Rupert Goodwins

When your broadband's down and the priovider's status page is spitting out things like '/2026 15:57 Exchange Name: N/A Incident Headline: Fibre - Under Investigation - IL2SOLT - BAAQJU /rack=1/shelf=1/slot=LT6/port=14 - Arkwright - NKW", the feelgood factor is negligable.

"I Have No Mouth And I'm Ice Cream" -- Ben and Jerry's flavour that tested worst.

Fun bit of Frippery - find out which King Crimson track Lester Bangs thought sounded as if written for an ad for vaginal deodorant, and stay for the awesome Under Heavy Manners. For best effect, follow immediately with Hard Times from the League Unlimited Orchestra. youtu.be/icgthx7Pe8I?...

Happy Equinox! open.spotify.com/track/7b8Oh5...

Also -- good luck Edinburgh itomorrow in the 12th European Tram Driver Championship in Warsaw! www.tramem.eu

Gotta love discovery -- email between Microsoft and OpenAI appears in court, reveals LLMs as toxic kleptofest destruying all they touch. www.404media.co/doom-loop-op...

Morpho-functional innovations in Shibantan fossils fuel Ediacaran frond debates. Coffee and paleo-Youtube, show me a better way to start the day.

Tried to find how to add TouchID to my Mac Mini sans the useless -- to me -- Magic Keyboard or Apple Watch. Apple: Fuck off, crip. You don't deserve biometric sec. Worse, caught myself muttering "I'm not going to burn any more tokens on this". AI Threat is more insidious than thought.

Go on. You know you want to. open.spotify.com/track/3HVX5r...

Jammed in eye, bowmen sly, and ponies toddling For tonight I'm gonna slay old Harold Godwin Norman hordes flash their swords, make Saxons cry-oh Son of a gun, we'll have big fun on the Bayeux

What actually happened with the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident reads like an Iain M Banks novel, and not one of the lighter ones.. Just the opening chapter... youtu.be/u15N3l4RT80?...

If you've done nothing wrong, please send me £13 billion and we'll say no more about it.

Ah, security. They've heard of it. nelson_hawhaw.wav www.youtube.com/shorts/GQoQk...

Very good talk about creating reliable software -- yes, even in C, you crazy kids -- from SQLite inventor youtu.be/V_qzqY1bb7I?...

Yet to read the book. Already joining the fan club.

For some reason, the Spotify a\go is feeding me stoner pop, and I am not displeased. open.spotify.com/track/0C2jnJ...

Found an intense postpunk new wave funk and experimental band from New York, full of energy and invention and clearly a good thing. Also clearly, with no idea what theirname sounds like to British ears. can;t stop laughing. Could not wear the T-shirt. Sorry, Gorilla Toss. youtu.be/bqICL_EwlOo?...

Two PR emails within five minutes, both startung EMBARGOED, which guarantees they are about companies I've never heard of doing things nobody cares about. One AI vertical rebranding snd snother with s product variation so tĥuddingly obvious it could be an Archers plot line? Oh boy. Right again.

If you have a third-party DNS server set up in your router, could you check on a DNS leak test site to see if your ISP is intercepting your DNS port 53 traffic and routing it to their servers anyway? I have Quad9, but Zen DNS seems to snaffle traffic unless I enable DNS-over-TLS.

Plus, the cuts go a lot deeper. Disasterous for UK astronomy. www.youtube.com/shorts/5rcvB...

Jodrell Bank petition to keep funding the Lovell Telescope open. its annual budget is around a third of the House of Commons catering budget... www.change.org/p/save-jodre...

You do not turn off Jodrell Bank. Aux armes!

Today's urgent task: design earbuds with a transparent mode that filters out the phrase 'picky bits' and replaces it with the preferable sound of a whining Labrador with explosive diarrhea.

Report from Spain's La Razon newspaper about the fires near Madrid threatening NASA's Deep Space Network facility near Robledo de Chavlea, which has been evacuated. No damage to the DSN as of when that was written, however. www.larazon.es/actualidad/f...

This may have been the most shimmering misguided steaming travesty of a Prom ever perpetrated.

One day. you're watching an early '80s documentary about radio telecoommunications in Norwegian, and a little gem of radiophonic music pops up that you can track to source, and you feel that the day has been won. youtu.be/wvczRu-bIJM?... youtu.be/zXWW4ZCu_To?...

Not unrelated, how had I missed The Riches? Their producer slips in a solo on this one, no prizes for guessing who and the prog link...https://open.spotify.com/track/3cPtZw0oqMEkKlGSF0SLkc?si=gUcy5LWCSTqCI0tNtSYQ1Q&utm_source=copy-link

Last night's Prog Rock Prom was a lot more fun than I expected. Carl Palmer and Peter Hmamill shaking hands after the closing great gates of Kiev elp style was particularly good -two old men and a drum solo.

Business concept: a chain of Catholic-themed bacon shacks called Corpus Crispy.

Turns out that if you cancel federal tracing and controls on food contamination, your county enjoys a massive surge in three-week untreatable explosive diarrhoea, and nobody knows from whence the brown laser cometh. Happy birthday, America. youtu.be/DxGvCj-LFmM?...

Gbosrd on my Samsung tablet just shrank for no good reason -- again -- to unusable size. Had learned how to fix this from last time, but Settings has been reworked by a skilled sadist. Had to nuke and reinstall. Worst UX this year. Why, Google?

Huge fan of public transport, abhor violence and try to practice compassion. However, having got home half an hour late after to missing my stop due to two rugtats' 100dB competitive whine-out of I wANT BOOBIE for 15 BLOODY MINUTES behind me on the bus, I'm in Club Ba'al's Learjet.

Bungface Out! Binface In!

Farage: I made Brexit happen, but the consequences are everyone else's fault. I am the most threatened politician, because milkshake. I'm going to talk a lot about my daughter, because it's bad to talk about my daughter. Worth five million quid of any crypto baron's ill-gotten.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a CRISPR. www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

At the end of a typically trying payment process, Scottish Power actually had a Leave Feedback button. Which took me to an unrelated page. It's the hope that kills you.

My venerable father got one of his Bible limericks read out as part of the opener by Jack Dee on I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue just now. They seem to think he's dead. he's very not, so buy his books! www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

@rupertg.bsky.social - was that your dad who just got mentioned on ISIHAC?

With longwave now vacated across Europe, it should be declared a community experimental broadcasting band and thrown open. I may already have a transmitter that can do 198 KHz and a plan for Pirate Radio 4, but don't mind me. The rewolding pf wireless starts here!

Don't know what's the deeper ponder - that the BBC has been on longwave for over a hundred years, or that I've been listening for comfortably more than half of that.

Wham bam thank you ma'am...

Very sad for Starmer the man, very glad for the demise of Starmer the PM. The Life of Brian exchange at the end of Burnham's swearing in - "He's not the Messiah!" - was the perfect glint of absurdity in the political psychodrama.

Man is born free, but everywhere is in supply chains.

Macbeth shall never vanquished be until / Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against him.

Love Digging Into China. Don't agree with all the logic, still a reliable jumping off point to look at Sino v Western issues. This one, about AI, energy and silicon, and the two economic structures, is a tad too credulous about US narratives, but a goood watch. youtu.be/d5jASMOK2hk?...

Meta blames massive porn torrent gobble on horny staff, not AI-nal insertions. Pull the other one, says judge. I'm not swallowing that. www.law.com/therecorder/...

Another marvel: the eradication of fatal cervical cancer through the HPV vaccine. Hundreds of women alive who would be dead. This is what we can do together in the service of truth, what we cannot do any other way. Also, fuck cancer.