Recently updated blogs

On the Eve of Valentines Day, I was sat scrolling Mastodon and a post from the @playdate account popped up on my Home Timeline to announce they had just shipped over 70,000 pre-orders of the console, followed with the news that they expanded the list of countries they ship to by another 20 – including Norway. I have been keeping an eye on the progress of the cute yellow little …

Working at pace often means you need to work on assumptions. The current team I’m leading. I’ve had to make some assumptions clear that we would have to work to. Some about our users. Most though, about the organisation. We had to believe certain things will be true to unblock our focus. As you define what feature, service or product you need to build. A team will have assumptions about …

A short introduction to the rdbg/debugger extension for VS Code, plus a guide on how to set it up correctly to debug your Ruby on Rails applications, as well as your RSpec specs. The VS Code extension takes 5 minutes to setup and it's great!

SFO Museum has joined the “Fediverse”. We have begun to operate a series of automated “bot” accounts that are published using the ActivityPub protocols which can be subscribed to from any client, like Mastodon, that supports those standards. These are automated, low-frequency, accounts and they currently only support a limited set of interactions: Accounts can be followed or unfollowed, individual posts can be “liked”, “boosted” or replied to but those …

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 …

$\newcommand\R{\mathbb{R}}\newcommand\C{\mathbb{C}}\newcommand\Z{\mathbb{Z}}$ Chain Rule for Map between Open Subsets of Euclidean Space Let $M$ be an open subset of $\R^m$, $N$ be an open subset of $\R^n$, and $O$ be an open subset of $\R^p$. Let $$F: M \rightarrow N\text{ and }G: N \rightarrow O$$ be $C^1$ maps. We want to prove the chain rule for the composition: Differential of a Map Recall that the directional derivative of $F$ at $x …

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 …

And what a swell party it was! A celebrity guestlist like no other; a Rihanna concert; a David Blaine magic show; hundreds of singers and dancers, Bollywood A-listers mucking about on stage and one Town Crier with a huge grin on his face wondering how he ever got to be so lucky as to be here in the first place. I landed at Mumbai International and then took a short …

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 →

This is intended as a quick guide for anyone who comes on as a Friday night Song Swap guest, but anyone who’s thinking of using Zoom (or doing their own streams) to share music with folk might find it useful, so I’m making it public. Publicity material I’m absolutely terrible at marketing, but it will definitely help me do at least some if you can provide me with some or …

Link: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2024/organizations If you are a student or early-career developer and want to make your mark in open-source geospatial, the following geospatial organisations are participating in the 2024 Google Summer of Code: OSGeo 52North OpenStreetMap Organic Maps Open Transit Software Foundation Applications from candidates will be accepted between 18 March and 2 April, while the internships run for 12 weeks over the summer.

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 …