1 : something devised or contrived: such as a(1) : a piece of equipment or a mechanism designed to serve a special purpose or perform a special function Merriam-Webster Dictionary I'm not, it must be said, the worlds most practical man. I can do a few things however, and have enough practical background to recognise when something is a truly beautiful example of a tool. Something made to be used, but also made itself of metal and wood and human ingenuity and a thing of beauty in its own right.…
NoteThis was supposed to be one post, but it grew so long that I had to split it up. Here are/will be the others. In July, I visited the Vienna Museum which reinvigorated my love for museums which is why I decided I needed to visit more museums this summer. The Vienna Museum was such a brilliant start for me because a) the permanent exhibition which encompasses three quite large floors is free and b) I could easily get a companion for the exhibition (free entry makes this more digestible for…
UC Berkeley researchers have identified regions of DNA that humans inherited from two unknown ancestors as a result of long-ago interbreeding among modern humans and at least four other archaic human relatives. New technique pinpoints human DNA inherited from ‘ghost’ ancestors We are a melange.
It’s a great topic. AI. Easy to dismiss. Easy to praise. But it isn’t everything. Not everything needs to be in comparison with it. Not every thought shared needs to take a stand for, or against, it. Not every article has to include a reflection on it. Sometimes you can just forget AI exists. Post the photo. Publish those thoughts. But don’t say that AI couldn’t have done this. Or AI wouldn’t do that. Or that it would be better with AI. Just let it go. Stop moaning about AI. Find a different…
Robert Kingett tooted that indieweb folk are saying RSS readers are flawed, I'm here to say that feeds are ESSENTIAL to the web, all of it, and if any web gardener/creator/writer folk are indeed saying this, they need to re-evaluate.
When I was young, you told me the scientists couldn’t agree. I argued when you blustered, that one volcano meant our emissions didn’t matter. I plead when you complained, it was hotter when you were younger. I whined when you joked, that China produces more than us so don’t bother. I despaired when you claimed, that global warming was fake because it was cold today. I cried when you asserted, that you had had enough of experts. I shrugged when you postured, we need to acclimatize when no rain…
Last year, I made a rudimentary attempt to capture some Perseids on video from my London home. Inspired by the fact that I managed to get something, I decided to try again this year. I was better prepared this time. I knew what camera settings I used on my Canon EOS R5 Mark II last time, so I didn’t need to spend much time thinking about those. And I was ready to record video at the peak of the shower, rather than two days later. And so I set up my camera, just after midnight, pointing it at a…
Sony took away digital movies that people paid for. Streaming services keep raising rates. Amazon bricked old Kindles. Sounds like the LA Clippers broke salary cap rules. Sports teams use tax payer money to build stadiums. Billionaires and VC just bought the Lakers, I guess. See also, The American Sports Plutocracy Is Bullshit. People will start turning their backs on all this. Back to buying books, borrowing movies from the library, going to local sporting events. I can see movie rental places…
On Monday, I came back to my day job from a weeklong vacation wherein we did birthdaversary stuff and packing / moving related activities. I rarely if ever talk about work here but one of the first things out the gate when I logged in was that I apparently missed a companywide meeting on how Claude use is now mandatory for all departments, and I was going to have to watch the missed session on how to implement it into my workflow. On top of that, the company has repositioned itself as an…
The eagle-eyed among you may have spotted that I've add an upvote button above the comments section. Don't worry it's an IndieWeb thing not CorpoWeb thing. If you haven't heard of bubbles.town then where have you been this past few months? 😉 It's a place for discovering IndieWeb content a bit like a HackerNews for nontechnical blogs and articles. The problem I have is, I read in FreshRSS. I Think "I should boost this on Bubbles", So I have to go check it is on Bubbles with their "Is a blog on…
I went out to get Bunny and I some lunch, and as I was leaving, as I used my fob to pop open the trunk to store the food for the trip home, I noticed that a car near my own honked briefly and flash its headlights. Odd, I thought. I then used my fob to unlock the car, and again, the nearby car honked briefly and flashed its headlights. I then used my fob to lock my car, but this time, the nearby car sat silent. I unlocked my car again, and again, the nearby car honked and flashed its lights. I…
Bought 2 pins to add to my collection today. Sometimes you just see pins at a store and they immediately call to you. These pins did exactly that. I thought they were very appropriate for how I've been feeling lately. Reply by email
Antiperspirant without aluminum Toothpaste without fluoride Mouthwash without antiseptic ingredients Food without salt (and don’t get me started on msg!) Food without seed oils Fat-free mayonnaise Lip balm without petroleum Hand sanitizer without alcohol Acetone-free nail-polish remover
Today, Instagram updated its logo wordmark. CNET had a nice image of the before and after, presented below as after and before: Instagzam vs. Instagram Although I don’t think AI was used in the creation of the new logo, it still smells of it in the way AI messes up things, like: Goofy kerning Goofy mix of cursive and non-cursive letters (apparently trying to call back to the previous logo the same way someone riding a bike off a picnic table and crashing calls back to Evel Knievel) Goofy…
This one should be more fun than yesterday's Blaugust post You know those moments where you're going about your day, brushing a cat and they're like, leaning into it and purring and then suddenly you're hit with an intrusive thought about the existence of Might No. 9? And how you once foolishly gave money to it? This morning after giving the diabetic cats their daily insulin I sat down to think about like, the wild west gamedev days of Kickstarter. I don't think I really even need to go into…
Dave Rogers’ Nice Marmot Republicans, “conservatives,” always, always like to make a big show of “supporting the troops.” It’s bullshit. It’s performative bullshit by people who never served anyone but themselves. Republicans and conservatives and the MAGA crowd are unacquainted with the notion of honor. It’s absent from their lives. You reap what you sow. I know people don’t like comparisons with Nazi Germany, but you should study how Hitler and the Nazi leadership employed their troops. We’re…
This is my 8th blog post for the Blaugust 2026 community blogging project. Join me all this month for more blogging. Today I am celebrating the one-year anniversary of the next chapter of my life: retirement. I am having a great retirement. In the years approaching, I gave it a lot of thought and was prepared for it. The way I see it, I am no longer employed, but I have a job: be retired. I had an experience back around 2009 that showed me what a bad retirement could look like. It scared me,…
It's incredible- this summer southern England has been hotter and drier than any other period since records began. Perhaps it was as hot and dry as this sometime in the Middle Ages or a thousand years ago but in the past few lifetimes no.
I’ve been thinking lately about what happens to my online writing and photographs after I die. To be clear, at my current age I expect to last at least another 20 years. But I’ve entered the time of life where my death isn’t an abstract someday — I can see it from here. I’m not kidding myself that my work is so important that it must go into the National Archives or the Library of Congress. But my children and grandchildren might enjoy a connection to me through my work. And I have done some…
Broken Cellphones Introduction So, I had planned to spend a lovely evening watching the returns in the Clacton by-election, but it seems that there are a few things I need to address on the topic of technology and voting with your wallet. (I actually did take a break and watched the results of the by-election on stream.) Gordon responded to my post with A rebuttal to a response on Tech Sucks while Michael Harley has entered with Re: Tech sucks? Really?, and both of them have made points that…
It’s been a few months since my post on leaving Gmail which sparked a lot of discussion on Hacker News. Email isn’t the most exciting topic in the world, but I figured I should give a little update on how things have been going after the move to Fastmail since so many people saw the original post. The quick version is that I think I picked right with Fastmail. You can find cheaper email hosts out there. I’m sure they’re great too, but I’m really happy with Fastmail’s value considering all I’m…
Introduction Gordon, Gordon, Gordon… I think you should look back at what you have written in Tech sucks? Really? and reassess your thoughts. Your conclusion shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between technology, companies, and customers in my opinion. Technology doesn’t suck. I think the problem is that we’ve allowed a handful of enormous companies become the gatekeepers to the extraordinary technology that many of us can’t imagine living without. You can’t separate the…
[!NOTE](This post was handwritten on Monday 10th of august and corresponds to week 32 but to reasons mentioned bellow, posted today.) Officially on holidays for about a week now. It was a fun week at the holiday park. And while my aim with my blog restrict the informality of this post — the practice of soft prose — here I go anyways. The Car We live close to all sort of public transport, which allows us to travel through the country without the need of a car — I personally do not like cars,…
Welp. My Forgejo instance got popped with an RCE two days ago by CVE-2026-60004. Luckily, I noticed the following morning and had the day free to figure out what happened. Let's dive in! The IncidentI woke up on Saturday morning to several Pushover notifications from Komodo warning me that my server's CPU usage was quickly spiking to 95%, then dropping back to 80%. That machine has an i5-10600K that normally idles at ~4% usage. I checked Komodo and found that it'd been at a sustained 50% CPU…
Today marks 39 years my lovely bride has put up with me. I’m very grateful and love her more now than ever. ❤️
We recently visited GESHARY COFFEE, a specialty coffee shop and roaster near Tokyo station that specialises in selling coffee made with Geisha (also known as Gesha) beans. They offer pour-over, cold brew and espresso-based lattes. The prices range from 1100 to 4070 yen for a cup. As a bit of an explanation, most specialty coffee stores in Japan tend to stock a range of beans from different countries. Each country has its own varieties of beans - Yirgacheffe from Ethiopia, Pink Bourbon from…
I’m just starting out with bird photography, and I’ve compiled a short-list of birds I want to take photos of, to have some sort of goal when I’m out there and what to look out for. It also helps if I have a few birds I’ve looked up to be able to say “oh cool, that’s a gray kingbird!” I went on my first outing today dedicated to bird photography and after a few shots I realized it was the same feeling as encountering wild Pokémon in Pokémon Legends: Arceus. I’d never been excited about pigeons…
A few weeks ago I finished reading Leviathan Falls, the ninth and final book in The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey. I started the series all the way back in October 2024. Not long before that, in May, is when I got my first e-reader to try to get into reading a little more seriously. I’ve read plenty of other books since then, but The Expanse has been somewhat of a constant for most of the time I’ve been reading. Now that it’s finished, I can confidently say it’s my favorite series I’ve…
The problems we face in the #openweb are often presented as technology problems. Which protocol, platform, licence, federation path, software? Which standard? These questions matter, but they are not the foundations of the problem. A lot of what we are seeing is really a cultural clash. Different parts of the alternative tech world have different ideas about what technology is for, who it should serve, how much control is acceptable, how open something needs to be, and how much compromise is…
I was in Germany last week for a week which was my first trip out of the country by myself. It was an adventure that I wish lasted longer, although even if I hadn’t bought train tickets in advance, I couldn’t have stayed longer as I’d run out of money. ’Tis the life of a broke student, but at least that week happened! I was in Berlin for four days and in Cologne for three. In both instances I was visiting friends with the goal of seeing areas that a tourist like me wouldn’t know exist. That…
