Recently updated blogs

ULA conducted a second launch of its Vulcan Centaur rocket last week, which the company declared a success despite an issue with one of its solid rocket boosters. Jeff Foust reports on that launch as well as efforts to get it, and two other new rockets, flying more frequently.

I guess I’m inventing a new-for-me format here: “Table Talk” While my usual interview format Origin Stories is based on 90-120 min conversations that are well researched and in-depth on a single game or topic, Table Talk will be shorter 20-30 min conversations to catch up with interesting people in the hobby. While being at SPIEL Essen 2024, head of SPIEL Carol Rapp was so kind to sit down with …

Was able to get some time this week to catchup with Bryan Boyer. We talked about some of the work he was doing with his students, particularly challenging them to think about design interventions and prototyping those across the ‘pace layers’ as famously depicted by Stewart Brand in his book “How buildings learn” The image is totemic for design practitioners and theorists of a certain vintage (although I’m not sure …

Sometimes things need to end so we can create something new. Essentially, what's ending is Minimalissimo, and what's beginning is a creative lab I’ve named FFF. I feel like I've done my part in curating beautiful minimalism on the web over the past 12+ years. Now, I’m ready to shift gears — from curating to creating minimalist products of my own. These will be both digital and physical, made in …

What kind of parent are you? Tough question, to be sure. Parents want to raise physically and mentally healthy children to become mature adults ready to deal with the complexities of life. Not an easy job to accomplish well at any time in history. Russell Shaw, the head of school at Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C. offers his view on parenting in this piece that appeared September 25, 2024 …

[politics] ‘If I have a fault, it’s that I’m too honest’… – Boris Johnson’s Unleashed, digested by John Crace. ‘February 2016. I was choked. Blocked. Stuck. Unsure of which way to jump in the referendum. Some have said that I chose to back leave only because that was the best career move. But I can categorically say this is untrue. Never in my life have I taken the selfish path. …

Amazon Prime Big Deal Day is here. Think of it like Black Friday for online shopping at Amazon, but it lasts two full days this October. We also know that historically, the EDC deals—to put it mildly—haven’t been great. But we’re here to help. While there will be tons of deals to sort through in the general sale, we’ll do the hard work of scoping the site (and your other …

A cloud somewhere near Tucumcari, NM

Saturday we participated in a home barista training session at the headquarters of Lucifer Coffee Roasters, here in Eindhoven. That’s also where they roast their beans. I was quite looking forward to it and I’m very glad I joined. It gave us the opportunity to learn more about the world of espresso, and do our first ☕️ cupping. After moving to our current apartment, we invested in an espresso coffee …

Do you like the idea of a daily planner but need more than one page a day? The two page per day A6 Midori Hibino might be a good fit for you. I mean, you can fill up all of its 768 pages of Tomoe River S Paper, can’t you? I have one Blue Green model to give away this week, so read the rules below and enter away! Midori …

Cultural conflict is fine (how we do things), but conflict on strategic goals is not (what we are building).

 It’s that time of year again, for the first round of sales going into the holidays. While I still expect we’ll see bigger deals as we get closer to Black Friday, there are some solid deals in here. The list below is constantly updated, especially later in the day as more deals go live (or, I find them buried deep in the caves). Still, below are my favorites thus …

From the late 1980s, allegations of sexual abuse of children as­s­ociated with Catholic institutions and clerics in several countries started to be the subject of formal investigations. In Ireland, in the 1990s, a series of criminal cases and Irish gov­ernment enquir­ies established that hundreds of priests had abused thousands of children over the decades. Catholic sexual abuse cases in Australia have involved convictions, trials and ongoing investigations into allegations of …

This is the year of my Linux desktop. Three months ago today I moved back to Linux for good after almost a decade with ChromeOS. That day I installed Linux Mint Cinnamon on a freshly delivered System76 Merkaat. I was growing increasingly dissatisfied with ChromeOS and bumping into the restricted confines of its Crostini Linux container more and more. The last straw was the rumor of Google considering a Recall-like …