Recently updated blogs

Researching another piece of writing, I discovered today with great sadness that the American composer and instrument builder Chas Smith died earlier this year, on 13 May. I can’t say that I knew a huge amount about Smith’s life before today – although he found success in Hollywood, particularly through his work on Dune, he … Continue reading Delayed memorial: Chas Smith →

We understand that a community has built up over the years and some of you will find this disappointing, however, in line with changing audience behaviours a decision has been made to direct users to our social channels where there are active communities discussing the show on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. The Strictly blog and its comment section will soon be closing in line with other blogs across the BBC, …

The cheatsheet that came with the Teenage Engineering KO II was pretty but a bit hard to parse, at least for me. Meanwhile the manual seems to leave some features undocumented. So I scratched together what I could, plus tips from forums, and condensed everything down to this.Things still unclear:The difference between "Reset fader" and "Erase fader"Does group FX send (hold FX, move fader) override the fader's own FX send …

Years ago I bought a cheap chinese E-Cigarette 510 box mod, the Eleaf iStick Pico 25. It's running the ArcticFox custom firmware which sadly seems to be no longer available. I never really used it for anything, but for reasons I want to get it going again. Unfortunately the display is so dim that it can no longer be used. So I wanted to repair the device. I found this …

Image: Bathhouse built on top of a hot pool, Taiwan. Photo from early 20th century, public domain. No Running Water at Home For people in industrial societies, few activities demand more privacy than washing and grooming the body. We usually do it alone, in our private bathrooms, with locked doors. Seen in a historical context, that is unusual. Bathing in the presence of others has been the rule rather than …

A while ago I went to north Wales with my daughter. I posted here a few pictures from that trip. We wanted to visit a place I saw in various websites, that at first looked like a mistake. Someone must have taken the wrong pictures, I first thought. These pictures looked like a place from another country. And actually, that is the intent of Portmeirion, a fake Italian village someone …

3 Text Editors for the Linux Command Line 17 September, 2024 I don’t know exactly, or even roughly, how many editors there are for the Linux command line. But I have tried more than a few of them over the years, and found that most weren’t for me. A variety reasons for that, which probably had as much to do with me as with the editors. But, regardless of what …

Bev and I fly off to the, sun-soaked, island of Corfu on Wednesday afternoon. Gatwick isn't a particularly pleasant airport from which to start our latest adventure, yet is certainly better than the Luton alternative when having to drive from Ramsgate. Because of this tonight will be the final time that the garden moth trap will be operated until we return. To be fair, the recent run of blustery winds …

There is a classic statistical test known as the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test (Wikipedia). This post is about an off-label use of the KS-test that I don’t think people know about (not even Kolmogorov or Smirnov), and which seems useful for experimentalists in behavioral science and beyond (most useful, I think, for clinical trials and field... The post [120] Off-Label Smirnov: How Many Subjects Show an Effect in Between-Subjects Experiments? appeared …

Have you ever read an autopsy report? It’s brutal. You peel a person apart, pick them over for information. You tour through their body, their organs, their selves like it’s the index to a book. In just a couple of pages of banal medical description, you are turned from an ordinary citizen into the holder of a dark secret. The autopsy makes you a witness to somebody’s most intimate moments. …

Yesterday, I was at State of the Browser in London. It was great to catch up with friends and make new ones, and the talks were once again very well curated. In this post, I'll share some notes from the day and the takeaways that stood out to me the most. The Barbican tube station Think about funding the web ecosystem Stephanie Stimac kicked us off with a brilliant talk …

The history of Western encounters with ‘the other’ is a horrifying collection of oppression, colonisation, extermination; of seemingly intellectual debates about race and the superiority of one race over another; of inflammatory remarks, persecution, camps. Anyone who was not Western (specifically European) and Christian (mainly Catholic) was considered vermin, subhuman, a danger to public life. […]

Written by Arthur McKenzie, Directed by Richard Holthouse Knowing PC Young’s eventual fate, it’s difficult not to look back at any episodes which featured him strongly with a keen eye to see how his character was developed. Even this early on it looks like the essential building blocks were in place – Young is keen to be a member of the team, but seems destined to always be something of …

THE EDITORS OF Not Just Bits of Paper, a compendium of writing on the original anarcho-punk wave which offers a participant’s eye view of events, has been republished in an updated edition to mark the tenth anniversary of its release. The original edition of Not Just Bits of Paper was published back in 2014. The 2024 edition is printed in full-colour, and has been extended to include an additional thirty-seven …

It staggers me to realise that, after penning this blog for almost 17 years now, I have only featured A. A. Allen’s incredible output once, seven years ago when I posted Crying Demons (now updated), a staple of pretty much every ‘worst records’ list compiled. Crying Demons is a classic noted, on the reverse of one of Allen’s many releases, as ‘one of the most amazing recordings of demons speaking …