Recently updated blogs

One could argue for Star Wars: Visions as the best post-Disney acquisition work next to Andor. So, suffice to say, I am excited about a 3rd season.

I just finished my fifth driving lesson in Taiwan.500 minutes down; 1,000 to go.For my first two lessons, the English-speaking instructor rode with me. But since then, I’ve been on my own: repeatedly, mindlessly circling the test track at 2km/h.During each 100-minute session, the odometer has never risen by more than 3 clicks. Three kilometers in an hour and 40 minutes.I’m yet to touch the accelerator.Aside from one 45-meter stretch, …

The VitalsRelease date: 7 June 2004UK chart peak: #1Running time: 46:42Singles: Mr Brightside (#10), Somebody Told Me (#3), All These Things That I’ve Done (#18), Smile Like You Mean It (#11) Now considered as one of the best debut albums of all time, Hot Fuss also reached number 1 in Australia & Ireland – and hit the top ten in Canada (#4), New Zealand (#5), Greece & the US (#7), …

They’re introducing some incredibly draconian changes to their API agreement, which will severely hamstring many apps, and kill off many others. DC Rainmaker has more details, but in short, apps aren’t allowed to show activity data to anyone other than the user, not even coaches; apps can’t do any analysis, analytics, or train AI models on data obtained from the Strava API; and on top of everything, all these third-party …

Blowing Cave Mill. A jpeg file straight out of the camera.I'm a jpeg shooter. Most of the time my files come out of the camera ready to use, with maybe just a little massaging in Photoshop's Curves and Brush tools.But I'm a piker. I hedge my bets. So my cameras are always set to shot both jpeg and RAW. I know it's heresy, but most of the time, if the …

Jetpack Compose's Navigation library has introduced long-awaited type safety, making navigation between destinations more robust, intuitive, and of-course safe. But what happens when you need to pass custom classes as arguments? Luckily, the library supports this functionality - with some additional setup. Here's a complete concise example to guide you.Consider a CheckoutFlow sealed interface with a Calendar destination accepting an Offer object as an argument:fun NavGraphBuilder.checkoutGraph(navController: NavHostController) { navigation<CheckoutFlow.Start>( startDestination …

"A 73-year-old Japanese artisan crafting model trains for decades" I am rather envious of this makers shop. It contains a lot of specialized tools and apparatus. Tools of the trade.

For the 9 inch animals... And for the 7 inch animals... Hello there, I'm just emerging from my cosy little corner, where I've been ensconced for the last few weeks knitting away every spare moment in my days, and I'm happy to let you know that I have a couple of new patterns ready to share. This is an animal outfit that I've wanted to work on for a while …

Possibly the biggest ever upheaval in the history of optics was the emergence of the telescope at the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century, closely followed by that of the microscope. Although mirrors in various forms–flat, convex, concave–had been known and their properties intensely investigated and described by optical investigators since antiquity, the lens only emerged in the Middle Ages. There are claims that the roughly ground …

Email's been here for years. But the reason Substack wants you to call your creative work by their brand name is because they control your audience and distribution, and they want to own your content and voice, too. You may not think you care about that today, but you will when you see what they want to do with it. I know you think you have control over your subscribers …

3 scenes of the great show Mr. Robot with my trusted mechanical pencil Pentel 205.

Drawing comics is how I learned to let myself be happy. My friend Bridget McElroy was the one who told me what I needed to hear to take the first step toward cartooning. Everyday, I think about the gift of what she said to me and it still keeps me going. Thank you always, B.--After some time offline, I've started sharing updates again, on my blog and Ko-fi page. I'll …

I needed a song with lots of secondary dominants in it for aural skills class, and I realized that Norah Jones’ adult-contemporary smash “Don’t Know Why” has a bunch of them. The song came out in 2002, though it could have been recorded at any time in the 50 years previous. “Don’t Know Why” was written and first recorded by Jesse Harris. (He plays guitar on Norah Jones’ recording too.) …

I wasn’t very concerned with the Dead Internet Theory1, until my daughter mentioned it asking for my views. “The internet is dead. They’re all the same. Perfect grammar. Perfect spacing. No soul.” It’s dead like a carnival when all the people have gone home, and only the machines keep running. The lights flash, and the music plays, but no one is there to see or hear it. Once upon a …

See how Amsterdam’s Weesperzijde transformed from an ordinary street to a cycle street prioritising walking, cycling, and greenery. A side-by-side comparison of the before (2022) and after (2024) shows the city’s commitment to people-friendly urban design. Watch the video and explore the story!