Recently updated blogs

A century of motorways This month marks 100 years since the opening of the world’s first motorway, the Autostrada from Milan to the Lakes.On 21 September 1924, if you were lucky enough to be living in Milan and wealthy enough to own a motor car, you might have driven your machine through the busy cobbled streets of the city to Viale Certosa, where the north western suburbs gave way to …

I often do LeetCode problems for fun. This site mainly provides short coding problems for students and others to train for the kinds of question that come up in technical job interviews. I use the site to keep up my programming skills and it often requires clever algorithms and data structures. The Daily Question is like a Wordle for recreational programmers. Try this problem which asks you to create a …

Because I lead a lot meetings, I often get asked to do territorial acknowledgements before the work begins. And because I’ve been a supporter of Squamish language education and fluency through the Sníchim Foundation I’ve been trying to learn how to do that in the Squamish language. The text above is a very basic acknowledgement of territory, that was shared with me by Khelsílem a while ago and I’ve been …

Hailing from Brooklyn, New York, emerging singer-songwriter Maria Lane will stop you in your tracks with her heartfelt indie folk pop. Captivating audiences since 2021, Maria’s unique style weaves profound lyrics into an emotionally charged fabric, making her a must-watch artist in the modern folk music scene. Releasing new single ‘what were our vows for?’ last week (September 20) is all about exactly what you might suspect – a couple …

About nine months ago, I ran into Evan Prodromou at an event at Meta. The social media giant was telling an audience of Fediverse and decentralized social veterans about its plans for its social network product Threads – focused primarily on its quite extraordinary plans to integrate it with the wider Fediverse. At the time, I wrote a very long blog post about the whole experience. It was a fascinating …

I mentioned the DJI Osmo Pocket in the "Future's so Dim..." post, and this got a number of responses popping into my email InBox. It's worth deep diving into the problem a bit more, because it's essentially the same problem that the camera makers have been fighting for some time: "good enough" wins. We've seen this "good enough" thing pop up in technology after technology. For example, despite the audio …

I get so annoyed at news reporters and political pundits when they talk about climate change because they invariably get climate confused with weather. All summer long, reporters were warning about how awful the upcoming hurricane season was going to be, and they always blamed anthropogenic-influenced climate change. Then, hurricane activity this year was below average (so far). Few of these same reporters mention this. A hurricane season is weather, …

Today, we’re upending the traditional name order. Names are usually arranged alphabetically by first letters. We’re used to seeing them and evening thinking of them sorted by their beginnings. Try it yourself. What would you guess is the all-time most popular American name starting with the letters ART-? Take a moment right now to think of possibilities, then read on. Maybe you thought of the right answer (Arthur), and maybe …

Whoa – this has been quite the week. We’ve been working with [redacted] to get something ready to launch in time for [redacted] and it is the kind of high profile activity that has a lot of important eyes on it (as well as opinions). It has got ye olde heart pumping but I have to be honest I’ve quite enjoyed it – it is the most I’ve felt like …

Team Lisp is ready to play: I'm entering the RetroChallenge 2024 (RC2024) with a NoteCards project targeting Medley Interlisp. The RC2024 announcement explains the point of the challenge is to do something new, learn, and have fun with retro systems: In a nutshell, the RetroChallenge is a loosely disorganised gathering of RetroComputing enthusiasts who collectively do stuff with old computers for a month. The goal of my RC2024 project, WebCard, …

Agatha All Along (2024) s01e01 “Seekest Thou the Road” D: Jac Schaeffer. S: Kathryn Hahn, Joe Locke, Debra Jo Rupp, Aubrey Plaza, Emma Caulfield Ford, David Payton, David Lengel. Direct(ish) sequel to WANDAVISION has Hahn playing a prestige series detective, except her latest case starts throwing her. There’s Plaza’s FBI agent, come to help, only Hahn can’t quite remember their history. And then suspect Locke is pretty sure he knows …

Happy autumn! Did you find any September Ale yet? Nope, me neither. But as I probably say this time every year – it was a thing! Whatever it was. Defo. A certain thing for a certain time: Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples …

As an extension of last week’s A Historical Summary of My Music Tastes, I kept thinking about the many ways hip-hop and other genres I started getting interested in intertwined. You’ve got your conventional hard rap tracks and the more gentle ones I already laid out a few years ago and for some reason keep going back to, meaning it must somehow be worth it to remix that. Hip-hop is …

Happy "new song by The Cure" day to all those who celebrate. This is like hearing from an old friend again after all these years. I can't wait for the album.