Corina Enache îs fast become one of my "must read" writers. Her perspective and reflective capacity as practitioner is inspiring. Her deep understanding of story and narrative and her wealth of experience gives her lots of material from which to generate beautiful essays. And her generous engagement with commentators and connections is exemplary. Her latest post is about "making rules you are willing to be bound by" and has a number of gems. I encourage you to read the full thing, because among…

Read: I wish you the best in the Offline

This is the weekly sniff. A roundup of links (linkdump) from the optimistically last week but more likely last month.Yup more likely the last month lol. Working 2.5 jobs so everything is flying. We moved apartments its to small but we are only here for a year. Coffee has been solid lately !Best in showEverything I UseEverything I use for computers, writing, gaming, audio, photography, self-hosting, health, and everyday carry.Bookmarks clean-upI can’t move on unless I post these bookmarks- Its…

Your phone is not the problem Jeff says that he is a better person without his phone. Widdershins says they’re the same with or without their phone. I think they’re both right because when Jeff gets on his phone, he doomscrolls. When Widdershins uses his phone, he contacts his family, uses it as a digital planner, music and taking photos. Jeff is a better person without his phone because Doomscrolling on X (formerly called Twitter) has no benefits. News outlets and social media make more money…

15, 10 and 5 years ago: nothing too fancy in those Septembers past, just mountains and forest. We’re looking at New Mexico’s Truchas Peaks, a sunrise in the Eastern Sierra, and some ghostly autumn ferns in the deep woods of northern Idaho.

Deansgate Market Street Victoria Square Victoria Square II Newport Street

I take pictures when am out (I try to do it on my camera) but don't use Facebook on my phone anymore and stopped using Reddit a few years ago A lot of people don't know that their phone tracks usage and has screen time limits built-in and can be set to stop you when you want Source

Announcing a new set of curricula for Level Up, aimed at trainers themselves, with lessons on asymmetric encryption, entropy, and hashes. So much of the actual practice of cybersecurity and digital safety training is rushed. Trainers work to get across a mix of critically important, complex concepts, while leaving enough time for enough engagement and hands-on time to have it sink in just a bit. This means we as trainers often rely on trust and rough high-level explanations of the core concepts…

Today’s XKCD is spot-on. © XKCD I feel very much the same this days. The time flies fast.

The build of the distlation tank and engine is coming a long. Although the engine has been completed the distlation tank still needs a few details: Steps up to the tank platform A wooden ladder up to the top of the tank Two feeder pipes from the top (I need to drill a couple of wholes on the top of the tank) Door for underneath platform Most of these components have been completed and are wating to be added in.

The European Commission has proposed the EU KIDS Act. It is yet another set of Internet/web regulation proposals to examine, for jurisdictional overreach, lack of common sense in terms of material scope, and so on. It is only a proposal currently It is only a legislative proposal at the moment, so it may not become law, and it may not become law in this form. Based on a quick skim, this is indeed another fine mess, full of unrealistic expectations. It has an incredibly broad scope The proposal…

My favorite annual review of the iPhone camera is back. I mean, just look at these! My takeaway wasn't the adjustable aperture or focus tracking, but the third generation of Photographic Styles. More and more digital photography is leaning into principles in film photography. Apple's inclusion of film texture and grain controls puts those kinds of tools right into the photographic pipeline, which I think will be great. I've found myself using !Camera a lot in the last year and think Apple is…

I've been sorting out my art and all the frames, and trying to put them together. One of the mini projects was sorting out my postcard collection. I've always been into postcards. They are just fun. Some years ago I collected a bunch of Paris circa 1905 to 1910 (and one of Milan.) Put them in a frame. No mounting because my god. And you know what, it looks fine. From a distance. So I had a bunch of postcards from my home town between 1905 and 1938. Featuring lots of trams! So cool. I framed…

Nice lunch for SPS Tower tenant’s today.

If you have an injury or feel very ill most people don't bother thinking which specific hospital to visit or what doctor to see. The broad assumption is that an M.D. is an M.D., they are all well trained to deal with most sickness, so you just go to whatever seems more convenient. A small minority of people may go deeper than this and pick specific doctors or hospitals based on word of mouth, but this seems like a less common experience. For people looking for a romantic partner, it is…

Another week is quickly vanishing down the rabbit hole and we find ourselves mid-September, though the humidity the past couple of days may belie that. This past weekend brought another trip to the drive-in, a musical adaptation of Tweflth Night out at Chicago Shakespeare, and sneaking off to see the new Practical Magic, which had all the right witchy vibes as the original, despite my relatively low expectations given Hollywood antics. The original came out when I was in grad school, and I…

Venue for our team’s away day today.

On a trip to Florida a few years ago, while my friends and I were shopping at the local grocery store, a man offered us a recipe idea in the... Source

Marcin Wichary: A big screen carries with it different UI expectations, and how that manifests itself in Apple TV’s Settings app, is that there’s always room for an additional hint about the thing you’ve just selected. So yes, I have been exploring Apple TV’s Settings after the recent update like any normal person would, and I have noticed how well-written those are. They help navigate difficult technical things, and they’re not afraid to get conversational, or offer advice, or even…

[I hope we can hold on to it.] Of late, as A.I. has begun appearing in so many parts of every day life, I’ve found more and more appeal in things that are analog. Over at Eater, there’s a great piece on restaurants leaning into human touches, and steering away from A.I. I was delighted to see one of my all-time favorite restaurants, Superiority Burger, shouted out. As well, the closing spoke to me. To me, a restaurant that employs AI art is capitulating to the culture of slop, akin to reheating…

I was getting annoyed at having to manually copy Youtube's privacy preserving embed code each time I wanted to include a video in a post, so here is a simple shortcode for 11ty that does the heavy lifting for you. Provide it with a Video ID or a full URL, and it will create a youtube-nocookie embed in your post for you. Arguements url (share/watch/youtu.be/embed/shorts URL, or a bare 11-char video ID), title (used as iframe title attr, HTML-escaped) Output: responsive 16:9 <iframe> embed via…

In case you missed it, I built the writing app of my dreams. It's called em — as in em dash — and I've been using it for all of my writing for about six weeks now. I think em is pretty great and it's now available on the App Store!Getting to this point has been a journey where I learned so many things about app architecture, Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, and exactly how not to build an app. But hey, I did it anyway and the reality is that you could probably do it too. Without any fanfare,…

The proliferation of artificial intelligence in software engineering clearly has consequences for how to think about computing education. […] with GenAI, the production of code is no longer the bottleneck for students or professional engineers. Instead, the key challenges lie both before and after the production of code. […] We must adapt our education mechanisms to address new metacognitive skills that are needed in a world with GenAI; curiosity, independence of thought, reading critically,…

Things just don’t stay the same in this universe. Enjoy today’s links. Have some reading pleasure. Why Does the Universe Expand?, by Daryl Janzen, Cosmicave What If We Never Find Dark Matter?, by Joseph Howlett, Scientific American Eating Alone, by Gabe Bullard, Longreads, excerpt from Against Convenience: Embracing Friction in an Age of Endless Ease How to Make End-Grain Cutting Boards, by Matthew Haughey, A Whole Lotta Nothing

In the previous blog about Operation Sea Lion, the planned German invasion of mainland Britain, I wrote how to achieve their stated aims, the Luftwaffe would need full control of the British skies. The German navy, the Kriegsmarine would also need dominant control of the sea in order to allow the invasion barges filled with troops to safely make it across the channel. Britain had spent the summer of 1940 expecting an invasion. After Dunkirk, the German forces were massed on the channel coast…

Ten years ago I admit I was shocked to see Fritz Leiber show up as a clew on Jeopardy! Not him by name, but his 1964 paperback original novel The Wanderer, which copped the 1965 Hugo for Best Novel. This time Fritz gets the name drop while The Wanderer lurks silently in the background. Catching up on the DVRed backlog of the recent Jeopardy! Masters I see that on September 1 — S4 Ep5 Quarterfinal 10 — in the Double Jeopardy round we have: Category: Sci-Fi Tech & Innovation This type of sphere…

It's a fairly safe bet that I won't be buying our third shirt this season. I think that is potentially worse than the football itself.

★★½☆☆ A really basic Gopher client for Android. Features bookmarks and history, and not much else. I’m not sure there’s even a way to change the home page. The UI is cramped, and my URL bar usually looks like “gopher://go”. It does use icons to distinguish different link types, though it doesn’t distinguish local from remote links. Search is supported, and it will download files that it can’t display. I keep getting tripped up by the system back button not being mapped to the app back…

If I have a book coming out, then I must be going on tour to support it — and indeed I will be this November, supporting my new and critically acclaimed novel Monsters of Ohio! This time around we thought I should take a turn through the US Midwest for the tour, and so, you can see me in: 11/3 — Beavercreek, OH11/4 — Franklin, IN11/5 — Chicago, IL11/6 — Ferndale, MI11/7 — Hudson, OH11/8 — Nashville, TN11/9 — Louisville, KY11/10 — Kansas City, MO11/14 — Cincinnati, OH11/15 — Austin, TX…