In this article for Michael West media, Claudia Weisenberger assesses the insatiable thirst for water of Australian data centres. Sydney Water is preparing for data centres to consume 25% of Sydney’s drinking water by 2035. Article: Waste tsunami. Water and the hidden cost of AI data centres. Take home quotes: No data centre operating in Australia is required to disclose how much water it consumes, nor is there a law currently requiring any of them to recycle it. One large AI processing centre…

I am having a bath. I don’t have baths very often, but I’ve a bad head cold so I’m hoping some vapour bath bubbles and a hot steamy room will help unclog me a bit. But I don’t have baths very often, to the point that I once shared the fact on social media. A bath in a new home. A photo of my feet sticking out of the water. I’m 186cm tall (6’1”) so most regular sized baths are a little too small for me to lie out completely. So there I was, happy in my bath, cropping the photo a bit to keep…

AllSides puts three opinion pieces side by side: one from the right, one from the left, and one they call center. All three are about whether hooking up is bad for people. Here's how it reads to me. From the Right: Emily JashinskyHer point is that hookup culture is a sweet deal for guys and a raw deal for a lot of women. Plenty of women are still hoping a fling turns into something real, and the guys know it. She puts some of the blame on Alex Cooper of the Call Her Daddy podcast, for telling…

How I use Bubbles to find the quirky stuff 🎲 It always warms my heart to read kind blog posts with interesting ideas for making Bubbles even better. Of course I can't just keep adding features: Bubbles is already packed with stuff, and I want to keep it minimalistic and intuitive. The main purpose of Bubbles is to find interesting things to read, and what counts as "interesting" is very subjective. To find posts they like, readers either search for blogs and topics, or they filter out the…

Today I learned more about fonts and found one great one to replace my current setup and pair with my colour palette. Maple Mono is an excellent monospace font with a rounded design and smart ligatures. After testing it on terminal and my code editor (both using Catppuccin Mocha), it worked great together, the soft, rounded glyphs complement the pastel palette. I’m adding this short note to my TIL section mainly as a personal reference for future use, I’ll probably write a full blog post about…

Above you see the nice li’l machine that has a nice SAS card that I’m using for my /dvd RAID (that, confusingly enough, has more ripped blurays than ripped DVDs now). Here’s the major, incredibly important problem: If there’s been a power outage (for instance, because I’ve had an electrician in to do something), the machine refuses to boot because the BIOS doesn’t know what date it is. I’m sure that’s really important! Oh my god! What would we do with a machine where the BIOS doesn’t know what…

Charlotte Tobitt, writing for Press Gazette, about subscription plans Meta introduced last month, that effectively monetise the posting of links from some Facebook and Instagram pages: Under the Meta One trial, those restricted from posting links would have to pay $49.99 (£37.65) per month to post eight links, $149.99 (£112.98) to post 20, or $499.99 (££376.60) for an unlimited number (alongside the other perks included). These are monthly fees, not annual. Three-hundred-and seventy-pounds —…

My laptop isn’t just a tool - it’s my deck. I live for tweaking it, making it run and look exactly how I need it to. Function and form, on my terms.

After Refern shuts down, I seek out image collection software that doesn't boast AI features and consider how difficult it is to find a replacement.

The Snow Day That Told Me Something Was OffIt's snowing hard enough that I'm not braving traffic to get to the gym. Too cold in the garage to tinker with anything. No new book on the nightstand, nothing worth watching on TV. So I do the thing you're not supposed to admit to doing in retirement: I sit there. Coffee, then the window, then the TV, then lunch, then the window again. And honestly? That day was fine. Good, even. Sometimes you need a day like that — your mind needs a break from…

There’s a new thing going around in the blogosphere1: human.json. The idea is quite charming: set up such a file to declare that you are human who doesn’t use LLMs to write stuff an your website. Then link to other websites of which you know the owner to be a human who doesn’t use LLMs to write stuff on their website (in their terminology this is called “vouching”). This is somewhat similar to a “human brain output” webring, in that you get a network of websites with content produced by human…

[In Europe, anyway, where regulators do this funny thing called “regulating”.] I’ve previously noted that Tesla’s claimed “Full Self-Driving” isn’t, and that the name ought to be illegal. Over in Europe, the name is no more. Tesla’s driver-assistance package is now called “Tesla Assisted Driving” in Europe. The company’s German website no longer mentions “Full Self-Driving,” and the old address now redirects to a new “Tesla Assisted Driving” page. As Electrek noted in their piece, this should…

on the price I'm willing to pay Diary:Hi, I have been thinking about the time I spent looking and admiring certain influencers on social media. I would say I tend to admire their material possessions. On how big their houses were, how fast their cars, how expensive their handbags and how cool their niche styles. I won't say I'm better than anyone for feeling the slight regret of admiring something like this. It's normal as a social creature, to have that kind of motivation and strive to be…

Notes on capping CPU frequency for daily use. A decade habit of running laptops at 500 MHz, why it started, and what it actually feels like day to day.

So today marks the 4th anniversary of us moving to our 2.5 acre smallholding in north Wales. I can't believe it's been 4 years already - it feels like 5 minutes ago that I wad writing my 3 years at the smallholding post. Last year's update wasn't as positive as previous years thanks to us having to get a new roof, which cost a shit tonne of money, and caused leaks all over the house. But I'm happy to say that the update for this year is mostly positive. I ended last year's post by saying: If…

When I was in my early/mid-teens, my dream was to work on MTV. When I was in my late teens, my dream was to make album covers. I did neither, but now that I'm OLD and decided to cross-stitch my favorite album covers of my favorite bands, because why not? I decided to start with The Libertines, of course, 'cause I love the band and this album cover is perfect. The Libertines, 2004 They continue to make great music, by the way, and there's this video they released last year that always makes me…

If there were doubts about Reform's political character, ITV's undercover documentary has put them to bed. In encounter after encounter, its reporters were witnesses to unprompted, off-the-cuff racism. But we're not talking about the casual dropping of slurs. Instead, a parade of councillors and party officials outlined their elaborate, violent fantasies. Of ripping people from their homes and shoving them in concentration camps, of personally carrying out public executions, of terrorising…

I just found out about Ember, a really nice theme for NetNewsWire that works for both mobile and Mac. An article from Unsung as rendered by Ember

I’ve had many memorable conversations in pubs, and about pubs, and one particular such exchange from a few years back still stands out. I’d been arguing the case that JD Wetherspoon was a social asset because its low prices helped bring all types of people together. The other party – whoever they were, but certainly…

Massey College, at the University of Toronto, is an important example of Canadian efforts to emulate the ‘OxBridge’ educational and college system at Oxford and Cambridge. I was pleased to join Massey as a junior fellow when I began my PhD in 2012, and found the college to be an indispensable social hub amid U of T’s general coldness. I was a resident during term time over three years but, for the rest of my PhD, still visited routinely to read, have lunch, or just see who was around. It used…

2026-10-12Hello! I hate the color in this image!Why do museums and exhibitions have such awful lighting? To my untrained eye, the color of this beige machine looks ugly. In person, it was fine. In the end, I caved and let a preset do the work of recoloring this image.And the display! Modern displays have advanced so far, so I didn't know how to deal with the strobe display of this Macintosh device. It has no smoothing whatsoever, and I could see the flicker in person.I would have needed to take…

2026-10-11Hello! I'm this close to pulling an all-nighter over nothing. No idea why, but there's always something worth doing.Past ten o' clock, I was still walking outside, exploring abandoned paths and overgrown gardens. I found this shed on my travels and decided to photograph it.I haven't yet gone back to this shed; maybe it's open during the day and I never noticed. Over my walk, I tried taking loads of photographs to get in the creative mood. It's crazy how a new scene will present itself…

2026-10-10Hello!I looked at a pumpkin design online that was way too complicated. It's also a bit too early to cut through pumpkins for Halloween, but I went to try this anyway.I adjusted the focus of my camera lens to make the pricks of light that shine through the dots look out of focus. They look blurry, but also increase in size. Dots become orbs of light.The dotted patterns seem to be a recurring theme with my photography. I just like the idea of polka dots.In post processing, I adjusted…

This week I wrote a bunch of blogposts! Some of them were quite fun, some others were rather personal and dealing with complicated emotions, but I am once again feeling pretty chill about life. The weather continues to go colder and I’m having a really good time. I’ve been doing some small changes that already feel good and working on figuring some things out as things move along. Here are some notes on other things that happened between October 13 to 19, 2026. 💻 Work has been interesting. My…

It’s been a while since I last discussed my devices: the last deep dive was back in 2019, and a lot has changed since. So, it is time for a refresh, and to show how I compute, for computer nerds like me. The switch to linux # I am a big fan of the Apple ecosystem and hardware. However, macOS has become more and more hostile to developers over the years, such as Gatekeeper, notarization, and the growing number of hoops to run your own software (Apple’s own documentation and the notarization…

I've always had an understanding that the independent web was designed by humans and for humans. There were times that my inbox or forums I visit were solicited by people (and maybe occasionally agents) who vibecoded a project and were proudly sharing it as part of the resistance against the corporate web. That always felt totally antithetical to what is trying to be accomplished and achieved with regards to the IndieWeb. Take for instance this website proclaiming that the IndieWeb is punk.…

After I published Five Years of Trying to Add Recursion to lychee, one reply I got was a very fair question: If recursion is so hard, how do other link checkers do it? Plenty of them already crawl websites! This sent me down a rabbit hole of reading the code of other link checkers. The key takeaway is: they didn’t find a clever trick we missed. They were built as crawlers from the very first commit, and I initially built lychee as a stream. I went and read the source of the recursive checkers…

Ben Nadel demonstrates how to prevent user generated content (UGC) from maliciously triggering HTMX 4 and Alpine.js behaviors in his ColdFusion output....

UFO is a great game from 1994. Possibly the first, great turn-based tactics game.

Tamago sando is a classic Japanese egg sandwich made with soft shokupan and a creamy egg filling. My mom often made these sandwiches for our weekend breakfast when I was growing up in Japan and it’s something I made for my children’s lunchboxes too, so it’s a very well loved staple for me. It’s one ... The post Tamago Sando ( Japanese Egg Sandwich) appeared first on Chopstick Chronicles.