Watched - all 8 Homelands. Not in a binge I hasten to add and actually not too shabby - although Claire Danes does seem to act with 4 or 5 expressions to cover all eventualities. Suspension of belief is - as always with such shows - necessary. For all of that ★★★
This from the end of March and only posting now as I am playing around with the Drafts MCP from @agiletotoise and discovering a few ‘lost in the stream’ drafts.
🔗 More Magic Math from OpenAI?
The real product here is not AI. It is an IPO prospectus.
💬 Om
Irony is dead.
🔗 The Youth AI Safety Institute Has Margrethe Vestager’s Backing
I love that the dickpanel is titled “We value your privacy” and then begins with the sentence, “With your agreement, we and our 399 partners use cookies or similar technologies to store, access, and process personal data like your visit on this website, IP addresses and cookie identifiers.”
💬 John Gruber
🔗 Wired on the Dark Mood Inside Meta
Unanswered remains my question from earlier this week: is MCI installed on Bosworth’s computer too? (And Zuck’s?)
💬 John Gruber
Given that Zuck keeps sticky tape over his computer camera - I am going to go with no.
Not so much the article (🔗 1Password is stepping on the rake again)
.. as his close 😂
Please note: If you have come here to recommend a different password manager, I implore you to not do that, as I just do not care. This is what I did. If something else works for you, good for you. Write it up on your own blog.
💬 Jamie Zawinski
Crucial Track 🎵 May 16, 2026
"Oh Well (Live)" by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
Talking of superb covers … as I wrote 🖇️ here not even a month ago - a glorious cover of track by Fleetwood Mac. Before John and Stevie. Even before Christine.
Bonus Round ...
🔗🍎🎵 PartONE that Tom covered.
🔗🍎🎵 PartTWO that Tom did not cover - totally different and Peter Green's favourite part.
both performed by Fleetwood Mac.
📺 Watched: Series 1,2 and 3 of The Lincoln Lawyer ★★★★
Watching: Series 4 now.
👁️ Problem of the day .. why is it so hard for Paste to keep it all in synch❓
Really? Is this right? I know nothing to be able to question - but it does seem to be an extreme that I would have heard about before?
The real problem is that Vercel doesn’t let you set a spending limit. Someone could DoS your app while you’re asleep and you’d wake up to a $10,000 bill with no recourse. It’s 2026 — AI crawlers and bots are everywhere, constantly hitting endpoints, triggering serverless functions. Vercel charges for CPU execution time, not bandwidth, so every bot visit costs you money. This isn’t a theoretical edge case. I couldn’t justify the risk anymore.
💬 Assaf Arkin
🔗 coolify-deploy — Vercel-style deploys on your own hardware — Labnotes
Webrings
Nearly time to switch them back on.
🖋️ A Podcast and Transcript of Peter Kafka Talking to Roger Lynch
Roger Lynch reveals that Condé Nast’s survival isn’t about scale or content volume, but about brand authority and direct audience relationships, he suggests that when Google search collapses and AI platforms commodify content, only publishers with deep trust and “taste” that machines can’t replicate will make it.
All my life I’ve suffered from ‘MOBS’. As the name suggests, it only affects males, and in my case is particularly severe.
So when Jax asked me last night to get her AirPods from her desk, I immediately said yes, while my internal alert system moved into overdrive.
I searched the desk, surrounding area, even where they would normally be charging, eventually returning to the kitchen, head hung low - to report an ‘F2F’ - that would be Failure to Find to you rookies.
She was quick to reply: “On the right-hand side of the desk, by the journals.”
Back upstairs I went. Nope. Not there. I searched the whole room. Nothing. Nada. Null.
Back downstairs I came.
“Still not there,” I reported.
“Good grief, do I need to go?”
“Yes,” I said. “Clearly I am incapable.”
She downed tools, walked two steps, and announced: “They’re in my pocket.”
Of course to Jax it was hilarious. Me? Still working through the emotional roller coaster that I typically ride in these situations.
MOBS? I hear you ask … Male Object Blindness Syndrome
🔗😂📼 Fridges tend to be the first experience of a man experiencing MOBS
🔗 What data sovereignty means for New Zealand
Data sovereignty is often viewed as a technical problem with a technical solution. In reality it is a question of accountability: who has the right to access information, under what rules and in whose interests. For New Zealand organisations, the answer increasingly depends less on where data is stored and more on whose law governs it, who controls the infrastructure and whether those arrangements can be trusted to hold when they are tested.
💬 Bill Bennett
We are learning - fast - that our laws seem to count for less and less. If a country has no rights - imagine how the the citizens of that country are faring.
Crucial Track 🎵 May 15, 2026
"I Write the Songs" by Barry Manilow
Never a fan of Barry. Too saccharine, too schmaltzy. Not my style - but there is always an exception to the rule (still looking for Rush’s exception - but that remains another story.)
When I first heard this in 1976 - my instant reaction - was - ‘TYPICAL - BLOODY BARRY. ’I’ write the songs … seriously? The arrogance.
But it hooked me. Totally - and still to this day remains on my Apple Playlist called Just Good Songs.
Of course he didn’t write the song, something I learned a little later - and so my dichotomy was resolved. Of course it was a great song - it was written by a ‘Beach Boy’ - and the claim ‘I write the songs …’ as certainly more defensible. Even more so when I realised that;
The ‘I’ in the song is God, and that songs come from the spirit of creativity in everyone.
💬 Bruce Johnston
(Why not share Bruce's version? In my mind - just not as good - so sticking with the version that hooked me.)
👁️ Sometimes it’s like wack-a-mole.
Crucial Track 🎵 May 14, 2026
"Une Nuit a Paris, Pt. 1 / The Same Night In Paris, Pt. 2 / Later the Same Night In Paris, Pt. 3" by 10cc
Thought I would follow a prompt for a change:
Share a song you call something other than its official title. What do you call it?
That's the way the croissant crumbles
Epic - from one of the most underplayed bands in the history of 'oldy goldys' - 10CC - and this offering will always be 'One Night in Paris' - I am English for heaven's sake.
This reminds me of my own setup at home. An OpenClaw instance running on one machine, network-attached storage, a few other boxes humming away. Work-related computing running over a residential connection. I suspect that within a few years, this will be commonplace.
💬 Om
Not so long ago we had ‘family computers’ - I have friends who still use a shared computer.
The edge of two personal computers is moving to the norm.
The new edge is having a network of computers. (I’m looking at you @amerpie )
I hear the Mac Mini is selling well these days.
They shoot horses don’t they? I wonder if they shot typesetters?
🔗 Twilight of the Velocipede: Typesetting Races before the Age of Linotype
Kid” DeJarnatt, “Bangs” Levy, and “Young Jack” Fasey — they carved out reputations in what soon became a national touring circuit. A few became minor celebrities, like the Tribune’s star compositor, Thomas Rooker, who took to wearing diamond studs on his shirts.4 One particularly gifted compositor, William C. Barnes, stunned onlookers by setting type blindfolded, with his type cases reversed.
💬 The Public Domain Review
🔗 Diagrams from Willem ten Rhijne’s De Acupunctura (1683) — The Public Domain Review
I know acupuncture is an ancient Chinese medicine.
I did now know it had reached the Western world over 400 years ago.