Recently updated blogs

Barbara Stanwyck enters the 1930 film "Ladies of Leisure" -- and film history -- in a rowboat. The oars squeak. Her face is marked by mascara-streaked tears and she's clutching a broken dress strap. She's Kay, a party girl who just left a wild one on a yacht.On shore is Ralph Graves as Jerry, who's also left a wild party, this one at his Manhattan penthouse. He's gone for a …

In the San Francisco Bay Area, the regional transportation planning body, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), has launched a major effort to improve the coordination between the region’s 27 transit agencies. One element of this, just unveiled, is a regional standard for transit network maps. The goal is to have all of the region’s maps evolve toward the same style, so that it’s easier to explore the entire region’s network. …

Oil paintings don’t look that great in books but photographs do. This is part —but only a part—of the reason why photobooks are ubiquitous in the photo art world. No other art form seems so naturally inclined to the printed page, no other art form is so augmented (it is hoped) by being placed in sequence, a turn of the page informing the previous image as it reveals the next. …

If you were listening to the radio in the 90s, or got a certain flavour of email forward, there's a good chance you've heard the song Jingle Cats. The original novelty single from 1993 is exactly what it sounds like—pitch-bent cat meows set to music to create the illusion cats are "singing" Jingle Bells. It was an absolutely huge hit and, between 1993 and 2009, led to the release of …

If you want your webapp to paint behind the status bar at the top of an iphone, you can just add these meta tags: <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes"> <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style" content="black-translucent">

A rare example of a crazy wall in the real world or, at least, as the background for a press photo.(Thanks Šmingvin.)

Here we are at Night 5, the penultimate game of this phase of the CSW Mordheim Campaign. For this evening we ventured out to the suburbs where Michael hosted us in his lovely home. GAME 1 For this game Michael had assembled a remarkable table that combined the original card-and-plastic Mordhiem buildings with traditional bases, other terrain elements, risers, water and even a ship! A three way battle with Mattias's …

In between my day job as an M&A attorney and my social responsibilities (which are legion), I have been slowly organizing the new workshop. Recently, this has included updating the tool wall that goes with my hanging wall cabinet. The tool wall itself hangs from the same french cleats the main wall cabinet hangs off, […]

If you haven’t already, I strongly encourage you to take a closer look at NotebookLM, a new(ish) Google tool to explore documents via a chat interface, based on a Large Language Model. It’s worth noting that NotebookLM does allow you to “chat” with documents, it does not train the LLM on those documents, though, so it all lives in the LLMs context window. I tested NotebookLM a bit over the …

Morning folks.Well, another post about film and I'm not even a hipster.Nor am I using the truly ghastly Ilford colour film either - a film that reminds me of the free stuff you'd get every time you got your holiday pics developed at Snappy Snaps (et al).Nope, this bad boy was fecking expensive, but lovely nonetheless, Kodak TMX 100 - and FRESH too, which is unusual for me as I …

[There is a shortage of skilled tech workers in Japan](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2024/02/06/tech/japan-tech-firms-labor-shortage/), and a growing number of Japanese companies have responded by building new, multinational development teams. An in-house multinational team, which typically uses English as a first language, can allow a Japanese company to take better advantage of the global talent market. But what's it like for the international developers working on those teams? Are there communication issues with management? Is …

Wizja katastrofalnego pierwszego roku działania kontroli czatów w UE - jak dziś możemy temu zapobiec.

The end of Summer is so close. We have a few days forcasted to be popping back into 30°c this week, but overall we’ve dropped down to the point where we can go outside without regret. We escaped out to Karuizawa to visit some friends. Karuizawa is a bit of a resort town. About an hour north of Tokyo. It’s an absolutely beautiful area filled with trees and views. And …

Setting up an 1825 game with all the Units has been an arduous task. I hoped to make it a yearly tradition in 2019, but then Covid-19 happened. After that, every attempt has failed somehow. Today, one of our players got stranded in Berlin, but as we had four players present, we made it. This time, we used 18xx.games as a moderator. This speeded up the game greatly. With the …