David Barry @pappubahry.com · 11/09/2026Good opening pair of recommendations from Facebook today: 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 08/09/2026Reading the vicious fighting over the Navier-Stokes whatever and thinking of the Clara Collier piece on life without work that I read yesterday. asteriskmag.substack.com/p/we-already... 020
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 03/09/2026A long thumbs-up to the National Gallery of Victoria: good place. 151
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 02/09/2026End of a long twelve days at the State Library of Victoria (not shown: requests requiring the Heritage Collections Reading Room): 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 24/08/2026Difficult to walk around the SLV dome because of all the people taking photos blocking the path. 110
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 24/08/2026Melbourne, much like Sydney, has buildings named after financial institutions rather than resource companies. 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 10/08/2026Background chess history reading taking me on an unexpected trip to Gallica: gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/b... 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 29/07/2026Descriptive notation is usually not found in French or with figurines, but French figurine descriptive was sometimes used; very strange to read at first. www.chesshistory.com/winter/winte... (The chess 'bishop' in French is 'fou', jester.) 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 24/07/20262700chess, now taking a very expansive definition of 2700, tells me that I've fallen more than 14,000 FIDE ranking places in the last 12 months. 010
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 22/07/2026There was once someone who liked cross tables even more than me. 010
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 12/07/2026Early impression of GPT-5.6 is that we're back in the bad old days of hallucinations. chatgpt.com/share/6a53a5... 100
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 11/07/2026Jeremy Gaige: "If I had to bet my life on the accuracy of such data, I would rather rely on this book than any other source, and yet remain in considerable fear for my life." 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 08/07/2026When the Sunday Times (re)introduced a chess column in 1964, they put it on the comics page: 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 05/07/2026Today's accidental microfilm find: graphical representations of a rifle shooting competition. (The Morning Herald, not digitised on Trove for some reason, 1905-07-01.) 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 30/06/2026At the microfilm reader the other week I was eavesdropping on a lady nearby saying how much she appreciated the good Christian morals that infused newspaper reporting in the olden days; she was not reading the Mirror. trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/ar... 020
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 28/06/2026Thinking ahead to how my WA chess history book should be structured. www.melbournechessclub.org/care-for-a-g... 110
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 26/06/2026The most annoying Chrome autocomplete at the moment is the way it takes me to smh.com.au when I type 'world' instead of autocompleting to 'world cup': 010
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 24/06/2026Probabilities are down about 7 percentage points over the last month: predmarketindex.com#overview 100
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 20/06/2026Today's chance microfilm find: on 13 August 1985, newspapers across Australia carried a 95-page supplement about BHP for the company's 100th birthday. 010
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 14/06/2026Last week (1976-06-07) the Sunday Independent didn't print their chess column. This week: 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 30/05/2026An accidental find on the microfilm today was the announcement of the old WA number plate style (1977-01-26, p4). They started at 6AA and went upwards; as a kid I always liked to see the latest letters and occasionally a new first digit on the new cars on the street. 100
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 13/05/2026ChatGPT is very good at searching for stuff. chatgpt.com/share/6a045e... 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 02/05/2026I got Claude to write a script to standardise the background colours of the document photos I took, trying to remove the gradient caused by the off-centre lamp and the shadow of from my hand and phone. It gives a particularly sterile look when my fingers are in shot. 100
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 02/05/2026State chess association meeting minutes: you'll never guess what major dispute caused this "atmosphere which was highly emotional and volatile" (it was whether the Junior Chess Council should have voting rights on all matters; presumably this decided a rare contested election for president). 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 11/04/2026Seen in the microfilm today, an idle curiosity: neighbouring advertisements in decimal and old currency in 1966: 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 07/04/2026The skill documents (in full, I assume) appeared in the reasoning trace. I asked it to make the python script available for download, so now I have that available for myself locally. 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 30/03/2026Only clear hallucination I've found in my test page is getting the wife's name wrong here (I had to look up the obituary to figure it out): 001
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 24/03/2026I'm spending some time in the microfilm section of the State Library at the moment, primarily looking for news about the Perth Chess Club -- its AGM's were quite reliably reported until 1954. Today I found a brief tournament report from 1962 mentioning two people I've played (Leonhardt and Lilly): 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 21/03/2026I've been thinking I should learn about how exp(pi*sqrt(163)) works for ages and write it up as a blog post, but I've been scooped: 000
