Recently updated blogs

a male korimako, in all his visual (and vocal) splendour • tiritiri matangilisteningthe symmetry of the spring equinox brings the first pīpīwharauroa songs of the season to my attention. even though these birds are sneaky and lay their eggs in the tiny riroriro's nest, i am always excited to hear their calls. it means we are well on our way back to the summer months, which i am very much …

• A train driver responds (BusAndTrainUser) • North & West London Lines – Driver’s Eye View (Train_Paul 94) • Europe-wide train ticketing – only EU law is going to fix this mess (Jon Worth) • When Denmark Kinda Designed a Train for Japan: Video (Simon Andersen) • The Cross-Continental Race Using Only Public Transit (CityLab) • Many US cities’ school bus network is larger than their transit system, but is …

In How should you adopt Large Language Models? (LLMs), we considered how LLMs might impact a company’s developer experience. To support that exploration, I’ve developed a system model of the developing software at the company. In this chapter, we’ll work through: Summary results from this model How the model was developed, both sketching and building the model in a spreadsheet. (As discussed in the overview of systems modeling, I generally …

Renters who give up their council or housing association homes to move to a smaller property are being offered at least £1,000 in an effort to get more families off the waiting list. Greenwich Council had previously offered £350 per bedroom for tenants who wanted to downsize, but for the next year the incentive is […] The post Downsize and we’ll pay you £1,000+, Greenwich Council tells tenants appeared first …

It was a quiet week for diabetes news, in this issue of The Savvy Diabetic: Somatostatin May Protect Against Sudden BG Drops Sernova’s Cell Pouch Contains Vascularized, Functioning Islets > 5 years A Spoonful of Laughter for dStimatize.org (diaTribe) Potential strategy against blood glucose drops in type 1 diabetes by University of Gothenburg for ScienceDaily.com, 30 September 2024.

In a recent post[1] I discussed the powerful use of upamān (analogies) as a pramāṇa (means of evidence) and offered a few original analogies that I composed. For this post, I will offer a few more analogies that I composed inspired by my attempt to explain the following section of the seventh chapter of the Bṛhad-bhāgavatāmṛta and to show the power of this tool in elucidating difficult subjects. Śrī Nārada …

Last week I wrote about Why a warm up shouldn’t be just vocal exercises. This week I’m going to revisit five old posts which look at warm ups in more detail. This is one of a series of summary posts around a specific topic, bringing together five relevant posts from the past. Warm ups are often a bone of contention: some singers love them and would happily have a whole …

The St Lawrence is water, the Mississippi is muddy water, but the Thames is liquid history. John Elliot Burns (1858-1943)

Look at these two happy bakers! They are looking on the sweet-side of life while they are busy decorating wedding cakes. This is an extra-impossibly difficult scene to recognize unless the film this screenshot is from is one of your favorites. As always, if you are not familiar with the rules to the Impossibly Difficult Name that Movie game or the prize, click here!

An Almost Impossible Thing by Fiona Davison made it on to a number of Best Books of 2023 lists, but as most of them were in gardening publications with limited circulation, you’d be excused if you missed it. But what a sad miss that would be for anyone interested in not just garden history but women’s history. Davison, who has the envious job of Head of Libraries and Exhibitions at …

Happy Sunday, everyone! It’s been an action-packed week with plenty of travel, presenting lots of opportunities to explore and test new stuff. Apart from some fun gear, I really enjoyed reading Sebastiaan de With’s absolutely gorgeous review of the iPhone 16 cameras, discovering a new iOS app for making delightful QR codes, trying out a magic app for turning 2D photos and video into 3D material for the Apple Vision …

In this post, we’ll talk about how to make rice flour to use in various recipes. All you need is raw rice and a powerful blender! Why Make Your Own Rice Flour? Rice flour is an ingredient that we use often in recipes like Turnip Cake (Lo Bak Goh), Taro Cake, and Nian Gao (Chinese ... View Post

After the best part of a month spent reading Japanese literature, today I manage to pull myself away to try something a little different, and ‘different’ definitely fits the bill here. My latest choice is a book that’s literally out of this world, taking us into outer space and into the midst of a war. It’s not all conflict, though. You see, romance is just as important in space as …

WowHaus Limited edition Modernist Weekly Planner 2025 Limited edition Modernist Weekly Planner 2025 (image credit: Blue Crow Media) I was going to save this for the gift guide update, but the Modernist Weekly Planner 2025 might sell out. (image credit: Blue Crow Media) It might not—and if it is still around, it will make my gift guide. But I have been stung before with these things. The Brutalist Calendar by …

I had to come back from the West sadly as my liver was acting up. It drains me and I have no energy me especially after feeling a bit better over the last few weeks. I hardly sleep which is awful. Yet I have to live with this and the ups and downs. I am back home now it’s pouring but such is life. Kalies flowers from her garden I …