Mon Oct 05
There’s a game I really love called Signalis; in fact, it’s one of my favorite games of all time. In it, you follow the odyssey of Elster, a synthetic android with feminine characteristics who is searching for her ship’s pilot, who disappeared after a crash. Yes, there’s a lot of Yuri in this story, and the lesbian...
Announcing a new music section along with some minor tweaks on the site.
I’ve been putting off upgrading from Jekyll 3.10. Partly late-adopter habit, partly because my setup worked fine, and a version bump seemed simple enough. I should know better by now. It mostly was. I run Jekyll on my NAS, in Docker, with a Gemfile shared by the GitHub Pages deploy. I don’t use Jekyll’s incremental...
Newly-wed investigative journalists Mike and Phyllis Watson witness unearthly fireballs plunging into the sea from their cruise ship and embark on a years-long mission to uncover the truth with the aid of a madcap scientist and the military. Although Wyndham is generally considered to be rather left wing in his...
I'm ok. This morning, I left the house 40 minutes early to head to the clinic. Normally, I can walk there in 20 minutes, but I wanted to take the bus. Which means I also had to give myself enough time to get to the bus stop. While I can get around the apartment without crutches, I thought it'd be safer to use them...
I started GUIdebook in 2003, and last updated it exactly twenty years ago. It’s an interesting time capsule itself now, incompatible with mobile reading and sporting an aged design. I have kept it up because it’s apparently used as a reference in various user interface courses, and if you haven’t seen it, it could...
The latest release of whatever card or tabletop game is coming out. Where do you play it? Not at your house, you don't have a table big enough. Not your friends house they live on the other side of town. Luckily your local game store has a half dozen tables ready for you and your friends to meet up and play. It...
在国外住久了，试了许多中餐。炒菜、炖菜，常常总觉得差着一点意思。说不出究竟差在哪里，也许是菜不对，也许是火候不对，也许只是人在异乡，嘴也跟着挑剔起来。 面馆却常有意外之喜。 兰州牛肉面、陕西面、日式拉面、越南 Pho，都挺地道。欧美的朋友也吃得很开心，英国老板说她隔段时间就会带侄子去吃一家兰州拉面（三千拉面）。 这大约先要归功于原料。面粉、牛羊肉、辣椒、醋、葱蒜，在英国都不算难找，核心原料很全球通用。面食不像有些炒菜，非要某一种青菜、某一种鲜味，还要有匹配的火候，少一样便差了神韵。面条的显得很包容，原料稍有出入，也不至于面目全非。...
I intentionally designed my home page to be radically different from other pages on the Indieweb. It's a reference to a very niche genre of film and game, the Screenlife. Breaking the Mold I have a lot of gripes with modern web design. Rounded corners, gradients, animated hover buttons look great for the first one...
Yesterday Mrs N and I attended another talk (it was 'Enlighten' weekend in Lichfield, a series of events aimed at making us once again a 'city of philosophers'). The talk was by biographer and self-confessed journalist Anne Sebba, and the subject was her recent book, The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz. Unfortunately...
I was very inspired by this post from a few days ago, and decided to have a go at something along those lines for myself but for macOS and my Paper Pure. What is it? Inkbridge is a small terminal tool that turns the reMarkable into a pressure-sensitive drawing tablet for your Mac, over USB or Wi-Fi. It supports...
Life’s been stressful lately, and I’m feeling the wear and tear. So I’m going to write about something easy and peaceful and fun: I’ve been thoroughly happy with pico.sh pages since moving my blog a couple months ago. One thing I dislike about deploying with Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, and the like is having to spin...
October 2026. Morley. West Yorkshire. I miss Richard Coldwell. He was interesting, enthusuastic and insightful. His comments on Morley after I popped in Oscars back in 2018 were prescient. “This is the first ‘cosmopolitan’ style bar in Morley and has closely been followed by Beer thirty across the road, which is the...
Ioanna Kuçuradi, a leading Turkish philosopher, has died. Dr. Kuçuradi was known for her work in the fields of human rights, human health, and ethics. She is the author of Human Beings and Their Values (İnsan ve Değerleri), Ethics, (Etik) Looking at Art Through Philosophy (Sanata Felsefeyle Bakmak), and Human...
I’m focusing on more care, compassion and kindness toward myself lately. It’s small things like just stopping and taking deep breaths and genuine breaks, letting go of arbitrary deadlines for myself that are not needed and stepping away from certain topics or blog posts for a while until I can handle them again....
In his albums, Logic occasionally has skits that play throughout that are part of the album’s overall story. A song in his album Ultra 85 titled In Retrospect has a skit at the end that left me wondering: [Outro: Thomas & Kai] Thank God for synthetic gravity and ribeye that never came from a cow I still don't...
This was a very crazy week I have to say, full of unexpected surprises and the like, as such, the things that happened kind of have to be more than listicles this time around, we will resume the usual style for future weeknotes, probably, or not! In any case, here are some events of note that happened from September...
Last edited 7 minutes ago. I socialized so much recently. Nothing like getting back to my roots I guess. And my kitty is with me in the move back home. I got my two cats now living with me under the same roof, and it feels good. Also I voted yesterday, despite the outcomes… You can reply via email or leave a message...
The Tiny Awards 2026 results are in, a contest honoring the most creative website launched during the year. The winner was a familiar face here at Manual: the little multiplayer exploration game Cursor Camp, which I recommended back in May.
Look at many early DVD releases, and you’ll see interactive menus touted as a selling point. Coming from VHS (or LaserDisc), which had no menus to speak of, this was a genuine improvement. That isn’t to say all DVDs had interactive menus, however. Many of the earliest releases just entered straight into their...
Statues of lions flanking entryways are not unusual in New York City public and private spaces. The two most famous are probably Patience and Fortitude, the beloved lions guarding the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue (and named by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia to inspire strength during the Depression). But...
For example, an excuse to post selfies of Della and I Aging is wild, man. I spent so much of my twenties worrying that if I hadn't done X "life goal" thing by 30 my life was over because, frankly, that's what society taught me. I needed to have my music career locked in, etc etc and like I've fully embraced that at...
What’s your favorite deep cut from an album? It’s 1977, I am 4 years old. Meanwhile, a band are recording their next, and sixth, album. Adjusting to a world of punk, still riding high after a tour featuring songs like Somebody to Love, Brighton Rock, and Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen headed back to the studio. During...
Rogallo v3.1.0 is now available. This release is in response to a recent user request. Right from the start of the development of Rogallo, I ensured that any MIME types that the application couldn't handle were correctly handed off to the operating system, to allow it to work out what to do. While it is possible for...
Enable an available site sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/your_site.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ Test config sudo nginx -t Reload nginx sudo systemctl reload nginx
I haven’t soldered anything since school. When we decluttered the flat some years ago, I gave away all the soldering gear of my dad. But this year, I finally soldered again. I upgraded my electric toothbrush with a much bigger battery, going from an aging 700 mAh to 2300 mAh. As we have three of those Braun / Oral-B...
Using LLMs to find bugs and vulnerabilities in software is no longer new and cool, and my 2025 post about using specialized tools to look for vulnerabilities in open-source codebases seems like a distant fever dream. The new cool thing is creating static or deterministic checks (gates, oracles, whatever you want to...
Cui, L., Jia, R., Yu, C., Xu, Z., Yao, Y., Guo, J. and Ren, X. (2026) Associations of tear mediators with ocular surface symptoms, signs, and corneal nerve morphology in dry eye disease: a cross-sectional study. Front. Med. 13:1929287. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmed.2026.1929287 My interest in corneal nerve function...
Tangentially related to the previous post. Alan Kohler. writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): Governments are approaching the task of regulating AI as if they are dealing with a powerful new tool, with the humans who make it held accountable for the outcomes. But regulating a new life form might...
I got the results of the blood labs from my annual physical and I'm doing pretty good in all areas except one: my LDL (bad) cholesterol is too high. This has been something I've struggled with for years and have managed to keep it down with diet and exercise, but it's higher now than it has been in a while. I'm...
I have had a good week-end, good in ways both expected and unexpected. I began the week-end by driving down to Columbia, SC to meet up with my parents so we could go to the James R. Crumley Archive banquet together. In past years, I had seen people post pictures of the banquet, and I always thought it sounded...
It is now October, but as the headline indicates, this is my June 2026 review. Suffice it to say, I have fallen a bit behind on my month-end review posts. But I will fully catch up by the end of this month (being October 2026) such that things will be back in order by the time my October review is due. Without...
- Macintosh Plus: The Adventure of a 40 Year Old Computer"> This is my entry for the RetroChallenge of 2026. While I skipped it last year, you can see the amazing things I’ve done with a Nokia Booklet 3G in the 2024 RetroChallenge err… Challenge. What is RetroChallenge you ask? Retro Challenge was setup to encourage...
C’est l’automne maintenant. Les gens restent chez eux pour plusieurs heurs. Il fait froid dehors pendant la nuit et il pleut plus souvent que l’été. Pour quelques personnes, ces sont les conditions pour devenir plus pensive et introspectif. Que est-ce que j’ai fais pendant les dernières mois? Comment va être l’année...
For a few months now, I've had these words on my about page: My goal for this year is to fully embrace discomfort Today I want to talk about my journey with this. Uncomfortable Situations Feeling uneasy or worried tends to be unbearable for me. When I'm there, I usually can't focus on anything else, and I will...
The YELLOW! Lamy Safari fountain pen arrived, and of course I have tried it out as soon as I had time this morning. (Sorry for the grammatically incorrect capitals and exclamation mark there, but just 'yellow' in lower case doesn't seem enough for how YELLOW! the pen is) My review:As a fountain pen - Disappointing....
Here’s a sentence I have been promising to write on this blog since at least March this year: Antarctica has been gaining ice since 2020. Not losing, gaining. Only 68 gigatonnes a year admittedly, actually a mere drop in the ocean, (or should that be crystal in the ice sheet?), given the vast size of the place, but...
Aujourd’hui ce sont les élections au Québec. D’après les premiers résultats il n’y aurait pas de gouvernement majoritaire, et le parti de l’actuelle première ministre perdrait tous ses sièges. L’annonce fin août de nouveaux parcs à thème au nord de Paris, sur l’ancien site du parc à thème Mirapolis, m’a fait...
Arizona is a unique place. In two hours you can traverse from the Sonoran Desert to the Mogollon Rim. A trip that will take you from forests of Saguaro cactus to forests of Ponderosa Pine and Douglas Fir. And, drop the mercury in the thermometer by about 25 degrees. This weekend, I escaped the Valley of the Sun...
Back in mid-September, I wrote about reconsidering my Apple Watch use, in large part because I don’t like the promised upcoming “Audio Intelligence” features. And, I thought, it could be good to have one less always-on computer screen with me. Right? Well, I went ahead and ordered that Fitbit Air, and I’ve been...
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3] [[The Primality Fallacies]] are a set of intentionally fallacious [[wikipedia:Snowclone|snowclone]] statements about prime numbers that parody common reasoning errors that are popular among people. They're primarily a bit by Twitter user...
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“So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself.” “How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip and yet do trip, and then get up and say OK?” Maira Kalman pondered in her visual philosophy. Such is the magnificent resilience of the human spirit. Our culture is haunted by the unholy ghost...
05 Smack | INDEX | 07 Panic Self-imposed constraint: Use the letters of the prompt word inside a 2-inch square to illustrate its meaning. Hongdian Black Forest fountain pen, EF, black ink on 120 gsm paper