Recently updated blogs

Dear Readers, Over the years, some of us (the past and present members of the collective that runs this blog) have been fortunate enough to meet some of you. We say fortunate, because such encounters have always been positive. Many of you have a background in anthropology, having studied it in college, or even a graduate degree, but — as is the case with most people who study anthropology — …

You’re allowed to have preferences. Set your preferences. I’ve been playing with user styles. Not like fancy site-specific styles, just setting the defaults that I want. Slightly larger text, nicer fallback fonts, etc. Why not? Firefox/Gecko: about:preferences (GUI) Chrome/Blink: chrome://settings/appearance (GUI) Safari/WebKit: go to… Settings / Advanced / Style sheet… (you’ll need to write CSS) As a developer I worry about seeing something different than what other people will see …

From: https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/all-my-friends/pl.u-KRoNGI18eDm?a=join&it=bo1G4SM8NAbs9VX08The latest version of iOS—17.3—just dropped*, and with it comes a great and long overdue update to Apple Music: Collaborative Playlists. There’s delightful touches throughout, including emoji reactions per song, which strikes me as just the right amount of social in a Music app. If you want to test it out, update to 17.3 and add something good (no pressure) to my shared playlist (link below). * Can operating …

It doesn’t matter if you’re working in a complex organisation or not. It’s pretty common to work on projects where you have opinionated colleagues who have a “stake” in the product or feature working. Either to their part of an organisation or their reputation. This can be the starting point for a lot of terrible features and ideas. Or things that sound very believable but aren’t quite right. Particularly if …

In October 2023, I updated the Laravel Artisan Cheatsheet to Nuxt 3.x. Along with several other changes, I wanted to add a new feature to the site, an API. Versions The /api/versions endpoint simply lists all versions of Laravel supported by the site: [ "10.x", "9.x", "8.x", "7.x", "6.x", "5.x" ] When Laravel 11.x is released, it will of course be available here too. Packages The /api/packages endpoint is similar …

The DOOR outcome strategy – “Desirability Of Outcome Ranking” – is a relatively new approach to composite outcomes in clinical trials. Rather than collapsing multiple outcomes – death, heart attack, new-onset angina, bad hair day – into a single binary ‘bad thing’, the idea is to rank the trial participants by how bad their outcome is. DOOR is obviously attractive: these bad events are not all equally bad, so we …

I’m not sure if I’m misremembering but my brain says there was a time when blog posts did not have “post titles” by default. Coming up with a post title is one of my least favorite exercises when writing a blog post. Often how these things change on the internet is a bit hard to unearth (particularly in the early 2000s) but it could have been as innocent as some …

Thanks to the ongoing efforts of labels that specialize in soundtracks — and the fans who purchase their products, thereby maintaining the pipeline — quite a few scores have received enhanced treatment since my two books came out in April 2020.Taking them in the order of release... Music Box Records released an expanded version of Philippe Sarde’s score for 1977’s Mort d’un Pourri (Death of a Corrupt Man) in June …

Back in May 2022 — let the record show, 20 months ago — I analysed the cost of the ingredients of an excellent home-made pizza. Based on the costs of bread flour, salt, yeast, tinned tomatoes and extra mature cheddar, I found that the per-pizza cost of ingredients was an satisfyingly low 53p (plus another 15p for the electricity to bake them, amortised over four pizzas for a total of …

All set for replacement windscreens. Work is ready to start with the Accurscale class 37 reviewed earlier this year – it’ll become 37037 as it was in the summer of 1992. The first job will be the windscreens – the plan is to full Shawplan arrangement with the backplate and separate windscreen etch. The aim being to maintain consistency in appearance across the class 37 fleet. More updates soon!

An article I wrote for the Conversation explaining what antitrust laws are and how the big four tech companies are breaching them. Read article here Permalink

Cover of first edition of Repent in Haste. There was a time when John P. Marquand was considered the best novelist of manners in America, even — according to a Chicago Sun review quoted on the dust jacket of Repent in Haste, “the best novelist in the country.” He never made such claims for himself, and regretted Little, Brown’s decision to use the Chicago Sun quote, since it only encouraged …

There was a time, before the screens took over, when people read these things called "books". Remarkably efficient things. Always-on display. Could survive dropping from a great height. Somewhat fragile but who cares when you could mass produce thousands of the things for hundreds of dollars.

Steamboat Willie (1928) was one of the earliest cartoons with synchronized sound. That is, it had post-production sound effects; this was something new and exciting. Now that the cartoon has recently entered the public domain[bbc24] we can safely delve into its famous soundtrack. See, there's something interesting about how it sounds... If you listen closely to the soundtrack on Youtube it sounds somehow distorted. You might be tempted to point …

I’m delighted to announce that I have brought on Stephen Hackett to help me with my apps. He will be working on customer communication, marketing and generally creating space for me to focus on the programming oriented parts of my work. Something that’s been rattling around my mind recently is the phrase “Independent as in Freedom, not Independent as in Alone”. For so long I think I have been conflating …