µblog - archive for 2026-07 🏳️‍🌈

🔗 [Falcon 9] Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5

On 2026 August 5, within a few minutes of 06:35 UTC, an upper stage (section) of a rocket used for a lunar mission will hit the moon. This may be of some (probably minor) scientific interest, and we may learn some things from it. It doesn’t present any danger to anyone, though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware (space junk) is disposed of.

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🔗 Pivot to AI – Sam Altman: Guys, we’re in the Singularity now

If there’s a singularity here, it’s that OpenAI is a black hole that all the money falls into. And you’ll never see it again.

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In retrospect, my interest in photography was on the wane when my first D700 and my beloved 45mm f/2.8 was stolen in 2020. Covid dealt it a death blow.

However an overseas holiday did rekindle some interest, and in a mad dash of proglifacy I got a used Nikon Z6 hoping to keep it up. High summer really isn’t good photo season but I’m going out in the evenings trying to capture good light.

I just might start paying for Flickr again, too. We will see. In the meantime I’m playing with Nikon’s Image Space, which is amazingly janky: https://img.gg/jD5nc9I

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🔗 Time Station Emulator

Web page which will play sounds through a speaker to emulate radio time signals.

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today’s wikidive: Mandolin

contains such nuggets as it being described as “an obscure instrument of romance” (I’ve got your obscure instrument of romance RIGHT HERE); Giovanni Vailati, the “blind mandolinist of Cremona”; and links to the mandobass

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🔗 Pivot to AI: AI vendors are destroying rare books to feed the chatbot

ISBNdb loudly advocates strip-mining the world’s old books, scanning them for AI training, and then pulping them — and leaving the only remainder of the original text as some weights in a large language model. And all this for an unnamed large AI company that’s going broke in a year.

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📺🇬🇧 Frauds (2025)

A by-the-numbers heist show. Forgettable.

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🔗 Foreign Policy: The Western Myth of Russian Greatness

[…] an implicit racism sometimes seems to be in play: Many Russians “look European” (i.e., white), and Russian Orthodoxy is still recognizably Christian, prompting Westerners to make assumptions about the country that they would never dare to apply to other authoritarian societies in East Asia or the Middle East, whose political traditions are arguably far closer to Russia’s.

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I probably should have done some research before buying this new used camera.

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Back home after bumming around Flanders. Good food, good beer, good chocolate. Bad temperatures.

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🔗🇲🇾 An Ode to Coliseum Cafe (1921 - 2021)

Legendary KL eatery closed just shy of 100 years.

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🇪🇸 — 🇦🇷 1–0

¡Viva España!

Oh and everyone hates Argentina, who knew.

Refused to watch giant shitstain try to keep the trophy for himself.

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Brussels - ✈ - (Zürich) -✈- Køpenhamn

There was no convenient rail option back to Denmark so we opted for a delayed and crowded flight which swallowed our bag.

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Ghent – Brussels

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🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 — 🇦🇷 1–2 England made the cardinal mistake of backing home after taking the lead, which is a bad idea in a semi-final.

Enjoyed the Belgian French commentary.

Oh, and las Malvinas son Argentinas 😀

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France loses on Bastille Day, quelle dommage.

I missed the match because we were at a fancy restaurant in Ghent.

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Antwerpen – Ghent

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Amsterdam – (Rotterdam) – Antwerpen

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🇳🇴 – 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 1–2 ducked out after 90 full minutes, so missed the winning goal.

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Amsterdam in high summer is an overrated destination. At least got my steps in.

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🇪🇸 – 🇧🇪 2–1

I watched this in a hotel in Amsterdam and would have preferred Belgium to meet France in the semis, but Spain deserved to win.

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Hamburg – (Osnabrück) – Amsterdam

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🇫🇷– 🇲🇦 2–0

Mbappé missing a penalty, don’t see that everyday. But he redeemed himself in the end.

Considering our location a Belgian win tomorrow would be awesome.

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Halmstad – (København) – Hamburg

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🔗 Dante Stella – Nikon F6: and so it goes

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🇵🇹 – 🇪🇸 0–1 football is like 90 minutes chasing the ball, everyone kinda settling down for extra time and then a substitute dishes in a goal. Super fun.

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🇧🇷 – 🇳🇴 1–2 wow, what a match, and what an upset. Lots of happy Norwegians, and even more unhappy Brazilians.

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Happy Birthday USA! 2 * 💯 + 💯/2 = 🎆🎇🎆🎇

Too bad about the birthday clown being the one in charge.

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🇵🇾 – 🇫🇷 0–1 lots of red white and blue - both national flags and pyrotechnics at the start of the match.

No pyrotechnics on the pitch tho. Fitting that the only goal was a penalty struck by the most persecuted player on the pitch, Mbappé.

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Today I learned that David McComb (lead singer in The Triffids) had his ashes scattered on the family farm in Jerdacuttup.

They soaked me in brine and they stewed me in juice
They took out my eyes and replaced them with glass
And with skin made of leather, and teeth made of dice
I slept in the peat, under ten feet of ice

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For some reason, this is the week when GenXers woke up, looked around, and realized it’s not the world they grew up in anymore. Specifically the Internet is not the same! Shock! Horror! How come these people’s formative experiences in high school or college aren’t preserved in amber for all future time?! There oughta be a law!

Weird how today’s surveillance capitalist internet flowed directly from the California Ideology of these people, and yet it’s not their fault at all the world looks like it does.

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🔗🇸🇪 SVT: Pricerunner stämde Google – får över 14 miljarder i skadestånd

Pengarna går rakt ner i Klarnas ficka, om inte domen överklagas.

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🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 – 🇨🇩 2–0 England advances, because it’s not a major championship without them losing spectacularly in penalty shootouts.

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