I saw a product announcement from Jake Spurlock -- a new feed reader called Today. From the description sounds well-thought-out.

He explains -- "Google killed Reader in 2013. I've been chasing that feeling ever since. So I built it."

I also know someone named John Spurlock, who I worked on some OPML and RSS stuff for Bluesky in 2023. I sent a note of congrats to him, when I really should've sent it to Jake.

Screen shot of the conversation I had with ChatGPT.

And text of the email I sent congratulating the wrong Spurlock.

• Congrats on the new product!
• Haven't tried it yet, I don't generally use Apple's store on my Mac, not sure why. I will do it though.
• Your product looks nice and well-thought out.
• And there are some ways we could work together now that I think you'll find interesting, like using FeedLand to get you instant updates based on rssCloud, assuming you haven't figured out how to support it from a client.
• Also OPML subscriptions are nice too. Another thing I'd like to get going, and need someone to work with on to make it happen.

Also, I wonder if they're related? Have they met each other? Do they know of the havoc they are bringing to the formerly simple world of RSS.

Everyone raves about this series, so I thought I'd grab the first book. It's basically fine, I guess.

It is moderately amusing having the Muderbot be an awkward teenage boy who just wants to watch videos and cringes when people stare at him. But it is a bit one-note. Similarly, evil corporations hiding details from exo-planet surveyors is a trope which has been a thousand times before.

This is a novella, serving to introduce the protagonist and fill us with a little too much exposition. The trouble is that nothing much happens. There's a bit of world building and a light smattering of action - although I found it rather plodding.

Essentially, a lot of telling and not much showing. Rather underwhelming given the hype. I might give one of the many (many!) sequels a go once I reach the end of my reading list.

Not to sound too wistful, but these days, it's easy to forget how modest the amaro options in the U.S. once were. Now, most backbars are lined with a wide and rich spectrum of amaro and European liqueurs, but that was not the case when, as a burgeoning drinks writer in the mid-2000s, I first spiraled down the bitter rabbit hole.

Perhaps that's why, when in Italy, my biggest thrill still comes from acquiring "suitcase bottles" of amaro, those deep-cut discoveries that range from limited-run riservas to special-edition releases, distillery gift shop exclusives (like Amaro Lucano Menta), dusty vintage finds, and yet-to-be imported brands.

At Popina, a modern Italian restaurant on the Brooklyn waterfront, owner and general manager James O'Brien shares a similar affinity for suitcase bottles. When visiting wine producers in Italy, he always makes room for a few special bottles, whether it's a rare wine, an amaro that you can't find stateside or a bottle of vintage Chartreuse. O'Brien views it as a way to surprise and delight guests. "The suitcase haul has always been one of my favorite tricks because it feels the most personal," he says. Offering guests pours from hard-to-source bottles "lets them feel like they tagged along on your trip."

The bottles in my amari collection that have made the transatlantic journey home do possess a transportive quality. Often, it was the "hunt" to secure these bottles that makes them special. Now, though, some formerly elusive brands and expressions have become available stateside. Does a suitcase bottle risk losing its allure when it attains dual citizenship?

Among the many only-in-Italy bottles I typically bring home with me, Bràulio Riserva, the annual limited-run release of the iconic alpino-style liqueur, remains my first love. Less filtered and aged in smaller barrels for up to 24 months, it's achieved a bit of a cult-like appeal among amaro heads, and its dated annual releases makes it ideal for vertical flights and tastings. I used to be able to find it for around 22 euros a bottle, though that's since gone up to around 33 euros to 45. 

There were whispers for years that Bràulio Riserva, part of the Gruppo Campari portfolio, would eventually make its way to the U.S., and sure enough, this past holiday season, I finally spied the amaro at my local bottle shop in Brooklyn. But my brief moment of joy was deflated when I saw it was priced at $82. This is in line with the list price of other Italian riserva releases, but the sticker shock made me balk. I left the Bràulio Riserva on the shelf. 

As O'Brien explains, "being considered more rare, riservas can probably afford to be less price-sensitive. But when they're new to the U.S. market they have the opportunity to see where they want to fall: approachable or luxury?" 

Taylor Mason, a fellow suitcase amaro fan, suspects the word "riserva" is being used to justify higher costs in the U.S. Mason is the chef and co-owner of Luca and Pizzeria Luca in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and he curates a small but growing vintage amari selection at his restaurants. He also helps lead food tours throughout Italy. "While advocates like us will always be singing their praises regardless of the cost, inflated pricing is unfortunate and hard to be looked at as anything other than price gouging," he says. Others, like Patrick Miller, founder and co-owner of Brooklyn's Faccia Brutto Spirits, attribute rising costs to tariff surcharges. "There's a point where brands have to look at the rising cost of doing business and say, 'Do we pass this on to the customer or not?'" he says.

For the Bràulio, the bottle does seem to be appealing to at least some stateside shoppers: Brooklyn Wine Exchange in Cobble Hill says that, since the amaro arrived in mid-December, it has sold almost two cases. Much of that, however, can be attributed to the knowledgeable staff hand-selling the product.

I found this funny , how Apple Music looks like BlackPlayer now

Adafruit furniture

Poverty in Britain has become so familiar that it risks fading into the background. Food banks on high streets; children arriving at school hungry; working families choosing between heating and eating.

Scrapping the two-child benefit cap is estimated to lift nearly half a million children out of poverty. But that will still leave child poverty levels at 28% - double the rate in the 1970s.

A staggering 4.5 million children - 14 million people in all - are living in relative poverty in the UK. And one in five people living in poverty are actually in work. This is happening in one of the wealthiest economies in the world.

This week, Taxpayers Against Poverty published The Nicolson Report: Poverty Benefits No-One (link at the top of the page).

The report's central conclusion is clear: poverty on this scale is not inevitable, but the result of political and economic choices. For years, governments have claimed that tackling poverty is simply too expensive. Public finances are stretched, we are told. The evidence assembled in The Nicolson Report shows this claim is wrong.

Poverty is estimated  to cost the UK more than £75bn every year, through lost output, higher health and social care spending, and reduced tax revenues. It damages health, places enormous pressure on the NHS, weakens productivity, and blights children's life chances.

The UK's economic system actively sustains this failure. At its heart, sits an outdated and unbalanced tax system that over-taxes work and under-taxes wealth.

Most people rely on wages and pay income tax and National Insurance on every payslip, and VAT on most of what they spend. Meanwhile, large amounts of wealth - from property, capital gains, and inheritances - are taxed lightly, inconsistently, or not at all. In some cases, the poorest households pay a higher proportion of their income in tax than the richest.

This is not accidental. It is structural. Wealth in Britain has not been created in isolation. It has been built on publicly funded education, healthcare, infrastructure, legal stability, and social cohesion. These shared foundations made prosperity possible. Yet today, they are underfunded and overstretched, while wealth continues to concentrate at the top. If we are serious about reducing poverty, this imbalance must be addressed.

Tax reform is not about punishment or envy. It is about sustainability, fairness, and funding the systems that allow a modern economy to function. The Nicolson Report sets out a practical "white paper" for this Labour government, if it wants to truly tackle long-term poverty.

With an economy struggling for growth, it recommends several simple, cost-effective reforms to the UK tax system, including:

• a 2% wealth tax on assets over £10m, raising £25bn annually, and enjoying strong public support
• aligning capital gains tax with income tax
• applying National Insurance to investment income
• closing income tax loopholes focused on large accumulations of wealth
• reforming council tax, and replacing it with a proportional property or land value tax

Taken together, these reforms would raise substantial revenue. But more importantly, they would rebalance the system so that it no longer entrenches poverty. Research shows these policies already have popular support. A wealth tax, for example, has the backing of Labour Party members, the wider public and even those most likely to pay the tax, millionaires.

Alongside such tax reform, The Nicolson Report calls for a stronger welfare safety net, action on wage inequality, and sustained investment in health, education, social care, and infrastructure to make lasting progress on poverty. This matters because tax reform is not abstract. It is what enables government to ensure social security covers the essentials of life; to make work a reliable route out of poverty; to invest in public services; and to reduce the regional inequalities that leave entire communities behind.

Preventing poverty is not only morally right; it is economically rational. Recent events and personnel changes in Number 10 have given Keir Starmer a chance to reshape his government and his priorities. He has an opportunity to truly tackle long-term poverty and set his government's own legacy for the 21st century. But will he take it?

With a thematic issue on a vital topic - the rise child poverty, ending on a hopeful note. You will find sharp analyses on the effect of poverty on children's lives, with a spotlight on the communities that are on the front line of deprivation, with personal stories and shared solutions. Click on the image to gain access to it, or find us on Substack.

Journalism by the people, for the people.

The post New report: Poverty is an expensive political choice first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

The US government spent decades funding the development of tools like Tor, which helps millions of people route around censorship and surveillance in countries like Iran, China, Cuba, and North Korea. As of mid-2024, about 35% of the Tor Project's $7.3 million budget still came from federal sources, with the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor alone contributing over $2.1 million in 2023-2024 for expanding uncensored internet access in China, Hong Kong, and Tibet. — Read the rest

The post Trump's aid freeze is killing US-funded privacy tools like TOR appeared first on Boing Boing.

My audio files are named Artist Name - Song Name.flac, I could add their respective track number to the file name but that's damn near 10,000 files I would have to do it manually for

Remembering Stanley Rondeau who died on 13th January aged ninety-two

Stanley Rondeau's great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Jean Rondeau was a Huguenot silk weaver who came to Spitalfields in 1685 as a refugee fleeing religious persecution in Paris. Jean's son prospered in Spitalfields, becoming Sexton at Christ Church, having eleven children, building a new house at 4 Wilkes St and commissioning designs in the seventeen-forties from the most famous of silk designers, Anna Maria Garthwaite, who lived almost next door, in the house on the corner with Princelet St.

Since Anna Maria Garthwaite's designs were exceptionally prized both for their aesthetic appeal and their functional elegance as patterns for silk weaving, hundreds of her original paintings have survived to this day. So Stanley & I went along to the Victoria & Albert Museum in Kensington to take a look at those done for Stanley's ancestor Jean the Sexton, nearly three centuries ago. We negotiated our way through the labyrinths of the vast museum, teeming with school children, with a growing sense of anticipation because although Stanley had seen one of the designs reproduced in a book, he had never cast his eyes upon the originals. And up on the fourth floor, we entered a sanctuary of peace and quiet where curator Moira Thunder awaited us in a lofty room with a long table and large flat blue boxes containing the treasured designs that were the objects of our quest.

Moira - chic in contrasting tones of plum and navy blue, and with a pair of fuchsia lenses which hinted at a bohemian side - welcomed us with scholarly grace, and duly opened up the first box to reveal the first of Anna Maria Garthwaite's designs. Drawn in the wide margin at the top of a large sheet containing an elaborate floral number, this design was the epitome of restraint with a repeated motif that resembled a bugle flower in subdued tones of purplish brown, labelled Mr Rondeau, Feb 5 174 1/2, and intended as a pattern to be woven into the body of a vellure used for men's suiting.

Stanley was instinctively drawn towards his own name revealed before him, leaned forward to touch the piece of paper - which caused Moira's eyes to pop, though fortunately for all concerned the priceless design was protected by a layer of transparent conservator's plastic. Once smiles of amelioration had been exchanged after this faux-pas, Stanley enjoyed a quiet moment of contemplation, gazing with his deep-set chestnut eyes from beneath his bushy white eyebrows upon the same piece of paper that his ancestor saw. I think Stanley would have preferred it if 'Mr Rondeau' had been written beside the fancy design below, because he asked Moira whether the other design for Jean Rondeau in the collection was more colourful but, with an unexpectedly winsome smile, Moira refused to be drawn.

Yet while Stanley's curiosity was understandably focussed upon those designs attributed to his ancestor, I was enraptured by the myriad pages of designs by Anna Maria Garthwaite, whose house I walk past every day. Kept from the daylight, the colours in these sketches remain as fresh as the day she painted them in Spitalfields three centuries ago. The accurate observation of both cultivated and wild flowers in these works suggests they were painted from specimens which permits me to surmise that she had access to a garden, and picked her wild flowers in the fields beyond Brick Lane. I especially admired the sparseness of these sprigged designs, drawing the eye to the lustrous quality of the silk, and Moira, who worked as assistant to Natalie Rothstein - the ultimate authority on Spitalfields silk - pointed out that weavers rarely deviated from Garthwaite's designs because they were conceived with such thorough understanding of the process.

And then, Moira opened the second box to reveal the second design by Anna Maria Garthwaite for Jean Rondeau, which Stanley had never seen before. Larger and more complex than the previous, although monochromatic, this was a pattern of pansy or violet flowers divided by scalloped borders into a repeated design of lozenges. Again drawn in the margin, at the top of a piece of paper above a multicoloured design, this has the name 'Mr Rondeau' written in feint pencil beside it. It was a design for a damask, either for men's suiting or a woman's dress, which Moira suggested would be appropriate to be worn at the time of half-mourning. A degree of formalised grief that is unfamiliar to us, yet would have been the custom  in a world where women bore many more babies in the knowledge that only those chosen few would survive beyond childhood.

Moira took the unveiling of this second design as the premise to outline the speciality of Master Silk Weaver Jean Rondeau, who appears to have built his fortune, and company of fifty-seven employees, upon the production of cheaper silks for men, unlike his Spitalfields contemporary Captain Lekeux - for whom Anna Maria Garthwaite also designed - who specialised in the most expensive silks for women. In response to Moira's erudition, Stanley began to talk about his ancestor and the events of the seventeen forties in Spitalfields with a familiarity and grasp of detail that made it sound as if he were talking about a recent decade. And as he spoke, with the unique wealth of knowledge that he had gathered over a lifetime of research, I could see Moira becoming drawn in to Stanley's  extraordinary testimony, revealing new information about this highly specialised milieu of textile production which is her particular interest. It was a true meeting of minds, and I stood by to observe the accumulation of mutual interest, as with growing delight Moira and Stanley exchanged anecdotes about their shared passion.

Recently, Stanley visited the Natural History Museum to hold the bones of his ancestor Jean the Sexton which were removed there from Christ Church for study, and by seeing the designs at the Victoria & Albert Museum that once passed before Jean's eyes in Spitalfields, he had completed his quest.

'It was a big day,' Stanley admitted to me afterwards, his eyes shining with emotion, as he began to absorb the reality of what he had seen.

Stanley Rondeau sees the design commissioned by his ancestor in the seventeen-forties for the first time

Design for a vellure for Jean Rondeau, by Anna Maria Garthwaite, Spitalfields, February 5th, 1741

The full page with Jean Rondeau's design at the top

Design for a damask by Anna Maria Garthwaite for Jean Rondeau, possibly for half-mourning

Stanley Rondeau chats with Moira Thunder, Curator, Designs, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, over a copy of Natalie Rothstein's definitive work "Silk Designs of the Eighteenth Century."

Anna Maria Garthwaite's catalogue of designs

Designs by Anna Maria Garthwaite for Spitalfields silks from the seventeen forties in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Textile design photographs by Jane Petrie

Textiles copyright © Victoria & Albert Museum

With grateful thanks to Moira Thunder of the Victoria & Albert Museum for making this possible.

You may also like to read about

A Dress of Spitalfields Silk

Dickens in Spitalfields, a Visit to a Silk Warehouse

Dickens in Spitalfields, a Visit to a Weaver's Loft

A 24-hour drinking city that embraces both the theatrical and the historical, New Orleans has been a font for classic cocktails for upward of a century. The city's homegrown recipes are known to have quite a range, too, spanning strong and stirred whiskey staples, fiery dessert drinks and even ice-cold holiday favorites. There's no better way to get to know New Orleans and its nightlife than by experiencing its iconic drinks, one glass—or to-go cup—at a time. But if you can't get to New Orleans just yet, here are a handful of our favorite perfected recipes to transport you there.

Though the Absinthe Suissesse was not born in New Orleans, the city has nevertheless adopted it as its own. With roots in Europe and northern U.S. cities, the minty drink has shape-shifted over time, with variations including or omitting egg white, orgeat, various liqueurs, sweeteners and soda water documented since the 1930s. It somehow made its way into the Depression-era book Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix 'Em, and, decades later, the Cure cocktail book. Kirk Estopinal, a champion of the drink, says, "It has a very Mardi Gras connection to me," adding, "it feels like the kind of drink you want to drink early in the morning."

For decades, swaths of the American media have failed to treat Elon Musk like a CEO with a track record of missed timelines and broken promises. Instead, he is portrayed as a misunderstood supergenius playing 11-dimensional chess with civilization in the balance. — Read the rest

The post How the media keeps manufacturing Elon Musk's "Genius" appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Take your programming to the next level with cross-platform development and AI-powered collaboration. Discover Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2026 for just $49.99 (Reg. $499.99).

Want to take your programming skills to the next level? The key is simple: learn how to work with AI instead of against it. — Read the rest

The post Your favorite developer's favorite development tool just got an AI upgrade — and it's 90% off appeared first on Boing Boing.

In April 2019, Steve Bannon texted Jeffrey Epstein a three-step plan to rescue his reputation: "First we need to push back on the lies; then crush the pedo/trafficking narrative; then rebuild your image as philanthropist." Bannon had spent months filming Epstein for a planned documentary — roughly 12 hours of interviews without ever raising the subject of his abuse of girls and young women or his 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution, according to TheWrap. — Read the rest

The post Bannon texted Epstein a rehab plan, called him "God," shared lawyers appeared first on Boing Boing.