don’t typically write about pets here, I tend to cover that in another site.

The shells will soon mark 8 weeks in their dedicated water tank. So far I’ve found no dead shells, so it probably went well.

Earlier today I did partial water change of the shells and they seem happy with that so far. It’s hard to interpret their “feelings” about this, harder than it is to assess the emotion of fish
e.g. stress.

here are cyber attacks against our Web sites this week. These attacks take several different forms. These are clearly censorship attempts. We have paper trail to prove that.

Any attacks – no matter their form – tend to indicate fear. In this case, the fear is that information that we published will be available and remain available for many years to come.

Sustaining attacks is one thing; reporting them is another. What’s happening is illegal. It will be treated as such.

We’ll carry on publishing as usual. Curtailing access to information is never a winning strategy for all sorts of reasons.

t’s ending. After 4 shows in the local stadium. “Doors for Take That on Wednesday 1 July open at 5:00pm with support from 6:25pm.” They’ll finish and pack up in an hour or so, back off the limelight again. No more “Shine”.

Maybe we’ll see them again in 5 years when they turn 60 and maybe by then England will have won a World Cup again. Seems unlikely. They have barely beaten DR Congo.

still remember finishing my thesis about two decades ago and working on experiments that compared my algorithms to those of Bill Crum. We used different approaches and compared them.

Bill was always nice to me and today I discovered that he has medical problems and he wrote a book about it. In a way, we sort of coauthored works (or collaborated with his division down in London). I hope he will find a way to cope with health perils.

HE other day I wrote about happiness and this morning I explained what that means to activists. I was checking for further input. “Money can’t buy happiness” goes the famous proverb, “but sometimes it can rent it…”

I derive much pleasure from writing. It hardly costs a thing.

“On a more practical note,” a friend told me, “there really is a minimal income necessary for comfort and health.”

Simple life reduces worry and reduced worry contributes to happiness. High-paying jobs are typically not compatible with simplicity in life. But there is an alternative way to look at it – and one who wrote about Om Malik perishing captured that when saying:

I had a tougher week than usual. Someone I deeply care about had a bad fall, followed by the passing of Om. It made me think again about the impermanence of life: the mundaneness of every day can seem like this can go on forever, but suddenly in just a moment everything may change.

I can’t help but keep thinking about Om and how he was writing so much till the end. Sometimes I feel like I take my writing for granted. It seems to be always there. But what if one day it wasn’t?

There is always some self-consciousness involved when publishing a public blog. Will I be flooding people’s rss readers if I post too much? Why would anyone read this obscure topic? Do people really want to know *my* opinion?? Omg people are going to get so tired of my posts on covid cautiousness.

But mortality has this ultimate clarifying effect. Pride, embarrassment, self-consciousness, etc – what are they in the face of mortality?

[...]

(of course, this website may not survive beyond my death, but that is another problem.)

It links to this older post about “website graveyards”, stating 6 years ago: “I am hence thankful to my partner – I have never understood how essential it is to have a witness until these recent years, or at least at this point in my life when everything seems so shaky and transient, how much it means to me that my ongoing existence is being witnessed. That all of this is real, someone is seeing my pain, my struggles. I think this is the outcome of feeling not being taken seriously my entire life. ”

It says: “Websites shouldn’t have to go offline once their creators are dead, yet they mostly will unless they are hosted on a free service that will likely sustain long-term into the future (i.e. wordpress.com or github)”

This did not age well because github is not doing well and wordpress.com shares a bed with sloppers.

The real solution might be friends who can help run a site for you, like Aaron Swartz did.

The above blogger (anonymous except in domain name) should know sites can outlast people by decades, as many have.

oday is the last day of the first half of 2026 and it has been a good year, except the heatwaves in May and June. They are too much.

We now have a new head coach for the local team. The other local team also had a new head coach confirmed a couple of months ago.

Football resumes (nationally, not internationally) about 1.5 months from now.

Crossposted from Tux Machines

When we say “the Tux” we mean Tux Machines

e’re only about two days away from July. The exquisite weather today (cool and sunny) is a fresh breath of air after a week(ish) of heatwave and even bursts of heavy rain last night. I’ve purchased Rianne many boxes of mochi, I’ve begun grinding down the coffee beans, and we’re now in a position to make it a fruitful summer with many editorial pieces, not just curated story picks.

2025 was a busy year for us due to lawfare (we received sound advice), but in 2026 we are catching up and we’ve already made several technical improvements to the site. Our development team enhanced some bits without adding bloat and we’re probably more robust to DDoS attacks this summer (after some attacks crippled us).

We are also grateful for the fact that we forged some new alliances with friendly groups that share similar goals. We help promote them like they help promote us.

Despite what may be claimed online (evil tongues), we have earned a lot of respect in the past few years and made a big leap since the site was 15 (my wife and I became chief curators when the site was 9).

Rianne is still the soul and motor of the site, even if she does not add many original editorials. Behind the scenes there are technical people who keep the site fast and perpetually available, fully patched, properly backed up etc.