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…

Last month I spent some time reorganizing my projects. I used to keep everything in Notion: one single database with tasks from every project, all tagged. I ran the ICE framework in there, the backlog, the Kanban board. It was convenient because I could update it from anywhere, online. But it was slow: slow to load, slow moving between things, slow just to look at a note. Or rather, the tool was too powerful for my needs. One tool to rule them all So I decided to build Atlas, something that ran…

GUILTY ON ALL CHARGESMore details as they become available.

I used to wear a fitbit. Three of them actually (not all at once though). I used to be really wowed by smart tech. Alarm clocks that read you the weather, smart assistant devices, wearable tech (anyone remember microsoft's hololens?), smart watches, the list goes on. There's various reasons now why I've stopped being interested in much of it. Disillusionment in tech, privacy concerns, better understanding of how they work, and just a general lack of need for the tech as well. An inconvenient…

I’ve a new page: River of News an rss reader for some of my favourite feeds. I’ve been testing Scott Hanson’s plugin that pulls in a River of News from Feedland River Embed for FeedLand, for a while. It is now available on WordPress.org so easy to install. It pulls in news from a set of blogs on a Feedland server. A river of news is: River of News is a kind of RSS aggregator.# Items are presented in reverse-chronologic order.# Each item has a headline, short description, a link to the story,…

There’s a new music DAW in town and it’s for the PS Vita of all things. It’s called the DS-8 Drumstream and it comes with a sampling groovebox, multichannel audio, BPM-syncing, pattern arranging, and a ton more. It’s amazing that you can get so much out of a handheld, especially a Vita which isn’t at the top of the list of most coveted handhelds right now (and sadly wasn’t for most of its life when it was new). But on a wider scale, its yet another showcase of what you can do with older…

I happened to walk past the TV and there was Dr. Monique Y. Wells, author of ‘Paris Reflections, Walks Through African American Paris’. Around 2002, when the book was published, I did a review and received a signed copy of it. A few years later, I loaned it out.It’s now 2026 and it hasn’t returned. Dr. Monique Y. Wells The PDF 🤷🏿‍♂️ Z-Library to the rescue. IYDK,NYK Asé Peace & Blessings,"Guided by the Ancestors"

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 commentary… but they always…

I’ve been stacking up a few reviews of science fiction and fantasy in the online magazine Strange Horizons: all free to read. On 11 May I reviewed Vonda N McIntyre’s last, posthumous, novel, The Curve of the World. It’s (pre-)historical, strange and sensual, with a very long quest from the Mediterranean to the north-west cost … Continue reading Science fiction & fantasy reviews →

We only had a short stopover in Munich but really wanted a proper session in a proper Münchner Biergarten. Goldilocks style, we ended up visiting three. We wrote before about how much we like “discovering” neighbourhood beer gardens in Munich, mostly by spotting green spaces on the map. This time we headed for the river Isar and started walking south where there were many potential destinations depending on how much we had in our legs after a week tramping around Brno and Rosenheim. Well, it…

A Study in the Demonic Digging Habits of Early StrigiformesStolas scratches at the dusty red dirt with his filthy talons. When his claw strikes a buried rock, he squawks, then pecks at it with his hooked beak. The sweltering Earthean sun beats relentlessly down on his feathered head. Still, it’s much cooler here than in hell.As he digs, the ground shakes behind him in powerful rhythmic steps. With a twist, he swivels his head to see the demon Aym climbing the mild incline toward him. Stolas…

I have too much clutter on my workbench and I continue to loose or misplace project components. So I have built a couple of parts trays from leftover foamcore bits. These trays only correct the problem with the clutter in a small way, but any step in the right direction is welcome. I used bits of copper wire as staples to insure the corners stayed where they are meant to be while the glue dried. This one is made from bits of matboard

Adam Smith’s 1776 book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, is often described in casual conversation (at least by noneconomists) as a manifesto for the benefits and power of free markets. That’s a part of it, to be sure. But Smith was a profound thinker, not a pamphleteer, and he digs down into a much wider discussion of why the people of certain nations become wealthy. Barry R. Weingast offers his own thematic emphasis emphasis in “What Every PhD Student Should…

It’s been several years since I considered a different web browser. I’ve used Firefox and Mullvad as my main desktop browsers for a while. Firefox Focus and Tor have been my mobile browsers of choice. More than three years ago, I stopped using the Chrome browser. But news about Mullvad as well as online conversations had me considering my browser choices. And taking a look at privacy-focused browsers. First browser which came to my mind was Vivaldi. I think my last time using Vivaldi was 10…

Yesterday I was having a rather random conversation with some folks on the internet when we started talking about Symbolic Sound, the company behind Kyma. I was a customer of theirs almost 30 years ago, and it suddenly struck me: Kurt and Carla are still doing it.I haven’t owned a Kyma in decades, but it had a huge influence on me. It pushed me to explore deeper audio processing, discover algorithms I’d never encountered, and think about visual, object-oriented programming in ways that were…

Newport Street This and more Northern Folk in Bolton in August 2016 herehttps://northernfolkarchive.pagecord.com/bolton-town-centre-18-august-2016

Linnea Berthelsen in Darkling, Bush Theatre. Photo: Alex Brenner A happy childhood in a play is like having a Chekhov’s gun: you are waiting for it to go off, for something to go wrong and Darkling at the Bush Theatre is no different. I confess I knew nothing of Bhopal, where the play is set, and so my thoughts were going in all different directions about what might unfold, but nothing prepared me. She (Linnea Berthelsen) lives with her father and sister and is a bubbly, happy child despite the…

Contains spoilers for Halo: Reach For me, the world of Halo came to life on the playground. I had never played the game series—I didn’t even know they were games. Halo was a conjuration of a friend, a new space for imaginative free play in the wide, wet field of recess. I learned about the parasitic Flood with their misshapen bodies and desire to consume the whole galaxy. I discovered the Library, a vast Forerunner megalith with the life-saving Index at its core. I was introduced to the…

It just dawned on me that my first post on here recently turned 20 years old. Who’d have thunk I’d still be at it? If anything, I am much more active now than when I used WordPress. The website itself did exist in one form or another for years before I started blogging, although I did do something like blogging by hand-coded HTML at one point. Switching from WordPress to Hugo and then Zola with a few quick stops in between has been one of the major changes here. For the most part the content is…

How does one actually build something when the tool available is a hammer and there are no nails — not even any screws — in the inventory? RIP Tom Ulen (nothing "official" yet). Yes, I actually maintain(ed) friendships inside the L&E movement, primarily among those like Tom who viewed economic analysis of law — and legal analysis of economics! — as a powerful tool and not an answer per se

OpenCode is an open source agent that helps you write and run code with any AI model, including free (for now although the free tier uses a limited subset of backend models including Big Pickle) use of its own OpenCode Zen model. It’s available as a terminal-based interface, desktop app, or IDE extension. So OpenCode is similar to Claude Code in that it has agentic abilities, MCP servers, etc. Their Zen model is interesting. You connect to it (so no download or local GPU really required) and it…

Yes, o passive Siri. Someone was seen.

Back in the time machine. Now it’s September 2007, which by coincidence is 19 years ago to the day so perhaps I’ll try and do one of these a month from now on. The top image is of a road side service stop in France. I only include it because it helps piece together a lot of the back and forth over that summer. Presumably we were heading back to Marseille. It was a long seven hour trip, that in the days before air con (maybe around 2000 for us) was brutal. And yep sure enough we’re back. You can…

I was bemoaning a jigsaw puzzle I’m doing, earlier today. It’s really cute and when it’s done it will be perfect but the pattern is way too busy for me to handle and I keep staring at pieces, thinking they could go anywhere and then set them aside, frustrated. I briefly considered putting the puzzle back in the box, but I’m no quitter. I walked away from the puzzle to make some tea and walked back, immediately seeing a piece that would go in a spot. It fit! I was so happy and immediately sat…

The plethora of detective series means there’s something for everyone whether its disturbing thrillers or so called cosy murder mysteries (though I’m not sure how murder can ever be described as cosy), Ludwig sits somewhere in between and owes as much to the likes of Inspector Morse as it does to so called gentler series. Its also something of a comedy drama, a difficult thing to pull off but which writer Mark Brotherhood manages to do with aplomb. This second series offers a new set of…

Best new feature in macOS 27 (Golden Gate): A handy icon in the menu bar to show you how much milk is left in your baby bottle.

I didn’t realize that the Coyote vs. Acme movie is based on a short piece in The New Yorker from 1990, by Ian Frazier. They’re both good!