Recently updated blogs

Dear Captain Awkward, My group of friends and I are all in our 30s, mostly queer, and have found ourselves in widely different circumstances regarding: financial stability, disability, and cultural acceptance. Most of this friend group has known each other for 10+ years. We’re pretty close! We share a lot of solidarity and a history of caring for one another. But, recently, our group has been fracturing around issues of, …

In modern app development, user experience is paramount. Gone are the days when a simple loader at the center of the screen sufficed. Today, users expect more refined loading indicators, with shimmer animations being popular. While many libraries are available for creating shimmer effects, we've found that it's quite simple to implement this animation "manually" in Jetpack Compose without adding another dependency to our project.Modifier extension approachOur preferred method for …

Posting is very sporadic right now, apologies. On to the links. The amazing USC Optical Sound Effects Library. Lots to download and sample here / Colossal continues to be so, so good. See, for example, this link to Tapedeck.org / … Continue reading →

Last year, I joined the crowdfunding campaign for a neat little 7-inch, open hardware laptop called the MNT Pocket Reform. After much anticipation, I finally got it in the mail a couple days ago, and absolutely love it so far. Here are some first impressions. Why this device As someone who uses computers every day for work and life, I’ve gone through many devices over the years. I’ve taken old …

How the hell do people stay informed nowadays? I have no idea, but this is how I do it. And some other thoughts.

“Why does that Wetherspoons have a drawing of a standing stone outside?” I asked incredulously a few months back during a visit to the soon-to-be levelled down (funded by levelling up money) Cumbernauld Antonine shopping centre. Soon followed by, “…and it is called The Carrick Stone!”. Little more encouragement was needed to go inside to, er, investigate, the schematic drawing of a lumpy standing stone on a wooden panel drawing …

Welcome fans and devotees of old school mattes, models and clever trick photography. It's time once again for another giant of a blog post, and I do emphasize, giant! I never do these things by half-measures and always try to cover all possible bases when examining and illustrating these amazing hand rendered moments of movie magic.I have a vast collection of shots here, from a very broad cross section of …

I’ve been pondering Founder Mode and I have a few thoughts about it. Paul Graham’s suggestion is that ‘career’ execs are numpties, and only super-human founders can do things that these losers can’t. It’s self-selecting nonsense. For every Chesky, there are five asshat founders driving their company and its reputation into the ground. There are incredible, transformative career VPs out there and I know this because I’ve worked directly with …

Lower Inver morning view upstream from the Scrambles Over the years I have been privileged to fish in many beautiful places, but nowhere else moved me as much as these two small Highland rivers. As I walked up the Lower Inver on the Monday morning of our week, I found myself humming the song "Dancing Cheek to Cheek" from the 1930s musical Top Hat, produced and directed to showcase the …

School started this week, and I haven’t been this nervous or excited in decades. I don’t remember my absolute first day of school ever—it was sometime when we lived in New York and the memory of those years are getting fainter and fainter as I age—but I do remember my first day of school in Canada. It was partway through the school year (we had immigrated in the cold of …

If you ask chatGPT to give you the first paragraph of Moby-Dick, it gets it exactly right. This and other such examples are sometimes taken as evidence that it has kept a copy of that book in memory, a potential copyright violation. The makers of these Large Language Models say they don’t, or at least […]

Reading Since last time, I read a few books: Sea of Tranquility, a book club book, Doppelganger, the new Naomi Klein, and Manywhere, a collection of short stories. Sea of Tranquility was very digestible sci-fi. I haven’t read that much sci-fi overall, so it’s probably inaccurate to say that it’s spiritually similar to Ted Chiang, but that’s the closest reference I know of. In the end, I think it’s a …

Beborn Beton's North American tour begins on October 3. The post Interview: Beborn Beton discuss their return to the U.S. appeared first on Synthpop Fanatic.