WEDNESDAY 26 AUGUST UPDATE Further to my blogs (below and 21 August), the Cabinet Secretary has now provided an on the record statement to Third Force News yesterday (25 August) as follows; Cabinet…

Yesterday, I finally removed the last vestige of Microsoft cruft from my life: Windows 10. For the last two years, I have been slowly decoupling myself from the Microsoft ecosystem - an ecosystem I…

In the last post, I covered an important difference between workflows and agents: Workflows, or workflow patterns, are systems where LLMs are exercised (used) through predefined code paths. Agents,…

I bought the Bose QuietComfort Ultra (2nd generation) Bluetooth Headphones ($450) based largely on several reviews that suggested they were more comfortable than similarly priced alternatives. The…

I bought the Bose QuietComfort Ultra (2nd generation) Bluetooth Headphones ($450) based largely on several reviews that suggested they were more comfortable than similarly priced alternatives. The…

Everyone suddenly wants to tell you SaaS is dead. The Klarna-replaced-Salesforce story spread because it fit the mood, whatever the exact boundary between “replaced the CRM” and “consolidated the…

In a panel at BCU Innovation Fest '26, I asked "are you confident you can get re-hired for your job today?" This question has helped me focus on keeping myself sharp in my career. Thinking of your…

Last Sunday, I had the privilege of leading a group into one of the ACT’s most remarkable, and perhaps least appreciated, natural places: Nursery Swamp in Namadgi National Park. The walk was part of…

My week notes for week 34 of 2026

There was supposed to be a storm but it wasn't too bad, so things were proceeding as usual. Volunteered at the Friends of the library of Hawaii bookstore today, spent about three hours alphabetizing…

See: the title of this blog. Yes, I’m a self-proclaimed geek. Yes, I love gadgets. Yes, I love playing with the newest and latest toys. BUT I must confess that I sometimes get a bit scared and…

July 24-26, 2026 “We are still stronger when we sing together”. Pete Seeger’s words greeted all who arrived at Fort Adams for this year’s Newport Folk Festival And, yes, it felt like the world hung…

New Zealand Labour has launched its 2026 general election campaign slogan: “Better starts now.” It’s a pretty good slogan. It’s … More

Crash Test Dummies aren't realistic enough

The windows cast our living room carpet in large puddles of tangerine sunlight. On my way to the espresso machine, I snatched the remote and turned on the tv to some BBC travel show about fishing in…

It's that stupid fucking thing again

Vincent van Gogh famously wrapped his severed ear in paper and gave it to a woman in 1888. About sixteen years later, Lara Remonu, perhaps somewhat inspired by the artist, wanted to send an old…

Executive Summary: Melbourne planned to have many Metro lines running every 10 minutes off-peak by 2016 and some more by 2022. Network Development Plan (Metropolitan Rail) execution is over a decade…

(Please save this column and give it your time—I promise you won’t regret it. The video is 15 minutes long, the read another 15, with very interesting links throughout). I had a dear family…

Why is a guy who normally writes about old churches, WWII defences and ancient sites suddenly writing about heavy weight boxing? Well I like boxing, and as its one of the top 10 most popular sports…

Live stream postcard from the Faroe Islands Excerpt from my live stream Link to the whole stream Following up on my Live stream postcard from Greece, this time we are visiting the Faroe Islands! The…

A long time ago I start my personal server in Django (a lot of the stuff from Django tricks were coded for my personal Django stuff) and some days ago I decide to upgrade to 6.1 or more. Why? New…

After striking out with New Balance and settling for a size-up Puma, I found turf shoes that actually fit my 11.5 2E feet: the Asics DS Light Club TF.

this is what putting children in positions of power looks like. Also concerning when one of the two kids has a gun.

I had nothing else to do, so why not explore the Santiam area again?

st. audrey of the bubblegum, presiding over the alley

Give AI agents a small world, leave some room for wandering, and watch what they notice. Susurration makes machine attention strangely visible.

With how much Area 51 has been in the news recently, I figured it would be a good time to talk about one of the facility's more interesting (to me) pieces of infrastructure, at least that the US…

This ASBI would target Americans 25-54 who want to update their skills to match ever-changing employer demand. My current version would pay them $1000 a month, no more than $9,000 a year, up to…

Trump uses language to obscure facts and arguments.Language is very ambiguous in that it allows for alternative meanings said at once or requiring qualification so as to make it accurate rather than…

Like most of my recent projects , it started out with an itch I wanted to scratch so, instead of just answering the question I wanted answered, I WAY over-engineered a solution and used AI to build…

A small application to manage STLs for 3D printing

I am so excited to be reclaiming my space on the Small Web. I'm excited to give this a try. I am a visuals and vibes person and tend to augment my blog posts with visual media, so we'll see if this…

Recently I found myself killing and yanking more often than ever. One problem with that is that the capitalization and punctuation of what I have yanked is often wrong. As a (pretty stupid) example,…

and all I got was locally searchable traces, metrics, and logs.

In 1958 the Skykomish River Basin was home to nineteen glaciers or perennial snow and ice bodies exceeding 0.1 km2 in area, with a combined area of 5.7 km2 (Post and others, 1971). It was the third…

Luckily, it could not be simpler to fix.

"Why should software paid for by taxpayers stay locked behind proprietary licences?" This is 100% true here in the UK, as well. £330m paid to the company-who-shall-not-be-named for the NHS' FDP -…

Listened to this What Now? with Trevor Noah episode with Lera Boroditsky, a cognitive scientist and linguist expert, discussing how language changes or affects your personality. (Transcription…

X withheld its classifier prompts to reduce gameability. There is no such exemption in the DSA, because the DSA never wanted the prompts. And in South Africa, nobody is owed an answer.

How to contribute a Library to DaxLib

A year and half of blogging, in numbers

In one month, my new book will be in folks' hands. "Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census" tells the story of what it…

In one month, my new book will be in folks’ hands. “Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census” tells the story of what it takes to produce…

On many of the podcasts I listen to, an episode will occasionally be prefaced with an apology for the poor audio quality. Hearing these apologies, I always prepare myself for...

It’s no surprise that the New York Times, the progressive Pravda on the Hudson, ran a piece recently chastising the Trump administration for trying “to crush California’s environmental policies”.…