Recently updated blogs

This post presents bits and pieces of Hollywood history appearing in an assortment of little-known films, many unavailable for decades. I closely follow Dave Glass’s invaluable YouTube channel. You never know what brief scene from an obscure film will reveal more Hollywood history. To begin, check out these scenes from the 1924 Billy Bevan comedy Bright Lights, starting at 05:25 HERE and again at 06:05 HERE. Do they look familiar? …

Wow, just wow, muchachos… Now, admittedly I’ve turned into something of an astronomical Luddite who is easily impressed by modern technology. Hell, I’d still be using NexRemote if they’d update it to a version that would take advantage of all the features of my 10-year-old Celestron Advanced VX mount. What’s an ASAIR? What’s plate-solving? What sort of witchery is all that? If I didn’t write the occasional Sky & Telescope …

The following was published in issue 13 of MacGuffin Magazine. It recapitulates some of the contents of my interrobang series and adds some new details to boot. I think — I hope! — it’s a little more Enjoy! The Speckters lived in a postwar apartment near Gramercy Park in Manhattan. Their collection of printing presses lived in a rented apartment across the hall, a three-thousand-pound Columbian press balanced carefully across …

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 …