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taking advantage of today's gift of wild and wet weather, i head to oneroa beach for a walk whilst the car is having it's annual warrant of fitness check up in the village. revelling in the grey skies, rain and wild seas, i send a video message to a friend in the uk — because i'm thinking of her, and i'm also trying to entice her to visit someday.the perfect …

I’m working for a Government department again. A fairly classic brief: we‘re designing a replacement for a 25 year old service used by a relatively small number of people but it captures an important set of data from a specialist group of users.It is basically digital forms. The old one being impenetrable grey forms on small grey screens with cryptic acronyms and truncations on all the labels. It comes with …

still stronger claims of self-authority in OSI’s new AI “definition”

In this day and age, you would think that with a push of a button a book could be released simultaneously all over the world, in all formats. Annoyingly enough, we are not at that day and age. We’re still dealing with contracts and subsidiary rights, licenses, and a bunch of other things that would bore you witless, were I to attempt explaining—presuming I could explain in any remotely intelligible …

173 years ago today, a masterpiece of literary history saw the light of day: “Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville. A book we love and that takes us on an adventurous journey with Captain Ahab and the legendary white whale time and again. We love the symbolism and power of this story. “Moby-Dick” is much more than ...

“e cannot write e cannot tell memory and vocabulary not enough here neither dead nor alive before the king of the vast kingdom of grief. . .” As David Peace’s novel 1980 opens, it is early December 1980 and the voice of Yoko Ono can be heard on the car radio of Assistant Chief Constable Peter Hunter of the Greater Manchester police force: “The 1980s are still going to be …

Creative lives are just inputs and outputs. You listen, watch, read, experience – that’s the inputs. Then you write, record, shape, create – that’s the outputs. The problem of course is that there are gazillions – we might as well call it infinite amounts – of inputs: endless blogs to be perused, films to be watched, books to be read and techniques to be admired. And the outputs? Sometimes they …

Super Logo Design, edited by Taki Ono, is a two-volume set of paperbacks published in 2001 and 2002 by Graphic-sha in Japan. These spreads are from volume two, available to digitally borrow on archive.org. It gives an interesting look at video game logos (among others) designed in the 1990s and early 2000s, listing the designer, client, year of creation, and software used (mostly Illustrator and Photoshop, but also Strata Studio …

Idea to be interrogated: Selective ignorance might actually save your life. It is OK to care less. What matters most is to attend the things you can control/change/affect. The more you try to control the more miserable you become. What can I control? I can control me and me only. Which, OK yes, sure but: really think about that. Do I care enough about myself to actually focus my attention …

Ten Years of AWS Lambda Everything starts somewhere. Today, Werner Vogels shared his annotated version of the original AWS Lambda PRFAQ. This is a great inside look into how product development happens at AWS - the real working backwards process in action. This was, in some ways, the start of serverless computing2. Tim Wagner, Ajay Nair, and others really saw the future when they wrote this PRFAQ3. I wanted to …

Over the last several years in the activist and community circles I've been in, people have talked occasionally about getting licensed as amateur or "HAM" radio operators so we would have an alternate means of connecting to one another in an emergency situation when cell or internet networks may not be available. This summer I did some research on what is actually required to do that. I started studying for …

Saw a man talking on the phone while using a urinal today. Junk in one hand, phone in the other. I don’t want to judge (out loud) but, what the actual fuck

Proteins are a distinct state of matter. Globular proteins are tightly packed with a density comparable to a crystal but without the spatial regularity found in crystals. The native state is thermodynamically stable, in contrast to the globule state of synthetic polymers which is often glassy and metastable, with a structure that depends on the preparation history.For a given amino acid sequence the native folded state of the protein is …

All bicyclists ride bikes. But not all bike riders are bicyclists. I'm a bicycle enthusiast: someone who spends enough time riding and repairing bikes to know a thing or two about them. But I'm not a bicyclist, because I don't race my bike, or care about power meters or pacing or compete in events. I wrote this article to help non-bicyclists better understand bikes: which to buy, what features truly …

I should take my own advice. I tell people to be careful to look for the tiniest checks in the end grain of a log because they will open up as the bowl dries. If a log section has been … Continue reading →