Recent
456 posts in the past 24h
A hike through the Lüneburger Heide to the Totengrund. We saw a Sägebock (the sawyer) that was impressively large.
MAGAs are discovering Trump's a fraud after all, just like they discovered that COVID was real after all, just like they discovered that the cabal of pedophiles (and cover-uppers thereof) was largely on the other side, just as conservatives discovered that the (original) Iraq/Afghanistan war was an awful idea, and the Vietnam war, and all the forever wars started by hawks from their side, and just as they wagged their heads in disbelief at this new forever war that's...
Saturday afternoon in a hot and busy north London seemed like the ideal time for a quiet pint with a mate visiting London. We joined a mere handful of other customers in a pub – and a music system blasting out tunes whose volume and genre sat oddly with this clientele. When we requested it…
Webmention is a great idea. An idea that could be used for even more things than it is used for right now. These are some wild and unfettered ideas I had today about Webmention and things you could do with it. Introduction In the wee small hours of this morning, I added a new section to Open Mentions – Brainstorming. The first brainstorming topic I added was New Uses of Webmention. In this section, I’m going to introduce my topic and explain what brainstorming is so all...
I have to be clear about where I’m coming from, as I’m standing in what might generously be called an undefined position. Not because I have no position, but because I’ve spent a very long time in the messy bit of history that nobody has ever managed to define: grassroots DIY direct action. It’s a long history, a lot of people have been building things, breaking things, occupying things, squatting things, filming things, publishing things, arguing about things and...
I was in a small independent bookshop in Clapham when I came across Opening Night (2026) by Sara Baume. I have a self-imposed rule that I can’t leave an independent bookshop empty-handed – yes, very self-sacrificial, I know – and I am increasingly drawn to the memoir section if I don’t have anything else obvious to purchase. For the past five or six years, we seem to have been in a particularly interesting time for memoirs, often by otherwise un-famous people. Baume...
The NTT IndyCar Series ended its 2026 season on Sunday. It was a season with a lot of highs, and a lot of twists and turns – both on and off the track. But if I told you the season ended on a high note, that would not exactly be truthful. As usual, the IndyCar […]
Zachary Kai is running the wonderful People and Blogs series where bloggers share stories about their blogs. He invited me to share mine and I was more than happy to join the wonderful cast of the series. You can find the original at https://zacharykai.net/notes/pb/juhis. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Juhis! I'm a community builder, writer, tech educator and software developer from Finland. I've been writing on the web since my early...
I hadn’t given my Nikon F2AS exercise since getting it back from CLA and meter-head repair in 2024. Feeling like it was a bad idea to let this camera sit for two years, I loaded some expired Agfa Vista 400 into it, set the ISO dial to 50, mounted my trusty 50mm f/2 lens on it, and took it out for some exercise. That included taking it to a Cars & Coffee. I’m starting with these images because they’re the most fun, but I was into the back half of the roll by the time I got...
Singers often say how tired they feel after a rehearsal or workshop. Paradoxically, singers who arrive tired at the start often leave feeling energised. What’s going on? Singing together takes a lot of concentration. You have to listen carefully as you’re learning a new song; pay attention to the choir leader; fit in with other singers in your part; remember how your harmony goes; balance your voice with others; and focus on the lyrics. That level of concentration is a big...
God bless Cory Doctorow, upon whose example my own relentless stretching of metaphors is inspired, but who has a knack of bringing them in to land that I’ve never quite managed to match: This isn’t hard to understand. Google runs an ad business that locks in buyers and sellers on a marketplace Google owns and controls, where it also competes with those buyers and sellers. Buying or selling an ad through Google is like going to court to get a divorce, only to discover that...
In this series of posts, we’ll be featuring mathematical video and streaming channels from all over the internet, by speaking to the creators of the channel and asking them about what they do. We spoke to Deniz & Thorsten, who host the aboutlogic channel. Channel title: aboutlogicLink: youtube.com/@aboutlogicTopics covered: Philosophy, logic, and mathematicsAverage video length: 30-90 minutesRecommended videos: Emily Riehl, Joel Hamkins What is your channel about, and...
The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here. Today the amount information that we get using various information streams is at massive overload. Thus one needs to focus only on what is important without the need to grep(1) the Internet everyday. Hence the idea...
ReadingYour libraryThe gap between an idea, and a usable feature can be days, or weeks. Other ideas have stewed for months, sometimes much longer. Not necessarily because they were complicated to implement, but they didn't yet fit into a larger whole.One such, long brewed thought, is to share what books you are reading. As a record, for yourself, to share your thoughts on a work, and to encourage others to read things you've appreciated.One may wonder where a reading log,...
There has been quite the uptick in “AI” labs’ claims of their LLMs “solving complex math problems”. I wondered why that is, especially given that LLMs are not exactly built for the kind of rigor that proving mathematical theorems requires. There’s a whole bunch of – really hard – math problems out there looking for solutions. For people who are not into that kind of thing: The issue is not that there is completely uncharted territory but that usually there is a hypothesis...
For immediate releaseAt 19:00 EEST (18:00 CEST, 17:00 BST) Monday 7th September a record breaking train journey will start in Kemijärvi, Finland. Jon Worth will attempt to complete the new longest train journey in the European Union, from Kemijärvi to Lagos, Portugal, in the fastest possible time. The trip should finish in Lagos at 21:09 BST (23:09 EEST, 22:09 CEST) on Friday 11th September. The total trip time should be 100 hours and 9 minutes.Kemijärvi and Lagos are the...
On a traffic island at Hudson and Bank Streets is a small dark plaque. Obscured by tree branches, it’s a low-key memorial to a 31-year-old man killed in the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. “In Memory of David Harlow Rice, World Trade Center II,” it reads, with Rice’s birth date and “9-11-01” embossed in bronze. Somebody placed that inconspicuous plaque on this peaceful stretch of the West Village who didn’t want Rice to be forgotten. Curious about his life, I found an...
Restaurants, please don’t make halloumi, paneer, “grilloumi” or similar hard cheeses be your “vegetarian” option because they are almost twice as bad for the climate as even pork is (and pork is already super bad). I know I come across as a killjoy nag on this doomposting blog but I don’t fault any one consumer for being taken in by this greenwashing. It’s presented as the green, the vegetarian, the vegetable-eating option but hard cheeses are not plants. I can’t really...
Sometimes, especially if you spend a lot of time online, it can feel like everyone is moving faster than you. Folks post dozens of times a day about their main project, their side project and how they’ve automated their life and have more time than ever. Reading those stories it’s easy to feel like you’re not doing enough.You can feel this way even when you are actively doing things. You have a side project but it feels like a slow burn next to everything else. You might...
Image credit: Mystic Vision Gallery Traditionally, kids return to school (although lots of places start before Labor Day nowadays), it’s the unofficial end of summer, and, according to National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, it’s the end of peak hot dog season. It’s a time to bid summer adieu and start planning autumn activities in advance of winter’s inevitable onset.This Federal holiday was signed into law by President Grover Cleveland in 1894 as day set aside to recognize...
I’ve long argued that in terms of digital transformation, Germany is easily ten years behind — behind not just the state of the art, but behind its European peers as well. Not everything is bad, and I’m keenly aware that there are many, many people within the administration – at all levels! – who work tirelessly to change that. Alas, I think the existing structures set them up for failure rather than success. The most egregious example to me is government websites, which...
This is the third of William Boyd’s novels featuring travel writer turned spy Gabriel Dax. If you haven’t read the first two, Gabriel’s Moon and The Predicament, I highly recommend you do so as it will make this book much easier to follow – and they are both excellent books in their own right, so you won’t regret it. Cold Sunset opens in 1964 with Gabriel in California where he has been instructed by MI6 to make contact with poet Francis Falkner who says he suspects his...
Una de las cosas que me gusta hacer en el blog es releer viejas entradas y actualizarlas para que, dentro de lo posible, envejezcan bien. No es que lo haga todos los días, pero cada tanto WordPress tiene una función que me recuerda lo que publiqué en años anteriores. Es ahí cuando entro a ellas y entre otras cosas veo si descubro algún error ortográfico que se me haya pasado por alto o si la info aún esta vigente. Muchas veces escribo sobre productos por salir al mercado,...
We recently watched the 2015 animated film The Little Prince for family movie night. I’ve seen it a couple of times before. It’s a beautiful, poignant film based on the 1943 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry book of the same name. This time, I was struck by a scene in the movie in which The Little Girl prepares for her entrance interview to the Werth Academy. In the waiting room, a poster reads: “When I grow up, I want to be essential.” The assumption is that Werth Academy is an...
Next up in the Games That Weren’t archives is a special prototype/demo version of Dro Soft’s Duck Out for the ZX Spectrum, which was likely sent out to different publishers at the time in the hope that someone might pick the game up. The demo has been saved thanks to Dean Hickingbottom, who preserved it from a set of disks that were part of Clockwize’s archives. Dean suggests that Clockwize were likely sent a copy to see if they might be able to help market the game. At...