Recently updated blogs

Some time ago, I presented a few listening tips on the subject of my favourite drink—tea—and tea culture. And in this blog post, I’m going to offer a few suggestions on the topic of the world’s second most popular drink: coffee. From the history of coffee to its health benefits and tips on how to make the perfect cup of coffee… Here you’ll find everything you need to know, and …

The other day I was sent an audio recording of a meeting I had been part of, but no textual transcript was available. With a relatively small amount of hacking it is now very easy to use the OpenAI Whisper model via the transcriptions endpoint to generate high quality text from such a file. This example uses Python, it’s a great language for these sort of ad-hoc tools. Process The …

Prince Arutha strategizes to counter the Moredhel threat. This is the first game I've played with "Chapters." It apparently isn't the first in the RPG genre, although unless some console game did it first, it seems to be the first with a western release. In any event, I can't imagine that the authors of Krondor played Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes in Japanese, so I suspect that to them …

The New York Times published this chart to illustrate the extreme ocean heat driving the formation of hurricane Milton (link): The chart expertly shows layers of details. The red line tracks the current year's data on ocean heat content up to yesterday. Meaning is added through the gray line that shows the average trajectory of the past decade. With the addition of this average line, we can readily see how …

The Moving Picture World2 October 1920A follow-up to last week's post on Frank L. Packard's The White Moll.TheWhite Moll was the fifth Frank L. Packard book to be adapted by Hollywood. It followed Tinseltown's take on his 1914 novel The Miracle Man by a matter of months. The Miracle Man is considered one of the great lost silent films. I first wrote about it thirteen years ago, sharing the two …

I read Sam Freedman’s Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It with a mixture of nods of recognition and gasps of disbelief. It’s all too apparent that – as the subtitle puts it – nothing works in aspects of life in the UK dependent in some way on the successful design and implementation of government policy (which is most aspects tbh). Those of us who have engaged …

In the last episode of this series, we looked at two popular sixteenth century texts on statics, the oft published and widely read pseudo-Aristotelian Questiones Mechanicae, and Guidobaldo dal Monte’s highly influential Mechanicorum liber. Today we are going to leave Italy and travel to The Netherlands to look at the work on statics of the Flemish polymath, Simon Stevin (c. 1548–1620). Source: Wikimedia Commons Stevin is usually referred to as …

You can tell the nights are getting darker. Dog poo is back on the pavements I found some on my trainer that I brought into my wee house, it was the last thing I needed. As soon as the weather gets better I will be out with the poo bags to clean up. Dog Poo Comments welcome.

A new location has just been announced for the Great British Beer Festival for 2025 which takes it away from London for the first time for many year, and whilst we are now in the midst of the festival season here's a look back at the history of large scale beer events....So the Great British Beer Festival is to leave its longstanding home at Olympia in London, and is moving …

“He was not of an age, but for all time.” Ben Jonson’s description of William Shakespeare certainly holds true, with a variety of productions of his plays showing in theatres of all kinds across the globe – as well as countless film, TV & audio versions, not to mention spin-off ideas inspired by certain characters or locations. But these original plays didn’t appear in a vacuum; the early modern theatre …

In this first of a three part series of blog posts, we explore the CDS Plugin mechanism in CAP to find out how it works, so we are well prepared to write our own plugin. Background This series of blog posts accompanies my session in the Developer Keynote at SAP TechEd Virtual this year. In particular, the content I presented in that session is reflected in this first blog post, …

I start every morning by opening up a GitHub search that shows me all the open pull requests across Laravel's open source ecosystem. It’s kind of like my personal to-do list for the day. Some mornings, there are just a handful, or...

As a science fiction kid in the 1970s, one phenomenon I recalled well was the “ancient astronaut” works of Erich von Däniken. These took a look at various artistic and architectural creations of various ancient peoples and claimed they were the result of extra-terrestrial contact. As von Däniken didn’t have the scientific or academic background […]

📝Editor note: Due to this article's unexpected attention, I've included a few more alternatives that people suggested. I've also added some contextual notes you should know before diving into these options.Due to gestures vaguely, everything going on right now with WordPress, I thought I'd put together a list of alternative CMSs that better fit the criteria someone might have for their website. The modern CMS landscape is super broad, with …

The article notes that the prize actually went to two humans, but this headline from MIT Tech Review may just be ahead of its time. Are we one generation of tech away from a Nobel Prize going to a machine itself — assuming the next gen is more autonomous in terms of what it applies […]