Recently updated blogs

Yuhki Danvers on Twitter: 5 months ago Patrick Harpin walked into Warner Bros. Pictures / DC Comics and pitched a Batman Beyond Animated Feature. Before we pitched, they warned us “there is absolutely no way we can do a Beyond movie”, but they loved our enthusiasm. We pitched the outline for the entire film, and what started as a “never” turned into a “maybe”. In the time since, we’ve been …

[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.]This is the Union Pacific Railroad’s Austin Subdivision in central Texas. It’s a busy corridor that moves both freight and passengers north and south between Austin and San Antonio… But it’s mostly freight. Trains run twenty-four-seven here, carrying goods like rock from nearby quarries, cement, vehicles, intermodal freight, and more. So, when Crystal Clear Special Utility District was planning …

Matthew Ball wrote a fun essay earlier this month entitled On Spatial Computing, Metaverse, the Terms Left Behind and Ideas Renewed, tracing the various terms that have been used to describe, well, that’s what the essay is about: virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, Metaverse, are words that have been floating around for decades now, both in science fiction and in products, to describe what Apple is calling spatial computing. …

I've been working on Carl, my IMAP e-mail client, for the past few months. Your browser doesn't seem to support HTML video. You can download the video in H.264/AAC format instead. I need to work on not saying "like" so much. Video notes: Remaining PowerBook 1xx Batteries Subtext 4 Kludge BBS on Mastodon IMAP4rev2 rev2 RFC Encoded-word RFC MicroBug and SM 0 A9F4 and G 0 MacsBug My stack walking …

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 …