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On Island Time6FPS V8#8: August 10, 2026E-mail: chuqvr@gmail.com • Site: https://chuq.meBlueSky: (https://bsky.app/profile/chuq.bsky.social)Know someone who might want to subscribe?Want to see previous issues? Visit here: chuq.me/6fpsWelcome to the new issue of 6FPS.Somehow, it’s August. Time is flying. Already the sun is setting before 9PM. We’ve so far avoided most of heat and bad air, but that’s changing this week as the winds have shifted, the smoke is coming over the...
I’m back from my travels, and have also recovered from the adventure, returning home a week ago Sunday. Both segments of the trip – the bamboo pipe course and the handbell shindig – were tiring in their own way. The journey to and from the pipe course was the bulk of the travel. This started with a bus to Inverness and a train to Inverness airport. Unfortunately, the airport train stops three-quarters of a mile from the terminal, and the suitcase had to be cajoled to the...
Hello, loves! We’ll begin with a look at the new Denizen-related code. Refactor a bit. Add a flower. Tout le monde déteste l’IA. Yesterday I had a thought and for some reason tooted it on Mastodon: Hmm. What if the messages were indexed by the state name? Well, but the first ones and last ones are said one per interaction, and the middle ones are said all at once. And anyway, there are three sets of messages and only two states. So in principle, they’re indexed by...
Is it really possible that pretty much every single college and university around the country will, this fall, be welcoming its best-ever, most qualified, most curious, most diverse set of first-year students? Seems unlikely. In an interview with Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Andrew Delbanco offers an alternative. The interview is titled “Is Academic ‘Smugness’ on the Rise? Andrew Delbanco on humility, complacency, and the value of...
10-08-26. A bright day but no outstanding items on the must-see wish-list. Not great enough weather to inspire a big day out so I kept it local and jogged up to Holyrood, which I realised I'd been neglecting for a while. Hadn't been there since the last big fire, below the crags opposite Dumbiedykes.extensive damage below the Cat's Nick, however...this bit of the stone trap, previously rich for NBAs and Common Bluesdirectly under the Cat's Nick seems to have survived, or...
I think Sheffield might be my new favourite city. It’s managed to become cool without ruining itself in the process, refusing to polish away the bits that make it interesting whilst building a city that feels lived in rather than curated. There is also an impressive amount of great food and drinks for a city that once made its money turning metal into things. Independent restaurants, good pubs, hidden wine bars, proper bakeries and the sort of places where someone has...
I absolutely love the Great British Bake Off so, when I saw this book challenge I though 'yeah, sign me up for that one.' ON YOUR MARKS – A Book You Can’t Wait To Read I can't wait to read The Last Mandarin, a fast-paced, all-too-real thriller co-written by #1 New York Times bestselling author Louise Penny and award-winning journalist Mellissa Fung, global politics become personal for two unlikely heroines. The Last Mandarin is an electrifying study of absolute power and...
As I read Trump say he’s in no hurry to end the war with Iran, I was reminded again of this post from Adam Kotsko: My overarching question throughout the second Trump administration has been: why hasn’t the other shoe dropped? … I believe that the answer to this tangle of questions is relatively straightforward: money. American society is largely able to absorb Trump’s destructive actions because we’re the wealthiest nation that has ever existed. And America’s erstwhile...
Back in 2014, when I pulled out some old Bratt miniatures and painted them anew, I didn't imagine that it was the start of a Confrontation obsession that has lasted twelve years. In that time, I have reacquired some old Confrontation favourites, hunted down unreleased miniatures and build a nice little collection of original Confrontation artwork. The scavvy king is the last of the 83 'official' miniatures products for Confrontation by Citadel or Marauder. You could argue...
Last week, Kevin Powell posted on Bluesky about the most common typo you make when writing CSS. Kevin Powell @kevinpowell.co One of the questions I’m asking is the most common typo that you make when writing CSS, and several people have listed gray/grey… except, they both work so I’m confused ? August 13, 2026 at 8:33 AM View on Bluesky I have two very common ones. The first is with font-size: .element { font-szie: 1em; } I tend to get the “i” and the “z” in the wrong...
Hey people! Earlier this year, I shared the fourth movement – “Fugue” – from Benjamin Britten’s Suite for Harp, played by Lavinia Meijer. I thought today I could share another movement from this same suite, but played by a different artist – and also one who has already appeared on My Inner Mishmash before, for example here; Welsh harpist Catrin Finch. She released this suite as part of her debut album, 1999’s “Harp Recital”, which she recorded at the age of 19. She’s done...
I have been using Claude to help me build maps for a few months now and I have been very happy with the results which I think have been improving. I keep hearing about Claude Code and wondered what is the difference? The answer: a heck of a lot! Using Claude Chat (or any of the other chatbots) you can prompt the AI to write files for you, to write scripts and guide you in running them. That’s how I have been working up till now. Once you have given Claude Code the...
A technology professor in France provides an option for students to use chat bots in his exam and researches what happens. Here are the rules he set. # Use of Chatbots Tell the professor if you usually use chatbots (ChatGPT/LLM/whatever) when doing research and investigating a subject. You have the choice to use them or not during the exam, but you must decide in advance and inform the professor. Option A: I will not use any chatbot, only traditional web searches. Any use...
In today's episode, I read one of my favorite poems from Emily Dickinson: Hope is the thing with feathers (254). Source
FAIR WINDS AND FOLLOWING SEAS: Actress Hayden Panettiere, known for roles in ‘Nashville,’ ‘Heroes,’ dies at 36. While she’d had issues with alcoholism over the years, releasing a memoir back in May about her struggles, no cause of death has been initially disclosed. I never got into Nashville, but Heroes was a favorite when it was airing.
A timelapse of driving our RV, a Tiffin Allegro Bus motorhome, just 46 miles / 74 km, about one hour of driving, from Mile 0 Park in Dawson Creek to Fort St John, British Columbia, Canada… where our truck’s front frame failed, causing the tow base plate to break free from the coach, while leaving a fuel stop. So we stopped for the night at Rosco’s RV Park.
I recently received the 14th issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly, the excellent magazine series focused on men’s adventure magazines, now into its fourth year of publication. This is one of the issues I’ve been looking forward to, as they focus on “Bigfoot.” As a kid in the 1970s, Bigfoot was everywhere. The Six Million Dollar […]
1. Computers don’t have to be electronic (Archimedes’ Antikythera Mechanism, a way to chart the position of the planets dating back to the ancient Greeks; here’s a video telling what it is and showing a working model [7 minutes]) 2. Computers don’t have to be electronic (Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace’s Difference Engines; here’s a video about it [5½ minutes], with some clips of one in operation) 3. Computers don’t have to be electronic (The Digi-Comp 1 kit from 1963,...
A few weeks ago I attended VCF West at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. One of my favorite talks was Making Games in the 1980s by David Crane and Garry Kitchen about the unique constraints of programming for the Atari 2600. Crane mentioned one hack in particular from his game Pitfall! that inspired this blog post. Pitfall! is a platform game in which you control a character named Harry through a jungle filled with crocodiles, logs, ladders, and, of course,...
Do you love PBR? Oh sorry, not the beer - I’m talking about precariously balanced rocks.Earth is a big place with lots of rocks, and so many of them are precariously balanced that there’s an entire Wikipedia page about them.Among the most famous of these PBRs are the balancing rocks of Zimbabwe, which are so popular that they appear on the southeast African nation’s banknotes. Here are the balancing rocks on the Zimbabwean 100 trillion dollar note:Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe,...
FAIR WINDS AND FOLLOWING SEAS: Tommy John, whose surgery blazed a trail for countless players, died over the weekend at 83. The pitcher was the first to receive the procedure later named for him, replacing a torn elbow ligament and allowing him to return to baseball for an extended career.
I almost didn't want to write this review. John of John has had a huge amount of hype attached to it for months now, and the people who love it seem to really love it. So it's not exactly fun to sit down and admit that I didn't get on with it. But I didn't. This is the eleventh book I've read from this year's Booker Prize longlist, and it's comfortably my least favourite of the lot. I've been deciding which book to read next by picking them out of a cup at random, so it's...
Before we get to any actual story content, a quick note. As I mentioned in Hello Worlds, I wrote a few books back in the ‘90s. Those were the days of dial-up internet—AOL, CompuServe, PowerPCs running Mac OS 8, and Windows 95/NT 4. For my first two books, I used FrameMaker on the Mac, paired with a fancy grayscale beast of a monitor and a dot-matrix printer. The last two books, written in the late ’90s, were done in Microsoft Word using a custom markup system—that’s how...