Recently updated blogs

I’ve been experimenting with the MapChart website to produce maps showing the birth county of people in North Walls and Brims in two censuses, 1861 and 1921. What do you think? 1861 Census And here’s 1921, a much smaller population, 401 rather than 597, but a wider spread of birthplaces partly due to the Naval base at Lyness. Middlesex – actually all these people were Londoners, some from the East …

I don’t feel like this is what Microsoft were expecting when they set up the ‘on this day’ feature. What a day though. What a day…

Welcome to my theatre newsletter, in which I offer notes and reflections on some of what I’ve been up to in the last seven days, both in and out of the theatre. I feel that in recent months I’ve been offering something of a ‘Groundhog Day’ paragraph (or three) somewhere, in as much as I’ve been regularly reflecting on my ongoing bout of depression. That sense of days repeating themselves …

Monday, January 4, 2021 keeping a log: 9 months / ~1k entries in Previously: org mode, vimwiki, timeslice. Mechanisms inspired directly by: A demo & talk from Lars Wirzenius on his ikiwiki-based external brain and journal; fediverse discussion of the Org mode agenda; and possibly too much reading about the Zettelkasten. Back in March, in the throes of a bunch of rabbitholing about note-taking, I roughed out a system for …

Just a reminder of my newsletter, available in English and Spanish. Let's continue the conversation there!

Checking in for 2024-03-25: Buckle up. This is a big update. Yesterday I felt like I was going to explode. I compared it to the video game "Dig Dug", which has been an interesting litmus test for how old my doctors / nurses are. I'm not going to sit here chastising folks for not having the same childhood that I did (I find the whole "do these kids know how …

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 …