Punkins!
Spotted on the way to a farm shop today. Well, of course it doesn’t look like anything – it’s a field of pumpkins. Here it is big and in color.
We had a nice long drive down country lanes today. I’m here to tell you – it’s fall!
September 24, 2025 — 5:33 pm
Comments: 6
Wooden computer goes for half a mil
Okay, it was the wooden-cased version of the Apple 1. They made fifty, they think nine are left, and this one is a very good example. It works. It’s got all its bits, including monitor and tape drive.
And they have the provenance: the first female graduate of Stanford Law School, a woman named June Blodgett Moore. I tried to find out more about her, but didn’t have much luck.
They estimated it would go for $300,000 but it finally sold for $475,000. I guess nostalgic geeks are all growed up and have money.
September 23, 2025 — 3:52 pm
Comments: 4
Oooh! New time sink!
Lookit the time waster Uncle B found! It’s called Every Noise at Once (URL everynoise.com). It’s a giant color-coded map of very musical genre on Spotify.
Every Noise at Once was a long-running attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 6,291 genre-shaped distinctions at Spotify through 2023-11-19. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.
Click anything to hear an example of what it sounds like.
Click the » on a genre to see a map of its artists.
It’s actually ten years old and is static now because the creator got laid off from Spotify. Click the name of a genre to hear a sample; click the right arrows after the genre to see a map of the artists associated with the genre (who can also be sampled).
Very cool.
September 22, 2025 — 4:35 pm
Comments: 4
Cheating!
This is Google Gemini‘s image creation mode, Nano Banana. I don’t know if it’s new or improved. I’m not sure how you normally invoke it; I followed a link from a promotional email.
I clicked the link and it had already filled out the prompt: First ask me to upload an image of myself. Then add a realistic looking alien doing a peace sign to my photo.
I mean, did it not trust me to come up with an idea on my own?
I gave it exactly the Miss Muffet prompt I gave MidJourney yesterday, and here is what it gave me back. It seems to have peace signs on the brain.
Good weekend, all!
September 19, 2025 — 6:21 pm
Comments: 4
Oh, c’mon…
The dude in the inset is Thomas Muffet, a 16th Century physician. He was one of the authors of Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum (Theatre of Insects), a big book on bugs, that wasn’t published until some years after his death in 1604. His speciality was spiders.
Wikipedia – that killest of killjoys – says there’s no proof of a connection to Little Miss Muffet:
It has been suggested that Muffet’s stepchild, his only daughter, Patience, is the subject of the nursery rhyme ‘Little Miss Muffet’. Although the name and subject fit the verse, there is no clear evidence of a connection and the verse was only printed in 1805.
*eyeroll emoji*
I like MidJourney’s Miss Muffet and googley-eyed spider. I had to cut off some AI weirdness on the righthand side, though. (That round thing in the bottom right corner appears to be a bowling ball).
September 18, 2025 — 6:22 pm
Comments: 7
Artsy
I was bone idle all day. Nothing to say for myself. So please enjoy this unremarkable photograph of rusty chains I took at Dungeness.
No, wait – it’s rubbish day! I took out the garbage!
September 17, 2025 — 6:23 pm
Comments: 5
Revenge of the earworm
Another successful gym session. I don’t suppose I’ll end up a jacked old lady, but it is making a positive difference in my day to day function.
One unexpected downside of the gym has been the loudspeaker playing Top 40 radio. They’re still playing junk from MY childhood. I remember all the lyrics to songs I haven’t heard in forty years. Songs I hated then and hate now – but by god I know the words! It’s evidence of how they’d play those things over and over and over until they were burned into your braincell.
I remember one day in the Sixties on my rather long commute to school our local station played “Cherish” seven times in a row. We always assumed the DJ lost a bet.
Funny, I never realized how much of our pop repertoire was Elton John songs.
September 16, 2025 — 5:26 pm
Comments: 8
Slippery weasels
I’ve been good about the gym. Twice a week is all I reckon I should do at my age, to leave plenty of recovery time, and I’ve hit it every week but one. I’ve been at it a couple of months now and I think I’ve developed…a muscle!
So I was puffing away on the shoulder press and a member of staff sheepishly approached me and said, “I’m sorry – the manager sent me up here to tell you you can’t wear jeans in the gym.”
!
So it’s slippery spandex for this little weasel. I hate it. Can you imagine a weasel in spandex? I asked Grok to, but I don’t think it really gets lycra. Cute that it signed its work, though.
September 15, 2025 — 4:23 pm
Comments: 9
See you tomorrow
I don’t post on 9/11.
RIP Charlie Kirk.
September 11, 2025 — 5:34 pm
Comments: 2
All this talk about flags
This is the Star Spangled Banner, the one that inspired the national anthem. You probably recognize it by the V sewn into the fabric (what that means is still a matter of dispute). After the Battle of Baltimore, it somehow found its way into the hands of the Armistead family. For a century, before they ultimately donated it to the Smithsonian.
It is positively huge at 30 feet by 42 feet, though you can see in the picture where about ten feet of it have been nibbled off the bottom. The Armisteads gave pieces of it away as gifts (which sometimes float back onto the market).
When the Smithsonian built the Museum of History and Technology in 1964, they created a special atrium called the Flag Hall, a three story showcase specifically to show off this flag. Since renamed the Museum of American History.
By the Eighties, they were worrying about light and dust damage and they built a curtain in front of it which they’d lower twice an hour for a moment or two.
The important thing is, I didn’t know any of this.
For several years after I got a corporate gig, I’d spend a week at the Smithsonian. I love museums, these ones are wonderful and free, all I had to spend was for transportation and hotel. Loved it. First time was probably 1984.
I was walking across the atrium of the Museum of American History. There was a boom and a creak and the national anthem began to pour out of the speakers while they cranked down that big curtain until I found myself standing face to face with the actual goddamned Star Spangled Banner.
My friends, I’m a sucker for anthems and symbols and oaths and all things jingoistic. I was floored. Paralyzed with astonishment. Gobsmacked. I don’t expect to be that stunned again unless I get hit by a bus, walk straight into the light and shake hands with Jesus.
I consider myself lucky I didn’t throw up or pee my pants right there in the Smithsonian Institute.
Anyway, they’ve since spent 10 years and $21 million on a restoration project and it’s back on display. I haven’t seen it, but it’s apparently in the flag atrium on display at a slight angle in a controlled environment. I haven’t seen it since.
September 10, 2025 — 6:14 pm
Comments: 9