Fri May 08
April 2026. Royal Tunbridge Wells. An evening in a sunny Pantiles, mainly spent in the subterranean bar of the Mad Dog, and again we’d forgot to eat. I’m sure the Pantiles has many dining options, most outside our budget, so we headed back up the hill for a minute before Mrs RM dived into the Youngs dining pub. Five...
We have bought a house recently. Our fist one, yay! But a house isn't really a home, until hit has all the necessities! WiFi, coffee, games.
On April Fools in 2021, the popular xkcd comic ran Checkbox, which was a Morse code puzzle in disguise. (It’s interesting to see the community trying to figure out what it actually does.) Engineer Max Goodhart built the front-end and wrote a summary of the whole project: This year was a doozy. We specced and...
When fires go raging, tornados tear, Hold loved ones closer to your breast; Of failings, fears and wounds beware: Together you may pass the test.
Site buildershttps://systeme.io/https://www.zite.com/Projects and companies by community members:https://www.instagram.com/kyoto__diaries/https://www.toremlabs.comhttps://koffe-landing-page.vercel.app/ (born at our Community Hack Day!)
Well, there's no escaping the Attenborough centenary – it's everywhere, and will be all day, with a special concert from the Royal Albert Hall on TV this evening. It was 100 years ago today that the Great Man, our most assured National Treasure, was born – in Isleworth, by the Thames in Middlesex (though he did not...
It is the sunset of the 1600s. Milton has just pioneered the use of the word space to connote outer space. Kepler has just pioneered science fiction by imagining space travel, but going only as far as the Moon. Gravity is a brand new concept and the notion of a galaxy is still more than two centuries away. The...
It’s been a very parkrunny week, which involved me presenting at a Volunteering Australia webinar about Community-Led Volunteering and my parkrun experiences. Some people have said nice things about the presentation and the recording will be available soon. I didn’t have time to run or walk at parkrun (or more...
🎵 Listening to the Bird Songs playlist by Anthony Ciccarello. I’m all set for my birdathon fundraiser tomorrow. I’ve even got my bird playlist lined up!
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[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.] Earlier this week, I saw this article in Apple News. It’s from the San Francisco Chronicle and discusses a recent report on the safety of the Golden Gate Bridge. The report is...
My first, full-fledged in-class course at APU ended this week. The final round of assessments is yet to be done. I am in the process of it. Most students have done well. I have done physical workshops, special classes, a bunch of short-term courses, but this was my first in-class, full-fledged course. Traveling to...
The steam of the espresso machine — of focusing in the milk to make sure it is just right, of tapping to remove the bubbles, of preparing. Soft instrumental music plays in the background, more upbeat than the music to which I was listening earlier — easing me more into the day. How the smile of a barista lights up...
Everyone in my life (including myself) has experienced one "big death" in their life, the kind that changes everything. Something I've noticed is that, whenever the dead person's name comes up, people start asking these hypothetical questions. "Do you think if ______ was still here that they would have liked that...
this post is in response to this post by lwgrs and this post by donthave2sting. I am also not going to talk about shortwave radio in this post as it's outside the scope of these two but historically speaking it predates FM radio and was crazy. Google it. It's crazy. I have probably mentioned this before when I talk...
As part of my birthday present earlier this year, Fern got me a half day cooking course for Outdoor Dirty Cooking and smoking workshop from Howl Bushcraft, which took place a couple of Sundays ago. As part of the workshop, we learned to smoke fish, venison, and cook over an open fire using leaves to add flavour, and...
Serving a Website on a Raspberry Pi Zero Running Entirely in RAM 2026-05-08 My micro site, zero.btxx.org, is being served to the public internet from a Raspberry Pi Zero v1.3 running Alpine Linux. The best part? It’s diskless and running entirely from memory! My Raspberry Pi Zero silently running in my cold-storage...
Today started with a misunderstanding between my digital scale and the corresponding app on my smartphone. Don’t even ask—it had something to do with Bluetooth. So I spent the first...
Read Maureen's story, Jigsaw, now!Are you a big fan of jigsaw puzzles? I don’t have enough time in the day to do them now but I used to enjoy them very much. I found them a relaxing escape from the stress and anxieties of today’s troubled world and there’s something magical about the emergence of a beautiful...
AI, Slot Machines, and Other Kinds of Happiness mtift Fri, 05/08/2026 - 08:54 A lot of AI products, when you strip away the hype, are happiness machines. Feed them your mood and they give you something back, such as a great playlist, a useful summary, an answer, a story, some pretty good code. We can debate the...
I had previously learned a lot from this book review by George Orwell, which is actually a lot more than a book review. Recently I had cause to look it up again and found it had vanished from the searchable internet. With some sleuthing I have recovered a copy of the review from the internet archive. Orwell’s review...
Silence can be deafening. Especially between two people who want to keep a conversation going, but fail to do so. I was always searching for a way to move the conversation forward. Early in my relationships, with new friends or with colleagues at work. Silence was not an option, because it would reveal something...
Sir David Attenborough is 100 years old and formed a large part of my love of nature through is TV documentaries through the 80s and 90s. I can remember when TVs went HIGH DEFINITION and Planet Earth (I think) was one of the first shows to take advantage and wow it looked so so good. […]Thanks for reading and...
Não acredito que mais um post sobre anime. Até eu estou surpreso comigo mesmo. Mas esse foi um filme que passou completamente despercebido por mim, não sei se eu só ignorei ele ou se não vi ninguém comentando sobre, e eu só descobri ele graças ao poder sobrenatural de outros blogs (surpreendente não?) que eu...
I don’t do politics much, but I woke up yesterday, fully intending to cast my vote in the UK Local Elections. The day, however, had other plans for me and voting was not factored in. I had a crazy day at work and by the time I finally wrapped up, it was so close to poll closing at 10pm that I just could not be...
I have made slow adjustments to my feed reader every other day now to exclude some empty negativity from my online space, and also to no longer click on some YouTube frontpage stuff. Don't get me wrong: There is still plenty of negativity in there in some ways, but at least it is productive negativity that lets me...
So there’s a hole in time with pretty clearr rules, right? You can only go back to a specific date and time. A specific September day at 11:58 AM, 1958. From a dark late night in 2011. That’s the portal. No freely controllable time-travel. While the past-hole is static, the future-hole is moving. I.e. each time you...
The default slog API is loose enough that a careless line ships broken JSON to production. Pin it down with Attr constructors, LogAttrs, a context-borne logger, and sloglint.
Despite what "small net" enthusiasts might claim, HTTP is a pretty good protocol for document retrieval. Can we develop a new protocol with all the same advantages, and none of the disadvantages?
Les dejo un par de lecturas para el fin de semana, con entradas de blogs que me gustaron. Si quedan con ganas de más recuerden que siempre esta ¡Blog!¡Blog! El fin de los piratas | jInversor Eran los piratas… “tomaban el software que necesitaban, no para venderlo sino para usarlo, y terminaban destripándolo,...
Heya! So, when i made the post announcing that i was hosting the bearblog carnival for this month a couple days back, i said I was gonna talk about my favorite PHP function names. So, here's that post! Now, before we get started, I want to talk about why I can even make a blogpost about this. Because, the reason I'm...
With No Brand Con 2026 in the rearview, I think it's time to talk about the business of running a small, nonprofit convention. This year was genuinely really good for us, and kind of a miracle. Events like ours usually don't come back from the dead, and I want to talk about how that death happened, and how we used...
2026-05-08Hello! Flowers are pretty, so I'll be sharing a few photos of the blooming flowers throughout the month of May. I started on May 1, and this is the second photo.These aren't grown wild, though. This was in a residential area that was next to a bunch of other cultivated plants.Finally, an article by...
Ya es noticia vieja, pero la NASA compartió aún más fotos del pasado viaje de la tripulación del Artemis II a la Luna. Verlas sigue dejándome boquiabierto. Hay algo inexplicable que me provoca ver estas fotos, nuestro pequeño planeta suspendido en la inmensidad del espacio, ahí frágil, brillando y siendo visto desde...
Queriendo arriesgarme un poco para obtener mas calidad, he decidido conseguir nuevos auriculares. Especialmente teniendo en cuenta que los Xiaomi buds 4 lite están en constante riesgo de muerte debido a la batería inflada de su cajita de carga. Pero no soy fan de los auriculares. Me hacen bastante daño. Pero para...
Japan's power grid has a fracture running through it that no one has ever fully repaired. East and west run on different frequencies.
Dear reader,As a person with a weird interest in browsers, I sometimes go through different subreddits to see what's going on in that space. I often encounter people sharing the browser extensions they use while asking for more suggestions. Here are a few examples of these setups: As useful as browser extensions can...
See for yourself This article was originally published at: https://andrei.xyz/quickies/digg-is-back-and-it-s-ai-slop-shit/
I have a theory that's based on a simple observation: two and a half decades since the birth of the internet—a full generation of perpetually connected, (social) media-trained technophiles has transformed society by structuring life on the basis of how it is best represented online. But let me step back and explain....
This blog is moving to another domain Please update your feeds. This is an Italian movie made during 2000s about a boy’s desires of a woman whose life changed so much during war times. He witnessed that change of her loosing husband, struggling for food, and doing prostitution to survive. It has a weird vibe, may be...
Last night one of my students sent me this screenshot with the message “You were right, Dr. Jacobs!” I’ve never used Canvas, because I despise it even when it’s working as designed. Some of my students tell me that I’m the only professor they have ever had who does not use it, which makes me sad: the ed-tech...
I. Tide Sleeping, breath rolls in waves,surf on the shore of dreams.Moon hauls the dreamer’s water, phase by phase;kelp-dark thought uncoils, opens like a palm. Thought-flotsam the shore collects,wrack from teeming verdant life.The dreamer buries treasure;the woken mind finds a chest—jinni, genius, jest—Ozymandias...
Why am I thinking about dipping back into Mastodon and Bluesky? I’ve been away for six or seven (!) months and it’s been good. I feel a bit like I’d like I’m curious if I could do it in a way that would only be a fifteen-minute commitment each week. I have doubts, but I suppose then I could just eject again. Hmm…I...
If you open up a philosophy article or chapter on your computer, the software you’re using, now updated with various AI features, may present you with something like the following message: “This looks like a long article. Would you like me to summarize it for you?” You may be unlikely to use this feature. You’re...
I a movie that I recently watched, the weather (a typhoon, to be precise) plays a key role for the progression of the plot. To foreshadow this, weather reports are used as background noise during establishing shots throughout the movie. The camera pans across a room in a house, and somewhere, a voice on the radio...
Carrying on with the theme of being lazy while editing posts, I've released blogmore.el v4.5.0. This version adds blogmore-set-as-cover. With this, if you place point on a line that is an image and run the command, it is set as the cover for the post. Sure, it's not like it's hard to copy, move, insert a new line,...
I keep a monthly journal in Markdown; one file per month, each entry stamped with the date and time. For a while I was creating those files by hand. That got old fast. So I wrote a Python script to handle it and want to share it with you. Each time the script runs, it checks whether a journal file for the current...
There are two kinds of fibre in the foods we eat. Many people think of fibre as stringy, flaky, tough things like bran, brown rice, or apple skins. Need more fibre in your diet? Eat brown bread! These fibres are called insoluble fibre. I always made the connection between edible fibre and usable fibre like linen or...
One of the other librarians emailed this morning asking if the rest of us had gotten an email from an outfit called Librar Labs. We hadn't, but I looked them up. And yeah, this whole webpage can fuck off: Librar Labs How can it fuck off specifically? Let us count the ways: "Librar makes it easier to set up and...
My company’s new health plan covers an online personal trainer, so for the first time, I’m giving it a shot. For all the running I’ve done over the last bunch of years, I’ve neglected any strength training and done only very little flexibility or balance work. I’m at that age where I need to break that streak and...
Tumbleweed es una distribución de GNU/Linux «Rolling Release» o de actualización contínua. Aquí puedes estar al tanto de las últimas novedades. openSUSE Tumbleweed es la versión «rolling release» o de actualización continua de la distribución de GNU/Linux openSUSE. Hagamos un repaso a las novedades que han llegado...
Back in 2018, the American Sign Museum saved the old Cincinnati Gardens sign and installed it on their exterior wall facing the street. Over time they put up scaffolding and have been filling it up with local signs to preserve and share with the community. I notice a new one every time I drive by.Currently...