Recently updated blogs

NB: This is a version of a paper given at the The Good Place: Welcome, everything is Fine Conference on 14 June. Comedy-drama The Good Place (NBC, 2016-2020) features a variety of existential and philosophical debates as part of its premise. For those unfamiliar with the series, it follows four people who have died and find themselves in what they initially thought was ‘the good place’ but… Source

My 2018 12.9 iPad Pro has been one of my greatest tech purchases. I’ve used it nearly every day for the last 5.5 years, and it’s still in great shape. Why upgrade now? While I’m not an artist, I love my Apple Pencil for taking notes, sketching my thoughts, and drawing; andwhen I tried the Apple Pencil Pro in a store the other day, I really liked the new squeeze …

Imagine you’ve set up a shiny new crowdsourcing project. How do you let people who might potentially want to volunteer online know about it? Here’s how we did it for one of our final crowdsourcing projects on Living with Machines. We called it the ‘language of mechanisation‘ internally, but you might have seen them as […]

Jhanas – a series of altered mental states that are accessed via concentration – are often described as an “advanced meditation practice,” a phrase that suggests that one must be a skilled meditator to access them: just as only a skilled outdoorsman would embark upon an expedition to the Arctic Circle. It implies that meditation exists on a spectrum of difficulty, with perhaps mindfulness apps like Calm and Headspace on …

Kobo Nia (left) and Pocketbook Basic Lux 4 (right) E-readers are lighter and more portable than a stack of paperbacks and offer a library’s worth of choices at your fingertips. While I adore the convenience, I’m increasingly squeamish about the idea of big corporations tracking every action. I crave the ease of digital books, but not at the expense of the privacy a physical book offers. This struggle sent me …

The Golden Rule of Game Promotion: No One Cares About Your Game (YouTube) Thomas Reisenegger gives a fascinating and actionable overview of how to think about marketing indie games. Some principles are timeless; others are targeted to the current social media landscape. My favorite insight (and one that has frustrated me when it isn’t followed) is that all your marketing should “work for the newcomers”. It’s important to remember that …

untitled #1713260953 is dated on or around June 27, 2020 and tagged orthis.

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is illuminating, bizarre, moving and often laugh-out-loud funny. No wonder it has special bragging rights. It screams London in the summer. This flag ship show is where amateur and professional artists compete to exhibit and sell their art. It is coordinated by a leading artist and equally celebrated committee. As you go from room to room, you can detect the individual …

On 26 June 2024, the 127th Ecma General Assembly approved the ECMAScript 2024 language specification, which means that it’s officially a standard now. This blog post explains what’s new.

Balcony horticulture, 2023 The social and political after-effects of the catastrophe of the First World War included recognising that many who had sacrificed their lives had done so with little if any stake in the nation’s future. Of those who had survived – a lot of whom had come from conditions of brutal poverty – found themselves returning to the same conditions, seemingly unrewarded. Not surprisingly, political consequences followed. ‘Homes …

Kurt Schlosser, GeekWire: Living Computers Museum + Labs, the Seattle institution created by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen as a hands-on showcase for rare computing technology and interactive displays, will not reopen, more than four years after closing just ahead of the pandemic. […] The estate also announced Tuesday that some key pieces from Allen’s personal collection of computer artifacts, displayed over the years at Living Computers, will be …

It's the update you've all been dreading: The admission by me that I've still been suffering from writer's block for well over a full year now, and that I don't rightly know if I'll ever get back to it!

24 June 2024…we’re beyond excited to share that Multi is joining OpenAI!Unfortunately, this means we’re sunsetting Multi. We’ve closed new team signups, and currently active teams will be able to use the app until July 24, 2024, after which we’ll delete all user data. …Thank you to everybody who used Multi. It was a privilege building with you, and we learnt a ton from you.

Inspired by an older list I saw online, I did some math to determine how to get exact values for oversized Lettermail postage. It’s not a clean effort unfortunately, you’ll be using small denominations for some of them. Here are the fixed stamp values as referred to below. These are the prices for purchasing stamps in a pane, not individually. 0.99 = Permanent Canada stamp 1.40 = US stamp 2.09 …