Recently updated blogs

Exploring different ways to make sense of OpenStreetMap data.

Reflections on my time as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Elon University, North Carolina. 1. Elon University · 2. Flora and fauna · 3. Teaching technology ethics · 4. The sport · 5. Being a Fulbrighter · 6. Life in the North Carolina Piedmont · 7. The national future. I try to arrive in the US as non-judgemental as possible, determined to reappraise America from first principles. Unrealistic perhaps, but …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 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 …

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 …

Superhero shows are a weird subgenre of sci-fi. The super-powers and how the superheroes use them in pursuit of their world-saving goals are often the point, and so often skimp on the sci part of sci-fi. The Amazon original The Boys is no different, where the core novum is a chemical (compound V) that gives people superpowers. I love the show. Though it’s definitely for adults with its violence and …