Recently updated blogs

Chances are, you’ve heard of a class of computers called Chromebooks. They’ve been around since 2011 and, in spite of the scorn heaped upon them during that time, Chromebooks have become rather popular devices. Chromebooks run an operating system called chromeOS which, no matter what some people say, is more than just the Chrome web browser. You can even argue that chromeOS is Linux, at least under the hood. That …

Previous Philosophical Transactions: JP Callaghan on Lithium Pharmacokinetics Lithium in Scottish Drinking Water with Al Hatfield M’s Experience with Potatoes-by-Default Jon on One Year Post-Potato-Diet Neoncube on The Meat and Veggies Diet Hi SMTM, I’ve now had the pleasure of watching many people encounter A Chemical Hunger for the first time. Some of them get wide-eyed with wonder, and some of them make the same expression that babies make when …

This reposted from the Cyberselves blog, which has died. Original date: 2018-02-05 Here are three metaphors for how we think about digital and robotic technologies: First, as tools. Passive instruments which extend our own power. Hammers enhance your hitting, video calling extends your presence, algorithmic trading merely implements the rules you designed for trading. Tools seem like passive objects, without their own desires, but a moment’s thought will tell you …

If you are interested in religion and gender in the ancient world like I am, there is a fairly strong likelihood that, at some point, you’ve encountered some version of the claim that, at one point in human prehistory (variously conceived as sometime in the Upper Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, or all three), either all human societies worldwide or at least the majority of human societies in Europe belonged to …

“Playback of this birds[sic] song is restricted.” “Playback of this birds[sic] song is restricted.” “Playback of this birds[sic] song is restricted.” I am not a board games person, yet I always seem to find myself surrounded by them. Such was the case one August evening in 2023, during a round of the bird-watching-inspired game, Wingspan. Released in 2019 by Stonemaier Games, designer Elizabeth Hargrave’s creation is credited with a dramatic …

***I’ve been absent for a couple of months because I was locked out of the account! Just to let you know that Chris and I continue to do our podcasts and there has been an episode on medieval x-files and now bird spirits. This is a fragment of an article on Fairy Census 2 I’ve […]

I'm making good progress on the Azure B2C User Management App that I'm building. I've been really thinking about how to roll out the app for the initial release and think that the best way to do it is to provide a published .Net Core MVC website. Users will be able to download the compiled website with instructions on how to set up the site and get it working right …

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 …