Recently updated blogs

Restic is good backup software. It’s a command line tool for backing up filesystems to various local and remote options. It is well documented, easy to set up, secure, and quite fast. It’s a very professional product. I am now backing up all my Linux systems with it. Note it’s a sysadmin tool; I don’t think there’s a friendly consumer GUI. The underlying data model is its genius. Backups are …

Source: belonging.berkeley.eduPart 1Yonah Freemark, a senior research associate with the Urban Institute in Washington, DC, is someone I had the occasion of meeting a couple times in my career. A little more than ten years ago he worked for Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council, an independent nonprofit organization created in 1934. MPC’s mission then, and since, has been to challenge inequity and create stronger Chicago neighborhoods and communities. Freemark’s time there …

What happened was, Brian and I were chatting about W3C GitHub issues and Brian mentioned how really long issues are annoying to search and read, because GitHub has this thing where if there are too many comments on an issue, it snips out the middle with a “Load more…” button that’s very tastefully designed and pretty easy to miss if you’re quick-scrolling to try to catch up. The squiggle-line would …

I was back in Rome recently for a strategic retreat and thought it might be interesting to wear an Italian dessert fragrance every day to mark the occasion. Caveat: I have incredibly narrow parameters for the gourmand category in general (I have no desire to smell like food) but I get even more exacting when it comes to Italian dessert fragrances. I have a serious weakness for Italian desserts and …

I just released v2.3.0 of @badgateway/oauth2-client, which I wrote because there weren’t any lean, 0-dependency oauth2 clients with modern features such as PKCE. This new version includes support for: Resource Indicators for OAuth 2.0 (RFC8707). OAuth2 Token Revocation (RFC7009). Hope you like it!

Nobel Laureate T. C. Koopmans wrote one of the most famous economics articles of the twentieth century, “Measurement Without Theory,” a devastating review of an important, and in many ways useful and meritorious, study of business cycles by two of the fathers of empirical business-cycles research, Arthur F. Burns and Wesley C. Mitchell, Measuring Business Cycles. Burns was then the head of the National Bureau of Economic Research, which had …

As a birthday present, I purchased and migrated to a new personal domain name. To mark the occasion, I put together a gallery from archive.org of my personal site throughout the years, from zacharyhamed.com to zhamed.com to zmh.org. July 2001 June 2004 September 2004 February 2012 April 2012 May 2013 October 2014 September 2015 Today I’m particularly excited to be moving to a .org domain. When I thought about it …

I have been blogging at The Ideophone since 2007, and not all of it has been as ephemeral as my PhD promotor once feared. My short post documenting the etymology of Zotero is apparently the only scientific documentation of where Zotero’s name comes from; it has served as a source in Wikipedia for ages and has received over 15 scholarly citations. It was also a blog post on here that …

Our mark, let's call her “E”, doesn't know that this is a surprise birthday dinner. Cake is in play. We keep the conversation light in wait of the music. One problem - the card is still blank! So begins the great birthday card heist of '24. This was a Tanzwüste kinda week. Melodic and cheerful. Wednesday evening was a real highlight. I can only gush about how delightful it was …

The parasite serves as a useful simulacrum for post-modernism. Post-modernity engages us with a kind of viral discourse, which seeks to comprehend an object without subsuming it under a system of concepts; without, that is, deploying a regime of truth (Lorenzini, 2015) that dominates and forces the object into a conceptual grinder. Instead, it does something much worse. It attempts to open up a line of interactivity, where the object …

Sheila Gear’s Foula. Island West of the Sun (originally published in 1983) is a new edition of a timeless memoir of life on a croft on Foula, an island 20 miles or four hours’ rowing to the west of Shetland. For all that the author was writing about crofting and the island in the 1970s and 1980s, … Continue reading Sheila Gear, Foula. Island West of the Sun →

The teaching profession is one of the most important vocations in terms of its impact on future generations. Yet at the same time, teachers are undervalued and in each decade, they have to tackle particular ‘problems’ and ‘mindsets’ that are unique to each generation. Invariably, the present generation is viewed by society as the ‘most misbehaved’. The only thing that is consistent is that schools are underresourced and ‘problem pupils’ …

Harry Spear was born Harry Sherman Bonner on December 16, 1921, in Los Angeles, California, to Joseph Bonner and Louise Spear. He was born at French Hospital in Los Angeles and initially resided at 5619 Fernwood Ave., Hollywood, California. His father served in the Navy, and his mother was a homemaker. After his parents divorced, his last name was typically listed as Spear. Spear worked as a child actor and …

Contemporary Belgian artist Alain Biltereyst works on abstract paintings characterized by bold patterns and colors. Most of the time, the shapes he depicts are not purely the result of chosen arrangements but act as a sort of “found art”: they are extracted from existing signs, advertisements, commercial signage, graphic decorations on trucks, billboards, and streets. These shapes silently inhabit our urban environment, possessing inherent graphical qualities, yet often going unnoticed …

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 …