Recently updated blogs

I adore Nala Sinephro’s 2021 debut, Space 1.8, and this year’s follow-up, Endlessness, is equally captivating. I’ve wanted to see her play live for some time and her mesmerising show at The Barbican didn’t disappoint. A terrible photo, but it’s my photo. It was an experience to cherish, though I won’t attempt to dissect it in detail — just a few notes for my own benefit. Nala sat on the …

The journey is over, gentle readers. Today is the publishing birthday for Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore from The New Press. This book answers (to my satisfaction, if no one elses) the question that I posed in my graduate school application in 1998. Why did the memory of a early eighth century Syrian teenager become my history in my mid 1980s Lahore? My path …

We left Grahame Park last week, newly completed in the 1970s and very much – in good ways and bad – a product of its time. It reflected the ambition of the 1960s to provide new, modern housing at scale and the desire for architectural statement. It incorporated much of the conventional planning wisdom of the day but marked a moment too when misgivings were emerging and challenges to those …

It’s October 2024 and I’m sitting here in my creative maker studio, wearing a bright t-shirt that excitedly bellows “MQTT 25”! To my left is a top-end Bambu Lab X1C 3D printer, that uses MQTT internally for communication. On my wall are a variety of connected gadgets that display data or that light up in response to MQTT notifications. Node-RED is sitting quietly on a Raspberry Pi in the corner, …

As our world continues to advance in its application of AI, it is important to educate our students and teachers on the potential of generative AI. One of the best ways to do this is to provide hands-on opportunities in a safe and structured environment. I recently discovered Mundo, an AI tool that allows students and teachers to explore the capabilities of generative AI without needing to provide personally identifiable …

Paladin - second only to Picador as a publisher's name to set the arty-intellectual bibliophile's heart a flutter... Radical, countercultural, polemical, esoteric, transgressive, avant-garde, youth culture ... a feast for the hungry young mind, portions selling at a reasonable paperback price. Eye-catching design.I have seven of the above Paladins - and five of the seven have the same covers as shown.Not all of them were bought at the time, though. …

Over the last few weeks, my much-missed dad has been on my mind more than usual, which has been largely as a result of a number of less-than-typical happenings in the natural world. The first of these was the BBC’s weather app going somewhat haywire, seeing it predict hurricane-force winds of up to 16,543 knots – strictly speaking not an unusual happening in the natural world but as a man …

Watches. Watches never change us. # If you’ve just joined us, welcome to my series: Wristwatch Roulette, where I furnish my forearm with two fancy finds a fortnight, from fan-favourite Ali Express, market of choice for my 2023 series Shenzhen Safari, and 2024 series Shenzhen Sojourn. Ghoulish Behaviour # Remember when games were good? Ahahaha. No. Things keep getting better. The possibilities of what can be accomplished are built on …

Most of the émigré Angeleno poets whose work I’ve shared here over the years wrote in Russian, though some of them had roots in Ukraine and even identified as Ukrainian. Today I bring you a poem originally written in Ukrainian by Abram Katsnelson (1914-2003), who, like Peter Vegin (1939-2007), came to California in the 1990s, on the same wave that carried my family to these shores. By that time Katsnelson …

Within the story, Jack’s problem, which becomes the reader’s, and must have been to some extent the writer’s, too, is that Roy has a theory, and the theory is just too much. For the Redux newsletter of the Paris Review, I ask whether the demons of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks universe were inspired by a 1982 short story by Norman Rush. Click here to read! And click here to sign …

Graham Hancock was again a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience on October 17th, presumably in support of the release of season two (The Americas) of his Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse on October 16th. The opening move Hancock and Rogan begin by complaining that they were duped by archaeologist Flint Dibble (who was just given a well-deserved Ockham Award) on the widely viewed and commented debate episode about Hancock’s claims, …

Pain conceals itself in the stone, the petrifying pain that delivers itself into the keeping of the impenetrable rock in whose appearance there shines forth its ancient origin out of the silent glow of the first dawn­ the earliest dawn which, as the prior beginning, is coming toward everything that is becoming, and brings to it the ad­ vent, never to be overtaken, of its essential being.from Language in the …

The 2024 election is fast approaching and once again, there's a lot to vote on. Most of your choices will have a (D) or an (R) next to…

I’ve written a lot of JavaScript. I like JavaScript. And more importantly, I’ve built up a set of skills in understanding, optimizing, and debugging JavaScript that I’m reluctant to give up on. So maybe it’s natural that I get a worried pit in my stomach over the current mania to rewrite every Node.js tool in a “faster” language like Rust, Zig, Go, etc. Don’t get me wrong – these languages …

LifeSpan Under Desk Treadmill TR12000-DT3 GlowUp Walking Pad As a software developer, I spend the majority of my time sitting at a desk. In the past, I worked in an office but still managed to get some physical activity through my daily commute. I had occasional back pain, but it was infrequent. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. We shifted to remote work, and my physical activity decreased significantly. My daily …