There was a cadre of cats here during the day, bright, skinny Sphinx-like things, who'll maybe wander off once they realise i'm not going to feed them

And pale, wild desert dogs that come out between sunset and sunrise. A small pack of them waiting around in the street when i came down from the roof, listening to the last call to prayer

Might need to give them a few days to get used to the idea of me being here, accepted, before venturing out into the souk after dark. They seem more relaxed than the dogs I'm used to seeing in the greener end of town, reckon they fight fewer territory battles. But we'll find out more when we hear the morning howl. And bray, and cluck, and prayer, and...

Long overnight drive to Siwa Oasis, spent the daytime decompressing. If most of my time here is just decompressing, that's fine

Past visits stayed with mum in a holiday flat she rents from a local restauranteur, but this time i have the option of house-sitting for a friend who's out in "the gardens", where the land-owning classes go to escape the dust of town

Amazing spot to inhabit. A newer tob-brick building, very Western inside, but right up against the abandoned ruins of the Shali, the old fortress-town. Much of the neighbourhood looks like this, old houses decaying back into sand, pockets of the core being recovered for tourism, a bit more every visit

What would motivate you to write a detailed recipe for self-replicating fridge worms, then send out an angsty press release to smear it around the internet?

Nice to be heading to a place where domestic appliances are still an optional novelty

A picture from @andypiper et al's plotter table at Liverpool Makefest, generated with parameters set by @gasman and now slightly decorated and fitted into a green frame i was given in a flat clearance. Not sure which way up it goes. Might even remember to hand it back :)

This little character caught my eye on the walk home for a bland lunch. It's Huehueteotl, an old god of the Aztecs, from the fire and sacrifice era. Try to resist bric-a-brac, but it spoke to me.

Amazingly we *just* completed a 52 year cycle of the Aztec calendar! 27th Sept was the start of the 5 unlucky days, and right now we are in a short period of renewal, "somewhere between winter and spring, something wakes in the dreaming heart which endures across the span of the cycling age".

https://www.azteccalendar.com/date/2026/10/6

A good time to welcome Huehueteotl into one's home :)

This is how @EvenRouault is materialising the FOSS maintainer strike against GenAI:
https://mastodon.social/@EvenRouault/117392736450738466

A quick count. Fully 1 in 5 toots on my timeline since last night are AI complaints. This is the only one i enjoyed.

There's clearly a lot wrong, huge impacts not being addressed, consequences ignored.

Can we please find ways use our voices, our experiences as technologists, to have impact - influence and inform decision-makers, support advocacy groups, build tiny systems, stop maintaining critical packages while being very clear about why - not just to vent into the moment. The Weaver's Guild, bringing each other down.

By all means let it out. But please keep it novel, keep it funny, keep not quite so much of it here?

Inspired by @stecks #mathober zine about tracing the perimeter of an ellipse with two pins and a bit of string, tried recreating it on the tic80, ending up with this, the central point between the two poles is wandering round in a circle

The prompts are nice. Good to be doing a tiny bit of recreational trigonometry again

People *do* warn you about Factorio, but they don't emphasise enough that it's the videogame equivalent of crack, almost painfully compelling

Did go into this with eyes open - played-out on all the comfort games that have been in regular rotation since owning a console, needing to rest and let thoughts settle, thought "why not try Factorio"

BUT. Nothing can prepare you for the depth of its induced hyperfocus. Nearing (hopefully) the end of the tutorial/demo and it's going to be an effort not to immediately buy the full release and lose the weekend (... week, month?)

Did you know that @libbymiller casually launched a startup, but isn't promoting it?

https://naturetelemetry.com/

Bristol Nature Telemetry. They do privacy-preserving acoustic sensors. "If you manage a space and want to know more about what birds and bats are present", get in touch with them!

The first iteration of the network map looks like this, it's already getting a bit red-string

https://betterhardware.uk/map/

The end state of this effort is definitely to persuade the Scottish Government to start a Reinvention Agency, pick a catchy name and we're halfway there

@labcrafter do you like this?

@waag what does it look like to you?

Casually setting a network mapping web crawler off on @cheapjack 's link collection, we're now at "Nematode Death Disco"

"Nematode Death Disco originated in Ross Dalziel's ProtestsForProtists repo for Domestic Science. Uses PDMS microfluidics moulded from old vinyl records - technique by microbiologist Alexandre Benedetto, inspired by article in The Worm Breeders Gazette. Students observe nematode bio-fluorescence death process; fluorescence = "disco lights of death."

https://domesticscience.org.uk/criticalkits/Library.html

deep breath, just put the phone away in a drawer, do practical things

This is interesting, https://www.123robot.co.uk/ a firm offering half-term holiday clubs for kids to do robotics, micropython and 3D design, in Glasgow and Edinburgh, sell a kit with a turtle-like device

No connection to them, just stumbled across it. They have a CIC, First Step Robotics, and are in Livingston

Look, the very wide steam washboard is a great idea that deserves palming off onto other people as quickly as possible

What fuels that rage i struggle to navigate - so much of the shit we're in now is a product of nerdy men having their work and their worst tendencies brutally exploited by patriarchal capitalism.

If you're running hacker events and you're not *pushing back against that status quo as hard as you can*, making a constant and loud effort to be welcoming, then you're normalising exclusion, weakening the network, making exploitation easier, however you want to put it. Is that hacker nature?

There are always a few gifted, committed women in every scene, doing the extra solidarity and awareness work that won't do itself. There are always too few, and that's not fucking changing, the anger is justified!

For better or worse it *is* my identity and vocation. Don't *want* to fight, but wrath can be righteous :)

Deep sigh, everything i've got to offer is either too incrementally basic or too distantly retro-futuristic.

"See, your problem starts over here, when some mid-Victorian wanker who'd never done a load of laundry in his life decided that a rotating drum would solve every other problem, then it all got electronically compounded, without regard for human life-cost" is not going to be an easy sell to people with near-term operational problems

La lutte continue

Off to Aberdeen to sample industrial laundry, yess

Note to future self, you definitely will not get sucked into HEMA, no matter how appealing the combination of swords, costume design, choreography and ridiculous levels of overcommitment. Peaceful soul, in tea monk mode

Learned that one of my new colleagues is deeply, intergenerationally invested in the battle re-enactment community. Mentioned my foray through Japanese sword arts and got an infodump about HEMA, historic European martial arts, and the effort that goes into them

https://www.battle500.org.uk/ - events this weekend in Lithlithgow, 500th anniversary of some battle or other. Reckon i'll visit, not aiming to get sucked into another nerdy martial arts culture, but super curious about it as a performance scene :)

Company away day. They are feeding us to The Wheel. See you all on the other side