Recently updated blogs

Since getting married earlier this month, we’ve been busy assembling a giant package of documentation for Rakhat’s US green card application. The insane complexity of an I-485 adjustment of status application is another article in and of itself (particularly given where we live), but we finally got the forms filled out, and all of the documentation and evidence assembled. So finally, with the application fully complete, I attached Form G-1450 …

Click to buy the book'My spoken material is about the facts of life,' I was explaining to the Mother Superior. 'I've been asking people what they were told, how they were told it and did they ask questions. Terribly funny...' During my Where do Babies Come From? talk at the Metrodeco Café, Brighton, a superfluity of nuns stopped at the window to listen. In the street later that week one …

After much work, the 2024 edition of my top 100 list is now available on BoardGameGeek. It takes some time to compile, but I find it interesting and useful, and since this is already the 11th edition of the list, there’s interesting long-term data in there. The top 100 list is long and has some slightly flaky games at the bottom – after all, I’m not picking the top 100 …

I missed parkrun today, Saturday. I lounged about instead, got up late. Very late, in fact. You see, I've listened to my friend Paul Francis, and to his disappointment.I enjoy being read - it's one of the reasons I write, and I particularly enjoy being read by an attentive and thorough reader, and those of you who know Paul will know him to be among the most assiduous of readers. …

A list of toolkits or resources for people that are new to advocacy and campaigning, or organisations that are considering starting work in this area. The Changemakers’ Toolkit this year especially for those new to advocacy and campaigning. Totally free with lots of using resources and tools. https://freecampaigntools.smk.org.uk/ The Beautiful Trouble / Source

The post Challenges and responses: Economic downturn’s influence on urban policy, planning, and transportation appeared first on CityMonitor.

THE FRIDAY PIC is an installation shot from “Amerika,” the wonderful new projection by Javier Téllez at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances, a two-year-old space in Greenwich Village in New York. In today’s New York Times, I published a long feature explaining the genesis of the piece, for which Téllez hired eight recent migrants from Venezuela to collaborate with him on a Charlie Chaplin-inspired film, as both its …

"Stupid" and "a marketing exercise" were the first two descriptions I saw of the New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century polled from hundreds of "literary luminaries" offering ten choices each, and while it is both of those things, "parochial" is the first word that comes to this non-American mind, and not only in the predominance of books written by Americans. The word also applies to "best", …

Did you know that you can use AI for more than just looking up information? I experimented with using Claude AI to generate an interactive math activity out of HTML, where students could input variables to determine the area of triangles, rectangles, and circles.Claude generated code and suggestions in just a few seconds! The model offered students a visual aid, clear instructions to help them calculate the area, and a …

What is Templating? Templating in the sense of this articlee is when there is a text with placeholders that get filled in according to some set of rules (the templating language). Using templating is often easier than hardcoding some string assembly logic, it also has the benefit that the template could be read in from a configuration file. In case you've ended up here because you have some sample templating …

A weak note

– “I used to read Mr. Money Mustache”, some people say these days, “Until he got all rich and fancy so that he no longer understands the common person’s plight. Stash probably doesn’t even practice any of these money-saving things he preaches any more!” When I read things like this, I can’t help but laugh. Because on the one hand, when you put a bunch of personal life details online …

Exhibition catalogue published by PWP/Bloomsbury, design by Lucy Morton I've been fascinated by Tirzah Garwood (1908-51) ever since I began researching her first husband Eric Ravilious (1903-42). The works I saw here and there seemed dark and strange, not at all like his and not really like anyone else's either. As a writer, her voice runs through the Ravilious in Pictures series I wrote for the Mainstone Press between 2009 …

I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for community-led events in the front-end community, and I am forever grateful for that. However, I am heartbroken by the current state of the events. Many community-led events have recently been cancelled due to low ticket sales, which feeds a gigantic gap of events left by the pandemic. I remember we had to cancel the in-person London CSS and IndieWebCamp …