Plutonic Rainbows

Two new albums are out tomorrow. Lateral, a sublime hour-long ambient drift subtitled Big Empty Country, serves as the analog counterpart to Eno and Wolfe’s Luminal, bathing in the near-still sonic waters Eno first conjured nearly fifty years ago. On their debut collaborative LP, Eno and fellow conceptualist Beatie Wolfe deliver ambient-tinged Americana lullabies that echo Lou Reed and late-era Spiritualized — forming the full-voiced companion to the atmospheric purity of Lateral.

On his first solo album in five years, Abul Mogard unveils Quiet Pieces a deeply personal ambient suite shaped by memory, emotion, and rediscovered family relics. Sampling his late uncle’s collection of 78rpm records, Mogard breathes new life into old sketches, blending nostalgia with spectral synthwork. The result is a graceful drift through loss, reverie, and renewal — a hushed, haunting meditation for fans of Eno, Cortini, and Jeck.

Just picked up the 4K edition of this movie in its uncut form of just over two hours. This film has been on my list for quite some time, so I am glad to finally get to see it.

Starting the new novel from Stephen King, entitled Never Flinch.

Version 1.10.0 introduces comprehensive automatic image format conversion. Supported image types (JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF) are now seamlessly converted to optimised WebP during the build, eliminating the need for manual preprocessing. The system detects and handles transparency in PNGs, applying white backgrounds to maximize compression. These enhancements are fully integrated into the responsive image workflow, offering detailed logging, smart caching to skip unchanged files, and output quality tuning—set at 85 for large images and 80 for smaller ones.

The responsive image generation pipeline has also been significantly upgraded. Each image now automatically produces multiple sizes (400w, 800w, 1200w, 1920w) using srcset and sizes for efficient loading across devices, cutting mobile bandwidth use by up to 95%. Original files are preserved for lightbox viewing, and lazy loading has been added to further optimise performance. Enhancements to image_processor.py and ResponsiveImageGenerator enable smart, conditional processing, while maintaining backward compatibility with existing WebP assets.

Earlier improvements in 1.9.0 and 1.8.0 focused on development workflow and performance. A new watch mode monitors project directories and triggers automatic rebuilds on file changes, streamlining live development. The build system now uses watchdog for reliable file monitoring with detailed logging and configurable behaviour. In 1.8.0, Lightbox2 script loading was fixed to run only when image links are present, reducing load times and eliminating redundant script execution on text-only pages.

Photographed in 1991, for Calvin Klein.

During the Phase 2 redundancy cleanup of the My Blog Project repository, significant improvements were achieved across three key areas of optimisation. The image asset cleanup successfully removed 6 unused files totalling approximately 1.6MB of storage, including the elimination of an exact duplicate (eternity.webp) while preserving the referenced version (eternity_1990.webp).

This optimisation resulted in a perfectly efficient image repository with 100% utilisation of all 10 remaining assets. Duplicate post file resolution addressed content redundancy by removing 2 duplicate markdown files after careful content analysis—specifically, removing an earlier announcement post about the “A Fire Within” fragrance in favour of a more detailed review, and consolidating two different “Bois Talisman” posts by keeping the more informative technical review.

The virtual environment dependency audit revealed that previous maintenance had already optimized the package set from the originally identified 34 packages down to 19 essential dependencies, with the only required action being the restoration of the bleach package for HTML sanitization functionality.

Combined with the previously completed Phase 1 log file cleanup, the total repository optimisation achieved approximately 165.6MB in storage savings while maintaining full functionality and improving overall repository health and maintenance efficiency.

I resolved a functionality issue with Lightbox2, where image links were opening in separate pages instead of displaying in the intended lightbox overlay. The problem was traced to build_blog.py, where HTML sanitization was stripping out the essential data-lightbox and data-title attributes required by Lightbox2. To fix this, I updated the ALLOWED_ATTRIBUTES configuration to preserve these specific attributes while retaining the overall security of the HTML sanitization. I then updated all relevant documentation files — CHANGELOG.md, CLAUDE.md, and ISSUES_AND_IMPROVEMENTS.md — to reflect this improvement in version 1.6.0, and committed and pushed the changes to the remote repository with a detailed commit message explaining the technical solution.

I have successfully addressed all critical issues identified in the redundancy analysis for the blog project. The most significant improvement was cleaning up the massive log files that were consuming 164MB of storage – the build.log (28MB) and deploy.log (136MB) have been cleared down to minimal placeholder files of 44 bytes each.

To prevent this issue from recurring, I updated the .gitignore file to use a comprehensive *.log pattern instead of the previous specific deploy.log entry, ensuring all future log files will be excluded from version control.

Upon investigation, the reported orphaned pagination files (index2.html through index103.html) were found to not actually exist – the build system is correctly generating index.html for the first page and page2.html, page3.html, etc., for subsequent pages as intended.

These changes provide immediate benefits including substantial storage savings, cleaner repository structure, improved deployment efficiency, and prevention of future log file bloat in the codebase.