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by John Cook Conventionally it is accepted that Play for Today died forty years ago, in 1984. In the spring of that year, the recently appointed Head of BBC TV Plays, Peter Goodchild, decided to ‘rest’ it, believing it had become ‘slightly tired’.[1] A final few single dramas badged as Play for Today aired during July and August of that year on primetime BBC1. In August, Goodchild announced a new …

It's been almost a year for me developing, maintaining, and running a production web application written in Rust.

Recently I ran a session of the tabletop RPG Trophy Gold for my gaming group, and because one of us had already read all the introductory adventures, I decided to make my own one, called The Everbarrow. And since it seemed to go pretty OK, I thought I’d make it public here. Grab The Everbarrow, an adventure for Trophy Gold set in an eerie burial chamber. Trophy Gold and its …

I missed last week's weeknotes! This is the first time I've missed a week since I started back in January 2020! My Two Weeks The reason I missed the weeknotes last week was that on Sunday the 15th I woke up to one of the parentals needing to be brought to the ER. After some tests, they needed to be admitted to the hospital for observation, so we had very …

Welcome to my 181st gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.1. A levelI've seen a number of fantastic new A level resources recently:From @the_chalkface, exam questions arranged by topic for Edexcel A level Maths and Further Maths. Although similar collections already exist, this may become my go-to: it's well organised, easy to access and

Scanning my hometown newspaper The Dayton Daily News yesterday I saw a story about Edwin Moses, Dayton's third most famous, home towner after Orville and Wilbur Wright. And most track nuts will give me a hard time about that statement. A documentary on his life debuted last night at Moses' alma mater Morehouse College. The title is "Moses - Thirteen Steps" signifying his taking the 400 meter hurdles to a …

Last week I attended Green IO, a conference in London all about sustainability in digital technology, organised by Gaël Duez (who also hosts the Green IO podcast). It was a fantastic conference, and amazing to see so many people who are passionate about this stuff all in one room! I’m not great at taking notes during talks, but there were so many great takeaways I wanted to sum up a …

While the birthday presents were accumulating, other books not slated to be birthday presents were also accumulating. Here's that batch:No, the 43 Visions for Complexity book isn't upside-down. It just has the title on the spine running upwards, rather than downwards. I know this is more traditional in other languages, but it makes the bookshelf annoyingly inconsistent when it's done in English-language books.

Since I started running in January, I’ve noticed something that, while not incredibly surprising, is still new to me: while I’m running, I feel stronger, more physically capable, and healthier. It’s a reliable way to experience eustress on a scalable level.What’s more, when my body feels like it’s functioning as it should, the quality of my thinking improves as well.Physical strength leads to clearer, more optimistic thoughts, and less ego-driven …

Yet another good survey (1045 parents and teens 13-18) showing high use of GenAI in US schools. Now the predictable story of learners using AI on the SLY.UseFirst, we have to recognise that they’re using it and that their use is across a number of tools for different purposes. But homework and assignments are the most common.7/10 teens, 13 to 18 used at least one type of AIUsing AI for …

(Ha, and why it's good none of the players read my blog.)(Northern Continent Detail by Zak S.)I had been intending to run Zak Smith's Cube World setting since Zak began to publish the installments back in 2020. Cube World, literally a cube-shaped world with the campaign taking place on the "near face" of the cube, is the overall campaign setting that contains Zak's major published works: Vornheim: The Complete City …

The first instalment of some much-belated travel photo blogging from our UK trip in May-June 2024. Above, the Sérilly Cabinet, a private room built for the lady of a Parisian town house around 1778, and now relocated in its entirety to the V&A. Completely unoriginally, we started our trip in London. Slightly more originally (for us), we stayed in Hammersmith, a part of town neither of us knew very well …

I decided to have a poke around and see if I could figure out how the HTTP streaming APIs from the various hosted LLM providers actually worked. Here are my notes so far. The general pattern All three of the APIs I investigated worked roughly the same: they return data with a content-type: text/event-stream header, which matches the server-sent events mechanism, then stream blocks separated by \r\n\r\n. Each block has …

If you’re anything like us, there’s nothing better than sitting down with a freshly brewed cup of coffee and a slice of homemade cake. But what if you could combine…

In the autumn of 2020, television production crews all over the world were beginning to cope with a new normal. Whilst non-scripted series were starting to return to our screens with socially distanced sets, reality show contestants in social bubbles and Perspex barriers in place, fiction was another matter, and production on prestige series including Better Call Saul, Stranger Things and Succession was only just starting to spin up again.Animated …