Recently updated blogs

It's funny how you can warm to a project over a few weeks isn't it? I really didn't enjoy painting the first Confrontation Elite gangers, but I'm closing off the project with a final pair, and they were a lot of fun to paint up. This time round it's a bit of an imposter-leader model, plus a champion with the coolest heavy weapon there is: PLASMA!Elite gangers may not be …

Recently I have been most baffled by how on my iPhone, my iCloud backup was over 5GB (and therefore would not back up into the free space that I have) despite how I had turned off most of the apps that might want to be included in the backup. There are many, many, many posts on the internet from people having this problem, and there are a few common things …

We all have that one friend who takes the joke too far: A singular and amusing case came up at Dublin Police-court on Saturday, a clerk, named Thomas Summer, being charged with handcuffing Richard M’Cormack. The evidence showed that the prisoner and a friend visited the Tivoli Music-hall on the previous evening, and there witnessed Read More

KILOMETRE CLUB - EARNEST TUB Long-form ambient tracks often explore a basic idea, which then is developed... or even just repeated in a loop. This remarkable album by Kilometre Club (Daniel Field, from Toronto, Canada) does the opposite: it presents just those basic ideas. 103 (One-Hundred-And- Three!) of them, to be exact, each of them 80 seconds (more or less), with a total playing time of 131 minutes. Why 103? …

When working: sync first *then* async

This case involves augmented reality (AR) effects/”filters” that people can use to doctor up images and videos on social media, such as the ability to add virtual bunny ears, flower crowns, or cat whiskers to people in the image or video. The tsunami of anti-AI laws (and other laws against synthetic content) puts all of those AR filters in jeopardy–after all, they produce fake algorithmically-generated images. But before we get …

Bestselling author Louis Bayard has written nine historical novels over the past two decades and has researched them all at the Library, poring over maps, sorting through personal love letters, consulting societal details of the lost worlds that he brings to life. His latest novel, “The Wildes,” a fictionalized account of Oscar Wilde and his wife and children, was released this week. His penchant of weaving real people (Wilde, Abraham …

Recently I wrote about the Wendy’s SuperBar. The SuperBar was Wendy’s reaction to dwindling sales, which had been inflated by an ad campaign that took America by storm, “Where’s the Beef?” In a series of commercials and print ads, octogenarian spokesperson, Clara Peller challenged non-Wendy’s burgers size, asking simply, “Where’s the Beef?” The phrase spread like wildfire and would become an accepted phrase when one wants to question the substance …

I just learned that the painter, illustrator and writer known as Ul de Rico (his full name was Ulderico Conte Gropplero di Troppenburg) passed away on 3 August 2023, a bit over a year ago, aged 79. I've written about him before, and here is the link. The Rainbow Goblins has been a favorite of mine since I first discovered it not long after U.S. publication in 1978. His family's …

Many local people and businesses helped to crowdfund SE London BookFest, a new literary festival. We would like to say a massive thank you to the following:Heather MacFarlane, Yvette Rawle, Mark Baxter, Sue Walker, Tristan West, Damion Viney & all at Co-Accounting, Dominic Walker, HTW, Tuts, Ellie Wood, Julia Mlambo, Guy Ware, Anne Coates.Sanjit Chudha, Jill Cuthbert, Kim Smith, Julian Kenny, Rosemary Chapman, Guy Haslam, Hayley Farrant, Rebeka Russell & …

Recently I got an interesting performance bug on emoji-picker-element: I’m on a fedi instance with 19k custom emojis […] and when I open the emoji picker […], the page freezes for like a full second at least and overall performance stutters for a while after that. If you’re not familiar with Mastodon or the Fediverse, different servers can have their own custom emoji, similar to Slack, Discord, etc. Having 19k …

Or is the only alternative to keep displays on all the time?

As a title, Why Am I So Single? has the potential to elicit one of two responses: some people will be like a moth to a flame, and others will run a mile in the opposite direction. But hold on and don’t judge a book by its cover (or a musical by its title), as this new Marlow & Moss production is ultimately the story of two friends who discover …

With Robert Recorde (c. 1510–1558) and John Dee (1527–c. 1608), we have already looked at two mathematical practitioners, who were among the first to publish mathematical texts in the vernacular in sixteenth century England. A third member of this group was Leonard Digges (c.1515–c. 1559) who was a friend of Dee’s. Usually, if Leonard is known at all, it is as the father of Thomas Digges (c. 1546–1595) a much …

One of these is not like the other two This week I found out that fake chimneys are a thing.I was walking past a building site and noticed a couple of chimney stacks sitting on the scaffolding. My first thought was that they were pre-assembled, but then I realised, why would you do that? That would make them extremely difficult to install. Also, after a little more pondering, this site …