Recently updated blogs

That’s it, I’m no longer posting to this site. New blog posts can now be found over on Substack at Andrew Old’s Education Battleground, or sign up to receive them as a newsletter. Details of signing up for paid content can be found here. Since the last time I posted on this site the following […]

On stage at Radio City Music Hall, I hid The Power Broker. All 1,200+ pages of it. I clutched the paperback close, under my academic regalia. On stage, helping deliver diplomas to eager graduating students at SVA, I sat behind the unmatched Robert Caro himself during a not-brief graduation ceremony where he would deliver the final Commencement address. I would ask him to sign the hidden book afterward as we …

The remains of The Cluniac Priory of Our Lady of Thetford The Cluniac Priory of Our Lady, Thetford, was first founded on the Suffolk side of the Little Ouse river by Roger Bigod in the early twelfth century during the reign of Henry I. Bigod founded the Priory instead of making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Approach from the south View of the remains of choir arch from the …

The Estonia disaster of 1994, in which a Baltic Sea ferry sank and hundreds of people lost their lives, symbolizes a problematic phenomenon in Swedish society: faith in the state. This event has raised deep questions about the limits of trust in state institutions, especially in Sweden, a country known for its strong faith in state institutions.The immediate reaction to the disaster and the subsequent investigations showed that many Swedes, …

UI = f(data)(state)

patgavin:Former Bethlehem Steel siteSteelstacks, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

In August I bought a Kinesis Freestyle Edge keyboard off of eBay. I’ve been using it for about four months now, and I’m typing this review on it. I’d been wanting to try out a split keyboard for a long time but didn’t want to spend a lot of money on one. Good quality split programmable keyboards start at around $200. The Freestyle Edge I found on eBay was new …

I've decided to migrate this blog to a quarto-based blog format. All future posts will be found here: https://swingley.dev/blog2.

WARNING: This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Picard Season Three, which as of this writing has been out for the better part of a year.In the spring of 1994 Star Trek fans were treated to the wonderful TNG finale "All Good Things". It was a little technobabble-heavy, but it was still an affectionate send-off to the TV adventures of the Enterprise-D crew as they made the jump to the …

Vincennes Review of Books 2023 is here!Key:* = Excellent, highly recommend~ = Actively bad, do not recommendFirst readsThe Book of Form & Emptiness–Ruth OzekiLove in Idleness–Charlotte Mendelson Straight Man–Richard Russo *The Complete Magazine Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1921–1924–F. Scott Fitzgerald *The Book of Goose–Yiyun Li The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot–Lyndall Gordon The Liar’s Dictionary–Eley Williams The Coaching Habit–Michael Bungay Stainer Cleopatra and Frankenstein–Coco Mellors The Waste Land: …

I’ve been writing these posts since 2015, and, especially in recent years, I keep asking the same question: what is time anyway? This year is no different. Or, it is different because there are new griefs and fears and time is moving in ways both slow and fast and it slips through my fingers before I know what to do. Part of this feeling comes from the year’s circumstances. I …

This is probably going to be short as this year is perhaps the most unproductive year I've ever had.As usual, I start this off with a compilation of monthly "highlights" that I've already listed in my monthly newsletter.January ⌨️ Got my first wireless mechanical keyboard. 👨‍🎨 Made a diagram with Excalidraw. 📹 Made a nice video. 🎮 Played around with some pretty cool UI (1) (2). February 💉 4th jab. …

How to serve protomaps tiles with NodeJS.

While working on a changelog-generation script for my vsvg project, I wanted to display the list of contributors as circular avatars, just like GitHub does in multiple places. After a few Google searches and some failed attempts, I identified a couple of key tricks. The first is about obtaining the avatar image for a given GitHub account. Although the URL is hard to predict, adding .png to the account page …

I really enjoyed attending and speaking at LeadDev Berlin in 2023. Here are just a few of the things that I took away from the conference. When to make quick decisions I learned the most from Nicky Thompson’s excellent talk, “Making work (and life) less stressful by making better decisions”. This was jam packed with information to help us understand how our brains work (both for and against us) when …