Intent ⬇ Preparation ⬇ Execution ⬇ Post-processing ⬇ Result The smartphone killed the idea of intentional devices. It is every device that you need and more. A phone, an iPod, an internet device. A phone, an iPod, an internet device. A phone, an iPod… you get the point. Having everything at the tip of your fingertips has removed the intent of certain devices and objects around us. Remember when going online was an intentional act? You needed to have a computer, go to it, wait for it to turn on,…

Finished reading: I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy 📚 I really liked this one. It’s a wild, dramatic story well told. I relate in very broad strokes, especially towards the end. Eveyone who wanted to read this probably already has but I recommend it.

# On this day last year, I announced "Acid Sucka" 1 in which I recreated the beat from Sucker MCs by Run DMC. At the time, I stated: 'This could be the start of something...' I've never followed up on that. I've thought about it from time to time, wondering what other classic hip hop // electro beats I could give an acid twist to. So far, I've only come up with a few: One for the treble (Fresh) — Davy DMX Surgery — World Class Wreckin' Cru Al Naayfish (The Soul) — Hashim Let the music play —…

A man is abducted into an alternate version of his life. Amid the mind-bending landscape of lives he could’ve lived, he embarks on a harrowing journey to get back to his true family and save them from a most terrifying foe: himself. Mind blowing parallel universes drama, starts fairly slow, like a drama in the first 5-6 episodes, but then it really picks up the place and turns into proper mind-bending thriller. Six popcorns and goes into the Movie Vault. To see all 30 photos, visit the article…

Marco Arment wrote about a world in which he didn’t know the politics of his neighbours. He just knew they were friendly people who helped him out, and he responded in kind. It sounds profound, at least superficially. I smile at strangers on the street, open doors for everyone, and help parents with their prams onto trains, all without knowing what their personal politics are. I greet my neighbours in the morning on the way to work, wave at the postie, and tip my hat to the guy who makes my…

It was my pleasure to cycle down to the Cinema Museum in Lambeth recently and meet one of the founders, Martin Humphries, to write a feature for The World of Interiors about the campaign to buy the former workhouse where Charlie Chaplin was confined as a child. Click here to read my feature about the Cinema Museum at The World of Interiors Click here to support the campaign to save the Cinema Museum The Cinema Museum is contained in the former Lambeth Workhouse where Charlie Chaplin was…

I'm a Jeanne Crain fan, so one of the movies I was most delighted to see at Cinecon on Labor Day was THE SECOND GREATEST SEX (1956).THE SECOND GREATEST SEX is, to my knowledge, not available in any authorized home viewing format. Seeing this Technicolor CinemaScope film in a good print on a large screen was thus a particular treat!I must have read about the movie in my Jeanne Crain books in years past, but it had escaped my mind that THE SECOND GREATEST SEX is a musical.Given that, I was quite…

Reconnected with my secret weaponWas happy to come across shimadofu, a type of tofu that is made in Okinawa.It is firmer than the firm (momen) tofu that we have on Honshu I made a shoyu poke and a tofu poke using one of the NOH poke packetsSatoshi enjoyed this and said it was like he was in Hawaii

From L to R: The Witch and the Chameleon no. 5/6 (1976), cover by Amanda Bankier; Janus, no. 1 (1975), cover by Jennifer Wilson, Jeanne Gomoll, and Janice Bogstad; New Moon (Winter 1981, 1982), cover by Robert Kellough; Aurora (Winter 1981), art by Steven Fox Over the last few years, I have highlighted a few curated pieces of science fiction scholarship in my Exploration Log series that I’ve found memorable, historically important, and worth sharing.1 Today I have an interview with SF scholar…

I just finished preparing my undergraduate lecture on ideal Fermi gases at zero temperature. Here are my slides. (Note. The derivations are not included, as I sketch them by hand on a document viewer.) (Aside. Personally, I would prefer to do derivations on the whiteboard, but this is viewed unfavourably as the video recording of the lecture will not capture that.)A few things I find amazing about the lecture content.Degeneracy pressure is a macroscopic quantum effect, since it vanishes in the…

I'm writing my legislators about this. Below is my email about this, which I've sent to my state reps. I sent a similar letter to my rep in U.S. Congress, and I wrote a similar Letter To The Editor to be (hopefully) published in my local paper. I've also sent a similar message to my state's attorney general. Apple announced a feature for their upcoming smart watch which will listen to everything 24/7 and transcribe notes for the wearer. In [my state], we have a two-party consent rule for…

I’m gassed. Not as bad as this morning but I am tired. Not only am I tired I am also lonely. This pile of to do’s and don’ts wouldn’t be so daunting if I had someone to share it with. I guess I do. I have friends I could reach out to. Family too. But I don’t want them. I want a someone. A someone who tells me it’s going to be alright. A someone who is warm and kind and laughs at my jokes and I at theirs. A someone who is there. A someone who I can hug. A someone I can cry in front of. A someone…

Leslie Parrish, who appeared in the movies Li'l Abner (1959) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and guest starred on shows from 77 Sunset Strip to Star Trek, died on November 14, 2025 at the age of 90. Her death was not made public until late August.Leslie Parrish was born Marjorie Hellen in Melrose, Massachusetts on March 18, 1935. She grew up in Black Eddy, Pennsylvania. She studied piano when she was very young and studied piano and composition at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music when…

Security engineering in the movies: Fighting off attackers with a katana. Security engineering in real life: It’s time to draft the Annual Review of Operations Security Policy Report.

Architectural detail of Oklahoma City’s Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center. The post Zags appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

While researching topics around relatively niche subjects, mostly cats, I’ve needed to access certain websites that block traffic from the UK, namely imgur and civitai. These platforms are global in nature and otherwise accessible to most people, who will have little reason to cater to my geographic circumstances. The most common, but inconvenient, workaround is to turn on a full VPN, visit the pages, and then disconnect and resume normal browsing. A more seamless approach would be to route…

Find all previous and future episodes listed here or in your podcast app under “Barbican Station”. This episode I talk with Scott from the SpyHards podcast about all the action in episode one, Circle of Life. We get into shocking returns, no pay and funeral wear. We do some investigative reporting on actor heights, talk about least preferred ways to be murdered and why you should always be careful where you point your laser. Plus, who are all the surprise guests at this funeral! All that and…

This is Chapter 1 of something I’ve been working on about family. I’m putting it here today because I want to see what happens when it leaves my computer. Chapter 1 Have Faith My oldest sister surprised us with a week at an evangelical marriage retreat. Really surprised us as a matter of fact. Lots of things can be said about what I thought of the idea right then, but it was set in the mountains of Northern California, along the Scott River, which was known for its vistas and fly fishing. 100%…

The Weight begs comparison to the Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 French classic Wages of Fear, remade in 1977 as Sorcerer by director William Friedkin. Like his predecessors, first-time director Padraic McKinley offers a stripped-down Depression Era story about men facing perilous conditions as they transport gold through the wilds of Oregon. An action-oriented plot kicks in when the warden of a camp prison (Russell Crowe) offers Ethan Hawke’s Murphy an opportunity to win a pardon. Wrongly…

Laurie Voss, who was one of the founder of NPM, the Javascript package repository that is now run by Microsoft, has written a longer post about an idea about how to fund Free Software that I found interesting. It’s worth reading if you have some time and makes good points even though I will critique it a bit. But financing Free Software is an unsolved problem right now and any meaningful contribution can help us move this forward. So, let’s dive in Laurie’s idea is quite simple: We need a way…

My aspiration is to be good at Tetris

It looks like I’ve been remiss in blogging about Zavala’s releases. The last blog post was about Zavala 4.1, the Markdown Import release. Now we’re up to release 4.4. There’s a fair amount to talk about. Let’s get to it. Zavala 4.2 Released April 1, 2026 Outline Locking Being able to encrypt and prevent others from accessing an Outline is a feature I’ve long wanted and have gotten requests for. This feature encrypts the Outline on disk and also when syncing using iCloud. For more on the details…

I spent three days on medication before I could leave the bathroom. Everything I ate sent me to the toilet. I even had to call a doctor to get a prescription over the phone, just to be able to get out of the house for an appropriate doctor’s appointment. It was the peak of my burnout, in 2023. It took me days before I could eat without fear. My job was such a pain that I wanted to finish my daily tasks as soon as I could, and I skipped meals and had irregular eating schedules. Bad idea! Getting…

I recently came to the understanding that I grew distant from a friend because of a fundamental difference in how we approach the world. They were motivated by fear of consequence, and I have grown into becoming motivated by seeking justice. They are incompatible in their most fundamental states, but this realization was incredibly helpful in understanding the situation. It was a very good reminder that “What keeps me safe?” will not always reconcile with “What is right?”

I’ve had this idea in my head for a while now, perhaps you can relate: I’d imagine I would find this amazing war game with a great historical backdrop and nice production that I could really sink my teeth in. Every couple of weeks or so, I’d get the extension of my table out to make enough space and set the game up, make myself a nice large cup of tea, and see how things would play out this time. The weird thing is: I’m not much of a conflict gamer. Ask my friends and they will tell you I’d…

Rest day, mostly pottering in the garden and making the finishing tweaks to the rabbit run water harvesting system. I’m happy that it’s now good enough to run through the winter and save up enough water to get the lawn through the next drought. Why do we care about the lawn. Because it’s rabbit food! RIP Joe Holyoak — I met him a couple of times at Birmingham walking events and he was always a lovely and generous presence with a great moustache. Horse piss and dirty honey: on the…

What have you recently finished reading? The last thing I finished was Cho Yeeun’s Teddy Bears Never Die, which I ultimately liked quite a bit, though the genre is a bit hard to pin down — at times it just feels like a gritty thriller, and then oops! Misshapen vengeful ghosts, a possessed teddy bear, and the classic disturbed remains of a mass graveyard (where people were buried alive). Before that it was Ianthe Jerrold’s Let Him Die; another new-to-me Golden Age author, thanks to Kobo Plus!…

The values. On a wall, in an onboarding deck. Be kind! Be curious! Be the change! Bring your whole self! Seek forgiveness not permission! Nobody argues. Then you say the thing that needed saying – and someone takes you aside afterwards.Feedback. You should know how you're doing. It beats guessing. Then it's permission to be unkind. Who gets to give it, who gets given it.Psychological safety. Say the hard thing, at no cost to you. Announced at the all-hands. Speak up, they say. They do,…

When a password manager detects that a user’s password has been leaked or reused, it can prompt them to change it, but the password change URL varies by site. The web’s answer to such discovery problems is the reserved /.well-known/ URL namespace (RFC 8615), home to machine-readable files and endpoints like security.txt. A Well-Known URL for Changing Passwords is the web specification that uses this namespace to fix password page discovery. It reserves the URL path /.well-known/change-password…

I enjoy daily mini-games. I play the New York Times ones (Wordle, Connections, and the mini crossword) and sometimes Clues By Sam if I am feeling extra smart. Recently I...