Recently updated blogs

As a longtime donor, got to visit the Internet Archive! They protect 50+ petabytes of web history over the past 28 years — nearly 835 billion web pages and 44 million books. Each drive rack holds 2.88 petabytes of data, so these 3 racks are ~2% of the archive counting backups.

Do your duty, prepare for your lethal injection. Tl;dr: Our medical/care system is screwed, governments are all efficiency- and cost-obsessed. They’re fixated on ageing and on the explosion of the ‘economically inactive’ population. This system would like the idea of more people taking the voluntary way out. Am I being neurotic? My concerns about the assisted suicide bill, currently in the UK Parliament, are not with the risk of coercion …

When I first decided to get an espresso machine, I went for a top of the line machine. I wanted something that would last a lifetime. The same applied to the grinder. I bought an ECM V-Titan 64, with titanium-coated flat burrs that are quoted to last at least 50 years before needing to be replaced. Here I am, 8 years later, and finding myself somewhat frustrated with my grinder. …

by Peter Wood Peter Wood reveals and explains his personal list of rules for good writing. Check out his latest story, “Murder on the Orion Express”, in our [November/December issue, on sale now!] On Writing by Stephen King should be required reading. There’s not a bad suggestion in the book, and you’ll also get some really cool backstories to some of King’s iconic fiction. I don’t have a writing advice …

I was very fortunate to speak at another excellent Beyond Tellerrand last week, alongside some brilliant and wonderful people. Once again I was inspired by the variety of topics and messages people shared on the stage. Alongside the usual artists’ inspiring career stories and techies’ (equally inspiring) web design magic, there was a strong undercurrent of anticapitalist messaging in a way that is more important than ever, especially relevant given …

I studied design in the early 2000s, a time of brutal design feedback culture. These days, I have at least two to three conversations every week with designers who need some advice on how to share often negative feelings at work. Sometimes it’s because of a personality clash, other times it’s ‘constructive feedback’ based on someone’s performance. In any case, it’s a ‘difficult conversation’. Helping people have difficult conversations well …

Recollections / November 12, 2024 ROBERTS: I don’t know if I told you guys this, but I worked at Musicland/Sam Goody for a couple of years in the early ‘90s, a pretty good time for popular music. I was actually a store manager for a few months—yes, Richard, it’s true—before my location closed down (there was another Musicland down the street in the mall). That’s what you did back then—you …

We all deserve and need random, enjoyable links. Onwards. Modernist Estates, a new agency (not for profit!) looking to make the most of the best bits of 20th century architecture and help get it into the hands of those who … Continue reading →

British painter Frank Auerbach has died, at the age of 93 years. Whatever else they may have been, Auerbach’s pictures were never easy — easy to make, or easy to love. Effort was demanded on both sides. First impressions of his work — on the part of critics and, indeed, the rest of us — often focused on the superficial. Auerbach’s paint could be almost ludicrously thick, his brushstrokes crude, …

In our list of hard words to spell in the English language, “awful” vs. “awfull,” “awefull,” or “aweful” is right up there in difficulty! What is the correct way to … The post Awfull, Aweful, Awefull, or Awful? How to Spell It… appeared first on Drawings Of....

The ability for SFO Museum ActivityPub accounts to both signal and promote one another provides a mechanism where people can subscribe to a single (SFO Museum) account can keep up with everything that all the other (SFO Museum) accounts are talking about. The introduction of a message processing queue, currently just to handle nearby requests, opens up a whole world of possible interactions between people inside (and outside) the terminals …

Okay, so I f**ked up. I forgot to write about <br> and now the whole series is out of order. Having announced this failing on social media, I appreciate the comments I received like, “give yourself a <br>”. Very funny and clever. “Excellent humor,” as Bob Mortimer would say. Anyway, here it is, albeit late. Some people get very uppity when you conflate the terms tag and element in HTML. …

PC, Mac$13.99Bureau 813.5 hours The Operator is a narrative puzzle game where you play an intelligence operative assisting agents in the field. By analysing photos and videos and searching databases, you discover clues, solve crimes, and unravel a conspiracy. All gameplay happens on a simulated computer desktop, which is why I like calling this genre “desktop/phone simulators”. Like alternate reality games, desktop simulators promise highly intuitive gameplay: if you want …

Below is a step-by-step guide generated by Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Here’s a step-by-step markdown tutorial to set up a cross-account AWS DMS migration from a PostgreSQL RDS instance in Account A to an empty RDS instance in Account B: Prerequisites Two AWS accounts (Account A and Account B) AWS CLI configured with appropriate credentials for both accounts Basic knowledge of AWS services (RDS, VPC, IAM, DMS) Step 1: Create RDS …