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This review of a Nottingham restaurant is a break from the Picky Glutton’s usual London-based coverage. I occasionally wonder what Japanese people think of the Japanese food they encounter outside the Home Islands. There must inevitably be a mixture of curiosity, bewilderment, mirth, along with more outright negative sentiments too. But kept politely bottled up, of course. Everyday People in Nottingham doesn’t claim be a traditional ramen-ya, but it’s similar …

Every few years, I remember that the whole reason I started woodworking was that I needed to build bookshelves for my family. Some things don’t change. When we moved into this house a year ago, we had big plans to turn our front room into a proper home library, complete with a whole wall of built-in bookcases. But as of last month, most of our books were still in boxes. …

Crossness Pumping Station is one of those amazing places that are always worth revisiting. It looks pretty snazzy outside, but inside will consistently take your breath away. And it was designed to do so – even if its purpose was pumping sewage. Victorian London had a sewage problem. As the city and its population grew and grew, removing ‘night soil’ became more and more of a challenge. ‘Solutions’ included dumping …

Back in 2014 I published the first edition of my Rudy Van Gelder Collector’s Discography. That version focused on albums I was interested in collecting at the time and didn’t contain any albums recorded after 1965. In 2020 I gave the discography a minor update, adding some smaller independent labels as well as ... More→

Excuse the corny title and associated video but I couldn’t resist it. What3Words’s accounts for 2023 have just been published and the cynics who have doubted W3W’s commercial model were confounded by the outstanding progress that the company has made in 2023. Here are a few highlights to save you reading through 45 pages. Revenues surged by 28% to break through the £1m barrier for the first time Employee numbers …

Imagen generada con Dall-e 3 La semana pasada, exactamente el 16 de junio, fue el 18º aniversario de Ikkaro. En estos 18 años he visto evolucionar la blogosfera, las redes sociales e Internet en general. Lo que veo no me gusta, todo parece haberse desvirtuado y no se cumple ninguna de las expectativas que teníamos de la WWW. Pero echamos un vistazo al pasado y al presente y no hace …

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 …