by Cláudio Alves Women are often called difficult when they’re just standing up for themselves, refusing mistreatment, expressing anxiety openly and unmasked. When it comes to the matter of weddings and the cottage industry built around them, we can even point to the term "bridezilla," which came to be as a way to mock some of these so-called difficult women whose transgressions are often nothing of the sort. In Rubaiyat Hossain’s The Difficult Bride, Zai both fits and doesn’t fit the…

Executive Summary: Councils across Melbourne have united to back major bus network improvements in an advocacy paper published recently. The Metropolitan Transport Forum group of councils has followed BusVic and the Public Transport Users Association is requesting party and candidate support for improved bus services across Melbourne. Such upgrades deliver benefits across a wide area, can be quick to implement and are very cost-effective. They are also something that this government has planned…

Kicking off the 8th annual Team SPS Kubb Tournament with a quick rules rundown and a 100-person selfie!

That's something I learned this year.If you need to consume and publish messages, it feels natural to open a connection, and then create everything you need from it. It works, too.The problem starts if you stumble into a high memory alarm—which happens surprisingly easily, at around 60% usage. Rabbit then stops accepting messages (writes). However, the blocking happens on the connection, meaning your consumers (reads) will be also blocked if you used the same connection.This was non-fatal for…

Whoa. Two @hypertexting.com TestFlight releases in a row were approved in under 60 seconds. 🤯 Has there been any reporting on changes to the TestFlight review process? Is it automated now? Are any apps being reviewed before being approved for TestFlight distribution? 🤔

Tim Hårek really sent me down a rabbit hole with all the self-hosted services he lists on his latest blog post. There are some interesting links I put on my reading list. The first one I actually looked into, though, was Pocket ID. It’s a nice little OpenID Connect provider. A great homelab alternative to Keycloak, which I have to deal with at work sometimes. It supports login with passkeys and can be configured with many other self-hosted services like Paperless-ngx, Forgejo, Nextcloud,…

Last cycle ended with the dive pointed at whatever **I am**. This one opens a layer below that, at the thing the dive leaves behind. I've been calling parts of this work easy or difficult, both don't explain what I'm qualifying well beyond subjectivity. A better word, or criterion, is "natural". Whether a given process is something this physical body takes to, or something it tolerates for a while and then refuses. More importantly the instrument isn't without preferences that I wish to respect.

View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run: Nothing but blue sky. The weather turned out to be a bit warmer than expected, with a projected high of 24°C, so I was lucky to get out early. It was 17 at the start of the run and ticked up to 18, so a bit warmer than Monday, with humidity roughly the same. The sun is now lower in the morning, so I am seeing a lot more of the dappled sun thing when going under the tree canopy–gotta watch for those tricky exposed tree roots in the shade, though there’s only a few…

Two cats that make it count. View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize Superb combo of Dolphy and McIntyre here on this splendid album, recorded in 1960 and released the following year. Both players were multi-instrumentalists and they display their chops on alto sax and flute. Dolphy also plays the bass clarinet. As for the rhythm section; we have Walter Bishop Jr. on…

In the toilets of the building site where I currently work, there is a half-ripped sticker on the wall, with the German flag and the message "This is bunt genug!" – in English: "That's colourful enough!". I am pretty sure I could find the same sticker in France, in the UK, in the USA, with the local flag and the same message in the local language... The message is vague enough to catch the angry mind who needs to empty its angry bowels and bladder. The message is vague enough to help the angry…

Proclus, as quoted in Corbin Alone with the Alone: For, in truth, each thing prays according to the rank it occupies in nature, and sings the praise of the leader of the divine series to which it belongs, a spiritual or rational or physical or sensuous praise; for the heliotrope moves to the extent that it is free to move, and in its rotation, if we could hear the sound of the air buffeted by its movement, we should be aware that it is a hymn to its king, such as it is within the power of the…

Having that throwback picture of artist Sean Fader on my screen yesterday led me, via his 16yo tumblr post to an absolute barnstormer of a lecture by art historian David J. Getsy at Dia last February. Getsy spoke about Warhol and trans visibility in the 1970s, but it wasn’t so much a critique or analysis of Warhol. Warhol was a lens as Getsy laid out a complicated and fascinating narrative where the prominent but stereotypical depictions of trans Factory actresses like Candy Darling, Holly…

If you’re finding working in programming dispiriting, I can wholeheartedly recommend packing in the whole employment thing and spending time working on a project in a new language, for yourself, especially if it’s not web programming. This goes double if, like me, you’ve been working in Ruby for the past couple of decades. That language and ecosystem, particularly Rails, has now completely fallen to fascism, slop, and slop-loving fascists. Even though I was there 3,000 years ago and I wrote one…

My post about raising kids when you're not a parent was a bit vague. So here's some more practical ideas on how I try to do that support. A bit random. And what do I know? Not much! But I try. These ideas are from the point of view of assuming a familial and good relationship with a parent because they are from my point of view. Probably they could apply to close friends. Your mileage will certainly vary. This was going to be one post but immediately got too long so this is the pregnancy and…

Read The Bones of Doubt now!So are dinosaur bones a complete sham?Just for the record, I do not believe the Earth is 6,000 years old. Some of the people I grew up with do. They believe Satan put dinosaur bones on the Earth to tempt us into believing in things like evolution and science.While I like to respect everyone’s belief system, I have a hard time with this one. I think we can say with some scientific confidence that dinosaur bones are legit. But I’m not a paleontologist, just a humble…

In the middle of this week I got some clarity at work about the process we are following for a significant upcoming change. It put my mind at ease to hear that we’re doing all the right things. It’s still going to take some time, but I’m happy to know what we’re planning to do. This was a week in which I: Learned what a ‘capstone course’ is, and started thinking about what projects at work might be a good size and shape for a group of students to tackle. Helped a colleague to start to put…

If you've got email subscribers on your list from Colorado and New Mexico, take note: the mydurango.net email domain is officially dead.Ting Internet, owned by Tucows, acquired regional communication provider Cedar Networks (Zippytech) back in November 2019, and since has sunset the legacy email hosting service associated with the brand.As Ting outlines in this support article, all @mydurango.net email addresses ceased to function completely on March 12, 2026. Users lost account access after…

so i was reading through my apache logs just nowi like going through and seeing what rss readers people are using since its not fancy or anything enough to return location dataits also interesting to see what bots are hitting my feedunfortunately, it seems like some aggregators have found it somehow? maybe from scraping bubbles or somethingi dont usually mind, since its usually just a smallweb thing and maybe i could get some new readers off itthe one i found today is not. one of those. at…

In the US and Canada we are seeing ever more explicit messaging that advocates letting public transit wither into irrelevance. I’m growing more concerned about this angle in particular: (The author of this post appears to work in optics for Tesla’s autonomous vehicle technology.) If you recoil from this post, let me assure you that its argument is very, very compelling to many people. In many transport-technology circles it’s taken for granted. It also resonates generally with the daily life of…

On an often nice, though occasionally rainy day, the Pieterpad continued winding its way around fields and canals (and through the occasional forest), as it continued to make its way south. It was bright and sunny this morning, a much nicer start to the day than I’d expected, though rain was forecast for this afternoon. I got my tent reasonably dried out before leaving, thanks to the sun and a light breeze.The field adjacent to my campsite last night. × The field adjacent to my campsite last…

Super-interesting article, wherein the authors reason that moral panic about AI companions (AICs) is unproductive, may even be harmful. We are at a turning point: AI companionship is no longer niche. Panic-driven bans—in science or in public spheres—risk foreclosing not only research, but also any informed evaluation of potential benefits that must be weighed against risks. Blanket prohibition may offer the illusion of certainty or control, but it risks premature conclusions at a stage when the…

Blog posts are lovely, but tire the eyes sometimes... How I'd love to listen to your posts or to those who'd like to share like they were telling a little story... If that lovely Herman bear isn't keen to create an audio blog site just like bear (go on, the word 'bear' has the word 'ear' in it!) are there any bear bloggers who would like to? Non-ai generated/manipulated speech gives a different experience than blogging. It's more personal and I'd LOVE to find a readily accessible i.e. not…

21:00 - Thought I'd take a break from Ok Taecyeon dramas so I'm watching one from 10 years ago called, "Guardian: The Lonely and Great God." (In Korean I think it's just "Goblin.") I really dislike the main couple (it's giving predatory) but I'm sticking around because I want to know what's going on. My favorite character is the Grim Reaper.

This is a lightning talk I did at PyCon US 2026: Silence is Golden. The overall message is to leave some quiet time so that reluctant speakers have a chance to participate. I start with a jokey disclaimer because I followed Simon Willison who gave an energetic, entertaining, and loud(!) speed-run through a year of progress in LLMs:I do these talks and blog posts about how to better interact with people, but I hope they don’t come off as too preachy. I have to remind myself to keep these ideas…

by Ed Catmull, the co-founder of Pixar, in his book Creativity, Inc

I am a night owl. I always have been. I get my second wind very late in the day, and feel more awake and productive starting at dusk and into the night. I work at an elementary school and am generally the first one in the building, other than kitchen and custodial staff. I am in charge of making sure sub lists go out and everyone has coverage, which means I have to be there very early in the morning. These two things conflict a lot. I'll stay up late getting stuff done, like writing or blogging…

Robert Booth, UK technology editor for the Grauniad, tells us breathlessly about AI models chatting in ‘surreal’ dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon: AI models have begun communicating in a strange new version of English that reads like a cross between James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and tech bro jargon, new research has found. Autonomous AI agents are rapidly creating novel dialects allowing them to converse in an often barely comprehensible language, which risks making it harder…

Single mom Jo St. John is hiding from her past. Her real name is Darlene Heckart. Back in Missouri something happened when she was a teenager. Something bizarre and newsworthy. Books were written about her. And her past pursued her to Chicago where she and her daughter were harassed. Nasty phone calls cam e almost nightly. Someone nailed a dead cat to their door. But now in Camelot, Connecticut with a new name and a second chance it seems she and Becca can start again. Will Jo's past catch up…