Recently updated blogs

A digression and some advice: Instead of writing a post about burnout or any complaint you might have about your job or AI or people's terrible taste, go outside. Take a walk.Take a drive to your nearest city. Go to a public park. Walk in a neighborhood you've never visited before. Sit at a coffee bar. Eat at a cafe. Read a book in public. Talk to a stranger.* Go …

The back story… Recently I replaced an electric water heater with a manufactured date from 1992. You might be asking yourself how the hell a water heater survived that long to begin with. Long story short, my wife and I purchased a farm which belonged to my great-grandparents in 2021. They had passed about 15… The post A Water Heater Breakdown Was the Best Thing for My Utility Bills! appeared …

Caravan SandWitch is a new open-world exploration game in the style of titles like Sable and Jusant (the latter being more of an aesthetic similarity than a mechanical one) from French developer Studio Plane Toast. This looks like it’s their first game, and it’s pretty captivating. I’ve only cracked the surface (played through the second chapter and associated side quests) and there’s a pretty startling amount of meat on its …

Ridgeline subscribers — A little over a hundred-and-one years ago, on September 1, 1923, Tokyo shook. Well, all of Kantō shook. Especially Yokohama, which shook something extra terrible. Since the start of the Meiji Restoration (1868) Tokyo has been reconfigured a few times. Ideologically / existentially by Perry’s forced opening of the country’s ports, the ending of the 265 years of (pretty peaceful) isolation. Later, during WWII, in the 1940s, …

I am very sceptical about the current trend of “generative AI” and pretending that they represent anything like intelligence. (Previous posts: one, two, three, four, five, six.) But recently I stumbled across a mistake so lovely that I wanted to immortalize it here. It’s on Quora, a Q&A website where people ask questions and other people answer them. In this case, someone asked: What does “Indeed much more rational, but …

This month’s Inspirational Spark is The Power of Place, one of the five themes AASLH has identified in its Making History at 250: The Field Guide for the Semiquincentennial. The concept of “place” can work for any organization, whether your site has a distinct tie to the Revolutionary War era or not.… Continue reading 250th Spark: The Power of Place →

(1924) Directed by Paul Leni; Written by Henrik Galeen; Starring: Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauss, William Dieterle and Olga Belajoff; Available on Blu-ray and DVD Rating: ***½ “Ivan was a blood-crazed monster on a throne, who turned cities into cemeteries. His crown was a tiara of mouldering bones, his sceptre an axe. His council-room was a torture chamber, with the Devil and Death as chief ministers.” – Intertitle for …

If I really want to make a Werewolf Metroidvania, a Game Design Document seems a good first step

The distribution of a \(n\times n\) quadratic form in Gaussian variables, \(X^TAX\) is a linear combination of \(\chi_1^2\) variables: \[Q\sim\sum_{i=1}^n\lambda_iZ^2_i\] where \(\lambda_i\) are the eigenvalues of \(A\Xi\) and \(\Xi\) is the covariance matrix of \(X\). This is not in the tables at the back of the book. For reasonable values of \(n\) and reasonable tail probabilities, the Satterthwaite approximation is perfectly reasonable. It is of the form \[\tilde Q_0\sim a\chi^2_d\] …

This September has seen a lot of convective activity with three days of thunder, already more than the whole of meteorological summer. The first storms arrived during the early hours of the 8th. Lots of thunder and lightning though only 7.1mm of rain. Further storms bubbled up at 1200 and 1720 with 9.8mm of rain. Both the 11th and 12th have seen further thunderstorms develop with hail recorded though rain …

TL;DR: A creative writing exercise inspired by getting up too many times last night.

”Understand me…I do not have time for things that have no soul.” – Charles Bukowski

We're thrilled to announce the next big step for Laravel Herd, making the best development environment for macOS and Windows users even better. This update ships an integration with Laravel Forge, a profiler, a way to store your project configuration in your repository, and massive improvements for the dump debugger.

The less interesting part of the story is that my big home stereo has new amplification: Tiny Class-D Monoblocks! (Terminology explained below.) More interesting, another audiophile tenet has been holed below the waterline by Moore’s Law. This is a good thing, both for people who just want good sound to be cheaper, and for deranged audiophiles like me. Tl;dr This was going to be a short piece, but it got …

Long term readers (or any Instagram followers) may recall that I am prone to several kinds of dermatitis: mainly the allergic and irritant contact variety, about which I have done a few posts, most notably - and graphically! - this one.I did also have a six month spell of seborrheic dermatitis, which came out of nowhere after the first Covid booster vaccine - I will of course never know if …