Recently updated blogs

Some people may think that Carla Rossi has done the sensible thing and slipped quietly into well-deserved obscurity, hoping that memories are short and people will forget that she was exposed as serial plagiarist by several independent newspapers, other organisations, and many individual scholars from at least six different countries.Perhaps encouraged by the fact that for several months I have not bothered to respond to, or refute, her tediously repetitive …

An 1851 San Francisco paper described a city of immigrants… I found a lovely line in an 1851 San Francisco newspaper that celebrates the diversity of Gold Rush San Francisco—a boom town whose residents included “Hindoos” (South Asians), “Mussulmans” (Muslims), and people “from the fairy lands of Persia and Arabia”: “In our streets, the fair European jostles with the swarthy Kanaka or the darker Hindoo; the pious Mussulman says his …

We’ve all been there — there comes a time when we must update our Python version to meet a different Python version yet, be it at work or when working on personal projects.Just a quick search about “update python version” and we will be bombarded with suggestions to run python --version followed by brew upgrade python3 or sudo apt-get update.Okay cool. Problem solved right?Not really. Probably 9/10 times an upgrade …

It takes a certain kind of temperament to be a bus driver. My uncle told me that. He drove city buses for forty years and during that time he saw some crazy shit. Women going into labor, couples getting into explosive arguments, people pulling knives on each other, the full spectrum of human experience crammed into 30,000 pounds of steel on wheels. You have to have an even keel, he …

Fancied dusting off the pike rods, so when I saw that the wind was due to ease on Thursday, accompanied by relatively mild temperatures, I booked the morning off and made the necessary preparations. Was up nice and early and made the short trip down the motorway, the moon setting to my right and the first glimmers of orange appearing to my left.Bumped my way down the track to find …

Snow Country – Sebastian Faulks The intertwined stories of Lena and Anton. Set in Austria in the first few decades of the 20th Century. Slow and thoughtful, it left me feeling quite sad at the end. Author page: Snow Country – Sebastian Faulks

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 …