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‘It has never been the BBC’s intention to set itself up as the arbiter of pronunciation, but inadvertently it tends to be regarded as such’. These were the words of Miss G.M. Miller, a long-serving member of the BBC Pronunciation Unit. Part of Miss Miller’s role was responding to complaints about the pronunciation and accent of those speaking on the BBC. To judge by this correspondence many viewers and listeners …

There’s a lot of choice when it comes to rip saws. And unfortunately options usually just make things more complicated.So hopefully the video above will help clear up some of the confusion around which saw to reach for or at least give you something to think about when you’ve got a lot of ripping to […] The post Which Saws Are Best For Ripping Thick Stuff? [Video] appeared first on …

The snow is still here from yesterday. It is enough snow to close some schools, but not others. The kind of snow a seasoned winter-ist would scoff at – just a dusting! The kind of snow that gives a phone-in radio host the excuse to exclaim “Why can’t we cope with a bit of snow, the rest of the world can?” The kind of peculiar, contradictory exceptionalism where he sees …

Photos: “Here’s a favorites album! You can put the photos you like the most in it! There are other albums, and you can share the whole library with your family, but not your albums. Apart from the favorites album, you have to share that one.” Watch: “You can sync any album of photos you want to your watch! But just one.” Lock screen: “You can have a rotating collection of …

In 1942, the literary critic and Princeton graduate, Edmund Wilson, then forty-seven, made friends with a scholar of Russian literature slightly younger than himself, Helen Muchnic. Born in Baku in 1902, Helen emigrated to the US as a child; after an intensely illustrious academic career, she was teaching at the elite Massachusetts women's college, Smith. Wilson did not usually like academics, but he took a shine to Muchnic. They started …

This website just passed its twentieth birthday. In web years, that’s more like a centennial. At the risk of waxing nostalgic, I’m posting a few highlights from our first year.

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 …

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 …