Recently updated blogs

I will be part of a panel discussion titled “Folk Around & Find Out IV: Folklore of the Future,” on Sunday (3/24), the final event of this year’s Salem Witchcraft & Folklore Festival. A panel of professional conjure doctors, astrologers, cunning-folk, artists, and witches talk about the place of folk magic in modern life around the world. Come join our discussions of how traditional folk magics do and don’t have …

Adding 70ft of N-scale layout and some overview picturesKanata Rail overview pictures Feb 2024:

A week ago I returned from a week’s trip to central New South Wales in Australia, driving from Sydney down to (almost!) Batemans Bay, then up again to Newcastle and then back to Sydney. The aim was to spend a bit more time exploring places I’d skipped / missed when I motored through quickly on my trips passing through NSW in 2018 and 2019 - which I did end up …

Over the last three years of maintaining this blog, there’s been a conspicuous absence in the acoustic index toolkit presented so far. Whilst the Bioacoustic Index (BI), Acoustic Complexity Index (ACI) and Normalised Difference Soundscape Index (NDSI) have been introduced and demonstrated across given case studies, the Acoustic Diversity Index (ADI) hasn’t been covered to date. Why is this? When I first started applying acoustic indices a few years ago, …

By Tshidiso Masopha Source: Facebook For three years there have been ongoing talks about uniting informal waste pickers with the City of Johannesburg’s waste management program. These talks have since hit a dead-end. Reclaimers are particularly important to the recycling value chain. They contribute to the economy by collecting recyclable waste which they sell to buy-back centres. However, they go without support from the government. The African Reclaimers Organization (ARO) …

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 …