Recently updated blogs

Some of the half-frame 35mm photographs from the French ‘Randonneur Round The Year’ rides will be included in a Brighton Photo Fringe exhibition between 16 and 20 October. The show is at Regency Town House in Hove, open between 11am and 5pm. Further details on the Photo Fringe website. Copies of the photo book 2704 will be for sale at the exhibition but can also be ordered from my Etsy …

Even when the legal arguments in such lawfare cases are weak or absurd, the litigation itself can be of value to litigants who seek to utilise the court hearings to air a litany of real or imagined grievances. In the wake of a decision by the Council of Stellenbosch University to close its Wilgenhof Men’s Residence for one year in an attempt to bring an end to humiliating and exclusionary …

Is your meticulously crafted strategy falling flat during execution? Discover a powerful approach to making your strategic vision a lived reality.This blog post is a summary of our webinar What is Strategy Activation? Watch the on-demand version now. For anyone responsible for leading change transformation in their organization, an effective strategy activation approach is critical to bringing a strategy to life. Too often, strategies are meticulously planned but falter during …

Maintaining secure integrations between Active Directory (AD) and identity management platforms like Keycloak is a crucial task in any modern IT environment. Password management for service accounts, especially those used in sensitive environments such as LDAP integrations, can become tedious when performed manually. However, automating the process reduces errors, enhances security, and saves time. In… The post Automated Rotation of Keycloak LDAP Federation Password for Zerto appeared first on Justin's …

The official Tour de France race guide ALWAYS SELLS OUT. It has all the info you need to follow the Tour de France. Here is how to find it.

The lovely Swan Public House in Clewer won a huge award last month. This 18th Century pub close to Windsor was awarded the nation’s best community pub in the Great British Pub Awards. The Swan is truly a special place with the amazing Green Room School having a classroom there. There is something going on every evening with groups as diverse as tabletop gaming, bicycle repair, German language practice and …

A fun book to draw from when teaching modern Japan is Soeda Azembo and Michael Lewis, A Life Adrift: Soeda Azembo, Popular Song and Modern Mass Culture in Japan ( London: Routledge, 2009). You can’t assign it, since it is not in our databases and costs too much, and maybe would not work that way anyway. You can pull a lot of songs from it though. There is a short …

A reader writes: Have you got any tips for maintaining motivation on a longer tour? I’m just past halfway through a Spain to Ireland tour, and I’ve just been feeling a bit burnt out. Been on the road since April with a bit of time off in July. Thanks so much for the question! This is a really interesting one. Because you’ve touched on something not often mentioned about long-term …

It’s Live! Zavala 3.0 is now live in the App Stores. There are only a couple of new major features in Zavala 3.0, but I put a lot of under the hood for this release. Lots of code was changed to modernize the code base and support new operating system features. For example, Zavala will support the Apple Intelligence Writing Tools when they become available in macOS 15.1 and iOS/iPadOS …

All Happy Families is director/co-writer Haroula Rose’s highly amusing foray into dysfunctional family dynamics. With all of the film’s endearing characters’ quirks and through all of the plot’s engaging twists, everything is wrong — until it’s right.

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 …

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 …

It’s so easy, watching on the news, to scream at people who don’t evacuate ahead of oncoming storms. I get it. I scream at them, too. It’s often a fitting reaction.And yet.Evacuation is a process. It’s not “throw a handful of things in an overnight bag and floor it.” You still need to put in the time, money, and effort of preparing your house (or condo, or apartment) for the …

Elite Hoops has hit the one year mark! I had a few buddies ask me some questions around getting those first paying customers, the kinds of marketing I’ve tried and other similar things. In short, indies talkin’ shop. So, here is a point-by-point brain dump of what I think the twelve most helpful things I’ve learned or tried are. I’ll try to keep each one around a few sentences to …

Or: what I drank on my holidays. In our perversely unseasonal family holiday in Swanage last year, I ticked off four of the town’s seven pubs and had beers from three different local breweries. This year’s perversely unseasonal return trip to Dorset took us to Weymouth, a much larger town and a considerably more serious proposition for the ticker; they’ve got two separate J.D. Wetherspoon’s! Dorset beer was considerably thinner …