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Tehran has fired missiles and drones at its Gulf neighbours causing blazes at a Kuwait refinery and a Bahrain warehouse. Israel has launched more air attacks against Iran. Powerful explosions were reported in the capital. Iranian media said sixteen of its cargo ships anchor...

The words shark (the animal) and shark (a predatory scoundrel) may have two different origins. “This would make ‘shark’ possibly the only word borrowed from a Mayan language into English directly.”

Quiche Browser is a rather astonishing app from the one-man indie developer Greg de J./Quiche Industries. (What a killer domain name that is.) Quiche Browser is a very robust, exquisitely designed, stunningly handsome web browser exclusively for iPhone. Just iPhone — althoug...

Parachord is “a new kind of music player that invites all your streams, local audio files, and playlists scattered across multiple services to the same party”. Interesting!

Every Fashion Designer, Explained. If you don’t know anything about fashion, this video will get you up to speed quickly. Vivienne Westwood, Nigo, Issey Miyake, Miuccia Prada, Dapper Dan, Hubert de Givenchy, etc. etc.

A strange brew that's hard to resist, even for a modern day microbe. In the war on devilish microbes, our weapons are starting to fail us. The antibiotics we once wielded like miraculous flaming swords seem more like lukewarm butter knives. But in this episode, originally r...

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said Israel will hold off future attacks on Iranian gas fields after being asked to do so by President Trump. An Israeli attack on Iran's South Pars gas field on Wednesday, followed by Iranian attacks on Qatari gas installa...

Research: SQLite Tags Benchmark: Comparing 5 Tagging Strategies

I had Claude Code run a micro-benchmark comparing different approaches to implementing tagging in SQLite. Traditional many-to-many tables won, but FTS5 came a close second. Full table scans with LIKE queries performed better than I expected, but full table scans with JSON arrays and json_each() were much slower.

Tags: json, sqlite

Hm. Somehow, the plot was a bit unsatisfactory. But there's still lots to like: the theme song is one of my favourites by Carpenter, the gory practical effects are great, I liked the characters, the humour, the atmosphere. Good one, but (after first watch) not my most-liked Carpenter film.

👍 Recommended!

300+ issues of the UK music magazine NME from 1969-1983. The ads alone are incredible.

Jeff Johnson, linking to my “Your Frustration Is the Product” piece: My browser extension StopTheMadness Pro stops autoplaying videos and hides Sign in with Google on all sites. It also hides sticky videos and notification requests on many sites. For more extreme measur...

Javier C. Hernández, reporting for The New York Times:

He was responding to a question about why Japan and other allies had received no advance notice of the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran.

“We didn’t tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise,” he said. “Who knows better about surprise than Japan, OK? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor, OK? Right?”

There was some laughter from the officials and journalists gathered in the room. “You believe in surprise, I think, much more so than us,” he added.

As Trump sinks further into dementia and his presidency slides further into disarray, his administration, in a sick way, gets funnier and funnier.

Link: nytimes.com/2026/03/19/us/politics/trump-japan-pearl-harbor…

Anne Applebaum, writing for The Atlantic (gift link): Specifically, they remember that for 14 months, the American president has tariffed them, mocked their security concerns, and repeatedly insulted them. As long ago as January 2020, Trump told several European official...

“The Tenth Muse is an art discovery engine. Over 120,000 artworks from museums and institutions — searchable by feeling, mood, atmosphere, era, and medium.”

Mark Simonson:

Just by coincidence, I discovered a copy of U&lc magazine in the graphics classroom. U&lc was published by ITC, the International Typeface Corporation, a typeface publisher, and the designer and editor was the legendary Herb Lubalin. I’d never seen such beautiful typography and design. It was a motherlode for an aspiring typophile like me. [...]

I decided right then that someday, somehow, I wanted to design typefaces.

Link: marksimonson.com/notebook/view/the-day-i-discovered-type…

Adamya Sharma, reporting for Android Authority: When Google execs previously said sideloading would become a high-friction process on Android, they really weren’t kidding. The company is finally sharing what Android’s new sideloading flow will look like in practice, and ...

Typos Have Plagued Us for Centuries. There’s the 1631 Bible that says “thou shalt commit adultery” but James Joyce resisted some of his corrections: “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.”

Paris now has a cycling network bigger than Amsterdam and “more daily trips in Paris are now made by bike than by car”.