Recently updated blogs

It's time. After 12 years of writing about cities with a Rust Belt perspective on this platform, I'm closing it down. And no, this is not an April Fool's joke. I'm moving on to a new platform with a new name: petesaunders.substack.com.It's got my name for now but that may change. It also has the more than 800 articles I've written since 2012 archived and available for viewing. As you …

Nature is all about life - and death.As lovers of the natural world, we delight in the abundant, thriving, humming life all around us, which is at no time of the year more apparent than during the spring season of growth and rebirth. As the world breaks free from the grip of winter, we revel in a season of renewal and resurrection.But remember that in the natural world, it is …

I have a story set in the modern day with supernatural traces, with three characters: a young boy, his bio dad, and his adoptive dad. The boy and his bio dad are Indian, the adoptive dad is Chinese. The bio dad is one of the few people in the story with powers. He put his son up for adoption when he was a child because at the time he was …

There is a space between renting woes and property sales that is often unseen. On the one hand, we read stories of students renting places with black mould and being taken to the tenancy tribunal for supposedly causing damage to their under-maintained properties. On the other hand are the first home buyers being priced out of the property market, and the novelty articles about people in their 20s beating the …

Findlater’s Corner – a prominent site on the western approach to London Bridge railway station – was restored to its original glory by The Arch Company, working with Benedict O’Looney Architects, in 2022. The result is impressive. Important aspects of the building’s history, however, have been misunderstood. This landmark site is named after the wine and spirit dealer, Findlater, Mackie, Todd & Co., which moved into new premises beneath the …

I was going to wait to do this until Nov. 19, 2024, the 10th anniversary of this site’s launch. However, now’s the right time. Vehlinggo.com, this music website updated with various degrees of regularity since 2014, is going on an indefinite hiatus. That big deep dive with The Midnight about their upcoming Dark Horse Comics graphic novel was essentially the last interview for this site. Vehlinggo the entity will still …

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 …

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