Some 40 years ago, in the darkest stretch of the Cold War, Exercise Northern Wedding ’86 was a massive, three-week NATO maritime and amphibious exercise conducted from late August to mid-September 1986, involving 150 ships, 35,000 troops, and 500 aircraft from 10 Western nations. The NARA has hundreds of pics from the exercise, and they really show off the might of the Western fleets at the time, including at least three carriers (Nimitz, America, and Ark Royal), the newly recommissioned…

Spotted aboard the 6,200-ton Italian Thaon di Revel-class patrol frigate Giovanni Delle Bande Nere (P 434) at sea on her way back from RIMPAC: Beretta Mx4 Storm 9mm SMGs. Beretta introduced the 12-inch-barreled, 1,000 rpm Mx4 in 2003 for consideration in military/LE contracts to fill the place in the company’s catalog left when the PM12 burp gun and its semi-auto PM12-S2 brother were curtailed. Designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro (better known for his car designs including the Maserati MC12 and the…

My brother Juan Pablo has a Supernote Manta and it’s pretty cool. I tried my hand doing a drawing. There’s a short lag but, to me, it’s noticeable. Not a deal-breaker, I think I can get used to it. The friction is good, I didn’t pay much attention at the time. We were talking before about an old wooden chess set we have, my brother was remarking on the craftmanship of the Knight across sets.

In Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro announcement, they almost mentioned in passing that the “Dynamic Island” is now 25% smaller and can now hold 3 live activities. Great leading with the user benefit there, Apple. However, it got me curious how did they achieve it? Apple’s functionalities often combine industrial, mechanical, electrical, optical designs with software innovations that get manufactured at scale. When you dig deep, there are often very few companies that perform those kind of core…

I’m tired It’s Tuesday. I have six agents running across three repositories. One is migrating a database schema. Two are writing tests for a feature I specified before lunch. One is refactoring something I asked about on Monday and had forgotten. Two are waiting for me to answer a question. I am not writing any code. I haven’t for months. I read, approve, redirect, answer. Then switch. Then switch again. Every one of them finishes with the same offer: shall I do the next thing? It’s never a bad…

Tom Breihan / Stereogum: Honestly, just look at that cover art. Really take it in. It’s so beautiful. I could stare at it all day. Back in the ancient days when we would sometimes flip through used-CD tracks and buy albums based on cover art alone, that one would’ve stopped me in my tracks. I would’ve run to the counter and laid my money down, no questions asked. From a post discussing the new Aesop Rock & Blockhead album, Trouble Mountain — and yes, the artwork is very good — but holy crap did…

The call comes in completely unexpectedly, as, I'm sure, all great things do. It’s Ray. He knows I wanted to come over to his house today, but he asks me if I want to have him come over here to my apartment complex, today. Usually, I don't like for people to come here because my apartment isn't exactly the best thing for hosting guests, but his voice is so soft and so attractive that it coats me in a never-ending calm, and immediately quiets my nerves. It doesn’t so much speak as it does…

Today’s TDC says: Seriously, pointing people are always better with budgies. From our friends at Boing Boing Pick your pointing person and put a bird on it! Enjoy. I decided to take a poster I’d already remixed and added the budgie to it: Your country needs you with added bird flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

I started reading this literature while building an AI scientist (Can an AI Scientist Start With a Dataset Instead of a Goal) that scores hypotheses by how much a test result moves the model’s belief.

I've written before about the case for ephemeral workstations, and more recently about how I use Ubuntu Server, Herdr, Mosh and Tailscale. The whole setup is basically what is called a Thin client. In computer networking, a thin client is a simple, low-performance computer that has been optimized for remote desktop connections to a server-based computing environment. Why have two computers instead of one? I always strive for simplicity, so two computers instead of one does not come naturally.…

Back in July I broke own rule of never backing a hardware Kickstarter and backed a hardware Kickstarter for a Pen N — a pen that supports 100s of refills with a universal clamp that screws into the barrel. I paid $55 for it plus another $20 for shipping. I paid the extra $5 for the orange clip because I was feeling fancy When it arrived I tried it with a bunch of different refills I had including zento, jetstream, Muji, and they all worked great. No wobbling, exactly as described. It came with…

There are many, many reasons to be angry at the AI crowd. One of mine is that they took the term vibe coding – how else am I going to describe the flow state when I have some repetitive music running in the background and am just breezing through some programming work? (And don’t get me started on the sparkles emoji. Bastards.) Reply by email

I had a fun conversation over on Facebook the other day. I have quite a few colleagues who are advocating for a “device-free classroom.” This is effectively short hand for “digital device free” rather than all devices. After all, a pen and a book are devices, just relatively old ones. In general, the approach advocated by these colleagues is that faculty need to model a digital device free approach to the classroom. This means leaving our phones, tablets, laptops, and smart watches in our…

The Atomium, an educational and cultural landmark in Brussels. EuroBSDCon 2026 EuroBSDCon is one of the events organized under the BSD community umbrella, focusing on all things related to and descending from 4.4 Berkeley Software Distribution. This year's event was held between September 9th and 13th in Brussels, Belgium, but the city and country change every year. The themes revolved around BSD (naturally), but there's always a healthy serving of generalizable talk about e.g. networking,…

8687/21606As the planet Earth spins ever closer to the welcome extinction of the human race (no point in having this blog preserved in the British Library now), I have been trying to tidy up my frankly disgustingly dirty and jumbled office space. It's been going quite well and today I decided to go through my drawers of cables and old bits of podcast tech and work out which, if any of them, I actually needed.

Prompted by Brandur’s 15 years later, a day without Tmux, I remembered my own slow removal of tmux from my stack a while back. I was leaving Alacritty for Kitty, whose creator has a distaste for multiplexers in general. I was probably in the sweet spot of tmux users for making this transition, though: I was rarely sshing anywhere, and didn’t have a need (at the time) for persistent sessions. tmux was a glorified window and split manager for me. Now, I have just enough configuration to use…

As previously mentioned, software veteran Carl Brown has pointed out that we can prevent incidents like the hugging face hack simply by enforcing existing laws.Here the reliable Cal Newport explains that these incidents all come not from LLMs in general but from the reckless application of one particular application of LLM-powered agents, and that there's no good explanation for the risks these companies have been taking. When Hubinger says “AI could kill all humans,” he’s not talking about AI…

One of my favorite spots in Portland is Mr. Tuna, though honestly, any Jordan Rubin restaurant is going to be high on my list. Food & Wine named him one of its Best New Chefs last year, after all! So when I recently came across his recipe for Tuna de Tigre, I had to see if I could bring a little of that Mr. Tuna magic home. The dish combines diced yellowfin tuna and creamy avocado with cilantro, scallions, and red onion, all dressed with coconut purée, soy sauce, and a punchy Thai vinegar. That…

Our province, Limburg, is known in Belgium for its cycling-friendly environments. This is not just a statement uttered by its inhabitants but also actively pushed forward by politics as one of the many strong points of Limburg: hence Fietsparadijs Limburg (Cycling Paradise Limburg). I am privileged to be able to make good daily use of these cycling paths that normally are neatly separated from the usual road traffic. But it’s not just the greenery or the maintenance of (most) cycling paths…

An English journalist, observing the Sisters of Charity and Calcutta, reasoned: "either life is always in an all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases, the one, and some cases the other." From For the Time Being

Arctic fox in Nunavut, Canada (photo from Wikimedia Commons) 17 September 2026 We think nothing of birds flying from one continent to another but the idea of a mammal walking from Europe to North America boggles the mind. There is no dry land between the two continents, only ice that thins in autumn. In 2018 polar researchers Eva Fuglei and Arnaud Tarroux tagged a young female arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus) with a satellite transmitter to see where she would go when she dispersed from her natal…

Check out As in guillotine... for more. NOTE: I’m not making this a weekly thing, but my schedule continues to be completely out of whack, and this is one of the few routines I can still (somewhat) control right now! “Kick that style, wicked, wild…” _ONE If Marketing Reports to Sales, Who Owns the Future Market? | David LaCombe, M.S. Not everything valuable can survive a quarterly attribution test. And not everything easily attributed is strategically valuable. The first half of my career in…

Cool personal website from Che Wei Lee.

“If you look for the light, you can often find it. But if you look for the dark, that is all you will ever see.” | Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender True in so many ways and across so many different contexts.

Life People are describing this time as the aftermath. After what? This isn't over yet. Not yet. This is a pause. A respite. A moment of reflection. A preparation for the coming whatever.Sounds Whenever I'm at the supermarket with my parents, we always get separated. I'll be off in the bread isle when they'll disappear into the frozen food. The only way we'll ever find each other is a whistle -- a particular whistle we only know. My Dad's is the best -- it's loud and turns the heads of all…

Let's explore a Robert E. Howard bestiary by reading three late 1920s stories from Weird Tales penned by the creator of Conan, Kull and Solomon Kane, all of which, coincidentally, have animal titles. These stories have all been reprinted in books, including books I own or have access to via the magic of internet piracy, but I will be reading the versions that appeared in Farnsworth Wright's unique magazine through the medium of scans at the internet archive. Click the links below for quick…

📷 233/365 - Airport activity

The kids are back in school, summer is winding down, and hopefully we all took a beat in the summer to catch our collective breaths and get ready to roll up our sleeves—because we have work to do. Note, I said WE have work to do, because whatever happens next here in the United States, ... Read more The post Action time! All hands on deck appeared first on Shay Stewart-Bouley.

Repurposing this from my old website. Enjoy!Subscribe nowI spent the last week or so rewatching The Last Dance, the ultimate documentary chronicling the history of Michael Jordan’s Bulls. It’s arguably the greatest piece of basketball nostalgia for my generation. So much so that it got me thinking back to my childhood and the Michael Jordan paraphernalia I owned, but was lost to time. I didn’t have a lot; a few cards, magazines, and collector’s cups. Oddly, the most significant piece of…

Tensions erupted in the classical music world Thursday after Imagine Dragons lead vocalist Dan Reynolds publicly criticized the New York Philharmonic, describing the prestigious two-hundred-year-old orchestra as “essentially just an expensive cover band.”Speaking on a music podcast, Reynolds questioned the artistic integrity of playing historical compositions rather than writing original material.“At least I write my own music,” Reynolds said. “You go to Lincoln Center and what are they…