…on a chicken hunt…
One of the nasty little rat dogs from next door got loose and chased Sam, my little white cockerel, into the hedge. He’s usually easy to spot because of his color, so I reckon he’s crawled deep under some bush and gone to ground. If we don’t find him before roosting time, Mr Fox is likely to overnight.
They hunker down and go silent. I’ve been on a scared chicken hunt or two.
And I have to go to an event in town later. I’ll give you an update, but it’s likely to be late.
UPDATE: GOT HIM! Not sure where he was, but I found him walking up the drive headed to his own bed for the night. I wanted to pick him up, but he’s a little too freaked.
April 9, 2026 — 4:37 pm
Comments: 9
Still seeking
A still from my lost masterpiece Damien’s Jaunty Balls above, celebrating the 2006 neutering of my cat. It makes visual sense as a stripey cat walking when it’s animated, which was fun to do.
I’ve tried a number of the swf > mp4 converters without success. Some render the audio but no images. Some do the job but result in huge files. One – Ruffle Player – will play the link for me when I upload it, but won’t download in any kind of shareable form. Hence the still image.
The text above reads: go go gonads, you’re the besticles, there never was a pair like Damien’s testicles.
No badger in last night’s footage, but there was a fox. Very misty again.
April 8, 2026 — 5:27 pm
Comments: 5
Some things won’t die
One of the roguelike games I used to play – a version of Nethack, I believe – if you played as a thief, your deity was Ratgod. That always tickled me. Whenever something strange but harmless happened, we said it was the work of Ratgod.
So I registered the domain ratgod.com. I built a number of websites in the early Noughties just for fun, and this was one. I used it for silly quotes (a different one every time you refreshed the page) and one animation called Damien’s Jaunty Balls, celebrating the day I had my cat neutered (if I can convert it to a modern playable file format, I’ll post it). Then I let the registration lapse. Something like 2006?
Damn if I don’t still get mail to it – always addressed to Ratgod Dot. I think I must have arrived in some entrepreneurial list. Here’s today’s:
Hi [my actual first name],
Not sure if this is on your radar but if Ratgod Dot is making at least $20k/month, there is a solid chance you can qualify for same day credit line.
Up to $750,000, no PG or credit checks and you get it in under 24h
Can I send the options available?
– Gabriella
Who on earth has a website pulling in $20K a month?
April 7, 2026 — 5:00 pm
Comments: 4
Gorilla in the mist
We have a badger! This is actually a very bad thing. He’s digging great holes in the lawn looking for worms (their favorite protein source). And there’s jack shit we can do about it. They’re a protected species, and even if they weren’t, what would you do?
We caught him on wildlife camera (he’s been digging up the lawn for days), but the picture quality was so poor owing to ground mist, you can barely make him out. The above was an artist’s reconstruction. By which I mean Grok, of course.
Note the stripes.
April 6, 2026 — 6:04 pm
Comments: 11
Well, *I* thought it was cool
Modern Word files are XML files, zipped. (XML is a sort of cousin to HTML, the markup language webpages are written in). That’s why the extension is docx. If you rename a .docx file to .zip, you can actually open it and see how it’s structured.
That’s what you see in the picture above.
The _rels folder contains relationship files (with the .rels extension). These XML files act like a “map” or “glue” telling Microsoft Word (or any compatible program) how all the different parts of the document are connected to each other.
CustomXML is self explanatory, and the docProps folder (short for “document properties”) contains the metadata about the file itself — not the actual content of the document, but information about the document: it’s the place where Word (and other Office apps) stores things you usually see when you go to File > Info such as the author name, title, creation date, etc.
The actual documents lives in the Word folder and the [Content_Types].xml file’s job is to tell any program what kind of content each file inside the ZIP package is. Sort of a “file type registry”.
And yes, they’re human-readable and you can edit them manually, with a fair probability of screwup if you get it wrong. Why you would want to I do not know; I just like to take things apart to see how they’re made. Yes, some of these words were cut and pasted from the robot.
I hope you had an awesome Good Friday. I’ll see you on the other side of the weekend!
April 3, 2026 — 5:59 pm
Comments: 4
That’s a disconcerting image, Mr Robot
I went to the dentist today for the first time in…let’s just say, a very long time. For those who haven’t been Chez Weasel from the beginning, I had my entire mouthful of old bridgework replaced with shiny implants right before I left the States. The most important thing to me: they don’t come out of my head at night.
Anyhow, they haven’t given me any trouble, so I decided just to ignore them. Like, forever.
I’ve been getting headaches, though, so I thought it would be worth checking out. One exam and three x-rays later and…everything’s fine. Bone looks healthy, no erosion. I’m good. He said come back in two years.
Incidentally, there is such a thing as an NHS dentist, but you’ll apparently never get on the list. Everyone sticks their hands in their pockets for tooth work.
Next week – let’s see if a massage will shift these headaches!
April 2, 2026 — 5:03 pm
Comments: 4
AI isn’t the only one to hallucinate
Behold the two big fat simplified Chinese characters that Google OCR dropped in the middle of the page of the Victorian history book I’m working on. They were about that size, too.
Google Translate tells me it means “Lulu” – but of course it doesn’t mean anything. It’s pure glitch.
I asked ChatGPT to explain and it said modern OCR is trained on a multilingual character set and isn’t smart enough to stick with Roman characters. It saw a shadow or pattern I can’t see and dropped a character in. And once it’s farted one out, it said it’s not uncommon for OCR to repeat the character.
Google OCR has a little AI-sauce mixed in – which is one of the reasons its OCR is so clean – but not enough to know there wouldn’t be two big fat Chinese characters in the middle of an English history book.
This stuff isn’t taking anybody’s job yet. Managers who are firing on that basis are kidding themselves (or using it as an excuse).
April 1, 2026 — 6:01 pm
Comments: 4
Let the robot do the drudgery
At the moment, I’m trying to get a clean OCR of a long and often dry early Victorian history book. Luckily for me, someone else did the scans – but the original OCR was awful. I’m doing it page at a time and it’s scooting along pretty well – except for the dreadful tables.
That’s them in the thumbnails above.
Then I had an idea – I wonder if ChatGPT will do those? Spoiler: yes. I upload the scan, tell it how I want the table formatted (fonts, etc.) and it gives me a link to a docx file I can just drop in.
At one point, I got too clever for my own good – I was giving it the big, raw png files – and I hit my data limit. I’ve never hit my limit as a paying customer! But it reset within a few minutes and I was told that wouldn’t happen if I jpg’ed them all. It even told me how to batch jpg the whole directory.
Some would say beware – before long, it will do the whole job for me. But y’know, I would be totally okay with that.
March 31, 2026 — 5:51 pm
Comments: 4
It’s…Adorph Hekler!
The Lineup today ran a silly article titled The Worst Person with Your Same Zodiac Sign and mine was – you guessed it! – the Furher. Apparently, he narrowly missed being an Ares and landed with a thud in Taurus.
Then ChatGPT, Grok and MidJourney all three flatly refused to draw a picture of him for me. Even a silly one. Even with his moustache left off. They got sniffy about it, too. I had to ask for a guy in lederhosen – definitely not Adolph Hitler – and an alpine hat.
Stupid moralizing robots.
So, go on then – who’s the worst person with your sign, if you don’t mind sharing your birth month?
pssst…apologies, but we’re still being hammered by spam. I kick posts out of the spam bucket numerous times a day, but I know it isn’t ideal.
March 30, 2026 — 6:33 pm
Comments: 17
I asked 3 AIs what they had planned for the weekend
Claude told me – rather sniffily, I thought – “As an AI I don’t have weekends or personal plans.”
ChatGPT, ever the leg-humping sycophant, said: “Nothing on my end—but I can help you line something up if you’re in the mood.
Given the sort of work you’ve been doing, a quiet weekend might suit: a bit more editing, or a change of pace—walk, bookshop, that sort of thing. If you had something specific in mind (local to you or otherwise), I can suggest options without overcomplicating it.”
And Grok’s answer is above. Perfectly encapsulates the ‘personality’ of all three.
Have a good weekend!
March 27, 2026 — 7:13 pm
Comments: 7