T seems like “Sleepy” the bird is improving at keeping good balance on the doorknobs and eating the seeds without jumping on the jar and flapping her wings like mad. Unlike “Bot” (Bottle) and her friend, “Sleepy” is a reasonably recent recruit and she doesn’t have good table manners. Sometimes she climbs on the doors, she is fearless about it, and this used to result in a mess (spillages). We began calling her “Sweepy” because she was sweeping the seeds aside instead of eating them properly.

Progress is being made by discouraging bad habits.

just want to state the obvious following this more formal statement from last month. The aggressors’ latest move indicates that:

1. They messed up their own Order and injunction
2. They recognise they cannot stop/prevent us from criticising them, so they try to ameliorate the injunction
3. They recognise we’ll enjoy both liberty (physical) and freedom of speech/press (platform) and don’t know how to recover over $130,000 in additional losses

HAVE just reproduced the latest long post from Pocock.

The election is tomorrow.

“Daniel Pocock wins the award for the person who has travelled the longest distance to take part in this circus,” someone wrote some hours ago, he “as he gives an address in Australia.”

So what?

There is another Australian in there.

spent a few hours today in town and at one point checked preowned laptops out of sheer curiosity, expecting that their prices would be somewhat proportional to their storage capacity. Indeed, any laptop with about 1TB of storage was very expensive, all the cheap ones had internal storage of no more than 128GB.

The slop speculators and price-fixing a-holes got their way.

XACTLY one week ago, on Wednesday morning, I sent the papers associated with the lawsuit I’m lodging against the Serial Strangler from Microsoft. Afterwards I went to Superdrug and spent 30 minutes examining the prices of non-edible goods, seeing that packaging got smaller, prices are much higher, and services barely exists anymore.

At the Post Office, there are still human workers, but they’re nowhere near as friendly or useful as decades ago. They act like they do you a favour by actually serving you (which they must). They’re basically a private business now (the tasks got offloaded to local shops) and postage costs have grown about 5-fold in 20 years. What justifies those price increases? The cost of fuel? The sour face of staff?

The world is getting ruder, more expensive, and there’s a moral obligation (I think) to do something about it.

Official numbers (US debt):

N case it’s not obvious, this blog will soon exceed 3,000 posts (after 22 years) because I want to keep personal opinions out of other sites, where authorship should focus on technical matters.

Back in 2004 I was a Ph.D. student and blogging as a term was barely known to anybody. I remember the first time I read that term, seeing the “blog” of someone from Cambridge around 2003, maybe earlier (maybe even 2002).

Seeing what a pile of crap the Web has become (slop, clickbait[*], and TikTok), I am compelled to get back to blogging.

____

[*] From IRC moments ago:

<admfubar> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/11/canadian-airline-cancels-flight-after-child-refuses-to-wear-seatbelt
28-29TechrightsBot-tr/#techrights28- 0606www.theguardian.com | Canadian airline cancels flight after child refuses to wear seatbelt | Airline industry | The Guardian
<schestowitz[TR2]> probably dramatising something
<schestowitz[TR2]> as it is hard to believe
<schestowitz[TR2]> “The child was standing in their chair as the 6 August Porter Airlines flight taxied towards the runway, the airline said. Repeated attempts by an accompanying parent and crew to secure the child in their seat failed, so the crew elected to return to the terminal and have the two passengers disembark as “the aircraft could not take off in this unsafe condition”, it added.”
<schestowitz[TR2]> cancels flight
<schestowitz[TR2]> for who?
<schestowitz[TR2]> “were able to depart on a flight the following day”
<schestowitz[TR2]> big delay
<schestowitz[TR2]> not cancelled
<schestowitz[TR2]> misleading headline
<schestowitz[TR2]> clickbait
<schestowitz[TR2]> one grumpy kid -> fly delay -> international news?