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Waiting for dinner Cote d’Azur, 2010. Quote of the Day ”The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. “ Bertrand Russell Thanks to John Seeley for spotting it. Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Kathleen Ferrier (Contralto) | What is life? | Orfeo ed Euridice | Gluck Link This is a remastering of a 1946 recording of Gluck’s Orpheo that stopped me …

5/5 golden merles Variety’s “Plover” is Texan avantpop rock composed of compelling narrative subversion, sticky melody and tone. The hook is a compacted material derived from descriptions of naturalistic imagery, the conflict of the domesticated and undomesticated in comparison to the authors interpersonal dilemmas. It’s thoughtful and pretty dang fun. I need my streams and mountains tempered by the grim specter of death. Gluck and Johnson, Bly and Ruefle. Some …

In 1973, an author named Alan Lakein published a book titled How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. It wasn’t the first book about professional time management — my library contains a first edition of James McCay’s 1959 classic, The Management of Time — but it’s arguably the first book to talk about the topic in a recognizably modern way, with a focus on personalized tools like …

What makes reality TV producers smile? Read on, because this stock image doesn't have the answers (Photo of TV by Kam Idris and inset by Count Chris/Unsplash)

We’ve just released version 2 of Kamal, our deployment tool for running web apps directly on VMs or bare metal servers. Kamal 1.0 was designed with 37signal’s use case in mind — deploying an application across multiple hosts, served with an external load balancer. With Kamal 2.0 we’ve focused on making it simpler to use at any scale, whether you are deploying your app to 50 servers or deploying 5 …

“As of late September 2024, residential households in the U.S. are eligible for another order of 4 free at-home [Covid] tests from USPS.” Order here! 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

By Will MoczarskiThe last time I ended my narration on a cliffhanger, promising a grisly death scene - however, that was only half true. But more about that in a while. When we last left the game we were busy collecting items to build a Leyden jar and subsequently conduct the famous Kite/Key experiment in order to get Ben Franklin out of his cozy hot tub. On the surface of …

Sorry, “opposite of more” doesn’t tell me much. The summary provided by man less is “opposite of more”, and the description opens with “…a program similar to more(1), but which allows backward movement in the file…” Not that helpful — especially since more is aliased to less on a lot of modern OSes, including macOS. A better summary: less displays a file in your terminal, page by page — thus, …

source unknown (Record Mirror?)date: spring 1984? Tracie Responds (boom boom)

When I saw news of the upcoming 9.9 CVE, I was thinking it was something significant, like a buffer overflow in the glibc DNS client, a ping of death, or something actually exciting. Nope, it's CUPS, the printing stack. The most vulnerable component is cups-browsed, the component that enables printer discovery. CUPS is not typically installed on server systems, but cloud expert Corey Quinn claims his Ubuntu EC2 box has …

This is the second in a series of posts on the reasons I will not be voting to return the former president to the White House. My focus here is not to support his opponent but instead to explain why I believe that Donald Trump is manifestly unqualified for the role.When I started writing this post, the presidential debate between Vice President Harris and former president Donald Trump was only …

NASA SVS/Ernie Wright and Michaela Garrison For the 2017 solar eclipse, NASA published eclipse maps that took the irregular umbral shadow of the moon into account: the umbra is neither circular nor oval but irregular—more polygonal—thanks to the uneven topography and elevation of both the moon and the earth. Not accounting for that introduces errors into the map that could make the difference between observing a partial rather than a …

In the market where I work, two advance screenings sometimes happen simultaneously. This week's viewing dilemma arose when screenings The Wild Robot and Megalopolis were scheduled for the same evening. I chose Megalopolis because a Francis Ford Coppola opus seems a must for anyone who has been reviewing movies for nearly 40 years. Coppola invested $120 million of his own money in the movie and had been talking about it …

I’m at InnoTrans this week, which means I get to both see a lot of new trainsets and talk to vendors for things I am interested in. Those are interesting conversations and much of the content will make it to our upcoming report on high-speed rail in the Northeast and to some ETA reports. But then, in broad stroke, the presentations about the trains here have deeply bothered me, because …

Gerald J. Massey, Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, has died. Professor Massey worked in logic, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, the history of philosophy, and what he called the zoological approach to philosophy, which “takes into account what science and experience teach us about animals”. You can learn more about his work here and here. Professor Massey joined the faculty …