Recently updated blogs

This past weekend I was fortunate to be a participant in the “Relay FM 10th Anniversary Extravaganza”, a live show in London celebrating Relay’s decade of podcasting. Relay is the home of Under the Radar. We didn’t quite join at the start but have been part of the network for nearly 9 of those 10 years. This event got me thinking a lot about longevity, especially as it relates to …

The Adderley Brothers get down to the nitty gritty in the cradle of jazz with Ellis Marsalis and friends. [row-start] [half] [/half] [half] Personnel Nat Adderley (cornet), Nat Perrilliat (tenor saxophone), Cannonball Adderley (alto saxophone), Ellis Marsalis (piano), Sam Jones (bass), James Black (drums) Recorded on May 19, 1962 in New Orleans Released as Jazzland 75 in 1962 Track listing Side A: In The Bag Sister Wilson R.S.V.P Low Brown …

I probably set up and configure (or reconfigure) at least ~5 computers a year for professional audio. A few years back I started configuring some machines to use Arch while continuing to mainly setup and use/support KDE Neon. The two Linux OSes share a lot (and can be functionally equivalent), but differ quite a bit… The post A New Computer appeared first on s c o t t e r …

More than 30 earths could fit between the earth and the moon. Our elementary school models of the solar system really undersell how big space is. The problem is, space is too big and human brains are bad at exponentials. Logarithmic charts like this one are technically accurate, but my brain has a hard time contextualizing it. To get an idea of how big space really is, let’s imagine that …

Earlier this month, we ventured off to Amsterdam after being in France for three months. Not too far from the city are the windmills in Zaanse Schans. We couldn’t ask for better weather to see… The post A Sight of the Windmills appeared first on Mia Rabbit.

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 …