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The first of many oddities in these pictures – granted, it is hard to choose – is arguably the tone. Why are these photos, with imagery that looks contemporary or certainly no more than 50 years old, rendered in antique sepia? But the when is no less perplexing than the who, the where and the why. To begin with the when: they were in fact taken in 1924 by Minya …

Lessons learned from my super long flickr average colour thread on Mastodon: Lessons learned: Flickr API limit of 1 API request / second means that if I am running 12 threads in parallel then I need delay minimum of 1 second between API requests (assuming my code needs 1 second to do its thing) and get the bare minimum metadata. I also learned that flickr integer ids are bigger than …

This blog is twenty years old. It’s not going away any time soon, but it’s not likely to become a hive of activity either. Not many academic history/humanities blogs I knew in 2004 are still around at all, and even fewer are still doing all the odd things we did then with any regularity. We do that on social media nowadays, don’t we? With added emojis. On the other hand, …

When I purchased this sateen, jacquard-woven fabric from Mendel Goldberg a couple of years ago, I wasn’t sure what it would eventually become. It had a wide repeat to the design (which is something to consider when you know you are facing considerable matching of the design), but it was a lovely 60” wide. I bought just 2 yards (it was expensive) and hoped I would have enough fabric to …

Giuseppe Pagano was a central figure in Italian architecture of the first part of the 20th century. Along with his practice as a rationalist architect and his political engagement, which led him to leave the Fascist Party, join the Resistance, and later be deported to Mauthausen, he devoted part of his life to documenting Italian rural architecture through the lens of his Rolleiflex. In 1936, together with Guarniero Daniel, he …

I've been using these kind of tools for more than 10 years and I love them. Lots. But if you don't want to invest into sashiko supplies yet, you really don't have to. When people started doing sashiko, there were no heat-erasable pens, no cutting mats, no washi tape. These are just some recommendations for things that I cherish. Feel free to choose.Stitches on the Run is reader-supported. When you …

At the recently concluded Cannes Film Festival, Indian director Payal Kapadia etched her name for eternity in the annals of cinema history by winning the 'Grand Prix.’ Kapadia's debut feature All We Imagine As Light, was singled out among 22 entries. Her contenders included the likes of Andrea Arnold, Francis Ford Coppola, Jia Zhange-Ke, Paolo Sorrentino, Sean Baker, and Ali Abbasi. Kapadia is the first Indian woman filmmaker to win …

Just a brief update here -- I recently had the honor of participating in Rock Paper Shotgun's "what's on your bookshelf" interview series.It's one of my favorite gaming journalism things happening at the moment, full of interesting book recs and observations from smart people like Alice Bell, Josh Sawyer, and Xalavier Nelson Jr. Check out the full series listing here.The implication is that I too am also a Smart One. …

Typographic glyphs have their moments. The @ symbol was barely used before it became indispensable for email and social media. The creation of the single European currency saw thousands of fonts being reissued to include € at the turn of the century. It’s likely that some crypto-boosters are hoping this will happen again, and the […]

This is going to be somewhat rant-y. I’ll hopefully get something longer written about this at some point, but for now a brief post will have to do. I struggle a lot with finding satisfaction in...things. I have to be careful, because at least some of this is biochemical, and it’s easy to find something that would make sense as a cause and assume that it’s actually the cause (as …

My family just returned from 2 weeks in Japan, broken up as such: Tokyo (4 full days, plus the evening of the day we landed) Japanese Alps Matsumoto (1 day) Takayama (2 days) Kyoto (3.5 days) Osaka (2.5 days) This is very much a first-timer’s trip, hitting the main three cities. We added the Alps to get away from dense urban spaces for a bit, and also for the historic …

When did we start using the ch unit to specify the maximum length for a line of text in CSS? To do so makes assumptions that don't necessarily hold up, and there are more appropriate units to use. Also: was it my fault? Read more.

I took a little break from sharing to get used to my new normal. A week ago I had to have some blood work done and for the first time in my memory I engaged in the process. Usually I would be sick from nervousness for days before. I would avoid and postpone. I would get to the blood draw place and start to panic. When it came time for …

Are you paying for servers sitting idle in the middle of the night? When we talk about scaling a web server, we often focus on scaling up. Can your server handle a spike in traffic? As your business grows, can your database handle the growth? There's less focus on scaling down. It makes sense, because most businesses are focused on growth. Not too many are looking to shrink. But if …

Over the past few weeks, I've been experimenting with painting in watercolours using my AxiDraw plotter. Watercolour is a medium I enjoy painting in (by hand) as a personal hobby, kind of separate from my public art making, so it’s been interesting to combine it with code. I’ve thought about trying this for a while but I was finally spurred on to do it after I visited Licia He’s studio …