Recently updated blogs

“King County Metro Route 8 | NFI XDE60 | Madison St @ MLK Jr Way” by Han Zheng is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Transit access is frequently depicted with isochrone maps. Given a starting point, time of day, and time budget, determine all the places that can be reached within that budget using transit and walking. These maps are not a new concept, with examples dating to the late …

Increasing the number of steps you take each day is definitely correlated with living longer, and if you raise them you benefit. CC-licensed photo by Timo Newton-Syms on Flickr. You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam. It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s …

Dave Winer’s 2004 definition of podcasting is what I think podcasting is: Think how a desktop aggregator works. You subscribe to a set of feeds, and then can easily view the new stuff from all of the feeds together, or each feed separately. Podcasting works the same way, with one exception. Instead of reading the new content on a computer screen, you listen to the new content on an iPod …

A tiny tool I used for the first time in late September, 2024. A few weeks ago, I was curious what my laptop’s “uptime” was — in part because it was acting a bit funky — and I realized I had no idea how to answer that question, but I also figured (correctly) it should be simple, so I looked it up. This Thursday’s Read the Manual adventure is about …

A new RFC was released for Structured Fields: RFC9651. What is it? HTTP headers have been a bit of a free-for all in terms of how complex values are encoded, with many headers requiring their own mini-parser. A while back an effort was started to fix this for headers going forward, named ‘Structured Fields’. They’re called Fields and not ‘Headers’ because HTTP has both Headers and Trailers! Structured fields let …

🐈‍⬛ and XSLT 2024-10-04T00:00:00+00:00, by Emma Humphries, from Infinite Wishes 🏳️‍⚧️🚀 On the last day one could post on Cohost, I put together a repository with an Atom to HTML stylesheet with folks who were on Cohost in mind. Since then, I’ve been playing with the idea of why not just post a feed and a stylesheet? So I created a site at https://dr-mae-space-cat.nekoweb.org/ which is just that: an Atom …

The 80-second clip above captures a rocket launch, something of which we’ve all seen footage at one time or another. What makes its viewers call it “the greatest shot in television” still today, 45 years after it first aired, may take more than one viewing to notice. In it, science historian James Burke speaks about how “certain gases ignite, and that the thermos flask permits you to store vast quantities …

We had some performance issues last week. Entirely of our own making but not in the usual way. We nearly DDOS ourselves by sending out emails. We do a lot of analysis in Energy Sparks and, to be honest, some of it needs optimising. Tickets are in the backlog and we are exploring solutions. Anyway, one morning last week we had a sudden spike in memory and CPU usage. This …

I've been working as a Senior Frontend Engineer for several years now at different companies. I tended to shy away from "the next step" as that usually meant not writing code. Often, it meant attending more meetings.At the same time, I also enjoy mentoring and trying to give people opportunities to do work that they find meaningful or fun. This ties into a recent change for me - I've joined …

A glass of red, paired with the dulcet tones of Tangerine Dream?

As I'm closing in on the end of the Confrontation project, I've decided to do some gap filling. This essentially means finishing off any WIP figures and making sure each gang is at least 10 models strong. After a bit of a stock-take, this meant that I needed to paint 3 more psykers, 3 more Helmawr, 2 more maniacs. Plus the Scavvy gang of course.Step 1 was to get those …

Thank you once again to everyone who participated in this year’s survey of freelance cartographer rates and business practices! Our apologies for the delay in posting the results; life has been busy for both Aly and myself. Before we get to the survey results, here are some handy links to take you to the previous editions: 2018 2020 2022 If you’d like to be notified when the next survey is …

Photographer: Neil LibbySummary Author: Neil LibbyMy son and I couldn't help but notice the center of these orchid blossoms look strikingly like orb weaver spiders. It's known many orchids are devious flowers when it comes to reproduction -- they use trickery to attract potential pollinators. In this case, perhaps the pollen mass in the central column mimics a spider to attract bird pollinators. Or, maybe to trick spiders into thinking …

In't language wonderful? We make these sounds with lingua, lips and larynx [Ug Ug beep beep] and other humans (and some dogs) can understand them to carry a particular meaning. Not all other humans, of course; your {family | roomies | co-workers}will probably get your drift; but someone who has just struggled from a leaking inflatable through the grating roar of pebbles which the waves draw back and onto Dover …

Every morning and every evening I send a brief e-mail to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, to reassure her that I’m still functioning. In the G’MORNIN bulletins I report my sleep times and summarize my morning vitals — my morning vital signs (always blood pressure and pulse rate, occasionally more tests if they seem to be called for). It was only this morning that I realized that morning vitals ‘morning vital signs’ …