Recently updated blogs

This is my response to Manu's article for the IndieWeb Carnival on digital relationships. As someone who grew up in the 90s, I spent my formative years and much of my teenage years without a screen. I wasn't even much of a gamer as a kid. I would spend as much time as possible outside. Getting up to all kinds of shenanigans in my local village. I had a positive …

The following is an “exam”. To my knowledge, nobody has ever passed it, as it is an extremely difficult challenge. But I am firmly convinced it is possible, and it makes for an interesting discussion.

Rarely has a Blu-ray set been more aptly named than French Revelations, a recent Flicker Alley release featuring two French-language films: Fanfare D’Amour (Fanfare of Love) and Mauvaise Graine (Bad Seed). I’m always up for a foreign film, but I was especially looking forward to checking out these two: Fanfare D’Amour (1935) was the inspiration for the hit 1958 comedy Some Like It Hot, and Mauvaise Graine (1934) marked the …

Taught By Thirst is a new Mesoamerican themed single player Quake map that I made for Remix Jam, a 3 week community level design event where we all adapted multiplayer maps from other games for Quake. The definition of "remix" was kept loose on purpose, and anyway some of the fun is in figuring out where the map came from... although that's not the case with mine: I clearly adapted …

Love Motion

Last week I implemented support for generating very simple (grid only) collages from photos/images in my image processing infrastructure. I had wanted to create some simple grid-based collages of some photos, and I was somewhat surprised to discover that neither Krita nor GIMP (free/open source image manipulation software) seem to provide any built-in functionality to generate this type of output, without manually setting up grids/guides and resizing and positioning each …

Our first release of 2024 is here! This one features many small improvements and fixes, plus a big new feature many people have asked for: newsletters / email subscriptions! Download v0.15.0 now, or read on to see what’s new in this version. Major Features Newsletters / subscribe by email (#478) Now readers can subscribe to receive blog posts via email! Connect an email service to enable email subscriptions and automated …

An update to this blog is severely overdue, it appears. I hadn't realised it had been so long since I had last posted.There's been no big leap forward since the autumn but there have been developments in a number of directions.Rolling stock acquisition continues steadily.The most recent arrivals are a suitably ragbag selection of carriages to represent the final few years of steam haulage on the Cambrian, made up of …

There’s very little we can say about Apple’s App Store policies that we didn’t say when it launched in 2008, in 2011 when it first tightened the rules, or in 2020, when Epic tried to stunt its way out of them. Meanwhile, the world has moved on: generative AI is the centre of tech innovation, excitement and company creation now, not smartphone apps. The Vision Pro might swing the pendulum …

Caltrain recently published a strategic financial plan update, where we learn that maintaining each EMU in the new electric fleet in good working order is expected to cost $1.2 - 1.5 million per year, a significant increase from last year's estimate. This post seeks to answer the question: is that crazy?This analysis revisits and updates an older post here.Historical vehicle maintenance costs Note these figures are in constant 2023 dollarsThe …

As i have indicated in my pre-AGM comment end of last year i intend to look at developments in the OpenStreetMap Foundation less on an acute level and regarding current events and more focus on long term developments, trying to help people better understanding those. This is the first post i am writing under that paradigm. In 2019 i last looked at the membership structure of the OSMF and how …

– The other day, an MMM reader stopped by and left the following comment on one of my older posts about the principles of FIRE: “While I still find some of MMM’s advice relevant, it seems like every FI blogger out there worked in tech 20 years ago, pulled down a 6 figure salary and bought a house for a bag of potatoes before 2019. I wasn’t smart enough to …

I spent a lot of time in TV studios in my yoof. My dad was a sound engineer, and I took any opportunity I could to bunk off school or use the holidays to go and hang out on whatever he was working on. I’d generally be left alone, because my dad had an actual job to do, so I’d raid the vending machines, chat to bored camera operators, or …

Last weekend I went to Cambridge to see the Kettle's Yard exhibition Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia and Friends. Laura Cumming wrote in her review last November 'I can hardly think of a more uplifting show for the dying days of autumn' and I felt the same way on a cold day in January. 'Everything about it,' she goes on to say, is bright, beautiful, hopeful and as amiable as …

Late last year I started looking at a microtonal pitch quantiser for my modular synth setup, and then I remembered that I had an Arduino Nano and an Adafruit MCP4728 Quad DAC sitting in a drawer, waiting for me to overcome my fear of soldering, and thought that fiddling with these would be better than spending several hundred Euro. So I soldered some headers onto the DAC and got it …