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The spork’s continued existence, in the liminal place between useless and annoying, remains baffling. CC-licensed photo by Karl Baron on Flickr. You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam. It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. A selection of 9 links for you. Cutting edge. …

Yaowarat (Chinatown)

When you need to know a bit more about how the system identifies a given user. Assumed audience: People interested in learning how the command lines tools on their computer work.This week’s Read the Manual is about id: a tool I only learned the existence of while researching last week’s entry on lsof! It gives you users’ user names, group names, and numeric IDs for a given user. This is …

Thinking about the scene early in the movie Tár, where the ghastly Juilliard student Max announces that because he’s a pansexual BIPOC with an overactive leg (I paraphrase), he doesn’t feel able to love Bach because he had 20 children and maybe didn’t do his share of the housework (I paraphrase further) and I wonder how many people who watch the scene think, yeah, fair point, awful Juilliard bloke.And then …

I had high hopes for this one. I love the 1992 original, came away from this modern take’s playable prologue feeling positive about it all, and am generally predisposed to liking horror games in general. So I happily approached Alone in the Dark‘s 2024 remake in the spirit it was intended to be taken in “…reimagining the iconic game that set the benchmark for the genre“, picked Edward Carnby (the …

Something a bit different today, as Kirsten Lawson summarises the recent Lancet Public Health series on suicide prevention, which looks at public health interventions, addressing the risk factors and determinants of suicide, and the transmissibility of suicide. The post Suicide prevention: expanding the narrative to preventing the crisis, not just treating the crisis appeared first on National Elf Service.

Cleveland’s You Should Be With Us dive deep into the Revolution Summer hardcore sound with their In Plain Sight EP. In just ten minutes, the band conjures the spirit of mid-’80s punk—think Embrace, Rites of Spring, and Dag Nasty at their most urgent and raw. Following their debut EP Expressing What We Felt, this five-track […] The post <h2>New EP: You Should Be With Us || In Plain Sight</h2> <h3>DC …

Pnårp found there are no more bagels, because there were no more bagels. Even in the Bagel Nebula, there are no more bagels. But its name makes Pnårp hungry. Bagels.

The big news is that I will be attending the Paperback & Pulp Book Fair and I will have copies of DREAMING OF UTOPIA with me. I will only have a dozen or so copies, and only a handful of other books (BEYOND THE VOID, TRIALS OF HANK JANSON) on me because I'm travelling up by bus and train and the trolley proved problematical last time.Lugging books around aside, I'm …

After finally looking at the options, we have a main low-investment proposal; the writeup will appear soon (optimistically this month, pessimistically next month). Here is the timetable for the fastest intercity trains: Boston 0:00Providence 0:23New Haven 1:04Stamford 1:30New York 1:56 (arrival)New York 1:59 (departure)Newark 2:07Philadelphia 2:46Wilmington 3:00Baltimore 3:32Washington 3:55 This timetable incorporates schedule padding, of 4% on the Providence-New Haven section (dedicated to high-speed trains except at the north end …

My dad was born in 1944 in the village Tarn Taran in India. He lived in a small clapboard house on a sandy sidestreet and shared a tiny bedroom with his three brothers and one sister. He was only three when his mom died of unknown causes and the family suddenly had trouble making ends meet. With his dad running a Singer sewing machine shop in nearby Amritsar their aging …

My chisels have been living in a roll-up fabric pouch, which I have to unroll and place somewhere whenever I need a chisel. Not a very elegant solution, to be honest. Time for a chisel rack! I own a set of Ashley Iles butt chisels, some bench chisels MKII, some “firmer chisels”, and I own a few other chisels that I want to store in a proper, easy-to-reach way. They …

Photographer: Patti WeeksSummary Author: Patti Weeks Why does the center of a sunflower develop in such a fascinating way? The answer can be traced back to the 13th century Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci. In his 1202 book Liber Abaci, he proposed this hypothetical mathematical problem: How many pairs of rabbits would be produced in a year, starting with one breeding pair, and adding their subsequent breeding offspring pairs each month. …

Start looking for oranges on sale. Dried orange slices are really easy to make, last for years & look just as good with a modern or a classic Christmas. PLUS there's a new trend in citrus drying on the Internet. And I test it. You can take your seats and relax because this is probably...Read More

You should be able to mention anyone on the web publicly, from anywhere, and have them be able to get it (if they want). Google Alerts kinda almost does this, but usually only for “news” sources (many of which are questionable), and its a closed system. I don’t know much about them, but talking with ChatGPT is leading me to believe that elements of such a concept exist already in …