Recently updated blogs

I was sad to hear that Edna O’Brien had died. She lived a remarkable life and leaves an amazing body of work: she was, in Eimear McBride’s description, ‘one of the last great lights of the golden age of Irish literature’. The controversy over O’Brien’s taboo-breaking early books – starting with The Country Girls (1960), which was banned in Ireland – had ebbed by the time I started reading her, …

Last month, I started full-time on a new startup. It’s early days, but we’re having a lot of fun. A startup, fundamentally, is a search for a repeatable, scalable business model. You rapidly try things, run experiments, learn, and iterate your theories about how to build a useful product that people love. This experimental nature makes many founders reluctant to talk about their startups early on. What if I share …

The Tenor Commodordion is an ergonomically improved version of the Commodordion.

Books After completing my visit to the Sir John Soane's Museum, I headed to the British Library to see which of their First Folios is currently on display. Fortunately it isn't the copy exhibited at the Shakespeare North Playhouse last November but a different one to tick off the list (or make bold and put [IRL] afterwards), with the shelf mark C.39.k.15 and available to also view online at First …

I broke the XML on my MLP Atom feed with unescaped HTML. Good times. Retro. Very early this millennia vibe. I got to visit the W3C Feed Validator which is a time capsule of a site. Confirmed that modern news aggregators for the most part still don’t rely on feeds to be valid XML. Except Slack. Slack’s aggregator apparently does. Got me wondering if it was possibly still Magpie under …

An adventure you say? Alex was keen to get me on a kayak so we planned a trip to Loch Laidon via loch Ba. I gazed at the map and it did not look too bad – the river that connects Ba to Laidon is around 2 miles and on one report it stated that it was 95% paddling with about 5% pulling the kayak. On the day it turned …

This set of week-notes is a bit of a catch-up on one guitar I’ve been fixing up, and another I started reworking a little. Whilst it’s easier to get people excited about new builds, every luthier I’ve met does work to maintain, repair or restore old guitars. Even the best guitar if it’s being used will need occasional work: new strings being the most frequent and obvious one that most …

Howdy to Deliberate Internet – my newsletter combining nuanced perspectives on Remote Work, Technology, Psychology, and other latest obsessions. Guilt, like pain, is a very useful signal: It means you are doing something you should not be doing. So when we feel guilty about “not being productive enough”, why do we do the same thing twice as hard? In this issue of Deliberate Internet, I’m going to share my simple …

Had a very nice and special POTA activation of DE-0094 Niedersächsisches Wattenmeer National Park: Conditions were rough but I've managed to get 16 stations into my log, including two from the Azores. It was great to sit on a dyke, watch people kite and enjoy the view of the sea while talking to stations all over Europe. My rig was the usual: Xiegu G90 and a 5.4m long telescopic vertical …

Weibo Fu wrote an interesting paper on upper bounds for spaces of Bianchi modular forms, pushing previous results of Simon Marshall and Yongquan Hu to get more or less optimal results in the weight aspect. More generally, for any number … Continue reading →

Tamara Andreeva in 1930 Nearly a decade ago, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, of which I was not yet the editor, I reported on some of the earliest discoveries I made on my long search for the voices of LA’s Russophone past. Among them was the journal The Land of Columbus (Zemlya Columba), which folded after two issues in 1936 and 1937. As I wrote in 2015, …

There is golf at the Olympics. This is a mistake for many reasons but primarily that golf is a bad and very boring game. But what always surprises me is...

The rise and fall of our interest in progress?

A poster for Exhuma, designed to hint at the silhouette of the Korean Peninsula In March 2024, the supernatural horror film Exhuma (파묘, Jang Jae-Hyun, 2024) surpassed ten million ticket sales, becoming the first Korean occult genre film to join the “Ten Million Club.”[1] The plot begins with young but renowned shaman Hwa-Rim (Kim Go-Eun) being hired by ultra-wealthy Park Ji-Yong to identify his newborn son’s illness. Determining the cause …

Episode: ‘Meet the man archiving Biden’s presidency’ From POLITICO Tech: “The transition from one presidential administration to the next is generally thought to start around Election Day and end with the inauguration. But for the Internet Archive, it’s already underway. The nonprofit leads a coalition of libraries and universities that works to preserve the government’s digital history and to protect it from partisan tampering during administration changes. On POLITICO Tech, …