous, from scissors to cyanide. Lets stop pretending otherwise and get on with it.

Ed Zitron on Prof G Markets podcast: If we had smarter fascists, we’d be in real trouble.

Sometimes when a new Artistic Director takes over a building it can feel like there's been a deliberate effort to get designers to reimagine how the stages can be used, and as we go into Indhu Rubasingham's second year at the National I can't help wondering if that's what we're getting there: After Electra/Persona's staircase going down to meet the front of the Lyttelton Stalls, Anna Fleischle cuts the front apron off the Olivier and adds a back wall to turn the vast stage into something…

💡Typhon is an embedded, persistent, ACID database engine written in .NET that speaks the native language of game servers and real-time simulations: entities, components, and systems. It delivers full transactional safety with MVCC snapshot isolation at sub-microsecond latency, powered by cache-line-aware storage, zero-copy access, and configurable durability. Series: A Database That Thinks Like a Game Engine Why I’m Building a Database Engine in C# What Game Engines Know About Data That…

Bild: Die renovierte Brücke der Wasserstraße über die Gräbenwiese unmittelbar vor der Öffnung (11.09.2026) Die Brücke der Wasserstraße über die Gräbenwiese stammt aus den 1980er Jahren. Sie stellt also schon seit etwa 40 Jahren ein gefährliches Nadelöhr für den Radverkehr dar. Radwege hat es auf der Brücke und weiter bis zur Stensstraße noch nie gegeben. Die Brücke im Jahr 2024: Weder Geh- noch Radweg. Und das bleibt so. Das Brückenbauwerk wurde ursprünglich als reine Straßenbrücke mit einem…

This is a full garden tour showing the complete state of things as of mid-afternoon Thursday Sept 17. If you're into it, get a mug of something and be prepared to scroll. We've had a couple frosts, with Linda covering only for the first and worst of them.And stupid Blogger software. Something changed with how it's doing photos. So these are in backwards order, which I guess doesn't really matter for you. These are starting at the right side of the garage, and going leftward around the house.

Somebits.com has a new server. It’s been up for a few days and seems to be working great. Big things hosted here: Weblog Linkblog Postcards The new server is hosted at OVHCloud and runs on NixOS. For 20+ years I’ve been hand-managing servers like this. This time around I got an AI to build it for me. It was a very good experience and I’m quite satisfied with the result. Nix feels like a good match for AIs: the entire operating system is described declaratively so there’s no managing of running…

Jimmy Millerprojectspostsadventtalksgithub Programming languages are fixed artifacts. Defined by committee or that one really smart person. They are sacred artifacts whose contours are fixed for good reasons. The idea of changing your programming language, of customizing it for your own needs, is a drastic measure that should never be done. Or at least that's how people act. In a world where software is becoming increasingly flexible, moldable, editable, our programming languages resist this…

I built statusbar, a status bar for any terminal.

Jimmy Millerprojectspostsadventtalksgithub Programming languages are fixed artifacts. Defined by committee or that one really smart person. They are sacred artifacts whose contours are fixed for good reasons. The idea of changing your programming language, of customizing it for your own needs, is a drastic measure that should never be done. Or at least that's how people act. In a world where software is becoming increasingly flexible, moldable, editable, our programming languages resist this…

Today’s seeding site with Glorious Grasslands was a return to a site we did back in 2023. Unfortunately, due to a variety of issues the seed sown back then did not take at all. A number of changes were made to the site and so today we were putting a second lot down to get it going again. Last time I was seeding from the back of the landrover, but today we had enough people that seeding by foot was possible. Two fields totally 11 hectares, with the morning one slightly smaller. Although it had…

I shared a while ago that I was reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower. Well, it’s a pretty long book but I finished it a few days ago and finally feel ready to share a few words about it. You could argue that I’ve actually read another book in the interim (a Jeffrey Deaver book I just finished) and that I’m jetlagged and hanging around in Seattle airport on the way to Honolulu. You certainly could make that argument. I really liked The Proud Tower. I don’t think I enjoyed it as much as The…

With a side of aircraft and flight trackingA couple of weekends ago, I ended up looking on Etsy at little widgets that showed a radar display, centred on a location, showing what was overhead. “These seem nice”, I thought, “but I don’t have the money at the moment to justify one”.What I did have was a Pimoroni Presto, a “desktop companion” with a 4" 480x480 display, powered by a RP2350 microcontroller, with wifi, bluetooth, and sundry other niceties. It’s programmed in MicroPython, which is…

How I got scammed into buying AI slop A few months ago, my best friend recommended me a new artist he had stumbled upon. We both love metal music and he knows exactly what excites me, progressive, djenty technical riffs well executed with great sound design. This new band hit all the right boxes. I instantly was drawn to most of their songs from their recent album. This does not happen often.

Went swimming with the kids for the second day in a row.