Recently updated blogs

This three ingredient fig jam is designed for canning and uses just fresh figs, sugar, and lemon juice. It’s bright, flavorful, and so easy to make. If you find yourself awash in figs every year, keep this recipe handy! Hello friends! I realize that it has been an absolute age (more than a year!) since I’ve posted anything new here. I have desperately missed sharing my canning practice with all …

We’re thrilled to unveil our latest endeavour – the IMMERSIONS project! Our new initiative, the IMMERSIONS project, is funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe program, and is set to transform the world of electronic music and cultural engagement across Europe. This collaborative effort brings together four countries – Poland, Norway, Portugal, and Lithuania – in an ambitious endeavour to create a European hybrid music network that bridges geographical and …

Here we are going to look at several diagnostic plots are helpful when attempting to answer a causal question. They can be used to visualize the target population, balance, and treatment effect heterogeneity. Setup I’ve simulated data to demonstrate the utility of the various plots. In each simulation, we have four pre-treatment variables: var1, var2, var3, and var4, a treatment, t, and an outcome y. I have also fit a …

I recently left my job at Netlify and have been looking at what's next. At Netlify I became very interested in the power of ML, AI and LLMs in particular, and that's the area I've been looking in. But there's a lot of hype and buzzwords around, so I wanted an explainer I can point people to when they ask "but what is all that stuff really?" It's intended to …

Grouping items in an array is one of those things you've probably done a load of times. Each time you would have written a grouping function by hand or perhaps reached for lodash's groupBy function. The good news is that JavaScript is now getting grouping methods so you won't have to anymore. Object.groupBy and Map.groupBy are new methods that will make grouping easier and save us time or a dependency. …

I’m very excited to announce my first proper album: Melodic Guitar Music. It’s ten original guitar tunes, inspired by Django Reinhardt, The Beatles and Chet Atkins. I’d describe the style as “Django phrasing + Chet Atkins fingerpicking + 1960s pop sensibility.” I’ve wanted to record an album for many, many years. I’ve been posting YouTube videos on-and-off since 2007, but generally the YouTube video format is very ephermal and not …

I know what you’re thinking. “David Benoit?! We’ve waited a year for a record review and it’s David Benoit?!? What the heck is Tarik doing writing about HIM?!” Weeeeell hold on there. This may seem out of place, and this is definitely the most recently-recorded music I’ve written about so far on my humble blog, but this record is major to me on a personal and musical level. With that, …

I was late. The minibus was already at the stop. I did something I very rarely do and broke into a run. I was the last one there. I was shown into a minibus that, at first glance, appeared to have no spare seats in it. The driver indicated a space at the back that would have suited a small child if they had been prepared to rough it a …

If you had to choose software to begin working in architectural design, which would be your first choice? Many might think that a BIM solution such as BlenderBIM or FreeCAD would be the ideal choice. In many cases, they offer numerous advantages. However, despite these advanced and modern workflows, a simple 2D CAD solution can still address most of our project needs. Using a 2D CAD solution has numerous benefits …

So, it’s been almost a year since Steve Wright in the Afternoon came to an end. This popular Radio 2 show had been on air for nearly 24 years, and Steve Wright himself has been a constant presence on UK radio for nearly twice as long.I thought it was worth me looking back on this end of an era one year on from that event, and also one year on …

I recently encountered an open source project that hadn't received updates for a while. The issue tracker had ~200 open issues, ~70 open pull requests, and CI was partially failing. It's not uncommon for projects to go through lulls, and that's where this project was at. As is often the case, some person had posted an issue to ask "Is this project still maintained?" The person ended with this line: …

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 …

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 …

Just a heads-up that the listing for my forthcoming book Beyond Hope: Collective Power and Mutual care in the Long Emergency has just gone live on Amazon here in the UK, and that you’d be doing me a real solid by pre-ordering it via the link. (I’ll update this with links to alternative/non-Amazon sources as they become available.)