Recently updated blogs

There have been recent controversies and scandals in higher education in the United States. Many contributors and readers of this blog have (Irish) university connections. Is there a discussion needed about the relevance, or not, to Ireland of these issues, which concern the question of free speech, variously interpreted? Probably so, since free speech does not defend itself, our history is hardly one of free speech, and our new (so-called) …

Back in May, Eugen announced that I’d joined the team at Mastodon gGmbH, to look after Developer Relations. I was helping out in different ways, and getting to know the community across different Fediverse projects, since the start of the year; it was great to be able to spend a small portion of my freelance time working on something that I personally believe in, that I’m excited about, and where …

Image: a solar panel with charge controller and lead-acid battery. Photo by Marie Verdeil. Readers have told me they like to build small-scale photovoltaic installations like those that power Low-tech Magazine’s website and office. However, they don’t know where to start and what components to buy. This guide brings all the information together: what you need, how to wire everything, what your design choices are, where to put solar panels, …

I publish this blog post with some nervousness, as I’m not a historian or musicologist. This is something I feel strongly about though, and as ever am very happy to receive feedback and corrections in the comments, either on this post, or on the fediverse or facebook. Luigi Russolo was an Italian painter and composer who wrote the Art of Noises manifesto in 1913, which has become influential particularly in …

Colour is more important than you could ever imagine # Red is the colour of hatred, anger, power, aggression, adrenaline, worry, jealousy, murder, blood; faux-love, hearts, strawberries, stress, lust; and Mario. In theory, red is not my colour. My skin is olive undertone. Tall, dark with brooding thoughts, ever cogitating. Autumnal, exuberant and fiercely loyal. I have no raw red. Not mainlining it in any case. My mind is orange …

I bought my mother a MacBook Air for Christmas. About a year back, I’d switched to a secondhand iPhone, but my family is all on Android. I have her email saved in her contact information on my phone, and that email is now associated with her Apple ID, which is now associated with a device that supports iMessage. My texts to my mother therefore switch over to iMessage automatically. These, …

Wszystko było w porządku, dopóki BASIC nie pojawił się na scenie. Edsger Dijkstra w halucynacji AI z 2023 roku Prostota jest ostatecznym wyrafinowaniem. Leonardo Da... Read more

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 …