Recently updated blogs

Monday So much rain last night that I got up twice to look. But what’s to see in the dark? I almost went outside but it wasn’t that kind of rain. Too cold and too heavy. In the morning, in a raincoat and wellies, I chopped back the spent buddleia flowers and emptied the pots of their ailing summer plants. The squirrel was doing busywork, digging fruitlessly in the grass. …

The Numero Group’s Rob Sevier for two hours of music from The Numero Group catalogue and chat Track List Lord Rhaburn ‘Boogaloo a la Chuck’ Father’s Children ‘Kohoutek’ Lion ‘You’ve Got A Woman’ Motion ‘Civilization’ Laraaji ‘I Can Only Bliss Out (F’Days)’ Margo Guryan ‘Moon Ride’ Iasos ‘I Passion You a Leap of Love-Flame’ Marj Snyder ‘Rain’ Catherine Howe ‘On a Misty Morning’ Propinquity ‘People Come’ Ted Lucas ‘Raga in …

What caught my eye this week. How filthy rich would you be if you could see tomorrow’s newspapers today – and then trade on the back of your unfair insight? Actually, many people could end up poorer. At least that’s the takeaway of new research by Victor Haghani and James White of Elm Partners Management. They decided to investigate conjecture by Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb that knowing the …

A railway station opened in Waterfoot in 1848, at the end of a line that connected it to Rawtenstall. It was always the intention that the line would not terminate at Waterfoot, but would travel on to Bacup. This presented a major problem for the engineers. The only route from Waterfoot to Bacup is through […]

B-tier black metal and the break of autumn Your tastes are not your own. Your moods are orchestrated by nefarious digital platforms. Everyone knows this now. ‘Inception’ may have been right that the mind can always spot an idea implanted by a foreign agent. That we would somehow care, or not act on this idea regardless? It got that bit wrong. We all know the influence algorithmic weather systems have …

Asceticism –The Fasting or Emaciated Buddha** I know that self-discipline and abstinence – asceticism – are parts of religious practice within many religious and spiritual traditions including Buddhism. That knowledge derives from many sources. They agree on a … 🐞 Read more about it ➞ ➞ ➞

Pricing & AvailabilityWhat comes in the box?Design & ConstructionSize & MeasurementsUser InterfaceEmitter & BeamMode ChartRuntimeDriver & RegulationSwitchesCarry & ErgonomicsBatteries & ChargingCompetitionConclusion Pricing & Availability FlashlightGo sent me this light in exchange for an honest review. Here is the product page on their site and their Amazon listing where you can see current pricing. I appreciate their support of my review work. If you do too, consider buying from them. What …

In the end, building beautiful experiences that make people laugh, cry, feel hope, catharsis, be crushed, feel joy, be amused, feel awe, happiness... is all that matters. It's why we care about art. Find your own path. Create your own space.

I interact with ChatGPT on a daily basis. My interactions cover a wide variety of topics and subjects. The last “conversation” I had with ChatGPT, which I decided to publish here, focused on education and career choices. Today’s chat was less formal than the previous one, but still important. I did a straight copy and…

For Shah, it wasn't just about 'how to create an animated revival of a live-action series, but 'why.'

An end of week recap “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” – Virginia Woolf We will be heading off on a slightly delayed honeymoon, or honeymoomin as our waggish doggy-sitter (pun intended) insists on calling it, on 1st October for four days – only as far as York, but it will, I’m afraid, scupper …

Unfortunately, it seems that today’s big LLMs are more like physicists than philosophers. Rather than more knowledge improving their awareness of their own ignorance, it only makes them more cocksure about knowing everything.

In the early years of my descent into the proverbial rabbit hole, Le Labo‘s City Exclusives collection was available in September. I didn’t follow it closely, so I’m not sure when it changed, but this year I noticed that the collection opened for online orders on August 1st. I wonder if it’s the beginning of […]

In this video, I make 8-bit SID music on a Commodore 64 without any software apart from the built-in BASIC interpreter. This involves poking numbers into memory and hardware registers and writing machine code in decimal.

The previous post showed making (warp knit!) lanyard cords with a crochet hook, suitable as drawstrings for hoodies and the like. In this post, we'll look at starting and ending these cords. There are lots of choices!From easiest to most complex, lots of choicesOf these endings, some are simple knots, some involve crochet, some are a form of macramé. But these are by no means the only