Recently updated blogs

learning a lot about sed, awk and other commands by making a spotify statusbar widget

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…

Text of a Presidential Address (2023) delivered to the Norfolk & Norwich Naturalists’ Society at Norwich, 26-3-2024 Thank you – firstly – for doing me the honour of asking me to be your President for 2023. It is a particular honour as my background is in geology and geological conservation, and the Society has a strong biological emphasis. However, it has never turned its back on geological enquiry. Many years …

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 …

Je suis heureux de vous annoncer que Monte-Cristo, ma trilogie de bande dessinée qui transpose le classique d'Alexandre Dumas dans l'Amérique de l'après 11 septembre avec de splendides illustrations de Mario Alberti, paraîtra en anglais chez Magnetic Press plus tard dans l'année. Notre campagne Kickstarter débute aujourd'hui et durera jusqu'au 12 avril. Vous pouvez précommander la version anglaise (224 pages en version reliée ou numérique) ainsi que différentes contreparties et …

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 in my inbox is an email from DeployHQ – my favoured deployment tool since as long as I can remember – telling me that they’ve been bought by DeployBot. My first reaction whenever this sort of transaction happens (a couple off the top of my head: GoDaddy buying ManageWP, WPEngine buying ACF, Atlassian buying Trello) – I don’t think “woo, superb, access to a whole bigger company who will …

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 …