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You don't have to wait for Donald Trump to rename Lake Ontario. Thanks to MapQuest, you can now direct all your small dick energy into hitting Canada where it really hurts - by taking a Sharpie to Canada's geography yourself.Canada's slow-witted response to the latest U.S. trade war has been to impose tariffs on a range of American imports, thereby increasing the cost of goods for American consumers. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has once again demonstrated why he is known as...
'Twas on a Friday morningThe painter made a startWith undercoats and overcoats he painted every partEvery nook and every crannyBut I found when he was goneHe'd painted over the gas tap and I couldn't turn it on! Flanders & Swann We do be living on the farrrm thirty years. In 1996, the farmhouse was in neglected, but not ruinous condition: hole in the front door, hole in the roof, missing gutters, no running water. After our neighbours John & Michael sunk a bore-hole to...
Reading Time: 38 minutes Hm, it does rather feel that Summer is now OVER – not, to be clear, that I am complaining about the fact that it is no longer threemillion degrees, but there’s been a feeling this week of the world rather rolling its sleeves up again and preparing to Get On With Sh1t, for better or worse. This, sadly, extends to work, for me at least – while all of you (or at least those of you in the UK) get to enjoy a bank holiday and maybe go to carnival and...
Afterglow running Flying Toasters, with the module library and original settings visible Afterglow runs original After Dark 68k screen saver modules natively on modern macOS without requiring a classic Mac OS installation or Apple ROMs. Rather than remake Flying Toasters, Fish!, Starry Skyline and the rest, it uses the Musashi 68k emulator and reimplements just enough of the old Macintosh Toolbox and operating-system APIs to run the original code. Modules are not included,...
“This is fine.” Trump’s timing is impeccable, as usual: after the AI boom helped turn RAMageddon into a sustained memory price surge, he has apparently decided that what data centres, PC builders and everyone buying electronics need next is a tax on the chips themselves. And this lands just as the AI industry’s “teaser period” is supposed to end–when vast take-or-pay compute commitments become actual bills and utilisation starts to matter. Nothing says “winning the AI...
Source But new research shows this image is misleading. The dodo was likely no less intelligent than any modern bird. It may also have possessed a rare and overlooked ecological trait: an adaptation to life in low light. Dodos probably weren’t that stupid Other Dodo posts.
About 180 pieces are going to be added to LEGO® Pick a Brick (PaB) on Tuesday 1 September 2026. The included elements are from sets released in May. See the list of all September 2026 PaB new pieces Continue reading »
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There is nothing that separates a password mugshot from a photography master piece: you can use the same camera for both, the same lens, the same location. The physical objects (file or print) are identical. So what is the difference? Industrial The vast majority of images taken are not art: surveillance cameras, medical imaging, scientific imagine, and accidental snaps of the photographer’s ear (yes, that used to happen a lot) are clearly not art. Nobody would think they...
Basque cuisine 🥓🫒🦐 The quintessential item of Basque cuisine is the pintxo (pronounced pincho, the 'tx' representing a 'ch' sound). A pintxo is a small savoury snack, bigger than bite-sized and generally breadier than tapas. They're displayed on the counter in bars to be eaten alongside a drink, sometimes a choice of umpteen and sometimes just the specialities of the house. Think cheesy ham or spiked olives with tomato or anchovies with truffle or sliced tortilla or...
There’s something wonderfully comforting about a good fruit crumble, and this Three Fruit Crumble brings together the very best flavours of late summer and early autumn. Made with ripe pears, cooking apples, and a handful of berries — blackberries or cranberries, whichever you have — it’s a simple, homely dessert that celebrates seasonal fruit at its best. With no pastry to fuss over and no complicated steps, this crumble comes together easily: just prepare the fruit, mix...
It’s been gloomy all day – the kind of August day that’s hot, humid and still, sapping all your energy because nothing *actually* cools you off except real air conditioning (or standing in front of the refrigerator), not even taking a cold shower in the afternoon. At least the nights are still cooling off, even if the days are muggy. Close to sunset, the clouds finally started to break up, and I began to think I might get to see tonight’s lunar eclipse after all. That’s...
…at both ends and seemingly for far too long beyond what my body deemed acceptable, and thus, I became sick this week. Did you ever have this? Just absolutely throwing all of yourself in the frying pan: bacon, eggs, butter, the works; and then serving yourself up and realising that if you are this amalgamation of fatty proteins, then surely you’ll need a nap afterwards? Yes, exactly like that. I don’t often get sick and when I do, it is usually mild (such is this bout),...
Paul Frees (1920 –1986), born Solomon Hersh Frees in Chicago , is better known for his work on Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Walter Lantz, Rankin/Bass and Walt Disney theatrical cartoons during the Golden Age of Animation, and for providing the voice of Boris Badenov in The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.Frees was sometimes known as "The Man of a Thousand Voices", an appellation more commonly bestowed on Mel Blanc. [Wikipedia]A good Paul Frees biography is Ben Ohmart, , Welcome ......
It’s a classic mistake. We develop a technology in N years for X dollars that’s 90% reliable, and extrapolate that traversing that final 10% will only take another 0.1N years and 0.1X dollars. This leads to the kinds of extraordinary predictions about fully autonomous self-driving vehicles or coding agents being just around the corner. We see agents build, say, a web browser that kind-of sort-of works and extrapolate that it must surely only be months before they can build...
At the end of a glorious day hanging out at galleries, antique shops and the pub with friend and historian Matt Allen we walked to the station at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, Australia (where I live) for Matt to get the train back to the city. We were confronted with this glorious mural representing a bushranger named Govett, leaping off the cliff with gun in hand and bags of gold strapped to his horse. How gleeful is he? Ecstatic with ‘you’ll never catch me alive’...
Or, new etiquette norms need to be created for abnormal situation. ~ Link: Please Don’t Rearrange Our Shoes When We Turn up, Paramedics in Japan Urge, by Gavin Blair, The Guardian
… You don't know what I got! In this case, what “you don’t know what I got” is the camera I shot this dragster with. Sold as a “Retro Digital Camera” for the grand sum of $40 (it’s a little more expensive now) it’s a fine example of just how far and how cheap digital imaging has become. While it isn’t quite capable of fine imaging and the numbers on the lens are a complete fantasy, it does the
Just a quick note for any of the Spanish language readers out there. There is a new translation of Wild Justice by George A Birmingham. Espuela de Plata based in Seville has been translating into Spanish then reprinting many English language Golden Age detective novels and thrillers since around 2017. Some of the books have been reviewed here including The Medbury Fort Murder, The Colfax Book-plate and Wild Justice. I've been in correspondence with the translator Antonio...
Dr. Johnson in The Adventurer on August 28, 1753: “. . . I shall, therefore, venture to inculcate to my ingenious contemporaries, the necessity of reading, the fitness of consulting other understandings than their own, and of considering the sentiments and opinions of those who, however neglected in the present age, had in their own times, and many of them a long time afterwards, such reputation for knowledge and acuteness as will scarcely ever be attained by those that...
Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.You...
Devotion is more than just belief. It is a distinction I make with my religious characters, the witches in particular. Take Stephanie and Faye; they are witches in every sense of practice. They put in the work, they learn their craft, they take their place in the circle as required. But Larina is not so simple. While she is a witch by trade and practice like Steph and Faye, you will find her more often in the role of a Wiccan priestess. For Larina, it is not simply an...
Notice what the last three weeks had in common. (Week 1, Week 2, Week 3)Listing your options. Making a timelines of your constraints. Working out what you're actually good at. Every one of those can be done alone, at a kitchen table, in your notebook. Nobody else has to know. Nothing can go wrong.That's what makes them useful, and it's exactly what makes them dangerous.You can complete all three perfectly and be in precisely the same position in a year.Better informed....
Last Saturday, I thought that I could do with time out. So I joined the Dawes van for a trip to Tenterden. They had a small model railway exhibition at the station, and we thought that we’d have a train ride too. So we headed east, and after a rather average (but very welcome) breakfast, we arrived just in time to catch a train for a round trip on the line. All services were diesel hauled, but we travelled in the heritage carriage rake, in comfort in a four wheeled...
A long, long time ago, I tried out on bass for a local country artist. He still plays around some, and there's no way, even if I prompted him, he would remember the audition. But I was a "punk rock-style player" and thought country was easy. I'm thinking about this because I'm simplifying my Grateful Dead style a little bit with the band and trying to make sure I'm hitting the fundamental stuff that non-Deadheads who like the Dead need to hear. Anyway, I went to this guy's...