It’s not just Gregorian calender

rateful for the long vacation (staycation this year), it has only a few hours left to it, then we wait until Xmas Eve. There will also be some football later tonight, tomorrow it’s back to normal, formally.

So we’ve managed to visit a lot of places, do a lot of exercise, prepare a lot of food, and tidy up everything, not just digital stuff.

2027 is looking like another year of conflict of Ukraine and maybe beyond it [1-3]. I keep watching the news about that war (every day since it began!) because I fear sooner or later it’ll expand to NATO territories.

Putin would rather destroy his country’s people and diminish the economy than admit that he was wrong and foolish.

____

1. China will stop Russia from going nuclear, Finland’s Stubb says

2. Don’t write off Russia’s defence industry yet

   Despite Ukraine’s recent battlefield successes, it is far too early to write off Russia, which is rebuilding its military in ways that many in the west have underestimated. Instead of simply replacing battlefield losses, it is creating a defence industry that combines Soviet-era industrial capacity with the demands of 21st-century warfare. The goal is not just to produce more tanks, but to reshape its military around the “asymmetric” advantages revealed by the war in Ukraine: drones, compact electronic warfare systems and other low-cost technologies that can be fielded at scale.

3. Kyiv suffers hours of daytime air raids as Russia deploys new jet-powered drones

   Kyiv is enduring hours of daytime air raids and air raid warnings as Russia has fired 800 jet-powered drones into Ukraine in four days, using the faster weapons to sustain prolonged waves of attacks

   The new-model Shahed drones have a cruising speed of 200mph to 250mph, about double the 115mph achieved by the piston-engine version and beyond the speed of Ukraine’s cheap interceptors, making them harder to stop.

N 2021 Garrett demanded that I remove, apologise etc.

I did not.

Did he sue like he said he would?

No.

Familiar?

Yes.

This was posted this morning:

No “manners” anymore

ots and scrapers are ruining the Internet, not just the Web. Today I read that Geminispace too is targeted by them (the LLM plagiarism engines). Earlier today they engaged in de facto DDoS against us, though it’s hard to know what those rogue bots are actually for and who runs them. Maybe their purpose is purely malicious.

Either way, Web traffic will become meaningless without some further context.

In today’s Web, like with E-mail, it is about merely surviving online (because of the many predators online).

Who will be left to clean up the mess?

Nor improve mood

erman cars are notoriously expensive to repair, but they are seen as reliable and cars in general are perceived to be time savers that simplify life and increase mobility.

But that assumes everything works smoothly all the time and that “third parties” don’t damage you, your day, your car, or even your life (fatality)

I’ve only just returned home from a run and a car near us got ‘knocked’ quite badly. It’ll probably cost a grand to fully repair/undo the damage. When I left there was no incident in sight, so it must have happened in the past 15 minutes or so. I saw another such incident near the same place only months ago. They put speed bumps, but they’re too low and don’t seem to be effective.

Optics at best.

I suppose the owner of the car will be one of two owners impacted by this collision, whose fault is probably one of them, not both of them. Now come a series of long tasks for both of them and probably no car for a week.

How does that translate into peace of mind and time savings?

What AWstat sees

raphs that say “traffic” can be misframed, as there are slop bots (scrapers) and all sorts of non-human activity in today’s Web. In relative terms, however, actively blogging this year has paid off and this domain rose in terms of reach. AWstat claims it can tell apart human from non-human, but its heuristics are outdated.

It says 1,336 people accessed this album this month (it is over a decade old!) and OS breakdown for August is as follows:

Remember “Pep”?

onight at 8PM BST we’ll know if Arsenal “goes top” or lags behind “City”. The “protege” of “Pep” (Arteta) had a strong start this season after winning last season and “Pep” is gone, he’s definitely not coming back.

It feels kind of odd, still, walking past the building with the face of “Pep” knowing he’s just some historical face like a long-gone dictator or dead war hero.

We really hope that Enzo will maintain the momentum and win again this coming weekend. The first season or “Pep” at “City” was a disappointment.

Last night I saw Ferguson in the United game (video of course, not in person). He’s alive in spite of lingering health issues (occasional hospitalisation), he looks a lot older than when I last saw him. Unlike “Pep”, he hasn’t got decades left.

Enzo is even younger, he’s about the same age and Carrick and not much older than myself.

It’s a choice

et up and do activism. The world needs it more than ever, as our downward trend towards oppression is very apparent and visible not just in the digital domain.

When I grew up I never knew and never planned to do activism. It just sort of happened.

Reading about (or from) other activists, it seems apparent they too had no such plans and activism was somewhat outlandish to them.

Saying stuff like “well, I’m not an activist” is a shoddy excuse. Did you even try?