Recently updated blogs

Children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities in residential special schools and colleges across England are to be offered free NHS eyesight, hearing and dental checks. Autistic children and young people and those with a learning disability are often more likely to experience eyesight, hearing and dental problems than their peers and […]

Erik Hoel: I think bookstores turned out to be weirdly sticky simply because people like being in bookstores. Going to a bookstore is an aesthetic experience. It’s fun. It’s something to do with your family. It is a pleasant feeling to be surrounded by physical books. It is a pleasant feeling to browse. It is a pleasant feeling to be the kind of person who goes into a bookstore and …

Ever since the Dobbs decision permitted states to set their own abortion policies, Donald Trump has taken the position that the issue should stay at the state level. Dobbs itself doesn’t require this, and leaves open the possibility of a federal ban. But Trump nevertheless declines to pursue such a ban, and indeed is opposed to such a ban. Now, a federal ban is in any event currently politically unrealistic, …

Saturday 5th October 2024 Hello blog readers. I need your help. In the coming weeks and months I’ve been invited to make a couple of online presentations about the state of bus and rail integration in Britain and what can be done to improve things. I’m enormously grateful to Britain’s renowned rail fares expert Barry Doe for his assistance in providing comments on a draft of this blog as well …

Kate Bollinger “Postcard From A Cloud” I love the simple little trick Kate Bollinger pulls off in this song – singing near the bottom of her register in the verses, and at the top of it on the choruses. It’s not heavy-handed at all and it took me a little while to even really notice, but it’s very effective in marking the broader contrast between those two sections. In the …

Make a better meeting when you can, and the best of a meeting when you can’t. The choice to avoid holding a meeting may snowball into problems that require even more meetings. Ensure every meeting worth the person-time, assuming organizational dynamics allow for it. Recurring meetings have to earn their continued existence. Steer meetings away from sidebars, confusions, digressions, and distractions. Meeting are an opportunity to go deeper than documents …

Today I heard about the sqlite3-rsync command, currently available in a branch in the SQLite code repository. It provides a mechanism for efficiently creating or updating a copy of a SQLite database that is running in WAL mode, either locally or via SSH to another server. Update: Thanks to gary_0 on Hacker News here's a MUCH simpler recipe: git clone https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite.git cd sqlite ./configure make sqlite3-rsync So it looks like …

Last week, in the Perfume Chat Room at the Serenity Now blog, rickyrebarco told about having to evacuate because of Hurricane Helene and shared which perfumes she took with her. I commented that I was recently thinking about how hard it would have been to make such a choice. And Old Herbaceous suggested that it […]

As I write this, OggCamp 2024 (which I have subtitled The Return in my head’s inner monologue) is a little over a week away. You can still get a ticket and join us! A few of us have done a little bit of promotion of the event that you may not have seen, heard, or read, so feel free to explore these: I was on Tom’s Hardware PiCast Dan wrote …

Below is the mid-term for my Modern Japan class. You can see the syllabus here. I wanted to think about this a bit, because I am trying to do several things with it, and I am not sure how well it will work. First a bit of background. I have usually liked take-home tests, since asking students to analyze history without looking at any sources is….1 less than ideal. I …

Continuing a thread about vintage TV ads we last did on September 8, today's post delves into 1950's and 1960's Commercial Land, specifically cigarettes.To get in the mood, it's time for a cuppa joe from Conquistador Coffee!Since the September 8 post started with animated ads, here are some very good ones plugging Lucky "LSMFT" Strikes.While I don't know offhand who produced the stylish "It's Light Up Time" ads, they are …

Well this is just a really nice piece of flattery, and a nice breakdown of my design system masterclass I delivered at HATCH Conference in Berlin last year. I truly enjoy teaching masterclasses, running workshops, and working with teams to help people understand important concepts, provide resources, and share my own experience working with dozens of teams on design system efforts. Thanks Zoi!

The New York Times recently ran a one–two punch of stories about the ostensibly softening political involvement of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta — where by “punch”, I mean “gentle caress”. Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac on Meta “distanc[ing] itself from politics”: On Facebook, Instagram and Threads, political content is less heavily featured. App settings have been automatically set to de-emphasize the posts that users see about campaigns and candidates. And …

Endre Penovác (Serbia, b. 1956) paints cats using a unique wet-into-wet technique. He uses a wet-in-wet technique, which involves applying wet paint to a pre-wetted surface. This approach allows the pigments to blend and spread organically, creating soft, ethereal effects.More about how he paints these cats on my Substack post

Nancy Friedman is one of my favorite writers on language, so I was over the moon to read her write-up of my book Gobsmacked! I can’t imagine a better appreciation of what I’ve tried to do with the blog and the book. Her piece also reminded me that, some months back, Nancy had suggested I write about “pap”–a noun for paparazzi photographers, and a verb for what they do, as …