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Paulo Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest, c. 1465–1470 This post is a work in progress about a talk I gave on August 24, 2024 at the final XOXO Festival in Portland, Oregon. The Saturday talks were all recorded, and videos will be up in three or four weeks; when the video of my talk goes up, I will a.) feel slightly sick and b.) link to it here. The …

I moved to Kaohsiung City in January 2023 after falling in love with its arty, relaxed vibe. Now, one-and-a-half years later, I’ve nearly mastered its pronunciation.There are two complicating factors when it comes to pronouncing Kaohsiung:Chinese is a tonal languageTaiwan has different ways of romanizing Chinese wordsLet’s ignore the tones for a moment—ignoring tones is something I’m unintentionally good at—and focus on the spelling.Although Taiwan has officially used the Hanyu …

It isn’t, as the Celestron website one-sidedly states on its page about observing Pluto, a “fun holiday to celebrate.” What today is is the anniversary of a terrible day for science and knowledge, a day in which a very political vote was taken, which has done tremendous harm to science education and communication over the last 18 years.“It” is the 18th anniversary of the highly controversial vote by four percent …

The open-air Voss Folkemuseum in Voss, Norway, is a wonderful place to visit. They have a great museum with a number of farming artifacts, and folk arts. Some of the most interesting artifacts are historic chests. Two examples are shown below, illustrating differing forms of assembly. These chests are both small, and simple in construction. The first uses butt joints fastened using wooden dowels or pins. The second chest uses …

Reflecting on my reading over the past year, I have found that I have been drawn to a considerable amount of historical fiction, most of which takes the lives of marginalised women as a starting point. Here are my top recommendations in this genre – as usual, in no particular order. The Maiden by Kate Foster In June I did a literary walking tour of Edinburgh (I know, a book …

Just learned this evening that my Mom has passed away.Not much to say right now. Lots to process. She was an exceptionally good person, a medical pro who cared about everyone.Not sure if I'll have much else to say on the matter. Just, marking the day, I suppose. Hug 'em if you got 'em.

In the past several years I've seen a number of posts attacking the company AirBnb, which is fine, but often they go further and attack the general concept of short-term housing rental outside of hotels. These posts have struck me as oblivious at best, and sometimes even callously indifferent. I rarely hear arguments in favor of short-term housing rental outside of travel industry promotion, so I wanted to give my …

I like the background() function in P5.js. It accepts one or multiple parameters and is very easy to use. Setting the background color is often one of the first steps when starting a new P5.js sketch. function setup() { background(200); } When comes to CSS Doodle, the background color is usually defined within the :doodle block, which indicates that the color is applied directly to the component element. @grid: 1 …

From the Daily Telegraph: A Pakistani web developer accused of spreading fake news that helped foment anti-immigration and anti-Muslim riots after the Southport stabbings has been arrested in the city of Lahore. Farhan Asif is alleged to have worked for a sensationalist news aggregation website called Channel3Now, which published false reports about the identity of the knife attacker. Channel3Now infamously repeated claims that the attacker’s name was Ali Al-Shakati; that …

Table of contents Problem definition Conclusion Feature flags are one of my favourite practices in software engineering. I wrote a detailed article about their use-cases and how I consider them a superpower! In this article, we are going to build a feature flag service on-top of the Cloudflare Developer Platform, specifically Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects. I recently wrote about Durable Objects, in my opinion the most underrated compute and …

I have just come back from a short break in Alnmouth, and where we were staying had a “4D Sudoku” puzzle. The website for this puzzle is long gone, the Twitter account has not been updated since 2011, there does not appear to be any solution anywhere on the internet. I was on my own.

Having dispatched punctuation and book news, we’re on to pocket calculators! Incredibly, half a century or more after their appearance, there is still news to be had on the subject. In the introduction to Empire of the Sum, I mention that like some other animals, ravens and other corvids are known to be able to count. Not only that, but they understand the concept of zero, which is something that …

Here we are againI will add to this, but it appears that new tools on both sides of the marketplace are emerging both for shoppers to get better deals and for shops to screw over their customers.Back in 2013 I looked at an area of work for a “data locker” product for Telefonica. Big data but for the masses, what would make sense. Tiny data, maybe?The shopper tool here showing …

I was very happy to see a new book by Lost Art Press on saw sharpening. The book, by Matt Cianci, a long-term customer and friend of TFWW, is succinct and very useful. Saw sharpening is a critical part of successful woodworking. A sharp saw is not only just a pleasure to use, it'll work accurately and quickly. In the past people didn't really sharpen their own saws. If you …