Recently updated blogs

First game of the season! My options were thus: a 1730 kick off at Crawley for the Blackpool match; or Chase away at Clitheroe, which coincided with a food festival and the launch of a real ale trail. I briefly considered incorporating a trip to Brighton into the Crawley weekender but decided the cost would be ridiculous – and news of the food fest and real ale trail in Clitheroe …

The Open Web Advocacy (OWA) initiative in their recent blog post Apple adopts 6 of OWA's Choice Architecture Recommendations highlighted the six recommendations that Apple has adopted from the group's recommendations to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act in relation to browser defaults and choice screens. In parallel, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched a Market Investigation Reference into mobile browsers and cloud gaming and have recently …

Why do governments go after companies and executives of services of more weakly encrypted tools? It’s very hard, this early, to pierce through what’s going on with the French authorities’ arrest of Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram — but that doesn’t stop people from having pet theories. Was it retaliation from the US and the FBI for not backdooring Telegram? Was it a favor to Durov so he could …

It’s been a minute, as they say. Here’s a sampling of what I’ve published on other platforms: Does Anyone Still Write Letters? (Other Than Me, That Is.) (Medium gift link) What I Like About American English (An Open Letter to Our Friends Across the Pond) (Medium gift link) And speaking of American vs. British English, here’s Bamboozled by Bits and Bobs (Substack) * What you need to know about some …

Is Steely Dan cool these days? Or is it the case that they’re deeply unfashionable? Either way, every person should make it their mission in life to listen to The Nightfly by Donald Fagen (the lead singer of Steely Dan). If I was writing one of those ‘100 Albums You Must Listened To Before You Die’ lists it would definitely feature.The reason I mention this record is that there is …

Source: Alan Bennett, extract from ‘Seeing Stars’, London Review of Books, vol. 24 no. 1, 3 January 2002, pp. 12-16, reproduced with slight emendations in Untold Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), pp. 160-173 Text: In the 1940s within a mile or so of where we lived in Armley in Leeds there were at least half a dozen cinemas. Nearest was the Picturedrome on Wortley Road but others were just …

I was going through the blog archive the other day and noticed that it's coming up on three years since I started reviewing again. Three years! The time has flown by for me. I also noticed that I'm posting way less often than I used to, which is a little depressing. At this point I have an enormous backlog of dolls that I'm dying to look at! I always set …

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CORS, and the browser’s same-origin policy are often misunderstood. I’m going to explain what they are and what you need to do to stop worrying about them.Note: I’m going to talk about CORS and the same-origin policy as one thing and use the terms mostly interchangeably. This is because they are basically one system, they work together to decide what you can do with what cross-origin resources. Basically if your …

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 …

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 …