The real and meaningful astronomical event

realise that the 2026 autumn equinox is upon us (Source: BBC) and it’s not the same as solstice. Quoting the article: “The equinox will occur at 01:06 BST on 23 September, according to Royal Museums Greenwich. It is a precise moment in time when the Sun crosses the celestial equator and neither hemisphere is tilted towards or away from the Sun, meaning day and night are roughly equal in length across the world.”

Goodbye, summer.

It’s better for more than just moral reasons like solidarity

‘ve only just realised that days ago marked 3 years since we moved everything to Simply in the UK. This webhost was recommended to us by Catalyst2, whose services I had happily used since 2003 or 2004.

One lesson I’ve learned is, if your team is mostly based in Europe, then it makes sense for hosting to be in Europe (or EU in this case).

Think local.

Combatting FOMO

remember how in 2009 or 2010 I was attempting to almost phase out E-mail usage (unless or wherever it was absolutely necessary, e.g. account creation/verification). It didn’t exactly work, but I did reduce my usage of E-mail.

Some years ago I made a habit of checking my E-mail only about once a day (unless I was expecting some very important and/or time-sensitive message from somebody).

This year I sometimes don’t check E-mail for a couple of days straight. I then realise I didn’t even miss anything critical. Put another way, there would be no benefit associated with checking E-mail more frequently, except maybe FOMO.

“Today I catch up with email,” I told someone yesterday, “and I think the above is outdated?”

I saw a message from 3 days prior. “Sorry, I don’t check email every day (anymore),” I said.

No harm done, and had I checked messages all day long I’d basically spend a lot of time triaging/gardening SPAM. About 90% of the E-mail I receive is SPAM.

Even if there was no SPAM at all, I’d probably still choose not to check E-mail every day.

Society, in my experience, compels people to be “wired” all the time and do everything “in real time”. That prohibits focus and obstructs concentration.

If you’re not a “999″ operator, then you probably need not see or respond to everything urgency.

We’re drowning in seas of words

‘ve been typing and keeping personal stories since around 2002. It started when I sat at my office in Manchester Computing with plenty of time to pass, not much to do. Some of those stories predate that habit by a year or two. I thought to myself, one day I can turn those notes into publications, even though books were still more common at the time.

The world has changed somewhat since then. Quantity of text does not matter because of serial sloppers who do not value quality and who conflate plagiarism with “intelligence”.

People’s stories that are authentic still have real value; a high quantity of computer-generated garbage ‘stories’ will be culled and put in the digital ashtray sooner or later.

A passing fad of mass plagiarism, not “intelligence” by any stretch of imagination

t was summarised neatly by Ruben Schade this week. Slop is uneconomic, we’ve seen scams like these before, and it is moreover a legal minefield, as recent court disclosures show.

The companies that do this know they’ll never earn any money, just lose a lot, and since it’s copyright infringement there are also major legal bills (or settlements) to consider.

The old pool

think today’s weather qualifies as summer. Maybe it’s one last chance to sunbathe. I took advantage.

We got some good news this afternoon. GNU/Linux replaces Windows and Microsoft is in general perishing while lying to shareholders about the potential of slop.

At this point in time it seems like Microsoft’s decline is truly irreversible.

Simple is funner

think there is a common perception or this widespread belief that when people are young they want to collect, to publicly boast about it, to keep accumulating “stuff”, then flaunt to peers and strangers. They seek affirmation. It’s not so gender-dependent a phenomenon and it has not much to do with “nesting” or “hunting”. It’s about insecurities and compensating for them.

So they hoard, they want big and complicated (extensive) things “in volume”. That is particularly applicable to habitats (homes). When people get older and more mature they may wish to give things away, want to move to smaller places for a simpler life with less maintenance to be done, less to worry about (less inside one’s mind).

The age factor is less to do with having to give things away at death; it’s not much to do with the physical difficulties of keeping intact large places or many rooms/units (sometimes with garden).

In practice it seems to boil down to mindset or mentality. The consumerism brainwash has less sway on older people, who learned from experience they can no longer conflate ownership with happiness and that having more than the minimal (bare minimum) required, e.g. life-sustaining medication, can become a burden.

What’s the point hoarding 100 pairs of shoes when you have only 2 feet for instance?

In geeks’ spheres it is the same. Young people install a lot of things (I was guilty of this too) and as they grow older they consolidate and try to simplify or cement workflows.

The human mind does not work well in parallel. It is an inherently serial machine, with ’round-robin’-type thinking relying on paper notes or memorisation.

Less is more (productivity).