The Geminid Meteor shower is a good one to try and catch, and this year is well timed - no Moon, and it's on a weekend! Excellent write up from Dave Dickinson here: https://www.universetoday.com/articles/why-2025-is-an-amazing-year-to-catch-the-geminid-meteors

Wooo it's up! New paper alert! I will write a summary thread about this paper tomorrow morning when I'm not quite as mentally exhausted! "An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions" by Thiele, Heiland, Boley, & Lawler https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09643 Not […]

So fun fact for those who haven't de-googled themselves yet: You know how you get a certain free storage allowance, which covers everything you have google drive, your google docs, any photos your phone uploaded, and all your gmails? And when you exceed that allowance (which a lot of people […]

A long read, but oh my does it explain why they're trying to hard to jam AI into every single damn thing: They're desperately hunting for something, ANYTHING, that might turn a profit. https://www.wheresyoured.at/nvidia-isnt-enron-so-what-is-it/

Oh yes, and then there is this! 😄 "Leading facial #ageestimation tools were easily fooled by a $22 "old man" mask, a Guy Fawkes mask, and other cheap party costumes, researchers have found." https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-02/social-media-ban-vpns-masks-age-checks-disguises/105836134 […]

*pinches brow* It is not my job to boost your margins by doing what your marketing strategy predicts. It is not my job to grow your social media presence by liking and subscribing. It is not my job to puff up your metrics by watching the entire video instead of just scrolling down the comments […]

Few things as satisfying as injecting a sly poker-faced remark into a conversation, and hearing people crack up 5 seconds later when it sinks in.

Geminid Meteor Shower Peaks December 13-14 - Sky & Telescope https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/looks-like-a-wonderful-geminid-meteor-shower-ahead/

Today we are calling on institutions around the world to take control of their #digitalsovereignty, including their social accounts. Governments should communicate directly with their citizens on open platforms, not through the mouthpiece of a corporation […]

Researchers sound alarm after observing behavior of African lions: 'Very serious' https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/researchers-sound-alarm-observing-behavior-090000414.html

I'm so old, I can remember a time when the idea of a software library getting compromised was sci-fi nonsense written by people who didn't know how to computer. "Battle stations, somebody got into Boost, now we have to update all pur c++ apps" lol are you high? How could they even propagate […]

Better than the Olympics

Watched The Matrix again last night. This film is 27 years old, but it hasn't aged a day. Still excellent. Actually, I noticed a lot of things for the first time, mostly just how totally *crap* everything is inside The Matrix. Neo's apartment, for example, looks like he invaded an abandoned […]

Phew. New round of glasses ordered for me and some of the kids. 1stborn needs fancy lenses that cost all the money. But I got free prescription sunglasses. Not to complain, but what a weird business model.

My 12yo was leafing through the Classics section of my bookshelf, and found an old invitation to a 21st birthday party that I went to in 1997. Classics: The stuff you buy heavily used at charity shops because you are young and want to improve yourself, and then you try dilligently to read it […]

Genius https://theonion.com/trump-announces-5000-increase-in-all-numbers/

I’m always amused when movies set in the present day have scene with a crowd of press photographers and use the whirring of 35mm film motor drives as a sound effect.

In the _Starfleet Technical Manual_ , there is a throwaway detail of the LCARS user interface that when it is upgraded, users can still utilize the previous several versions. This is because their work is mission-critical and it is unacceptable to compromise the mission by forcing unfamiliar […]

Thanks to @AnonymousMouse556 for drawing me so I can stop using actual photos of me!

Zuckerberg has blown 77 billion – enough money to revitalize entire countries – on an idea so overwhelmingly, obviously stupid that I have never once heard anyone, from the Thanksgiving avuncular table to the most wretched depths of social media, say they liked it or even tried it. He was so […]

My Thunderbird is configured to not autoload images. This is good because it breaks tracking and stops email marketers from monitoring my behaviour (it also stops any potential no-click email malware from running, although this hasn't been a fashionable attack for some time now). The down side […]

Driving my kid to a birthday party yesterday, I saw a big old highway billboard saying that it is illegal to "jab" your kids without your consent and encouraging you to lay a charge with the police. No company or organization name behind this message, but it does look an awful lot like those […]

We need a generic word for those bulk-cheap-loophole-exploiting direct-from-chinese-factory ecommerce stores like wish.com, shein, temu, etc. We need this so we can standardize the "Trump's wish.com peace prize" joke format.

feel like there's a bit of nuance lost when people argue about usability in Linux. Just because I know how to do something by editing a file in a very specific directory that changes between distros does not mean that I think it's good ui/ux. I can be frustrated with how something should be a […]

These activists have gone TOO FAR with their defacing cheap panes of easily replacable glass in front of priceless old art that we don't understand but it shows up in heist movies a lot so we know it's important and a vital icon of our superior culture Just putting this out there for next time […]

Cant wait to hear who won FIFA prize for physics this year... #fifa

Okay, all my FreeBSD servers are upgraded to 15.0 I had the same hiccup on all of them: my customized pkg config, to get daily builds and not quarterly, broke everything because the names have changed. Once I figured that out, and changed the contents of /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf […]

Hot take: I blame the modern trend towards containerization of code as a not insignificant partial cause for all the recent package repository breaches being as bad as they are. Okay, hear me out. When a developer had to get her code to actually build on a machine she doesn't have full […]

[Advice request #writingcommunity] My mother-in-law is making good use of her retirement and has finally written her first novel. It's a mystery, about a young police detective trying to solve a murder, and the beautiful young woman who found the body. She's asked me to give it a test reading […]

Something is happening - AGAIN. Many websites are currently showing a 500 Cloudflare error. #cloudflare

I just remembered the time an ex-employer tried to counter my resignation letter with "Ah but we paid for training, your contract says you have to reimburse us" and I said "Bill me" and walked out the door and they never billed me. It's one of those things that seems so scary in anticipation […]

OH NO CLOUDFLARE NOT AGAIN?! https://dash.cloudflare.com

Oh hey, just saw the Rand/Dollar exchange rate just dipped below 17 for the first time in many years. The Rand is ten percent stronger against the dollar than it was one year ago today. This is what happens when Trump tries to punish countries economically.

I got the "Need the toilet so looked at my calendar for the first time and saw I have a chain of back-to-back meetings starting in 5 minutes" blues

The new phone is a Samsung which I'm finding a delight to use (Ever since my Huawei's, I've always gone for the cheaper Chinese brands, so this is a change for me). But one thing surprised me: The camera is *shit* I mean, AI-enhancements that nobody asked for and that you can't turn off, make […]

this is the future they took from you

So a lot of people are saying Google's space-datacenters idea is stupid, but have you considered that every time something like this gets proposed, I see an uptick in sales of my book on space?

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@patrickcmiller/115661348626353481 Years ago: "Your concerns about Starlink satellites being harmful to astronomy are overwrought. All serious astronomy will move to orbital telescopes because they are better and SpaceX has given us the launch capacity to send up as […]

You haven't truly lived the life of a #sysadmin until you're googling around to figure out some issue and find a post about it where someone's asking the exact same question and... it's you. You, asking the exact same question ten years ago. And nobody answers.

Huh. Just chatted in person with someone who's been on #mastodon for a while, now, who honestly thought that all the Mastodon domains were run by Mastodon. And having a different domain was, like, just a vanity thing to look cool. It only came up because they were complaining about an issue they […]

So random snippets about Trump that sneaked past my content filters have let me know he's getting MRIs and other serious scans, and claiming that it's all perfectly normal and routine for everybody to get this all the time. And it makes sense, right? The guy and his party routinely run on the […]

Unix - BSD developers : this code should run and be maintained as long as computers exist. Linux - GNU dev : this code should run and be maintained as long as someone is willing to do the work Consultant: this code should run until the end of my contract. Enterprise grade B2B software : this […]

Lady from the Nielsen company just rang up and told me sooooo many liiiiiieeeees They want to put a microphone on me (they call it a "meter") in exchange for an unspecified number of "points" that can turn into an amount of money that a different department will tell me about if I choose to go […]

Spam calls have gotten so bad... I'm literally expecting a call within a 15 minute window. Phone rings, I answer, it's my mobile provider telling me they've studied my usage patterns and are so very excited to offer me an amazing data package. Every. Damn. Time.

It's been a while since I last moaned about South African Weather Services who by all accounts are solid meteorologists but absolutely failing in their duty to inform and warn the public. So here's a long-standing gripe I have with their alert system […] [Original post on mastodon.monoceros.co.za]

Ooh, cheers to @davidgerard for cluing me into: https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/ Which is all about why you don't want data centres in space. I knew some bits, but there's so much more! #space

In order to avoid the tragic events of last December, I have carefully explained the rules of both Whamageddon and Mariapocalypse to my children and asked them to please be very careful with their bluetooth speakers.

Just me, trying to work while I wait for the mechanic to tell me how much damage he's about to do to my Christmas budget...