Recently updated blogs

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 …

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.

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 …

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!

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 …

2024 has been a hectic year so far. Most recently, we very nearly moved to western New York, but a series of unfortunate events and observations made us reconsider at the last second and decide to continue renting in Wilmington. I haven't made any progress on reigniting my morning jogging habit. However, once my leg heals (dermatology thing, don't ask), I intend to start it up again. I completely halted …

Metal Gear: Ghost Babel Japanese release in April 2000 North American release in April 2000 European release in May 2000 Published by Konami Developed by TOSE It’s such a clash to have the intricate artwork of a mature stealth title sitting next to the Technicolor smorgasbord logo of the Game Boy Color. It feels like Konami was getting away with murder. Like this game shouldn’t be on Game Boy Color. …

Summer is here. Time to cool off. Cocktail coolers have long been a fixture in the mixological world. This particular refresher comes from the classic Savoy Cocktail Book of 1930. Like their cousins, Tom Collins and the Fizzes, coolers are served in a tall glass with plenty of ice and topped with soda water. Any number of drinks are named for schools of higher learning, and today we are off …

Hire meLooking for a new role. Expertise in cryptography, security, networking, reversing. Dev, ops, security. Amongst other things I've authored a QUIC implementation, a Let's Encrypt client and an RFC. I gave a talk about reverse engineering an Ethernet controller's firmware at 37C3. LinkedIn / contact details.

A few days ago, Business of Fashion posted an op-ed on the difficulties faced by companies operating a slow-fashion model. The term was first coined as the answer to the problems of fast fashion. Though it gained steam during the pandemic, it seems to have disappeared into obscurity when global economic conditions nosedived in the last year. To operate a slow fashion model in the age of next day delivery …

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 …

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, …