Recently updated blogs

Today is the 25th anniversary of my mother's death. This isn't going to be a tribute post as such - I have already written one of those, on the occasion of the 11th anniversary. It is true, however, that an item belonging to my mother has inspired this post...to wit, her book log / book diary? / book book?!. This is a small hardbacked notebook in which she used to …

Introduction # As we gear up for the release of Bonfire Classic 1.0 – which includes not just the software but also extensive documentation and tutorials for people to customise and extend functionality in-depth – we're testing the framework's modularity. Our goal is to understand the workflow involved in planning, designing, implementing, and shipping a Bonfire extension from scratch. Our first experiment involved implementing a design pattern from the Prosocial …

Perhaps the sharpest distinction between science and pseudoscience is that science has a far keener appreciation of human imperfections and fallibility than does pseudoscience (or “inerrant” revelation). If we resolutely refuse to acknowledge where we are liable to fall into error, then we can confidently expect that error—even serious error, profound mistakes—will be our companion forever. But if we are capable of a little courageous self-assessment, whatever rueful reflections they …

When I got the new (to me) car it only had one key – although it had two fobs, it was just that the actual keyblade on one of them was missing. (Which is quite an achievement in the first place!) I like having two working keys for the car – it means, among other things, that I can leave it with people (valets, MoT/Servicing etc.) without leaving my full …

Let’s talk about Power Electronics. It’s a genre of music largely credited to the band “Whitehouse” (which is really more or less just one person, but for the record, I am a fan of those sorts of shenanigans). Whitehouse’s output basically consists of high pitched synth noises, very loud kick drum noises, and shouting. On their earlier albums, that shouting consisted of simple, repetitive phrases– the song “Erector” mostly is …

“The court concludes that the conditions are met” The decision of the ICJ to impose provisional measures is a vindication for everyone who spoke out against the war – for the Palestinians of course and above all – but also everyone who marched, and for the hundreds of people in Britain, and the tens of […]

In a nutshell: -Chiswick’s neighbourhood coffee shop -Offering pinball, a Japanese arcade, fresh pastries…and coffee -An effortless welcome served with meticulous care Chief Coffee: serving you coffee, pastries and…pinball If you find yourself walking along Chiswick High Street, you might just think you have stumbled upon the perfect antidote to city life. I raise you – take a left (or right – not sure of your coordinates) into an unassuming …

Those who do not react flexibly to the demands of the situation make themselves slaves to their stubbornness. When processing James Clear’s Atomic Habits1, I deviate from the actually recommended reading method. The reason is: I work the way the book requires and not the way I would like to. Atomic Habits is perhaps the best-selling book on habits and how to work on them. Reading this book was one …

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 …