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Of all London’s lost rivers it is the Walbrook that is the most irrefutably lost: lost to time, lost to place… well, almost. An important source of water in Roman times, when its banks were lined with the workshops of Roman industry – tanneries, potteries and glass workshops – the river has not been visible … Continue reading "The Ghost of a River – The Walbrook"

So you want to ride Ventoux? If you need a little support, I'm now offering a bespoke service to help you arrange your Ventoux cycling holiday. Here's how I can help.

Bungay Castle gate towers In my post about Mettingham Castle (https://asuffolklane.wordpress.com/2023/05/15/mettingham-castle/) I mentioned that I visited a cafe next to Bungay Castle and had a cup of tea there. For my first post in six months I thought that I would tell you about the ruins of Bungay Castle which are hidden behind the main shopping street in the town. Sadly, it is not possible to walk round them at …

Mask of the Rose is a dating-and-murder-mystery virtual novel set in Failbetter’s Fallen London universe. In line with that genre, it typically gives the player between two and four dialogue choices for conversation – occasionally more or fewer than that, but usually keeping things in that range. The trick was, though, that we wanted to actually grant the player a lot more latitude than that to decide what they wanted …

I just realized that I hadn’t posted this. Several months ago, I read about whisper.cpp and started playing with it. To quote from their docs, whisper.cpp is a High-performance inference of OpenAI’s Whisper automatic speech recognition (ASR) model: Plain C/C++ implementation without dependencies Apple Silicon first-class citizen – optimized via ARM NEON, Accelerate framework, Metal and Core ML https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp In other words, a fast and free speech transcription app that …

.NET Blazor has been touted as a revolutionary framework that allows .NET developers to build interactive web applications using C# instead of JavaScript. It's mainly aimed at ASP.NET Core developers who want to build SPA-like apps leveraging the .NET ecosystem and a wealth of existing libraries and tools available via NuGet. It's Microsoft's latest instalment in an attempt to gain traction amongst frontend developers. With the recent release of .NET …

Years ago I wrote about my trouble with a job queue in Postgres, in which table bloat caused by long-running queries slowed down the workers’ capacity to lock jobs as they hunted across millions of dead tuples trying to find a live one. A job queue in a database can have sharp edges, but I’d understated in that writeup the benefits that came with it. When used well, transactions and …

CSS today has advanced features that make browsers powerful, our work easier and JavaScript dependency minimal. Here is a list of some of my favourite new CSS features, including masks, container queries, and parent selector. The post Modern CSS appeared first on tourist wannabe.

The other day, I was thinking about less-obvious skills that I find helpful for working as a software engineer. Some skills are obvious, like understanding technical topics, learning new things, and thinking like a computer, but there’s a separate class of unobvious skills that an outsider may not immediately think of when they imagine a career in software.1 Empathy and communication are the main ones that come to mind.2 3 …

The people afraid to show their peers or bosses my technical writing because it also contains furry art are some of the dumbest cowards in technology. Considering the recent events at ApeFest, a competitive level of stupidity is quite impressive. To be clear, the exhibited stupidity in question is their tendency to project their own sexual connotations onto furry art–even if said art isn’t sexual in nature in any meaningful …

Every so often, somebody makes a bot account in the fediverse, expects people to love it, and is then surprised when people get mad. If you are thinking of writing or hosting a bot account on Mastodon, Pleroma or other fediverse software, here are some tips that will make it less likely that a server admin will ban your bot and yell at you. 1. Identify your bot as a …

Paul Linebarger (aka Cordwainer Smith) was an interesting guy. Among other things he was heavily involved in developing psychological warfare techniques for the US military. He was also a close adviser to Chiang Kai-shek and the godson of Sun Yat-sen, the first leader of the Kuomintang (Wikipedia) The table Pinlighting is a hell of a way to earn a living. Underhill was furious as he closed the door behind himself. …

Like many parents, I have a kid that loves playing games on his tablet. He's gone through several iPads over the years. One tablet has managed to survive his rough-and-tumble lifestyle, and it's a budget-friendly option from Amazon. The Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids Pro has proven itself as a perfect match for a rambunctious youth. The Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids Pro offers a blend of durability, parental control, …

The weekend markets live-ish and direct in my hand A few years ago, I ended up spending 9 months living in South Gippsland, about two hours from Melbourne. We were doing a renovation on our house and had wonderful builders who took care of everything, so we left town for 9 months and left them to it. It was mid-Pandemic, too, so that provided a bit of extra incentive. My …