Recently updated blogs

I came across this chart from an infographics that claims to show which zip codes in the U.S. are the "dirtiest" (link). I won't go into the data analysis in this post - it's the usual "open data" style analysis that takes whatever data they could find (in this case, 311 calls) and make some hay out of it. It's amazing how such analyses frequently land on the Top N, …

Conway’s Game of Life is a simulation developed in 1970 describing a grid of binary cells and transition rules for each cell which depend on the state of the cell’s neighbors. It’s capable of creating some pretty cool patterns. This variant of the Game of Life uses three overlapping channels, so instead of just one simulation, there are three simultaneous simulations. I visualize these in the three color channels, red, …

Earlier today I got a surprise invitation to Google Foobar,1 a series of coding tests presented as a text adventure. You’re presented with a normal terminal interface, and a few familiar commands like ls, cd, cat to navigate around the file system and print the readme files. There are five levels to the challenge, and it’s allegedly used as a secret hiring technique, with the winning prize being that you …

Different policies introduced by a social planner, whether the government of a country or the head of an institution, lead to situations in which different peoples' lives go better or worse. That is, in the jargon of this area, they lead to different distributions of welfare across the individuals they affect. If we allow the unfettered accumulation of private wealth, that will lead to one distribution of welfare across the …

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports: For years, cops and other government authorities all over the world have been using phone hacking technology provided by Cellebrite to unlock phones and obtain the data within. And the company has been keen on keeping the use of its technology “hush hush.” As part of the deal with government agencies, Cellebrite asks users to [Read More...]

Even the most unobservant readers of the blog will have spotted that August's Pylon of the Month is a bit different and I have @moakcarlsson to thank for bringing it to my attention on Twitter. I'll certainly be getting hold of a copy of the book she is currently writing that includes this and other CEGB adverts. The image of a pylon being plonked down by a hand from the …

How to Keep Coffee Fresh with Airscape Coffee Canister Few things pain me more than fetching beans from an already open bag of once delicious coffee only to be met with a flat, lifeless aroma instead of that heavenly scent of the fresh roast. The key to keeping the freshness and taste of coffee lies in keeping the beans or grounds shielded from the four enemies of freshness: oxygen, light, …

When I set out to build a simple computer with an FPGA ( here, here, and here), my end goal was always to display something on a computer monitor. VGA was a natural choice because it’s simple and analog, rather than the complex digital nature of something like HDMI. All you have to do is place voltages on some pins at a specific frequency and the monitor is able to …

Something has been bothering me for some time since moving to PipeWire on my Linux boxes, and that is the way multichannel audio devices are handled. As we all know (and loath), Linux audio is complicated and terrible, but the upshot is that it gives us a lot of control and the possibility of extremely low latency — critical to realtime audio recording, processing, programming, etc. The post Multichannel Audio …

I’ve started work on sourcing and painting up some scenic elements and terrain for the 15mm Terminator project, and am kicking things off with some wrecked cars and a suitably scrappy junkyard.I’ve found that 15mm vehicles in a pristine state can be fairly expensive to buy, given that in the Post-Apocalyptic wilderness they will be just heaps of rust - so have resorted to utilising some HO/OO scale railway pieces …

The first time that I came across the name Roy Rosenzweig was in the textbook for a class titled simply, “Historiography.” The book discussed Rosenzweig’s 1983 book, Eight Hours for What We Will, as a key work in American labor history. Since Eight Hours is a history of workers in Worcester, Massachusetts, just thirty miles from where I grew up, I went to the library and checked out the book. …

Every year we try to produce something really special. A guitar that showcases the best that we can do using the finest materials we can get our hands on.This year we have knocked it out the park with a new guitar called Reina. Reina is an M12 - a size and design that has become our calling card and TSG’s signature sound. She has back and sides made from The …

some thoughts about web desktops

These disembodied elements set against an otherworldly backdrop are a perfect image for this novel about Benjamin Vaughn, a young illusionist who dies under mysterious circumstances at the height of his short career. New York-based Joan Wong designed it. She spans both the world of book cover design and editorial illustration commissions. Published by Nouvella in 2019