Recently updated blogs

This is a very niche post, which I write simply to help others who fall in the niche with me; the rest of you can move right along. As I’ve mentioned before in passing, my RSS reader of choice these days is Reader, from the team that brought us Readwise (itself an estimable “highlight and catalog what you read” app in its own right). Reader reads RSS feeds, but it’s …

Every once in a while, I’ll get an email from a reader who asks the most important wardrobe question: Can you recommend a tailor? For all the information online about sleeve pitch, shoulder divots, and the dreaded collar gap, solving any fit issue still requires finding someone who can lay their hands on your garment. More than knowing the technical intricacies of tailoring, you need to find a good tailor. …

“Graffiti Tower” in DTLA. Picture courtesy NBC News. Tall unfinished luxury housing towers right next to Crypto Arena. Chinese developer went bankrupt in 2019 and abandoned the site. It sat dormant until taggers fucking finally jumped the fences and started to tag it floor by floor a month or so ago. After all the tagging and Youtubers base-jumping off the building, it’s now become a “public safety issue” to officials. …

In 1865, a 14-year-old boy becomes a Union soldier in the U.S. Civil War. In 1931, at age 90, he marries an 18-year-old woman, who continues to collect his Civil War pension after he dies. Today, in early 2024, she is one hundred and ten years old, still collecting that pension. I was inspired to this thought by reflecting about some long-dead people my father knew, who survive in my …

A ninetenth-century Italian-born monk and hermit became a famous resident of New Mexico, dwelling on a mountain that would be one day named Hermit’s Peak. Giovanni Maria de Agostini (1801-1869) had been banished from Brazil to Mexico for provoking masses of curious to follow. Agostini went to Mexico but found the same official ire, then … Continue reading "Giovanni Agostino, New Mexico hermit"

Quanta on ‘the mysteries of polygonal billiards‘: Is it always possible to hit a ball so that it returns to its starting point traveling in the same direction, creating a so-called periodic orbit? Nobody knows. For other, more complicated shapes, it’s unknown whether it’s possible to hit the ball from any point on the table to any other point on the table. Some very deep maths involved here and I …

Dear friends, I said I wouldn't post any more on this site. But Elon Musk doesn't like me posting Substack links on Twitter. And Substack itself is a mess. The home page looks amateurish, and new posts don't even appear on it until they've amassed enough views to push down previous posts. It's an absurd way of organising a site. So I have decided in future to post links to …

I recently finished Pozdniakov's Proto-Fula-Sereer, freely available through Language Science Press. This is obviously a very welcome and valuable contribution to West African historical linguistics, an area where much remains to be done. I have little experience of Atlantic languages as such, and therefore not much useful to say about most of the book (though it made me want to also read Merrill's work, with which much of it is …

Setting up VS Code for Ruby on Rails development can be tricky, so I wrote this article to help. In it, I share different VS Code extensions for things like autocomplete, linting, formatting and more! I've even put together a handy extension pack to get you setup fast.

Hello! I am pleased to announce a new version of my Ruby One-Liners Guide ebook. Examples, exercises, solutions, descriptions and external links were added/updated/corrected. When it comes to command line text processing, there are several well known tools like grep for filtering, sed for substitution and awk for field processing. Compared to such tools, Ruby has a feature rich regular expression engine, plenty of builtin modules and a thriving ecosystem. …

We think of plywood as a modern invention, but is it? it is surprising to learn that the ancient Egyptians were already using plywood. In the 1933 edition of Annales du Service des Antiquités, there is a description of a coffin whose walls, and bottom were made of plywood, found at Saqqara and dating from the Old Kingdom (ca. 2700–2200 BC). There are six layers of wood, each 4mm in …

Contents Pricing & Availability What comes in the box? Design & Construction Size & Measurements User Interface Emitter & Beam Mode Chart Runtime Driver & Regulation Switch Carry & Ergonomics Batteries & Charging Competition Conclusion Pricing & Availability FlashlightGo sent me this light at my request in exchange for an honest review. Here is the product page on their website where you can see current pricing and purchase this light. …

Washington, D.C., circa 1901. "View of Eighth Street N.W., east side, looking north from D Street with Hoy's Hotel on the corner and the U.S. Patent Office building at the end of the street." 5x7 inch dry plate glass negative, D.C. Street Survey Collection. View full size.

I’ve openly proclaimed my dislike for current trends in AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) before: it’s being misused to genereate crap to put on the internet and the availability of hallucinated crap makes students’ learning painfully worse. So I’ve been wondering: can these ChatGPT-like systems be put to any real use? I think the answer is yes: here are two possibly interesting use cases. Case 1: Personal Knowledge Management …

Is it me, or is there a trend going on that's trying to tell us something? It starts with new products. In terms of new cameras, we're down from a peak of 21 new mirrorless models a year to something around 17 to 18. Coupled with no new DSLRs and very few new compacts, what used to be a vibrant "here's a new camera" followed by reviews of same seems …