Recently updated blogs

My excellent Nick Roche commission. First up, a quick piece of housekeeping for people that don’t follow me on social media: Because writing Revisitation is so time consuming and difficult (and whilst my break for TFN was planned, you’ll have noticed it doesn’t take much to knock me off-course and create an unplanned gap), I’ve decided that, once I’ve reached the end of 2012 in six weeks, I’m going to …

The 8 Moon Phases Names Here are the “official” 8 Moon Phases in order: New – the new moon is not visible Waxing Crescent – the Moon starts growing First Quarter – the moon looks like half a circle Waxing Gibbous – still growing Full – we see the entire circle of the Moon lit … Continue reading "Moon Phases Names – an easy way to remember" The post Moon …

Who wouldn't want a goat dress?No, No, No. I don't mean a dress for the goat to wear! I mean a human dress, with a goat print on it!Despite my years and years of raising goats, and my (slightly fewer) years of making myself what ever dress struck my fancy, I actually never considered making myself a goat dress, until The Dreamstress shared this Gilbert Adrian dress on Facebook last …

Chociaż strona ta poświęcona jest erze 8-bitowej, kiedy w Polsce królowały Atari, Commodore i Pegasusy, a ja aż do czasów Pentium III byłem “jedynym” posiadaczem... Read more

Having boarded our flight to Türkiye (estimated flight time of three and a half hours) with a two- and a four-year old, E—— received a text from the airline telling us our flight had been delayed two hours. We deployed every form of entertainment we had on us before the plane had even left the gate: a “scratch pad”, two magnetic “doodle pads” and my Nintendo Switch. As I walked …

Olympic Silver Medal Finally Awarded to Tim Koleto Today, my friend Tim Koleto was awarded the Olympic Silver Medal with the Japan figure skating team in Paris at the Victory Ceremony near the Eiffel Tower and the River Seine. His mother, his constant cheerleader, was there to see it. Olympic Victory Ceremony The “Victory… Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian billpetro.com Subscribe to have future articles delivered to your email. …

Wednesday, Aug 7 IPA (phonetic) wordle solver (permalink) made and submitted by rfong find words that fit phonetic criteria! a total cesspool of regex. don't actually use it to cheat at phonetic wordle though, it's better for your linguistics brain to solve puzzles yourself. — rfong

I’m just back from a productive week working with Mika Satomi and Lizzie Wilson on a mini project ‘Modulating Time’ at the annual, week-long PIFcamp gathering in Slovenia’s Julian Alps. We worked on handheld stick-based and woven devices for tactile control of musical pattern and tempo, so that audience members could manipulate our live coding performance. Here’s a sneak peak at what we ended up with!

I recently got my hands on a USB drive with Kakasoft USB Copy Protection (DRM protection). This software promises to let you share data without the fear of it being copied by the end user. However, the pseudo-hacker in me couldn’t resist the challenge. After all, “If it can be read, it can be copied.” In this article, I’ll walk you through the entire process I used to crack this …

I’ve always been careful to ensure Curious British Telly doesn’t become a rose tinted, nostalgia-for-the-sake-of-nostalgia borefest - you know the thing, see all those Channel 5 documentaries about the 1980s. Nonetheless, it’s sometimes difficult to deny that the past had some amazing opportunities.Sure, there was nothing as conveniently lazy as, for example, Deliveroo in 1981. But did you need really need it back then? Especially when your hunger could be …

The CSS Anchor Positioning API is a game-changer in web development because it lets you natively position elements.

"Get or create" is a very common operation for syncing data in the database, but implementing it correctly may be trickier than you may expect. If you ever had to implement it in a real system with real-life load, you may have overlooked potential race conditions, concurrency issues and even bloat! In this article I explore ways to "get ot create" in PostgresSQL. Illustration by Abstrakt Design Table of Contents …

photo by Milton GreeneLike so many summer days in Los Angeles, this one began as a balmy and sunlit morning. It would grow warmer and sunnier, but the languid summertime mood was shattered by news of a shocking event in one of the city’s most elite enclaves. It was Sunday, August 5, 1962, the day Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her West Los Angeles home, an empty pill bottle …

The long-awaited day has arrived! It's been a while since we've had a Release Day celebration for a new Furrowed Middlebrow title, but as of today Eleanor Farjeon's delightful Miss Granby's Secret is officially out in the world, and doesn't it look lovely added to my shelf?Thank you to all who pre-ordered. Hope you enjoy it as much as I have!

Welcome back readers. It was very painful this week to hear of Game Informer’s sudden shuttering, layoff-ing, and off-lining, as such a long-running publication that has continued to publish good work for nearly as long as I have been alive. These folks deserve far greater dignity than an unceremonious blindside by their parent company. It feels timely yet also evergreen to remind folks that independent games crit–not subject to the …