Recently updated blogs

This time-lapse drone video following the climbing route up Mount Everest does more to make clear the sheer scale of Everest, and in greater detail, than the eponymous 1998 documentary I first saw in an IMAX theatre—which wasn’t exactly a slouch. This video, however, uses a commercially available drone that starts at around C$2,750 (and it’s no coincidence that it was posted by the drone manufacturer, because oh lord does …

With brevity, my operational view on structured concurrency is the management of a tree structure of tasks. It doesn't matter what color the function is, this task tree can be fully controlled by a parent, child interface. You can cancel children tasks, bubble exceptions up to the root task, catch them from raising exceptions, or even restart them when they fail. While this might sound a little abstract, I wanted …

Here’s the text and images from my talk at Wuthering Bytes 2024. Credits / links are here. This isn’t exactly what I said, I was distracted by a talking robot at one point for one thing I had a really lovely time and met lots of interesting people. Thanks for asking me to speak Andrew. I had a big fight with WordPress over the formatting here and it still looks …

Hello! I am dipping my toe back in the water – just to see how it feels. My last post on Heavenali was in mid June, and at the beginning of July I stopped reading other blog posts and announced on social media that I would be taking a break. Although I didn’t put a time scale on it – I had the vague idea of coming back at the …

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 …

Fonts: Brauer Neue, Agentur

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 …