Recently updated blogs

I mentioned a while ago that I wanted a way to filter Podcasts into multiple separate feeds based on their content. The tool I mention in the previous post, SiftRSS is pretty good, but the only thing it doesn’t currently do is let you change the name of the feed, which means I end up with several feeds with identical names. So, I made my own: Baleen. It’s pretty simple, …

By Dr John Ringquist By Dr John Ringquist The Iranian HESA Saheed 136 suicide drone (unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)) entered the war between Ukraine and Russia with undeniable effects. The influence of the same Iranian drones on Red Sea shipping in 2024 is equally undeniable, as Houthi militias utilised drones to threaten world shipping the … Continue reading #Commentary – Iran’s Drone Sales Threaten Sahel and Red Sea Stability →

V2X technology allowing vehicles to communicate with each other is Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s “moonshot” toward Vision Zero. (Bloomberg) Cities are using new technology to change the way they use curbs; for example, installing sensors to restrict loading zones to emissions-free vehicles. (Government Technology) Technology can also help make streets safer by helping to identify dangerous corridors and enforce traffic laws. (American City and County) New Rochelle, New York — …

Also OpenAI’s restructuring and Eric Adams.

Reading Time: 2 minutes How does working memory influence classroom learning and behaviour? Working memory is essential for learning, but it involves complex brain interactions that influence capacity, storage, and control, which has direct classroom implications for teachers. In this new research (Tardiff & Curtis, 2024) on Short-Term and Working Memory, the authors delve into the limits of memory […]

Google search does away with its cache, an archived copy of an earlier version of a webpage, but now links to the Internet Archive’s (IA) Wayback Machine copy instead. Try it on your own website, assuming it’s indexed by Google that is. On the search result, click the “more about this page” button, which will take you to a page where you’ll see a Wayback Machine link. You won’t see …

Imagine you can choose between a million projects, each of which you rank by two criteria: practicality and inspiration. You want a project that is both practical and inspirational. How much of one must you sacrifice for the other?Turns out this question is easy to answer if we make one key simplifying assumption: that these two ranking are independent of one another. In that case you can take the thousand …

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 …