Q&A with Paul Massell, founder of Catholic Gigs. Sponsored: This article is made possible by Catholic Gigs, supporting quality and engaging Catholic content. Start at the beginning. What is BOSCOS? BOSCOS is a free, ten-minute assessment on Catholic Gigs. You answer a set of statements about how you tend to act in ordinary situations, and … Continue reading How Were You Made to Work? Inside Catholic Gigs’ BOSCOS Assessment The post How Were You Made to Work? Inside Catholic Gigs’ BOSCOS…

If you're in the mood for something fun, comforting, and a little bit cheeky, this Welsh Rarebit Poutine is the kind of dish that will make you smile even before you take the first bite. It starts with a batch of hot crispy fries, topped with bits of cheese, melting from the heat of the fries and ends up with a delicious drenching of a rich velvety Welsh Rarebit cheese sauce.Traditionally Welsh Rarebit is spooned over hot toast as classic British pub fare. This is not that and I don't apologize…

Open House used to be one weekend, then it was two and now it's increasingly filling in the gap in the middle. Some properties open midweek as an extra to the weekend and some don't do the weekend at all. Some do midweek because it's easier, some because they're open anyway and some because they're shameless attention-seekers. Here are five midweekers I've been to since Monday. And just for a change I'm writing about places you could visit because they're all open again. Open House: County Hall…

Sorry, no posting today. Should hopefully be back tomorrow. Click here for full story

Did you know that it only takes one vote to send a post from New to the front page? Now you do. If you (like me) are tired of the same, multiple day old posts that you've already read staying on the frontpage, you should look through a page or two of New. But what about all those uninteresting, hard to read, low quality, or just posts that don't interest you? Well there is a Hide Blog function, use it well :) 2026/09/hidden_blogs.png

Nearly back on schedule. Recovering from a big week makes it... another big week. But, it's getting easier to get numbers and graphs together. Last week looked like this: And the trend line this week is at least stabilising: Breaking it down: AccountTotal Groceries80.95 Gym76.00 Health Insurance64.57 Broadband and mobile56.82 Books37.99 Garden Supplies26.00 Charity9.26 Total351.59 $351 is a lot less than last week's $1002. So I shall feel good about that. Groceries cost more this week. In my…

Fantastic video essay on Steven Spielberg's MUNICH, which I haven't seen since I the first watch when it came out. Definitely due for a rewatch if for nothing else but the unparalleled masterful camera work alone. Spent a full day assembling Ikea furniture and another full day breaking up all the boxes. I really hope it's the last time I crack open an Ikea box ever again as I am somewhat traumatized by the sight of anything Ikea after all the relocations made in the U.S. and the obligatory Ikea…

I am alone now. I don’t know who else survived.We think it started in a lab. A team of scientists wanted to create a self-replicating machine, just to see if they could. They stored the program in a polymeric ribbon. They made the machine out of carbon, not silicon, so that it posed no threat to life. The team published a paper, sterilized the vat, and flushed the waste down the drain.It shouldn’t have survived. It shouldn’t have mattered — the scientists assumed the machine would find nothing…

A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “Certified queer”, a riff on a t-shirt that I posted about in 2022; the message on it is the playful 100% Certified Queer, and it has the the label QUEER in it. Today’s posting focuses on four tees recently acquired or on their way to me soon: three with labels on them — GAY, PANSY, FAIRY — and one with gorgeous pansy flowers, the label being merely implicit. The gang of four. GAY. (#1) In bright purple, the bald assertion (from the Get Funny? site) PANSY.…

I remember one afternoon as a boy while in the neighbor’s back yard falling in love with the word of. A common preposition suddenly seemed intriguing, like a pretty girl you’ve known all your life. English is dense with such small words, known early by most native speakers, that are notoriously difficult to define yet even more difficult to live without, assuming you wish to be reasonably articulate. The OED gives dozens of shades of meaning. The most familiar is probably this: “Of origin or…

Lots of RPGs describes themselves as heavy metal. Today I will dare the task known to be impossible, but which every metalhead is drawn inexorably to do: I will decree what is and is not truly metal. Who am I to speak? I’ve never read a biography of Dave Mustaine, I’ve never seen the Big Four live, and I wasn’t born yet when a bat was orally decapitated in Des Moines. I don’t listen exclusively to metal; my musical tastes are diverse. Here is what I have done. I’ve spent a lot of late weekday…

Anouk Ricard is a French comic-maker, and her work is often translated into English. She's done the fun all-ages books about, "Anna and Froga," and created the stellar, "Benson's Cuckoos," some time ago. Her latest work is, "Animan," which is a bit of a superhero story...except not really. Published by Drawn & Quarterly, this book is loosely inspired by the 1980's show, "Manimal." The idea is that as a baby, Francis was bitten by a radioactive mosquito that had absorbed a lot of animals' blood…

I am very excited about Jev. Typesafe.ai has something fresh, powerful, unique here. I'm mentally infactuated. Attributes of Jev that stood out to me: common-sense judgments over unstructured data machine interfaces matter more than the chat interfaces code owns the workflow and AI handles narrow, structured decisions We get the tokenization LLM powers to breakdown input (token window) but without the word vomit. No hallucinations because it's not using probability to hopefully create a…

Not quite a month later and our little hedgehog is back home, off nesting somewhere in the woods that border our creek. Wildlife Rescue Cork got in touch earlier this week to say he’d made a full recovery and to ask if I wanted to help re-home him (easy YES!). I’m grateful the little guy chose to leave himself on our patio, as it seems that without a helping hand he wouldn’t have recovered from whatever it was he got into. I drove up to Whitechurch on Tuesday to bring him home. And while I’m…

I've wanted to write this story for a bit, but today was particularly bad, and I felt like I needed to write this. It might be messy, it might not be subtle, but I don't care. “Hey Sibling…” They slump in the pilot seat — a seat almost only used in formality, as Eumidean auto-nav left manual flight only those with autos for thrillseeking and those who frequented messy atmospheres— hazy limbs folded atop their lap. Jam knew why xyr friend was there. Xy hung quietly in the air just beside xyr…

Perfume PosseMidnight Omen by Trudon 2025 NEW! NEW! Heya Posse! New stuff from Trudon is always cue for celebrations. While not all of their offerings suit my taste, they are all nicely crafted and often smell as expensive as they are. Midnight Omen is not groundbreaking but it… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseMidnight Omen by Trudon 2025 NEW! NEW!

A couple of days before leaving for the UK, I saw a notice that John Rogers was holding a meet & greet in London while I was over. On the off-chance I emailed before flying out and got on the list. The evening was held in The Ship, near Regents Park. It was great! He read a passage from his upcoming book. Told stories of meeting Nick Papadimitriou and 20 years of having a YouTube channel. During the Q&A John shared his thoughts on Psychogeography and the changing landscape covered in his walks.…

Thursday 17th September 2026 Full disclosure: Historian Ruth Thomson (co-author of this wonderful new book along with husband Neil) contacted me in June 2025 explaining how she was compiling “a history of Lewes bus station (including the garden of Trinity House on which it stands) and … wondered if you would be interested in being involved?” I was delighted to share recollections of my involvement over almost 45 years with this iconic structure in the town but more importantly put her in touch…

Picture of people doing the thing you wish you were doing instead of reading this blog by Emiel Boven, CC-BY 4.0 IntroductionSo I've been talking about Play Style Preferences lately, which is good to talk about just so one can figure out if their play culture aligns closely enough with the play culture of everyone else in the game. There are lots of models for having this conversation, whether its Skullboy's RPG Preferences Matrix, the Three Question Taxonomy, or Close and Distant Playstyles.…

When things go right, as Apple had designed and intended, we are delighted. But when things go wrong, we lose time and convenience. And we may not even be Apple’s customers. Larry Salibra: Despite a PIN being required for purchase, Apple Hong Kong decided to accept the card anyway. They either did not ask for the PIN or accepted an incorrect PIN. Compare this to the average 7-11 in Hong Kong which will request the pin for a Chip and PIN card for even a tiny HK$8.00 transaction. ~ Link: Apple…

After completing four of the ten courses in my philosophy bachelor's program, I decided to move on to a master's degree. When Newlane announced its Master of Arts in Philosophy, a new graduate degree accredited by the U.S. Department of Education, I was thrilled to pursue it. . I already have a mast…

I wanted a way to catch coding-rule violations the moment I introduce them, not three days later in a PR review. So one evening I sat down with Claude Code and built a real VS Code/Cursor extension for it. What surprised me most wasn't the idea, is that by using Jev I could run locally by hitting sa…

In PostgreSQL, every tuple starts with 23-byte header, and the first eight bytes are two transaction IDs. t_xmin for the transaction that created the row and t_xmax for the one that deleted or updated it. That is the visibility story covered in PostgreSQL MVCC, Byte by Byte. For now we have discussed t_xmax acting as the delete marker. t_xmax has a second job. When you run SELECT ... FOR UPDATE or an insert checks a foreign key, PostgreSQL has nowhere else to record the row lock. The shared…

We first discovered the wonders of burger chain Lucky Pierrot while staying in the city of Hakodate but decided to come back for a second visit to the store right next to Onuma Quasi-National Park - their Togeshita (峠下) store. As it turns out, this is their flagship store, and it was huge. The Japanese call clowns ピエロ or “piero” after the French/Italian pierrot clown, hence the name and clown mascot. Each of the 17 Lucky Pierrot stores has a different theme, and this one was birds. More…

The doges Deusdedit (742-755), Galla (755–756), Domenico Monegario (756–764), Maurizio Galbaio (764–787) and his son Giovanni (787–804), from the "Istoria Veneticorum" by John the Deacon.

What makes Apple products most interesting is not the hardware. Nor is the software. It is that Apple makes the whole widget. Keren R. Bell, Quibbletown: How do we communicate the weird turns and tumbles of the hardware not just to the system, but to the user, to prepare them for what their big cumbersome motion will do to the apps they’re interacting with? ~ Link: The iPhone Duo’s Windows Into Liquid Glass, by Keren R. Bell, Quibbletown

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] This video Matt Parker posted a couple of days ago really pissed me off: It’s cheating to say that a result arrived at through classical mechanics—in this case, that 12mv2 is the kinetic energy of a particle—is wrong because it’s only an approximation to relativistic physics. Of course that’s the case, and I swore at my phone when the “reveal” came. By the…

I’m posting this — the kind of report-back on a personal experience that I’d look for on Reddit — because I want anecdata to be available on the open web, too. Two and a half-ish years ago (late February 2024) I had emergency surgery to remove my gallbladder. I had been meeting with a nutritionist about my digestive issues for a couple years (after trying to figure diet improvements out myself), and working my way through tests and specialists trying to hunt down the source of my issues: H.…

Yes, it’s short notice, but if I can do a talk on short notice, perhaps your schedule might allow you to show up TONIGHT (Thursday, September 17) to attend the first Machine Learning / AI / Technology / Risk + Happy Hour event, taking place from 4 – 9 p.m. at Schiller International University in downtown Tampa! Calling all devs, designers, AI and data geeks, cyber and everyone in the “tech-ish” orbit! This event brings together technologists and technology-adjacent professionals to connect,…

First: Apple Passwords works really nicely. As it should, of course. I’m required to use Chrome at work, and the Apple Passwords integration is fine, but definitely clunky by comparison. Second: reader mode. And one of the cool things about reader mode, which I only just realized, is that it lets me impose dark mode on a website that doesn’t have it. Usually I don’t care much, but occasionally (like right now) I’m computing in the dark, and sites with white backgrounds are blinding. That said,…