Recently updated blogs

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear …

In Our Name: Royal Letters, Power and Diplomacy in Scotland and England (1513-1542) Performing and Resisting Power in Early Modern Life Plate 1 from Thomas May, Arbitrary government displayed to the life, 1690. Image from The Folger Shakespeare Library (www.folger.edu) Online Symposium, 19th May 2023 Call for Papers: Ideas, acts and practices of power were intrinsic to all levels of early modern life. This online conference will explore, question and …

I've spoken at a lot of events this year, some small community events, some large multitrack conferences, some meetups. All the events have had one thing in common. Organisers who care. Organisers who care about the community as a whole, the experience of the speakers and the experience of the attendees. This is what set Modern Frontends apart so starkly from the rest. The first red flag went up for …

Have you tried any blindfold activities with your child? If your child goes to a Montessori school, it's likely they have tried some sensorial activities like the pink tower, knobbed cylinders, thermic tablets, perhaps even the trinomial, binomial cubes or roman arch while wearing a blindfold. What is the point? Wearing a blindfold takes away the child's sense of sight, and therefore the child needs to rely their other senses …

Two weeks ago, I noticed a tweet by Jason Lengstorf about a Netlify project called Dusty Domains. The idea: use a domain that you registered but never actually used, "ship a site to Netlify and turn that dusty domain you’ve been squatting on into real money for charity". Well. I have plenty domains, most of them unused. And I had had an idea about a particular one a few days …

A few weeks ago I gave a talk for Smashing Meets about Web3. Find the talk description below. You can watch the video of ‘Web3: creating problems where we need solutions’ on Smashing Magazine’s Vimeo. Web3 is one of Silicon Valley’s latest buzzwords, hoping to become a movement. Blockchains, cryptocurrencies, the metaverse, and NFTs may paint themselves as futuristic solutions to tech and society’s problems, but who really benefits from …

The Audi museum mobile special exhibition entitled "More Than Red – Passione Ducati" will see around 50 Ducati models from past and present exhibited.

Instant Lettering, A Letraset Database. From Hoosier Type Co.

Why write a blog post somewhere nobody has published in five years, in a new WordPress interface where you recognize… yeah, nothing? Where somehow you can’t even upload a JPG or PNG file you downloaded from another site “for security reasons” without converting it first? Or get paragraph tags or linebreaks working inside blockquotes? (Really? On Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s own World Wide Web???) Because sometimes there is no other place …

Good news! The Dacia Sandero is now, despite used car prices going a bit… daft, available for under two grand. Bust out the balloons, fire off the party poppers and bust out the cake, for this is joyous news. Or at least, it is if you want a Dacia Sandero. If you don’t want a Dacia Sandero (weird if you don’t) then put all the party paraphernalia away until something …

The year is 2016. It was a Monday, starting my second week of my first trip to New York in August, and I was sitting on the subway. I think I was just looking at my phone, not paying much attention to anything when suddenly, approaching a station, someone hands me a drawing. Of me. I was flabbergasted; this guy just gave me a sketch of me, and an amazing …

Creatives for Change is a Manchester-based art collective responding to the biggest challenges of our time by raising money for charity. Using creative skills as a force for good. Each year they set a different poster brief, and support a different charity. I was invited to design a poster to respond to this year’s brief of ‘Restoring Nature’, raising money for the Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Manchester and North Merseyside. …

Ahhh! Year end holiday break. This is deeply needed. Ten days of long walks, reading, writing, and perhaps some planning ahead this stretch. The past week turned out rather well after hitting a wall, but no resolution, but others also seeing the pain and how backwards things are and working to resolve them and bring them closer too modern without repeating known problems and pains of past years so to …

Wow, long time, no posts! Anyway, about them text-to-art generative models going about, eh? Surprising nobody: I am extremely into them. I’ve been using DALL-E and MidJourney since they came out, and even though tons has been written about them, I wanted to give a slightly different overview: the perspective of someone who isn’t interested that much in their realism skills. I think that the most compelling place for ML …

In 1972, the government drew up plans to construct a deportation facility off the coast of Ireland that could house as many as 70 million people - the entire population of the UK, if need be. The intention was to make it an exact replica of the United Kingdom and call it Bad Kingdom. Nobody, it seemed, fulfilled the increasingly stringent criteria of what it meant to be truly British. …