Recent
493 posts in the past 24h
I recently attended The Fifth Elephant conference on 31st July 2026, it was an interesting experience overall, I got to learn a lot of things, and also had a fanboy moment! Read on for the whole scoop :). Speaker to attendee Hasgeek had reached out to my $WORK for submitting a talk to the conference and I had gladly volunteered! Topic was already decided, it had to be about Composable Query Engines. Basically covering all the rave about datafusion, arrow, etc. Projects of...
Signed up for a Vinted account. My options to "secure my account" were adding a phone number, or to logout. I fucking hate this side of the internet. Scumbags. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.
TIL that godspeed does not refer to celerity, but rather is derived from the archaic sense of speed: “luck, success, prosperity”. Which makes the phrase “Good luck and godspeed” a pleonasm! Felix Felicis?
Last month, we lost Belghast in his fight against cancer. The mentors of the Blaugust Discord, of which I am one, were determined to see Blaugust continue on in his honor. Just as he would have wanted.
How’s one of my favorite telescopes of all time, Charity Hope Valentine, my ETX125 PE Maksutov Cassegrain, doing? Muchachos, the reason you haven’t heard much about her in long while is because the answer to that has been, “Not good, not good at all.” For all practical purposes my long-time companion was dead. I’d tried to take good care of her…but… Charity, you see, is no spring chicken; she is going on 21 years old. She’s had a good life for a small (5-inch) telescope, I...
Cupboard LovePhoto credit: Marc Gascoigne Continuing the 2026 Grimeborn Festival is The Opera Makers’ Murder Games: A Double Bill, featuring two modern pieces with a connection to killing. The first is Cupboard Love, with music by Madeleine Dring and libretto by D.F. Aitken – this follows an illicit meeting between She and He, dramatically interrupted by the appearance of a corpse (It) in the cupboard. Accusations fly as the couple attempt to identify what has happened to...
This year I'm taking a sabbatical pause to explore the world of tech, especially in Europe. So I've searched for a way to keep a record of what I'm up to: the cities I visit, the events I attend, the people I talk to, the tech I learn... This way, my family can follow my adventures, and I can help my forgetful brain to keep these memories for longer! The obvious answer is a shared photo album. But none of the apps that I've tested had quite all that I wanted: I don't want...
Possibly my all-time favorite garlic scape recipe, this simple salsa comes together lightning fast and can be canned for use throughout the year. With only a handful of ingredients you can tweak with what you have on hand, it's a great way to use up a tangle of scapes from the farmers market or the... Read More The post Fresh Tomatillo and Garlic Scape Salsa appeared first on Forager | Chef .
Earlier this year I treated myself to my DREAM pen. I've been longing for this pen for yeeears, since I first set my greedy eyes on it. So when I saw it second hand, I paid out big money (imo, seeing other people's collections... oioioi) for my Dragon Palace Sailor Pro Gear Slim. It's not my first Sailor pen; when I heard that Sailors have a distinctive feedback, I had to check that the Dragon Palace really was the pen for me. I got a cheaper Profit Junior model, which I...
“Song from the perspective of a ransomware virus” has to be up there with “Song from the perspective of a child’s bedroom nightlight” in terms of the great musical points of view, right? Chærete again. I’ve been reading Snow Crash for the first time recently, and it’s absolutely rewired my brain. I suspect i shall have more to say on it when i finish it — in which event you’ll be able to find it on the brand new “Stuff i’ve {watched, listened to, read, played} recently”...
Monday Walk towards two women sitting on a bench in the wood. Chatting quietly they’re looking up, contemplating the sky. This area was cut back a while ago to make a clearer route for bats. In the winter everything is ground level, although right now, ferns and rosebay willow herb (fireweed) are more than shoulder high. There’s a clear sky above us. We say hello and one of the women says, “I’m trying to remember this blue — so I can get myself through the winter. Y’know:...
Hey, if you have a Poem/1 then can I ask you to do a manual firmware update? It’ll take just a few minutes and I built a special firmware update tool to make it easy. (That is an actual AI clock on my actual bookshelf in my actual house.) Why? Three reasons… No more stopped clocks. These clocks are way better at recovering from intermittent network faults like the Wi-Fi dropping or the back-end server changing – including one nasty, rare bug that would affect people for a...
Titan Tactics What Works Well? What Works…Less Well? Opportunities What’s Adaptable? Six Years Hence: Manuel, the Magnificent Mechanical Man Coming Attractions This week, our Free Culture Book Club plays Titan Tactics. To give this series some sense of organization, check out some basic facts without much in the way of context. Full Title: Titan Tactics Location: https://team-potato.itch.io/titan-tactics, https://gitlab.com/team-potato/titan_tactics Released: 2020 –...
LIKE MOWING THE GRASS The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. —Robert Frost, “Mowing” Fed up with my angel-ridden, Latinate dirges, my sophomore poetry professor kept telling me to write about something more ordinary and at hand, like mowing the grass. Instead of elegies for my mother who’d died suddenly a few months before, always mowing the grass was my prescription. He wanted it plainspoken, monosyllabic, backyardly. Certainly not the lines I’d been writing,...
Until its reappearance as a guest-star vehicle for Rick Dalton in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it was mostly only oldtimers like us who remembered Lancer, the western which ran on CBS for two seasons from 1969 to 1971. As is the case with so many Westerns, Lancer thrives on drama involving intertwined family trees; Bonanza's Ben Cartwright sired three sons with three different mothers, The Big Valley had an outsider who turned out to be the illegitimate son of the...
The latest batch, comprising his'n'hers reciprocal birthday presents.
It’s time for #6degrees, inspired by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. We all start at the same place as other readers, add six books, and see where it ends up. July’s starting point is Land by Maggie O’Farrell (2026). Land is about an Irish family in the 19th century, and is described as a spellbinding story of separation, longing, recovery, and survival as a family makes a new home in the aftermath of 1840s famine. It’s set on an unnamed, fictitious peninsula on...
So yesterday started out ok but then the day took a turn and folded in on itself. In the neighborhood of the Airbnb we’re staying in on this trip, the city is replacing the sidewalks. Inconvenient, but hey, infrastructure. That party started two days ago and ended just short of our digs and kicked off again yesterday morning. I stepped outside to take a picture and noticed workers all running away from the torn up hunks of sidewalk and then one frantically waving me back...
#OurWorldIsAwesome – Edition 23 | Context on this series – we live in a beautiful world and National Parks are akin to the crown jewels of this planet. These landscapes remind us of the fine balance and complexity woven into the fabric of the world around us. Every time I spend a while inside one of these places, I’m reminded of how precious that balance is, and how much it matters that we try to understand the complexity and our own small role within it. I think that’s...
This post absolutely benefits from musical backing so I’d recommend sticking this on and then coming back here. One day I’ll write about raising boys and how that’s different today than it was 30 years ago, and why it’s strange to see the word “masculinity” without the word toxic before it. But today is not that day. Today I’d like to talk about dudes being dudes. It’s good that they’re smiling My six-year-old son, no doubt encouraged by his metal-loving father, is really...
Data and statistical insights are key drivers for international development. They allow decision-makers to: objectively understand the reality and complexity of the world, logically coordinate various development activities between conflicting priorities, and effectively distribute finite resources, such as money and people. From the United Nations and World Bank to governments to non-profits, narratives in their visions, strategies, roadmaps, and reports often rely...
“Welcome August” sunrise, 1 August 2026, 6:06am (photo by Kate St. John) 1 August 2026 There was a spectacular sunrise this morning to usher in the month of August. As quickly as it built to fiery red with a sun pillar, it was gone. On Thursday 30 July, Charity Kheshgi and I went birding at Frick Park where our most impressive sighting was not a bird. In the area south of the large deer exclosure on Clayton Hill we saw a 10-point buck browsing with a 4-point comrade. Both...
The good folks at Hikmicro have sent me their D02 Infrared Camera to review. It's part of their "Eco" series of thermal imagers - designed to be easy to use around the home and relatively cheap. Despite the no-fills appearance, it packs in a lot of features which put some more expensive models to shame. It even works with Linux. Shove in a USB-C cable to grab the photos or even use it as a webcam. All the images you see in this post are unaltered. I haven't optimised them...
Before I zeroed in on education as the area I want to focus on, I’d spent years reading all I could about the climate crisis. This is a collection of links from that period that I still have, all in one place. I’m sharing them in case they help others. Not all of these links will be relevant since they’re a couple of years old, but some solutions and perspectives might still be helpful. And yes, they’re mostly written by Western journalists about the effects of the climate...
Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die - When cultural preservationists cast every extinction as murder, they can ignore speakers’ decisions—and the costs of keeping a fading tongue alive. By Nikhil Krishnan in the New Yorker