Recently updated blogs

When I was preparing the Post about the Town Hall, I started to write about manorial records, and their value in local history. But this was breaking up the Town Hall story too much, and so I started this separate Post instead. The customs of the “twin” manors of Witham (Chipping) and Newland were unusual, in a way that is especially useful to us. The 18th-century historian Philip Morant wrote …

It’s said that thinkers are either foxes and hedgehogs. The fox knows many things, and the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ever since I heard about this I’ve known that I am a hedgehog. My one big idea is the idea of moral ecosystems: decentralized systems of moral belief and their relationship to our technological media environments. Since 2016 I have been exploring this idea and have made many attempts …

Representational Image Your phone is an absolute jungle of sensors – it can measure temperature changes, pressure changes, touch input, voice input, environment brightness, gyroscopic tilt, movement, among quite a few other things… and now Samsung wants it to measure the air quality around you too. It might seem odd at first (I felt so too), but this feature ties in with the broader approach at making your phone or …

Life lived with a bang, ended with a whimper Look at the cover image on this biography, written by Thomas Edgar Pemberton. Dressed with long, theatrical whiskers and a quizzical, confused glance – this was an extraordinary gentleman, resembling a 19th century Tom Selleck, who commanded a fee of £235 a week (roughly £23,500 in […]

Today, Downpour comes out! In case you don’t know, Downpour is the game creation tool I have been working on for the past few years. I started it after I left Niantic in October 2022, and I have been working on it ever since then (with breaks for illness and freelance work and going on trips and so on). I am proud of it. I hope people make good things …

Those who don’t remember the web before platforms, tend to believe that for 10 years web users stared at their monitors in anticipation. Actually they were made to believe it. First by Web 2.0 proponents, and nowadays by aggressive Web3 … Continue reading →

I reviewed David Brooks’s How to Know a Person for the TLS: David Brooks was raised in a Jewish family whose motto, he says, might have been “Think Yiddish, Act British.” He learned to be awkward and reserved around strangers, but also inherited a disputatious streak that saw argument as “a form of prayer”. The result, for many years, was disappointing conversations, stymied by his tendency to either clam up …

On All Hallow’s Eve, we quite naturally watched Buster Keaton’s 1921 two-reeler, The Haunted House. And of course, there on camera, displayed in all his glory, was The Great Stone Face, as Keaton is known far and wide. Yet I beg to differ. Oh, sure. In most of his film appearances, Buster didn’t smile. But he did a lot of other things with his face that were a beacon for …

In the final season of ALF, Jason Cort brings us the highest amount of outfits in a season. A total of 59 outfits were worn by ALF in his last season and they were a mix of new and repeats. Season 4 – Episode 1 “Baby, Come Back” A repeat of ALF’s red sweatshirt. First seen in S2E9 and then in S3E1, S3E13, S3E18. Season 4 – Episode 2 “Lies” …

INSIDE: Find kindergarten measurement activity ideas for teaching length, weight, capacity and area using nonstandard units. Our Kindergarten Measurement Investigations Every January, we explore the wonders of measurement, diving deep into the concepts of length, weight, capacity, and area, by asking questions, making predictions, and uncovering answers through hands-on investigations and play. Teaching measurement through […] The post Kindergarten Measurement Inquiries: Teaching Length, Weight, Capacity, and Area appeared first on …

I had the pleasure of reporting and writing the Many Worlds column — sponsored by NASA’s NExSS initiative and the Lunar & Planetary Institute — for more than seven years, but the run came to an end in October. Now an archive of the more than 400 columns is easily available at http://www.manyworlds.space. The stories focus on astrobiology writ large, but also include profiles, more general astronomy and planetology columns, …

In the last couple of years I have developed a complicated relationship with my phone. Whether it's scrolling past an endless wall of hate on Twitter or feeling my mood buckle under the weight of every TikTok or Reel that I push skywards, the tiny computer in my pocket has started to feel a bit like that box from Dune – there's nothing but pain in there. Increasingly though, it's …

I loved this interview with author Steven Johnson. It covers a lot about the way he writes and how he structures his books and articles. It also reminded me about the piece he wrote back in 2022 on ChatGPT which has a wonderful opening paragraph that illustrates the simple premise behind Large Language Models – predicting the next word. The article still rings true even though the technology has moved …

One of the biggest complaints new creators have is that they hate dealing with stretch goals. it’s a common customer complaint too, because if you do stretch goals wrong (you are), you’ll overburden your project and put yourself behind schedule, over budget, and cut your profits to nothing. So why have stretch goals? What’s the point? You’re doing stretch goals wrong Stretch goals are not “cool stuff we can do …

There are several nice options in NixOS for specifying scheduled backup jobs, including borgbackup, borgmatic and restic. But I’ve often used rsync in the past, and there is no such module for scheduled rsync jobs (or rsnapshot either). So I wrote my own simple module.