Recently updated blogs

I recently completed Tom Jones' Masterclass Advanced Genealogical Writing Skills Using Microsoft Word offered through the Family History Academy. The class was incredible - I had no clue how much I didn't know about using Microsoft Word. If the class is offered again, I highly recommend it if you want to improve the look of your genealogy writing. One of the topics Tom discussed was preparing Tables and Figures for …

Hell hath no fury like a woman’s scorn for Sega ORIGIN Magic Eye books were all the rage in the early-to-mid 90’s. You couldn’t walk into a Scholastic Book Fair without seeing half a dozen kids using a variety of techniques to try and see the hidden three-dimension image that lurked within the pages. It truly felt like magic and so whether you stumbled upon a book that featured Magic …

Shoutout to the Astro and Starlight team for helping me get this right. This guide provides step-by-step instructions on how to integrate Astro.js Starlight documentation into a Next.js project using proxies. Astro Starlight is an excellent documentation template. However, if your main marketing site is running on Next.js, you may wonder how to integrate the two seamlessly. Let's explore how to do this. Setting Up a Proxy in Next.js Begin …

It can be hard to comment on a lot of tech news without coming across like Apu taking a bullet for a big tech platform. But a few aspects to the current debate around the new StackOverflow deal with OpenAI have irked me, as reported in TechCrunch and The Register and debated on Mastodon. So here I am writing a blog post. I’m not trying to take a bullet for …

Photo by Taile Eigeland Hello You. Very excited to announce a two day Howlround residency taking place 11th-12 May at project DIVFUSE in Hackney, both days consisting of a daytime workshop/installation/loop creation session (free to anyone who would like to come along and contribute!) and then a performance in the evening of the day’s recordings, for which limited tickets are available. All are welcome and warmly encouraged to drop in …

The more time passes, the more I think that establishing relationships, or repairing imperfect ones, is mostly about establishing mutual trust. Friends, work colleagues, family members, anyone really. Obviously a heck of a lot of other factors impact whether or not the relationship is enjoyable. But without trust, it’s really hard to maintain most of those other factors (respect, affection, communication, mindfulness, etc). Been thinking about this a lot lately …

By Richard McKenna / May 6, 2024 Of all the visionary artists to emerge from the illustration boom of the ’60s and ’70s, Bob Fowke must be one of the most unfairly neglected. I first became aware of his idiosyncratic visions through his covers for Sci-Fi 1, 2 and 3, anthologies of specially commissioned science fiction stories for young children published by Armada books in the mid-’70s. To an extremely …

I love this aphorism about visionary leadership paraphrasing Saint-Exupéry: “Building a boat isn’t about weaving canvas, forging nails, or reading the sky. It’s about giving a shared taste for the sea, by the light of which you will see nothing contradictory but rather a community of love.” A shared vision obviates many management tasks. People make good decisions with little explicit project management, communication, and coordination. Without a shared vision, …

We all have some problem we are trying to solve. First off, if you can convert the problem to text, or increasingly pdfs, images, video, etc., then you might be able to use AI for some or all of the solution. Let’s focus on text for now. In this case, we have Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, at our disposal. Now, simply inputting your entire problem into the LLM …

Having regular pain can be depressing and demoralising, but waking up in the middle of the night in pain, as I did last night, can be even moreso.For some reason my left knee ached severely enough to wake me at 3:25am, and to keep me awake for a while after. I rang my call bell and asked the nurse for some Oramorph, and she gave me 7.5ml. I was still …

writing code on TRS-80 like it's 1983 (sort of)

Remembering Rahul: A tribute by Rohit Chopra Aniruddha Bose, Associate Professor of History at Saint Francis University, passed away on March 31, 2024 from brain cancer. Aniruddha was a remarkable person and brilliant scholar, soft-spoken and modest to a fault, combining a rare gravitas and decency with irrepressible cheer and good humor. With his passing, the world feels slighter and lesser. He was much loved by every single person who …

It’s often said that America has not been this divided since the Civil War, but even these tumultuous times pale in comparison to the social unrest of the 1960s, when post-war America’s cleavages along race, gender, and sexuality threatened to rip the nation apart. Within ten short years, the United States saw the unfolding of [...] Read More... The post American Space Cowboys appeared first on Die, Workwear!.

CLR is a beloved brand in the candle community, which is a corny opening sentence but also completely true. They’re inclusive and diverse, owned and operated by LGBTQIA+ people of color who donate a percentage of their profits back to the community, so this isn’t Big Candle, this is Cool Candle. Most importantly, their scents, throw, and burn are always top-notch, so I was excited when they offered to send …

Pam was born in 1952 and has lived in Sheffield for 51 years. She was a teacher. Reading has always been extremely important to me, although I cannot remember how I got started or recall having stories read to me. I have vague recollections of Joyce Brisley Lankester’s Milly Molly Mandy and Noddy and Big Ears from Enid Blyton, but my clearest memories of reading and being read to come …