Recently updated blogs

I’ve been writing and editing for such a long time now that I’m well trained in the art of brevity. So I enjoy finding signs that don’t obey the rules. The disruptors and mavericks – mixing things up. A bit wordy. Slightly long-winded. They meander to the point. This one might be better as a map, but I’m glad it’s this very stolid (and highly legible) sign.This one is like …

Laura Biagiotti's iconic Laura, with its aqueous character, has been so characteristic of its era that 30 years later it still springs forth in our minds as a 1990s staple, alongside L’Eau d’Issey (1992), L’Eau Par Kenzo (1996), Aqua di Gio (1996), Escape For Men (1993),and Eden by Cacharel (Indeed, I recently wrote a dedicated fragrance review & homage to Cacharel's Eden). Perfumer Anne

Spook Country by William Gibson, 2007 A '90s indie-music star enters the 21st century as a freelance journalist working on a piece about locative art, interviewing a Los Angeles artist who uses augmented reality to restage famous deaths. No one has heard of the magazine she's working for, a Belgian start-up headquartered in London knocking off Wired magazine. Meanwhile, a family of Chinese-Cuban subversives deliver iPods containing data in and …

While I was doing some programming in Racket, I found that I wanted to be able to define variables in the middle of a cond block, so that I could use the variable in subsequent conditions, without having to add an extra level of nesting.To do this, I created the following macro:(define-syntax (cond/define stx) (syntax-parse stx ;; terminating with else [(_ [(~datum else) expr ...]) #'(begin expr ...)] ;; continuing …

In the last post, I’d expressed some concern about the bow in the wood. I’d had two solutions in mind: clamping the bow out, and just making the diameter a bit thinner. I ended up going with both approaches. First, here’s what it looks like to clamp the first layer of the four-layer glue-up to a cleat: This worked pretty well, at least until I got to the later stages …

Spotify killed the New Releases by Genre function of Every Noise at Once when they laid me off and cut off my website from its internal data sources. As I've described previously, the fact that a functional new-release tool required internal data-access, to begin with, was a result of minor structural contingencies, not conceptual or business objections, but in 10 years of working at Spotify I do not remember ever …

Sunday evening and Monday morning (Aug. 11-12) is the peak time for one of the better meteor showers of the year – the Perseids. While the best night is Aug. 11-12, there could be significantly more meteors in the sky than usual on Saturday and Monday nights too. Meteors or “shooting stars” (which have nothing to do with stars) are pieces of cosmic dust and dirt hitting the Earth’s atmosphere …

Google Maps “Location History” is now called “Timeline” and is no longer available on desktop. Gone as well is the method we all used to back up the Location History, which involved downloading the history in Takeout or just from the Google Timeline webapp. Now, Timelines will only be available on a single mobile device. Ostensibly for security reasons. This kills a ton of usecases, e.g. I used it for …

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

As 2030 comes around in the not too distant future, the striking force of the Finnish Navy will consist of four Pohjanmaa-class corvettes and four of the smaller Hamina-class fast attack craft. This force is large enough to able to create two distinct task units (though obviously having all eight vessels at sea at all times is not possible), as an example each with two corvettes leading two FAC. While …

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