October 21, 2026 It’s time to bring out the bright colors, if you have them! The crowds these days are pretty drab (and I don’t really do much to help that, unless I’m wearing some…

I did this for hexes and planets , but what if I want to use this same system for giving an NPC some specific behaviour notes? Forget how they look, how do I give this NPC some life without doing a…

Early in the development of Paxton Road there were decisions to make about arrangement of structures… In the original concept the cement silo was to be placed at the rear, as per the inspiration,…

A composing stick. A macro in X_eTaL is a function from the text written at its call to the code that replaces it. That makes it easy to embed a notation, an equation as a paper prints it, a…

Electro-pop addicts, your next discovery has entered the chat! ⚡ BRAZN's “My Final Boss” brings big beats and bigger feelings. The post EMERGING ARTIST: BRAZN Takes on Their Inner Demons with…

My work these days is in part focused on trying to ensure content is what might be called uncontaminated: that the cold clammy hand of AI is not only anywhere near it, but is seen and believed to be…

It's the time of year when German beer is that little bit more visible in the shops and speciality bars. There are the seasonal Oktoberfest variants, of course, but it seems to be an excuse for…

The International Festival of Economics will take place in Turin from 22 to 25 October 2026. I hope to be there to participate in all but the first day. (I'll be speaking on Saturday.) The…

I would really love to know what the “U” stood for. It’s not a name I’ve seen used by anyone else. The passage of a couple of decades have seen some significant changes to U. The gravity has fallen…

Here are two random 1950s photos for ya (I saved .02 seconds typing "ya" instead of "you"). Somebody stuck some Skyway gondolas up above the Pirate Ship, but you know what? It works. If we all had…

LFF, you do not have to say anything, yes plus time equals no. The post The half empty nest | weeknotes 21 October 2026 first appeared on Neil Williams.

The pocket calendar of Thomas Moran’s Grand Canyon of Arizona painting is just as heavily cropped as the wall calendar. The pocket version includes more of the right side of the painting than…

I’ve decided that cactus cats and splitercats are related to each other, why not.

Vancouver, British Columbia, is something of a conundrum. Why would the better part of a million people pack themselves in at 15,000 people per square mile in a province whose average population…

8 failure modes to watch out for in math learning resources, that will tank your learning efficiency:

Back when I was teaching over the pandemic, there was a kid who barely showed up to class Zoom sessions, never did HW, and scored worse than random guessing on tests. Parents unresponsive.

So I needed to regenerate some Rust code from my spec files as I had added a new feature. I decided to try out Muse Wonder. I sent it the specification, and it spent 54 seconds on a response, which…

The Quatuor Elmire was part of the String Quartet finals at Geneva a few years back (see here); currently in residence at the Singer-Polignac Foundation and the Chapelle Musicale, Reine Elisabeth…

BackgroundIn this article, I will continue the t

Baseball and basketball are handing measurable calls to machines while keeping judgment and integrity work with people, and that split is a useful lesson for anyone building AI into decisions.

Setting up a remote BirdNET microphone on a Raspberry Pi is a great way to pick up bird calls from the other end of the garden, but it's no use if you have to SSH in and start the stream by hand…

secure-iam-lint v1.2.0 flags SCP and RCP guardrails that never fire, adds baseline mode for noise-free PRs, and stabilizes SARIF fingerprints.

Define preconditions, bounded retries, and escalation handoffs so an operational runbook stops safely when reality no longer matches the procedure.

This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare by Katrina Manson, held October 18, 2026. Ratings ranged from two stars to…

Picture the last afternoon of a two-day leadership offsite. The whiteboard has been rewritten three times. The head of sales wants the enterprise tier. The head of product wants the new onboarding…

This daily blog is not a journal, and yet it kind of is. It’s not a journal in the traditional sense because if I wrote down my thoughts stream-of-consciousness style, the result would be a jumbled…

Most parents of adult children have said that they lost sleep worrying about their kids when they were younger, but perhaps surprisingly, some stress and wonder nearly as much about them when they…

My Last Poll Vote: Bratwurst. Most of these are my favourite kinds of sausage, but a few of them I haven't tried. Never have I ever had Blood Sausage or Kielbasa (or penis), but have been wanting to…

The Maclock hack I linked to many months ago is now a finished product (with various flavours of kit), which is kind of fun to see. I have managed to procrastinate assembling mine for a stupefying…

Testing AI-generated code without the noise: lint the patterns coding agents follow, share one test harness, and add tests only where a file leaves its pattern.

Today is Bijoy Dashami (or Vijay Dashimi) the final day of Durga Puja or simply pujo as we Bengalis call it. It is the most important festival for Bengalis. Today, Durga, the beloved daughter of the…

The world is still sad and annoying, let's talk about classic video games instead! Previously: SNES Games I finished ~30 years ago!, 30 NES/Famicom Games I finished as a kid, my list of completed…

Two Books. One Purpose. A Better Life. It was early afternoon on 10th May 1996. Rob Hall was leading a group of climbers toward the summit of Mt. Everest. Hall had climbed Everest several times and…

  This prize-winning sci-fi novel about wolf rewilding made me cry When There Are Wolves Again by E. J. Swift somehow delivers both a determined call for more wildernesses globally – and a great…

If my last week of incident work is predictive of everybody's next month, you're going to be doing more incident response too. Here's what the first few hours of an incident look like. Let's be real,…

Remi’s repo didn’t have today’s PHP security fix, so I rebuilt his PHP 8.5 packages from source on a matching VM and shipped them to prod, with a rollback plan.

Last Updated on October 21, 2026 by Kay Thinking about visiting Rusutsu Resort in Hokkaido with your kids and wondering if it’s worth the trip? Better yet, what should you know before you go?…

My new ranching novel Grasslands, coming in April 2027, has all the elements that my readers love: a strong female protagonist who encounters adventure and romance on the Canadian prairie. But this…

THE STRUCTURE OF COMPULSION Lived experience is characterized by a non-optional dependence, contingency, and relationality—conditions that precede and exceed one’s individual control, conditions that…

I had a great idea in my early days at The Institute, which finished up creating a Dr Kavanagh, PhD, while generating some quite noisy [ ie useless] data about Lithium in the groundwater . There are…

I’ve been working long days to finish a new book, a memoir of being a contented 84-year-old, rambling around America doing stand-up and last Friday, sitting in an old library on East 79th Street, I…

Today is the feast of St Ursula and Companions . St. Ursula has always intrigued me, and was one of the most popular saints in the Middle Ages, although she has since been banished from the Roman…

Happy Wednesday all! Thankful to have a day off in the middle of the week to get my chores done. Mom's still in the rehab center, so I am chatting with her everyday now. She's getting better and…

One of the most useful business books I know is about eighty pages long, was first published in 1916, and spends a remarkable amount of writing on tinned peaches. On Obvious Adams, learning to see,…

Wakusei Closet, Volume 2 is the second tankōbon of Tsubana’s science-fantasy-horror manga, about which online information still appears to be scarce. Aimi has no idea why when she…

Cayó el otoño El sauce ya no llora Queda, mudo, un tocón. Lesújtott az ősz Nem szomorú már a fűz Néma maradt: rönk

My learning bits for today.

I started with a real task: let an AI coding agent containerize a Product Catalog app, and make it pick Docker Hardened Images (DHI) for its base layer by talking to the DHI MCP server at…

Sometimes it’s all you can do.