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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

BackgroundIn this article, I will continue the t

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

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.

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…

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.

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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

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…

A capacitive dropper is one simple method used in some transformerless power supply circuits. In this method a capacitor is connected in series with the AC supply to limit the current going into the…

Everyone has probably heard of Wordle, which is a fun game itself, but I think I prefer this one to it. It really makes me think a lot more, and I usually can't get all the categories. There always…

A photogram I did way back when. Actually I made the belt part. The ass stole from somewhere online. Bill Evans playing something beautiful.

Last Updated on October 21, 2026 by Kay Hokkaido is one of the best places in Japan for skiing and snowboarding, thanks to its amazing powder snow. When we visited this year, my husband (who happens…

At various times, people have tried to improve Esperanto, starting early with the language Ido (which did not catch on). Modern objections usually focus on the heavy reliance on roots from European…

Mt Shirouma-dake (白馬岳, shirouma-dake) is a 2932m peak located in the Northern Alps of Japan, right above the village of Hakuba. With a hiking course of around 12 - 14 hours, it can be done as a long…

We are currently testing a new WAF for our organization. After activating it, we noticed that some requests never hit our server. Further investigation showed that the root cause was linked to our…

I am back in Belgrade.... But my suitcase is not! 😯😔 A short connection in Charles de Gaulle airport is most likely the cause, andc here are several Paris - Belgrade flightsca day, so I am hopeful.

Believe it or not it's a video game

Toxic culture rarely starts with a bad actor. It starts with the leader who saw it, said nothing, and called it patience.

As a product person, you quickly learn the art of saying no. You have brilliant colleagues who come up with all kinds of ideas, and you'll only ever be able to invest in a small fraction of them.

Looking at https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/utility/bitset/count, I was intrigued to see popcount mentioned in the “See also” section. Handy. That made me curious to see how the stdlibs…

The very strong El Nino appears to have hit its peak earlier than predicted a few months ago, suggesting a substantial weakening later this autumn and winter. Let's begin by looking at the sea…

Consistently wrong about Computers, Social Media, Artificial Intelligence and Immortality - While educated readers typically consider science fiction as more of a lens on our present world rather…

BT.1886 Color Space Conflation The Standard: ITU-R BT.1886 defines only a reference Electro-Optical Transfer Function (EOTF). No white point. No color primaries. The Claim: Despite this, Charles…

Twenty Years Ago on FITK Fríða Frænka, an Antique Shop in the lower two floors of a house on Vesturgata, is a pleasantly over-stuffed collection of curios, furniture and household items. The pack-rat…

What happens when your rich, eccentric villain of an uncle leaves you his legacy? You get a cat, obviously.

In my last article I spoke on CLoudflare tunnels as well as Ngrok ones. As we were wrapping that, I found a clean approach to just adding a sidecar to a Kubernetes pod to create tunnels on the fly. I…

Handy Windows utility for keeping things up to date | UniGetUI by Devolutions | Windows package manager GUI https://devolutions.net/unigetui/ 'One GUI for WinGet, Scoop, Snap, Chocolatey, Pip, Npm,…