Recently updated blogs

Hello all, Status updateSo.Mid-June saw me catch Covid again, which was a distinct lack of fun. I was wiped out for a good 10 days and am still feeling the its effect on my energy levels and mood three weeks later. As I approach the second anniversary of my Long-Covid it's put a bit of a damper on any sense of recovery I was feeling recently. Interestingly when Fiona inevitably …

Inforrm reported on a large number of defamation cases from around the world in 2023. Following a now established tradition, with my widely read posts on 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 defamation cases, I present my personal selection of the most legally and factually interesting cases from England, Australia, Canada and New Zealand from the past year – with three “bonus” cases from the US. After a haitus …

Episode 35 of the Ted Dabney Experience podcast is available now for your listening pleasure! If you enjoy reading ArcadeBlogger.com, you’ll love the other project I’m involved with: The Ted Dabney Experience Episode 35: Click to listen in Jeff Bell was a hardware engineer in Atari Inc’s coin-op division and officially the longest serving employee of the company; literally the last person to switch off the lights in 2004. Jeff …

Salvaging 18650 li-ion cells from dead battery pack of a ThinkPad T530.

SEGURA, Alain. Une saison avec Marianne: la dernière surréaliste. Bassac: Plein chant (coll. « La font secrète »), 2022 SEGURA, Alain. A Season with Marianne: The Last Surrealist. Trans. Bill Brown. Brooklyn: Common Notions, Dec. 2024 We are excited to announce the translation of Une saison avec Marianne, to be released in December 2024 by Common Notions (who also published our book a few years ago). Best remembered as the …

A gift from Bonner to a budding woodworker On this this July 4th holiday I’m re-posting this tribute to a woodworker and mentor, Bonner Hall. Bonner Hall stooped down and flicked a Japanese beetle off the barely open rose blossom. He paused to relish the fragrance and take in the beauty unfolding before him. Bonner was sixty years my senior, quiet, spent most of his time putzing in his rose …

The Commodore Amiga Port of Cecconoid -- by Ian Ford [h0ffman] & published by Thalamus -- is out! As you can see, Thalamus have put serious care and attention into the production of the big box version, and it really is special. Massive thanks to Andy Roberts for the tireless work, over many months, putting this together. You can order your copy, here. When I was working on Cecconoid, back …

I was invited to give a talk to a graduate-level NLP class about my work on Filipino resources. It was fun preparing and giving that talk because I was able to synthesize my thoughts and look back on my previous research. This blog post is my lecture in text format. You can find the slides in this link. Finally, thank you to Dr. Charibeth Cheng for the invitation! Given all …

by Laura Luebbert and Lior Pachter Background (by LL) Four years ago, during the first year of my PhD at Caltech, I participated in a journal club organized by the lab I was rotating in. I was assigned two classic papers on the honeybee waggle dance: “Visually Mediated Odometry in Honeybees” (Srinivasan et al., JEB 1997)1 and “Honeybee Navigation: Nature and Calibration of the ‘Odometer’” (Srinivasan et al., Science 2000)2. …

Patrice Lejeune and W. Patrick Edwards show off their creations, the "Treasure Box" series, 2008-2024. When the economic crash of 2008 happened, all our business plans for making expensive marquetry furniture changed. We needed to revise our approach to creating new and exiciting objects in order to follow the money which was still available in a dramatically changed market. Previously we had had little difficulty in selling objects that involved …

Chris starts our new podcast episode (Mermaid 101) with this question (see title) and I answer ‘yes’. Mermaids (which have featured for over a decade on this site) are social supernatural beings who happen to live in the water rather than on land. They are essentially marine fairies. But there is an important difference in […]

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. …

Read about my journey as a senior software engineer, looking at the importance of understanding people and managing time wisely.

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 …