Recently updated blogs

The Times has reported that next month the UK will to deploy 20,000 military personnel across eastern Europe as part of the NATO exercise Steadfast Defender. They will be accompanied by one of the Royal Navy’s two aircraft carriers, eight other warships and F35 fighter jets. The article quotes Grant Shapps, the UK Defence Secretary, as warning that the world had moved to a ‘prewar’ phase as global conflicts escalated. …

In the first part of this chapter we discussed what we might need live regions for, and how to create them using HTML and ARIA. In this part, we’re going to discuss what live regions are not suitable for and why, and we’re going to discuss more robust ways to implement some common UI patterns that you might otherwise consider using live regions for. After that, we’re going to go …

After 25 years of running this blog under various names — all of which can be lumped under the "Archidose" monicker — I've decided to shut it down, moving this hobby, this labor of love, to Substack, which I have used since mid-2021 and where I will continue to send out weekly newsletters focused on architecture books, but in a new format. (You can subscribe to my newsletter here or …

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 […]

This nebula is very, very dim and therefore it's not very popular with astrophotographers as it takes a long time to get a decent image. All in all this image took me over 50h of total exposure time over multiple weeks.The nebula itself is quite similar to many other nebulas with a center that glows from oxygen and sulphur emissions embedded in a larger area of hydrogen gas. There's also …

This is an exceptionally long post detailing pretty much everything I learned at an event shortly before Christmas at Meta’s offices in San Francisco. I’ve been delayed in writing it up because of traveling back to the UK for Christmas and other commitments – and because I wanted to capture everything. It’s roughly written, and I’ll probably edit it a bit after posting. If you have questions or comments or …

A few years ago, we interviewed Jen Cardello for Finding Our Way, and she shared that her team (UX Research) is peered with “market research, behavioral economics, brand, and advertising research, and customer loyalty” in an independent Insights team. The idea was for research to avoid a functional bias, so that it couldn’t be “weaponized” by marketing or design. And while UX Research is still typically found within a UX/Design …

Paul Simon got there first.. I’m giving up ‘intelligence’ for 2024. That is, I’m not going to use the term ‘intelligence’ except to critique it as an inherently flawed construction firmly grounded in race science and unable to sustain the weight of current usage as a measure of cognitive ability that can help us assess human, animal, or machine-based capabilities. It doesn’t do the work we want it to in …

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 …

A building on a street corner often provides the opportunity for visually striking designs with this being the case for the former Commonwealth Bank building on the corner of Liverpool and Elizabeth streets. The impressive concrete ribbing and sheer visual bulk provides a commanding presence. The building was officially opened in 1954 to great fanfare, with thousands lining the streets to take a glimpse of the bank which was described …

Wanted to fire up OmniOS to play with and didn’t have any spare x86 hardware to hand so decided to figure out running it in UTM on Apple Silicon, meaning it needs emulation as OmniOS is x86 only. Grab the ISO from the OmniOS downloads page, I used the LTS release but the current stable should work too. Just make sure it’s the ISO version, not USB, etc. Open UTM …

1. Close Your Eyesby Victor Erice"The unluckiest filmmaker in the world," was how Ben Sachs described Victor Erice. The funding cut or witheld entirely for projects realized and unrealized, years without financing, dear friends dying before their time, and lately a great movie going undistributed after of a fiasco of a Cannes premiere. As always the central tragedy of film history is people not knowing what they have on their …

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)