Recently updated blogs

February 2024:We are excited to share that Skiff is joining Notion.Skiff’s mission is to bring freedom to the internet by helping people collaborate and communicate with freedom and privacy. …We’re extremely excited to accelerate our mission by joining forces with Notion’s world-class team. We sincerely hope that the Skiff community will join us for this next stage of our journey. We’re pursuing big plans for making all of our online …

Soon our local hackerspace Toolbox Bodensee has its 10-year anniversary, and it will also be present at the IBO fair 2024 in Friedrichshafen. Some five or six years ago I already prepared a small setup at one of the Toolbox open-door-days with an oscilloscope and a laptop playing Jerobeam Fendersons Oscilloscope Music. But it never looked quite right. So I decided to tackle the topic again this year. 'Function' with …

Love Letter to my Dog It's exactly one year since Kaddi and I drove to the shelter and picked up Tarly the dog. One year of daily walks. One year of feeding, grooming and petting. One year of setting rules and boundaries and sometimes letting them slide. One year of growing closer and more comfortable with each other. One year of falling in love. I had pets in the past, …

src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdeW0q5Qo9wbxo2SYtOFQhWymKq9vkCXfIXT_xLkyPAR9RN-oGpQ2HhIj3tWenJksz9kbSgPkOVSPTjizxX2dTN26KYGBorKPE3eUVT3pZzY_qRVAALkRxXq6A_8tFvkuBl4PQOk3YqrJvqvxHmU6zc7lNd1wpIivvmBjTkv5VpLDblew-iUtzmS8Gtrk/s16000/sleeping_trees.jpg"> The pretty darlings sleep yesterday at Hutchins Farm in Concord, Massachusetts. ¶

We are collectors. We don’t just collect books, we collect everything we like that we find on the beach. Beachcombing is our hobby, which is not only motivated by the joy of searching and finding, but is also healthy. It’s a luxury, a relaxing pastime that gets us away from the computer screen and onto ...

⤳ Highlight of the week was convincing my friend Matt (owner of the amazing When Spaceships Appear record shop) to come down to South East London for a spot of record shopping, a few pints and a pizza. Along the way we stopped in at the Book and Record Bar in West Norwood and the Four Quarters Arcade Bar and Bar Jazu in Peckham. ⤳ I started watching Mr & …

Despite the fact its already February, I am going to do another of these annual end of the year reflections. They’re likely to be of little interest to anyone else, but I find the practice useful. I’ve previously done these for 2020, 2021 and 2022. What follows is a mix of personal reflections on the year, as well as a brief lists of the things I’ve enjoyed watching, reading and …

Sounds dirty, doesn’t it, getting your palimpsest on? In fact, it’s the broadest sort of euphemism for swearing. It’s not total absence of profanity from a text or conversation. Profanity is there, legible in occasional traces despite the better-behaved language that effaces it. When your grandmother says she never swears, I call bullshit. When authors avoid profanity but acknowledge that their characters (including a narrator) swear just beyond our hearing, …

Thanks so so much to everybody who’s supported the app over the years!🎩🎉 Let’s do 21 more!

(Photo by Lauren Lulu Taylor) I am losing a step. Actually, I believe the technical term is “becoming an idiot”. To be honest (“At least you’re being honest!” says my friend Chris, champion of dad jokes), … wait a minute, … Continue reading →

Introspection only gets you so far. Gut feelings are not a particularly good way of evaluating the outside world. Gut feelings are a reflection of all our biases and intuitions and heuristics. Those all grow, largely unconsciously, out of our experiences. Our experiences are our own; they do not generalize. The phrase “the plural of anecdote is not data” describes all the reasons gut feelings are not reliable for evaluating …

In the Chinese Zodiac, this is the Year of the Dragon, beginning on February 10, 2024. The Dragon symbolizes power, nobility, honor, wealth, and success. Those born under this sign are said to possess intelligence, confidence, tenacity, and courage; they can also be, at times, temperamental and impulsive. Famous people born in the Year of the Dragon include John Lennon, Bruce Lee, Martin Luther King Jr., Adele, Stanley Kubrick, Robert …

It’s that time of year when the garden is coming back to life and my seed growing fingers start to itch. It’s too soon to sow anything here though. Anything I sow inside will get leggy in search of light and anything outside will just rot in the cold ground. I’ll have to wait until March but that’s not so long away. Meanwhile I’ve done my seed audit, raking through …

Edgar Award© Mystery Writers of America. DB here: Some good news for Perplexing Plots. It’s gotten positive reviews in various places; they’re sampled on its Amazon page. Most recently, Geoffrey O’Brien has written a very generous review for the New York Review of Books (February 8, 2024). He has, needless to say, kind words for Martin Edwards’ monumental Life of Crime as well. More broadly, he shares his insights into …