Recently updated blogs

Oscar Wilde by MaxThe New York Public Library recently hosted an exhibition on Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity from October 20, 2023--January 28, 2024. A small book (around one hundred pages), with text by Margaret D. Stetz, with Mark Samuels Lasner, describes many of the items showcased in the exhibition. Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) is perhaps best remembered as a caricaturist (he

Photo card included with some copies of the Sunday Funnies 45 on Skoop. From left: John Rice, Luke Pride, Gary MacShara and Tom Sheffer. The Sunday Funnies 45 on Skoop 1070 has two excellent original songs, “Sunny Covington Avenue” an uptempo rocker, and “It Won’t Happen to You”. The labels list Gary McShara (actually Gary MacShara) as the song writer on the labels, with publishing by Buna Music. I don’t …

As a long-time barista turned professional coffee blogger, I'm often asked about the different types of coffee beans. One variety that generates both interest and confusion is caturra coffee. Where does this coffee come from? What sets it apart from other varietals? In this beginner-friendly guide, I'll answer all your questions about caturra. I'll cover everything from how it's grown and produced to the characteristics of the caturra bean and …

It might be hard to believe for some younger anglers but for many of us the only way we could indulge in our daft pastime at home was through words and pictures, magazines and books. The only worthwhile filmed fishing was John Wilson, there were very few videos, no Discovery channel and certainly no Youtube. So most of us scratched the itch by reading and found information and inspiration whilst …

An Unsung Masterpiece Rediscovered: Viewing NotesAdapted from Émile Zola's novel, this definitive movie version of Nana [Jean Renoir, 1926] is a masterpiece, the longest Renoir film, and restores one of the master's earliest successes to a length of 2 hours 49 minutes. What follows are some viewing notes from my recent revisitation of the film, -The lines of suitors, but with hierarchy.-The hair on the comb-bristles.-To liken one film to …

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 …