Recently updated blogs

Out past the last lights of town, André Palais

I loved this article about NeonWorks which seems to be the last neon artisan in the Bay Area. The owner, Jim Rizzo is a character, and the article is full of nuggets like: “I think the love of neon is still there, but because budgets are tight, people are going to LED fake neon. Have you seen that stuff? It’s trying to look like neon, but it’s plastic with little …

I didn’t even know this flavor left shelves. (Spotted by Robbie at H-E-B.) If you’re out shopping and see new products, snap a picture of them, and send them in via an email ([email protected]) with where you found them and “Spotted” in the subject line. Also, if you want to send in photos and are wondering if we’ve already covered something or if they’re new, don’t worry about it. Let …

Elegant but eclectic, this shabby-chic manor house in France’s Pays-de-la-Loire region is a mosaic of history stretching from the 15th century to the present day. Parts of the 15-bedroom, heritage-listed château were built in the medieval period, though the majority, as it stands today, dates from Le Grand Siècle (the reign of Louis XIV from 1638 – 1715). Around 50km from Nantes and Angers (and 2.5 hours from Paris by …

Not all heroes wear... well, I guess we don't know what they're wearing... Cops Searching for Vigilante Who Installed NSFW Traffic Signs in Colorado. The "don't kill any kids today" one is fantastic.

NEW RESOURCES The Verge: This website unearths YouTube’s lost and forgotten iPhone clips. “The ‘IMG_0001’ website features a frame with an old TV static effect and a floating retro Panasonic remote that you can click to start watching random YouTube videos from over a decade ago that were recorded and uploaded from devices such as 2010’s iPhone 4.” TWEAKS AND UPDATES The Scholarly Kitchen: Is it Over Now (Social Media …

Apple’s spent a lot of time investigating alternative ways of interacting with its devices, but one of my favorite is one of the newest: head gestures with AirPods. If you’re not familiar with this feature, introduced in iOS 18, it allows to you use a head nod (up and down) or a shake (side to side) as substitutions for OK and Cancel. For example, you can answer or decline a …

As announced by Automattic and covered by TechCrunch, I want to take a moment to welcome Elijah Potter and Harper to join Automattic. Harper is a super-fast (way faster than LanguageTool and Grammarly), local English grammar checker. The technology is nascent, but I’m very excited to embed this throughout all of Automattic’s products, and then expanding it to other languages, all in an open source way that can be embedded …

EagleFiler 1.9.16 is a maintenance release of my Mac files/notes/e-mail manager. This version improves the formatting of community notes and quote tweets when importing from X/Twitter and includes a bunch of other fixes (e.g. for the help viewer) along the lines of what was in SpamSieve 3.1. I had left in support for Growl, even after it was retired, in case anyone was still using it, but it’s now removed …

NASA's Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex is again inviting its guests to "Discover Something Real" with the debut of Michael Lopez-Alegria's Axiom Mission-1 (Ax-1) flight suit on Thursday (Nov. 21). The black and blue uniform, which is now on display alongside space shuttle Atlantis, was worn by Lopez-Alegria when he became the first NASA astronaut to revisit the International Space Station on a privately-funded mission two years ago.

Submitted by Bushland Maps, who say: Ferries are a bit of a forgotten mode of transport in Melbourne. With no integration into the fare system or journey planners, and with overarching public transport body PTV only “overseeing” three of the routes (which doesn’t have any practical effect on the service), they are mostly either seen as a tourist attraction (which fairly some are) or not seen at all. Since there …

seekingstars:I’m going to New York!(what a lark! what a song!)where the tough Rocky’s eaveshit the sea. Where th’Acro-polis is functional, the trainsthat run and shout! the booksthat have trousers and sleeves!I’m going to New York!(quel voyage! jamais plus!)far from Ypsilanti and Flint!where Goodman rules the Empireand the sunlight’s eschato-logy upon the wizard’s bridgesand the galleries of print!I’m going to New York!(to my friends! mes semblables!)I suppose I’ll walk back West.But …

This is a worthwhile (and trippy) stop-motion animation created by animator Daren Jannace using the 10,946 Post-It notes he drew over the course of a year (30 a day x 365, minus 4 for some reason). The soundtrack is audio taken from his phone during the year of animation. Played at 30 frames/second, each second represents a single day’s worth of drawing. Everything I do in a day? It doesn’t …

ALTA page in the Book of the Eramprunyà Barony showing the donzel* Eimeric de Cunit paying homage to Jaume Marc, baron and lord of the Castle of Eramprunyà (Gavà, Barcelona Metropolitan Ambit, Catalonia).One of the other documents in this book was written by Jaume Marc himself, narrating in first person and with all kinds of details how he was invested as a knight by the king Peter the Cerimonious in …