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By Josh Domanski & Reilly QyoteAfterthought CommitteeOSELevel 0 Like viscera from a corpse, a carnivorous tangle of vines and bramble has spilled forth from an ancient fortress, swallowing up the countryside. Today, it reaches the outskirts of Peatstead. Your home. With promises of gold and glory swirling through your head, you’ll accompany a small army of commoners to put an end to its deadly expansion and emerge as heroes. Discover …

Here we will live stream two sessions from the New York Super Trunk Show today Saturday October 5. See live from the final of the U.S. Championships of Shoe Shining, see the results of the shoe patina exhibition, and get a look at all the amazing shoe exhibitors from all over the world. Will also be available to watch after the live sessions. The schedule for today’s live sessions is …

Find all previous and future episodes listed here or in your podcast app under “Barbican Station”. Go on a tour of the real locations seen in SLOW HORSES. Go to https://www.squaremilesecrets.com/slow-horses and enter the coupon code SLOUGH for 20% off your tour. We are back to break down all the excitement of the season four episode five of SLOW HORSES. I’m joined this episode by author and podcaster Lloyd Shepherd. …

It is becoming harder and harder to tell whether information on the internet is created by humans or by computers. As more money and time is funnelled into new generative AI models, their output becomes better at blending in.Some words I associate with human works are: create, imagine, think, dream, inspire, connect, heart, brain, soul, love.I believe that computers cannot do or have any of those things. Computers are the …

One strand I want to try to work into my horror marathon this October involves filling in a few gaps re: films I really should have seen by now, but for some reason have not. Given that I’m a big fan of both Hammer Films and eccentric, black & white British sci-fi movies more generally, the awkwardly titled ‘X… The Unknown’, Hammer’s immediate follow up to the success of ‘The …

Last week OpenAI rolled out its new virtual assistant, dubbed Advanced Voice Mode, that allows users to have a conversation with an AI bot. There’s some controversy about the technology, not least because actress Scarlet Johansson threatened a lawsuit when the tech was first demonstrated earlier this year. The early demo voice sounded an awful lot like the actress, whose character in the 2013 film Her was a disembodied voice …

Children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities in residential special schools and colleges across England are to be offered free NHS eyesight, hearing and dental checks. Autistic children and young people and those with a learning disability are often more likely to experience eyesight, hearing and dental problems than their peers and […]

Erik Hoel: I think bookstores turned out to be weirdly sticky simply because people like being in bookstores. Going to a bookstore is an aesthetic experience. It’s fun. It’s something to do with your family. It is a pleasant feeling to be surrounded by physical books. It is a pleasant feeling to browse. It is a pleasant feeling to be the kind of person who goes into a bookstore and …

Ever since the Dobbs decision permitted states to set their own abortion policies, Donald Trump has taken the position that the issue should stay at the state level. Dobbs itself doesn’t require this, and leaves open the possibility of a federal ban. But Trump nevertheless declines to pursue such a ban, and indeed is opposed to such a ban. Now, a federal ban is in any event currently politically unrealistic, …

Saturday 5th October 2024 Hello blog readers. I need your help. In the coming weeks and months I’ve been invited to make a couple of online presentations about the state of bus and rail integration in Britain and what can be done to improve things. I’m enormously grateful to Britain’s renowned rail fares expert Barry Doe for his assistance in providing comments on a draft of this blog as well …

Kate Bollinger “Postcard From A Cloud” I love the simple little trick Kate Bollinger pulls off in this song – singing near the bottom of her register in the verses, and at the top of it on the choruses. It’s not heavy-handed at all and it took me a little while to even really notice, but it’s very effective in marking the broader contrast between those two sections. In the …

Make a better meeting when you can, and the best of a meeting when you can’t. The choice to avoid holding a meeting may snowball into problems that require even more meetings. Ensure every meeting worth the person-time, assuming organizational dynamics allow for it. Recurring meetings have to earn their continued existence. Steer meetings away from sidebars, confusions, digressions, and distractions. Meeting are an opportunity to go deeper than documents …

Today I heard about the sqlite3-rsync command, currently available in a branch in the SQLite code repository. It provides a mechanism for efficiently creating or updating a copy of a SQLite database that is running in WAL mode, either locally or via SSH to another server. Update: Thanks to gary_0 on Hacker News here's a MUCH simpler recipe: git clone https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite.git cd sqlite ./configure make sqlite3-rsync So it looks like …

Last week, in the Perfume Chat Room at the Serenity Now blog, rickyrebarco told about having to evacuate because of Hurricane Helene and shared which perfumes she took with her. I commented that I was recently thinking about how hard it would have been to make such a choice. And Old Herbaceous suggested that it […]

As I write this, OggCamp 2024 (which I have subtitled The Return in my head’s inner monologue) is a little over a week away. You can still get a ticket and join us! A few of us have done a little bit of promotion of the event that you may not have seen, heard, or read, so feel free to explore these: I was on Tom’s Hardware PiCast Dan wrote …