Recently updated blogs

I attached the roof panels to the mollicroft frame, undercoated it all (figure 1) and then hoisted the whole thing atop the body and fixed it to the two end-wall rafters (figure 2). Fig. 1. The mollicroft ready for installation… Fig. 2. … and screwed to the end rafters. I made up the short side rafters (figure 3), which are attached to the top wall plate at their outer ends …

It looks like that Orson Cart has been playing with his caravan again. Jack Plane

Welcome back to the (very) occasional newsletter Working On It. It has been 277 days since the last issue. Antisemitism, U.S.A. A couple of years ago, my colleague John Turner and I bounced around ideas for a podcast on the history of antisemitism in the United States. We were sure it was necessary topic that public audiences would benefit from learning about. Regrettably, it has become painfully obvious that we …

At the start of 2024, I gave a talk titled "Secrets of the Laravel Team" in which I talk about how Laravel works as a company, how we manage projects and continue to ship the high quality you come to expect of us. I‘ve given this talk at: Laracon EU (where the video was recorded) Laracon India

I’ve been reading scripts for schemes, competitions and all sorts on and off for over a decade, and from when I first dipped my toe into script reading, I learned about how highly regarded the BBC Writers Open Call was. It’s one of the biggest opportunities for scriptwriters in the country, with no threshold on how experienced you had to be, no entry fees and few parameters on the story …

Last year I was asked to contribute to the Serpentine Galleries’ Infinite Ecologies Marathon, a prelude to their Inifinite Ecologies programme, with something that expressed what I thought was missing from most discussion and practice of what we might call ecological art. Over the last few years, I’ve been concerned with what might broadly be called a new crisis of representation when it comes to ecological work. This awareness stems …

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 …