Recently updated blogs

We’re hosting an event in London in a few weeks to launch Mapped, a project we’ve been working on over the last six months with the support of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. ​Mapped integrates with common organising platforms like Airtable, Mailchimp and Action Network to augment membership lists with other useful data sources. ​Organisers can visualise their membership lists on a map overlaid with contextual geographic, demographic and political …

Here follows the next episode of our Brittany holiday. I thought I would include here an example of Breton folk music just so you can get an idea of the kind of music we heard when we arrived in Brittany. I also apologise for the grainy and blurred photos. Sunday 22nd August This is where we were staying. I believe the building was a converted barn and the house where …

I just had surgery to repair an incisional hernia near where my appendix used to be. By “just” I mean Thursday week ago. I am recovering well, thank you, though it did knock me for six for several days, as abdominal surgery does. I’m tapering off the painkillers now, back home, moving around, and even gingerly doing things that don’t involve heavy objects. Or medium weight objects. Everything is fine. …

I have a few providers which initialize state, shove it in a context, and then ensure that the state is synchronized with AsyncStorage so that if the app is quit and restarted, the context’s state is rehydrated from AsyncStorage. A few examples of the types of state I tend to treat this way are API tokens and user IDs. When I realized that I’d been doing this a lot in …

The Secret to Coffee Shop Success: Choosing the Perfect Location Opening a coffee shop is a dream for many aspiring entrepreneurs. A place where people come together, work, and enjoy good coffee—what could be better? The truth ist, running a thriving coffee shop is much more complicated than one might imagine. While a few factors, like the menu you offer, the interior design, and customer service, are important, there is …

In 1974 National Semiconductor introduced what is arguably the first 16-bit microprocessor (it had a 8-bit mode as well which was more efficient but could run 16-bits as well). This chip was made on a PMOS process and ran at 1.3MHz. In some ways it was ahead of its time, there wasn’t a ton of demand for a 16-bit processor at the time and interfacing to its PMOS architecture was…tricky. …

Why, when I have a perfectly good one available right here? Because change is healthy. It’s nothing dramatic, just a change of scenery and a simpler outlook. You can read more about why on the new site—I hope you’ll join me there. It’s a new RSS feed too, so if you want to keep seeing stuff from me you’ll want to add the new link to your feed reader. This …

Thank you to everyone who liked, reblogged, or made a witty comment on this tumblr over the years. This is the last post.

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:

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) …

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!

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 …