Oh wow, that's Reykjavik? Beautiful

And good luck! Hope it's going well

If I ever had a DNA editing robot I’d probably name it Gene Hackman as a little joke.

A quick watercolour painting of a castle

Today’s 10 minute sketchbook challenge (10 mins to draw (with pen), 10 mins to paint) is of Carew Castle in West Wales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

#sketchbook #watercolours #carewcastle #castles

We Rate Dogs rocks.

Jane Austen themed lego. It's small, shaped like a book. It has a piano, books, curtains, and a desk with a quill.

I finally got around to putting together my Jane Austen lego last night.

John Hurt enjoying a meal in the film Alien

NASA say that the crew member who was ill and returned to earth is doing well and now having a meal with colleagues.

a man in a striped shirt and tie stands in front of a computer screen with the words pc load letter written below him ALT: a man in a striped shirt and tie stands in front of a computer screen with the words pc load letter written below him

Maybe the policy announcement they had planned got stick in a "PC Load Letter" warning in the printer behind Jenrick's resignation speech?

That's something I'm never going to unsee.

The thought of "Vote for Beaker!" posters popping up come the next election, that's making me giggle.

And, he's my MP.

Retrogamer cover for May 2025, the subscriber issue, shows a solitary 48k ZX Spectrum, with the iconic Spectrum rainbow stripes on the machine and on the cover background.

@wizwords.bsky.social, reading your Spectrum article in this month's Retro Gamer. A fascinating read, nice touches of tech detail.

I loved the info that Incentive reverse-engineered Sandy White's I, of Mask for their Freescape engine. On the shoulders of giants!

Marvellous! #zxspectrum #retrogamer

eBay auction prices seem to be broken these days. The price of an auction item on a search list is different from the price on the listing page itself.

Even worse, when you go to put in a bid, there's another two different prices on the same item, which makes incremental bidding a running joke.

Rifling Through the Archives With Legendary Historian Robert Caro Reams of papers, revealing how the scholar came to write his iconic biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson, are preserved forever in New York. But his work is far from over

This is a delightful and insightful interview but for pity's sake LEAVE THE MAN ALONE HE NEEDS TO FOCUS!

At least something to give players time and space to replay 400 years of chess opening theory evolution.

Applying modern methods to the start positions. Not flounder like our Italian and Spanish ancestors.

#chess #chess960

I kinda look forward to a "thematic" tournament, where a single Chess960 starting point is picked a day before the first round, and every round uses the same position.

The tournament becomes a battle to see further and deeper than your opponents. Or find creative solutions and systems.

a computer screen shows a chess game being played with a time of 10:00 ALT: a computer screen shows a chess game being played with a time of 10:00

At the moment, I can't help feeling that we are tending more towards rediscovering Napoleon's mate than inventing modern systems like the Sveshnikov Sicilian.

That players have 10 minutes before a game to figure out a position seems like something out of The Generation Game. #chess

Chess 960 is basically 959 starting chess positions that don't have 400 years of opening evolution.

It's a thought experiment: Given our modern chess understanding, if we went back 400 years, how would we approach solving the opening?

Two practitioners and bloggers on Zettelkasten worth following reading:

Bob Doto: writing.bobdoto.computer/zettelkasten/

Chris Aldrich: boffosocko.com/tag/zettelka...

Both regular commenters on www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkast...

My thoughts conclude with: What does a link blog look like done in the spirit of a zettelkasten, and necessarily public?

A single link blog item has (two way) references to other link blog items and commentary/thoughts.

It may be a bit wild (in the untamed sense), but over time...

So I'm toying with the idea of, not just link blogging, but threading conversations with that particular second-brain over time, may result in interesting connections (and serendipitous ones).

A single item in a link blog isn't isolated, it's a time-stamped pin in a journey of discovery.

The bite-sized posts reflect the idea of "Atomic notes", and mirror Simon's philosophy that one note may not be ground-breaking, but the evolution of thoughts, and narration, in subsequent discoveries -- that's the fundamental basis of zettelkastens (of the pure Luhmann variety)

My approach to running a link blog I started running a basic link blog on this domain back in November 2003—publishing links (which I called “blogmarks”) with a title, URL, short snippet of commentary and a “via” …

Reading @simonwillison.net on running a link blog simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/..., and the recursive commentary through HN, I saw a parallel with zettelkasten: your commentary is a discussion on points raised in the material, and Zettelkasten enables subsequent self-conversation/threaded musings.

Bid to halt children's bill 'sickening' - Bridget Phillipson The education secretary criticises a push for a new inquiry into grooming gangs by halting progress of the bill.

Ah, I found this BBC article: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

AIUI, if I'm reading this right (disclaimer: brain fried)

An amendment added would delay the bill, because it's got to go through the various reading stages again.

So the amendment is used to stop the bill from going ahead now.

Hi @ottoenglish.bsky.social, I saw your tweet now. I don't know parliamentary procedure, wanted to understand better:

How/why does an amendment cause a bill to be killed? Is it the content of the amendment itself, or is it some procedure?

thank you!

But in its panicked retreat from the system it spent years building, Meta may now be putting billions of users at risk. Just because Meta deleted that line about hateful speech causing offline violence doesn't mean it isn't true. And now the company has all but declared open season on immigrants, transgender people and whatever other targets that Trump and his allies find useful in their fascist project. "I can't tell you how much harm comes from non-illegal but harmful content," a longtime former trust and safety employee at the company told me. The classifiers that the company is now switching off meaningfully reduced the spread of hate movements on Meta's platforms, they said. "This is not the climate change debate, or pro-life vs. pro-choice. This is degrading, horrible content that leads to violence and that has the intent to harm other people."

I talked to 10 current and former Meta employees about the company's surrender to the right on speech issues. All were upset. One person called the changes "a precursor to genocide" www.platformer.news/meta-fact-ch...

The comic that got us demonetised on Facebook back in August. (We’re no longer on Facebook).

I know it's not a tunnel but there is definitely a light at the end of it. The Rochdale Canal at Mytholmroyd in a photograph by Tim Green. CC BY-SA 2.0

Image from Star Trek TNG in which Óglach Data, speaking from the future, recalls an imagined past where Irish Unification (generally assumed to be the combination of the +353 and +44 bits of Ireland into a single state) occurred in 2024.

They promised me 32 counties
But all I got was just 32 Bountys
In my box of Celebrations
In 2024 🎶

Just tried a NameCheap renewal. Honey didn't find any discount codes. I popped up a Google search, 2nd site that wasn't namecheap gave me a 20% discount code that worked: COUPONFCNC

The video seems to give a convincing explanation of why Paypal's Honey doesn't give me even this code on checkout.

What's infuriating is that the Honey extension is using dark patterns to coerce customers into clicking it's buttons in cases where no discount codes are found. and using that to cookie stuff their affiliate code as a referral. FROM THE CHECKOUT PAGE!

What started out as a genuine "find the best deal for customers" after Paypal's aquisition of Honey, looks to be optimising their own affiliate comission at the expense of customers and content-creators using affiliate marketing for their income.

Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam YouTube video by MegaLag

Paypal's Honey extension, for finding the best coupon codes on the internet, this video shows customers and affiliate marketers are being fleeced. From withholding the best discount coupons, and claiming the last click affiliate, Honey is anti-consumer!:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4y...