Recently updated blogs

I love hackable URLs. A hackable URL is a URL that makes sense to a human reader, and where the human reader can guess what to change to get to another page. For example, if you look at the URL of this very blog post, https://blog.tomayac.com/2024/11/02/eleventy-11ty-year-year-month-and-year-month-day-indexes/, what would you expect happens if you hack the URL to any of the following values? https://blog.tomayac.com/2024/11/02/ lists all posts that were published on …

I haven’t seen much of London in October. I’ve been away every weekend in October, partly in the UK and partly visiting friends overseas. And now we’re in November, the clocks have gone back, but temperatures haven’t plummeted yet. London feels busy – pubs still have crowds outside. Finally, the UK’s first Labour budget for 15 years The big UK political/market news of the month was the new government’s mucn …

If you visit Canary Wharf regularly, you would have noticed activity for a few months around the middle dock. Now all has been revealed with the opening of Eden Dock. In a pioneering partnership with the Eden Project, Canary Wharf have turned part of the historic Middle Dock, into Eden Dock, a waterfront oasis of interconnected pontoons and aquatic islands. Eden Dock with its plants and the soothing sound of …

Last week, Tadashi Tokieda came to Chicago to give a colloquium. If you have seen him speak, you will not be surprised to learn that it was absolutely delightful talk. I carried the talk around with me in my mind … Continue reading →

October is now two days away. Halloween is gone - which I always enjoying mentioning despite never doing anything for it -, and my birthday too. I’m now 25, a quarter of a century, a very interesting-feeling number. Some would say it’s now closer to the 30s than to the 20s. Let’s recap what’s happened this last month! ✍️ Website During this past month, I made quite a few updates …

This rough looking shed was made using boards made from tree bark from my yard. The part of the bark I used was from the inside of the bark - the part next to the tree. It took a lot of time to make the boards since I had to cut them out, slice them down and sand them. The only commercial parts are the details around the shed. Above …

Following a creatively quiet September, here’s a round-up of what I got up to during October Soundwalking and presenting This month involved a couple of activities I hadn’t done in quite a while – giving a presentation on my work and facilitating a soundwalk. Waite Arboretum soundwalk Cover page of the handout I made for this year’s participants About a week ago, my workplace had its annual ‘HSME’ (i.e. health …

Only one book read this month. School is pretty busy, so I'm working many evenings on grades and other teaching related tasks. I'm able to read a few nights a week before I go to sleep. The Book of M - Peng Shepherd I picked this up after I finished reading The Cartographers, which I read in September. This book took a long time to develop and felt like the …

My 2024 virtual jack-o-lantern was created in Nomad Sculpt, then rendered and animated in Blender. Seen here with my virtual jack-o-lanterns from 2022 and 2023. The post Jack-O-Lantern 2024 appeared first on Evermore Stud.io.

Spanish GardensI am delighted to announce the publication of my latest book Spanish Gardens. Spanish Gardens is a detailed record of my travels throughout the country as I visited the country as a relative newcomer. The book explores how Spain has evolved from the darker days after the civil war to its successful transition to democracy over fifty years ago, tracing those changes through its gardens - from the more …

Hello, happy to report that I have made another appearance on Paul Meier's fantastic podcast, "In a Manner Of Speaking"! Paul, Cameron and I discussed British and American accents in popular music, which is a topic that I've been interested in discussing for a long time. I hope you'll listen and enjoy the podcast; we had a tremendous time making it.

This week long event of scything across the Shropshire Hills included getting a lot of bracken cut plus a few meadows along the way. It culminated in a competition and BBQ. The results from the scything competition 18 entries on a 4x4m square NameClassBladeTimeQuality Peter BlackwellM*9502:438 Phil HoldenM Q*7505:268.5 Hannah HoldenF*7005:168 Ted WaldronM8503:395.5 Shane O’ReillyM V*8504:106 Jim McVittieM V 75*7504:507 Mike TowrieM7504:185.5 Andy HydeM V6007:158 John BowbrickM6007:497.5 Steve MarshM7505:014 Jayne …

I liked Clarke's previous novel, Piranesi (I reviewed it here on Jan. 12, 2022), so the idea of a new book by her attracted my attention. Disappointment after disappointment followed. First, I learned the book is only sixty-three pages: so, a novella at best. But then I got a copy. Nineteen of those pages are publishing matter, or illustrations without text. Eleven pages have only a small amount of text, …

Some idle thoughts for a Friday afternoon. I was just taking a look at Source.Plus a dataset of public domain images for training Foundation models. It’s a project of Spawning.ai which is working to build “data governance for generative AI”. I have some thoughts on the tools they’re building, but that’s not what I’m writing about here. It was this statement which caught my attention: “Through the Source.Plus platform, we …

In addition to the point barrier symbols i also re-designed and extended quite a few of the existing symbols in the style for human built structures of all kinds. Starting point was that i wanted to port back some of the changes in OSM-Carto that happened after i created the AC-Style. But i did not want to use these designs as is. Instead i wanted to re-evaluate the design decisions …