Recently updated blogs

I thought these guys were dead. But there they were, large as life in the Bourke Street Mall on Valentine’s Day – which probably explains the balloons. Why? Honestly I don’t know, but the characters went way beyond the originals after the franchise was sold off in 2021 – almost to ridiculous extremes. Anybody want to buy a Dumb Ways NFT? (Though even this 2014 life insurance ad from Canada …

An anti-Valentine’s Day book now, Ovid’s Heroides (25-16 BCE, somewhere in there), a collection of fictional letters in verse written by mythical heroines to their no-good boyfriends and husbands. Many end in suicide. Dido castigating Aeneas, Phaedra mourning Hippolytus, spurned Sappho jumping off a cliff. Although strictly speaking written as letters, many of the poems edge close to monologues and interiority, thus their large influence on the European novel and …

ONE LITTLE INDEPENDENT release the next two singles in the Crass Records’ reissue next month, with twelve-inch vinyl editions of Annie Anxiety’s Barbed Wire Halo and Flux of Pink Indians’ Neu Smell, both originally released in 1981. Both records will be issued on black vinyl by OLI, and in digital format through a variety of different online partner platforms, with a 15 March 2024 release date. Annie Anxiety – Barbed …

I think it’s time to step away for a bit.The way the discourse around the Bluesky bridge played out this week was… profoundly disappointing. Watching people with no interest in having a rational discussion making bad faith arguments and engaging in some disgusting ad hominem attacks has left a very bad taste in my mouth. What made it worse was the incredible hypocrisy of it all; you can’t engage in …

“Friends who had known him in the old days would comment on the uncanny resemblance between his two wives.” Cracking open Gabriel Josipovici’s novel The Cemetery in Barnes (Carcanet, 2018), we are immediately ushered into a world of ambiguity, confusion, and repetition, even though it’s a simple story of a man and his two wives (none of whom is given a name). He works as a professional translator with a …

Hello you. It’s Valentines Season once again and time for us all to show our love to some good causes. Here are three that are very close to my heart, and no doubt yours as well. Please consider supporting one or all of them and let’s all do our bit to support grassroots art and culture in these gloomy times. First off, as regular visitors to this site will be …

My ‘Unnecessary Rankings!‘ series have quickly become my favourite blog posts to write, and I love reading your comments – sometimes in agreement, but usually not, and that’s the most fun. Of all the authors I’ve done so far, Stella Gibbons has the widest range – i.e. some of her novels are all-time favourites, and some are unbearable trash. As I put this together, I realised I’d read fewer than …

In the meantime and just at this moment the fool people called Addison and the lady called Bubbles tumbled together out of the San Remo Café into the night thick with snow swirling down through the light of the corner streetlamp.“Fucking hell,” said Bubbles, “look at this shit.”“I adore the snow,” said Addison. “It reminds me of the Norman Rockwell Christmases I never had as a lad myself, and now …

Here’s the latest installment in the series on working with LLMS: Creating a GPT Assistant That Writes Pipeline Tests. Once you get the hang of writing these tests, it’s mostly boilerplate, so I figured my team of assistants could help. I recruited Cody, GitHub Copilot, and Unblocked — with varying degrees of success. Then I realized I hadn’t yet tried creating a GPT. As OpenAI describes them, “GPTs are custom …

Staying at Ecocamp Patagonia was the biggest highlight of my monthlong honeymoon in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. I completely adored this place, and it made my time in Chilean Patagonia incredibly memorable. Ecocamp Patagonia is home to the world’s first geodesic hotel room. That’s right, they were first — and we can thank their influence for the hundreds of dome hotels that have sprung up all over the world! But …

In the comments to episode 4 of our back to basics series of live stream episodes on CAP, on the Hands-on SAP Dev show, there was a question on my use of code in VS Code, which, when invoked in the terminal (e.g. code services.cds) opens the file directly in a VS Code editor window, like this: The question was about code being recognised in SAP Business Application Studio (BAS) …

I get a lot of odd emails pitching me services I don’t want. Private jets and yachts aren’t really my thing. But one offering to ‘build my audience without spending hours writing content’ intrigued me so I followed the rabbit hole to see what was down there. It turns out there’s a whole industry of people who will pretend to be a better version of you on social media, especially …

Joseph Smith's "Explanation or Key to the Various Manufactories of Sheffield" C. 1816Joseph Smith's "Explanation or Key to the Various Manufactories of Sheffield,"also known as Smith's Key, is one of the earliest tool catalogs. Originally published in 1816, The Key is simply a collection of tool engraving showing many different tools and style. Pretty much all the manufacturers made the same products. Smith, a printer, would print the engravings and …

Nowadays it seems that it’s the fringe and Off-West End venues that are keeping the spirit of international theatre alive in London. Whereas much mainstream and big-name theatre feels increasingly insular, the smaller players are embracing their freedom to experiment by staging work from beyond these shores. A great example is Sergio Blanco’s When You Pass Over My Tomb, translated and adapted by Daniel Goldman; it’s a brilliant meta-theatrical piece …