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Prusa is a 3D printer manufacturer which has a long history of being admired by the 3D printing community for high quality, open source printers. They have been struggling as of late, and came under criticism for making the firmware of their Mk4 printer non-free.1 Armin Ronacher uses Prusa as a case-study in why open source companies fail, and uses this example to underline his argument that open source needs …

Photographed with a Fujifilm X-T5 + XF150-600mmF5.6-8 R LM OIS WR – 377 mm focal length – 1/500″ at f/7.1 – ISO 320 National Elk Refuge, Wyoming, United States – Newe Sogobia (Eastern Shoshone), Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla, Shoshone-Bannock, and Tséstho’e (Cheyenne) land This photograph, titled “Bighorn sheep at the National Elk Refuge, Wyoming. December, 2023.”, was originally published on All-Encompassing Trip.

This time next year, we'll bring back the Greek, Old Church Slavonic, three kinds of Swedish, Haitian, Icelandic, and Quenya....

This is the last of a series of posts I’m doing as a sort of Python/Django Advent calendar, offering a small tip or piece of information each day from the first Sunday of Advent through Christmas Eve. See the first post for an introduction. Python contains multitudes There are a lot of container types available in the Python standard library, and it can be confusing sometimes to keep track of …

For a presentation at work where it’s tricky to add video but an image is ok, gifski worked brilliantly for converting a video to a gif. Even with the defaults it was fine. I needed to tweak it a bit as I needed it a bit smaller, -W worked great for that for me, but there are a bunch of other ways too. Here’s one of the Montpelier partridge from …

What kind of life would a dog have at the North Pole? What could a puppy do to help Santa? Under The Fir Tree: The Day of St. Claus (もみの木の下で The Day of St. Claus), an interactive storybook for Mac released in 1994, follows a small dog after they get stranded far from home and adopted by Santa. The Day of St. Claus opens with the dog and their relationship …

I’m closing out 2023 with the first installment of a project I hope to continue on a regular basis throughout 2024.

Out of all the stars dubbed “box office poison” by the Independent Theater Owners Association in May 1938, the label has become most strongly associated with Joan Crawford. For the most part, being called “box office poison” ultimately became a footnote in the careers of the stars included on the list. Some moved on from Hollywood, but others stars successfully moved past it and entered into new phases of their …

Happy Solstice! In honor of Winter Solstice, I've made an updated list of popular lights. Today is the day you're most likely to need a flashlight in the northern hemisphere; if you're shopping for one, I hope this will help. There is no best flashlight, so this is an amalgamation of what enthusiasts have been buying and recommending to others lately along with the author's arbitrary preferences and biases. Please …

Non-fiction Viviane Robinson Reduce Change to Increase Improvement: My brilliant colleague at the National Institute of Teaching, Paula, recommended this. It has been hugely influential in developing leadership approaches that are clear and simple, and is full of helpful and … Continue reading →

December brought episode number three, the last of the calendar year 2023. This edition of “The Almanac” first aired on Wednesday the 6th at 8pm Eastern over on Uncertain.FM, and got a replay the following day at 4pm. By now you’ve hopefully got the drill: The first Wednesday of every month brings a couple […]

Never let a name fool you: Yvette Mimieux. The ooo-la-la French seductress thing was all the rage in the early 1960s cinema and TV. After WWII, French culture spilled across the Atlantic and wormed into American culture. French plus female, along with even a minimal degree of attractiveness, propelled a woman into the hearts, minds,… Continue reading Evan Engber and Yvette Mimieux Kayak the Coquille River

In Rainham Marshes, at the edge of the Thames, lie strange and abandoned craft. These odd survivors are concrete barges, stranded by the shore and surrounded by myth. Why were they built? It's not certain, but evidence suggests that they were constructed during World War II. Given the shortage of steel for wartime construction, concrete vessels were a tempting alternative. They had been developed in the nineteenth century for use …

Sometimes a story takes a number of years to ripen. And sometimes two or three stories merge in unexpected ways. I just had a moment of convergence when new infill development, sub rosa adaptation, and wartime migration all collided. Back in the 1990s I used to live across the street from an old gas station. It was still functioning at the time, but some years after I moved it went …

This is a post about multiple wordles and the point at which they hit diminishing returnles. If you don’t know what Wordle is, this post is not for you and also, how is life back in 2019? Just so you know things are about to be terrible, maybe forever. Maybe I’m just bad at it? Ever since we all collectively lost our minds over trying to guess a word once …