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My maternal great-grandma's nephew very likely married Tony Curtis's cousin. I was reminded of this connection when looking at Olga, Valeria, and Blanka Schwartz this week. Okay, this gets complicated!Schwartz and Klein from Mateszalka, HungaryAbove, an excerpt from the Find a Grave listing of those buried in Mateszalka Jewish Cemetery in Mateszalka, Hungary. Olga and Valeria both died young, sorry to say, and both were buried in this cemetery. Researching …

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. ***Readers of a certain age will know that, before there was the internet, there was Ceefax, that magical service on the BBC where, with a press of a remote control, you could access the latest written information about the worlds of news, sport, weather, politics and arts. All done with hi-tech blocky …

Archons are angels-but-not-angels, lawful good celestial guardians divorced from Christian iconography (and clear precursors to the “ardlings” that appeared briefly as a playable species in the OneD&D Unearthed Arcana). Morte’s Planar Bestiary presents three: the lantern archon, the hound archon and the warden archon. “When pushed into combat, they prefer to subdue foes,” the flavor […] The post Archon Tactics appeared first on The Monsters Know What They’re Doing.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang says this term for “idiot” is “usually Irish.” Green’s gives quite a few alternative spellings — “edgit, eedjit, eegot, eejut, e-jit, ejot, idjeet, idjet, idjit, idjut, ijet, ijit, ijjit, ijiot, ijut” — which complicates the nationality issue, since Green has found “idjut,” “idjit,” “idjet,” and “ijit” in U.S. sources from the 1880s through the twentieth century. But not “eejit,” which, I’m pretty sure, is a separate …

The datalist element is good. It was a bit bumpy there for a while, but browser implementations have improved over time. Now it’s by far the simplest and most robust way to create an autocompleting combobox widget. Hook up an input element with a datalist element using the list and id attributes and you’re done. You can even use a bit of Ajax to dynamically update the option elements inside …

In the mid-14th century work Bughyat al-ruwwād fī dhikr il-mulūk min banī ʕAbd al-Wād, Yaḥyā Ibn Khaldūn (brother of the more famous Ibn Khaldūn) ventures two possible etymologies for the name of Tlemcen (Standard Arabic Tilimsān, dialectal Arabic Tləmsān): تسمى بلغة البربر تلمسنين كلمة مركبة من تلم ومعناه تجمع وسين ومعناه اثنان اي الصحراء والتل فيما ذكر شيخنا العلامة ابو عبد الله الابلي رحمه الله وكان حافظا بلسان القوم ويقال …

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 …