Recently updated blogs

Argues that following the traces of mosquitoes can provide valuable insights into the history of quarantine in the twentieth century, the relationship between medical knowledge and public health, and their ideological entanglements.

Here’s the video update from the last two weeks of work on the red bus.

Things I love to see in my product include how certain users make use of the data structures, forms, tables, etc., to perform actions that aren’t originally possible within the product itself. For example, imagine I have a data structure for categories, where there is a table of categories and a form to create a new category. These categories can be associated with products, where a product belongs to a …

A client emailed me a screenshot of a table rather than pasting the table as text into an email. I thought about using an LLM to convert it to text, but the table is confidential client information and so I shouldn’t upload it anywhere. I searched for a command line utility to do OCR and found tesseract. I installed it with sudo apt install tesseract-ocr libtesseract-dev tesseract-ocr-eng and ran it …

This ad for Enna Jetticks shoes from 1965 reminded me of a section of the book The Thoughtful Dresser by novelist and fashion writer, Linda Grant. “I can think of nothing worse than to have been a middle aged woman who loved fashion in the 1960s, because fashion hated middle-aged women.” (146) If the middle-aged felt left out, then what about the elderly? The message in this ad was (I …

About a year after we got the first Straw-Man book, we get the second from Barry Reese. This series is set in modern times within Reese’s Sovereign City universe, in a small town known as Grove’s Folly that is near Sovereign City. However, other than a reference to one of Lazarus Gray‘s associates, none of […]

If you had told me, 20 years ago, that I would one day look forward to a real winter again I would have laughed at you. Yet, here I am, looking forward to the winter and all it brings. Here’s to us getting the chance to make the best of it.

A reflection on rural pubs, how things have changed over the years, and how some of them have adapted in order to survive in these difficult times....I revisited a pub at the weekend where I used to go sometimes when I was a lad, and whilst I have called in intermittently over the years, it was quite a while since I'd last visited, and so it was interesting to see …

As a web developer, I love Mastodon: Since Twitter became X, there are enough web dev people here. I’m happy with the web app – it even has several nice touches where it is better than Twitter. I’m not locked into an ecosystem that is controlled by a single company. That being said, Mastodon still has several major weaknesses. In this blog post, I collect those and explain what’s being …

When my site analytics reported a large number of inbound traffic from Hacker News clones, I got curious and started clicking links.[1] I like to visit links. I am connoisseur of it. I love the feeling of landing on something you didn’t expect — which is precisely what happened. I landed on a site that had one of those Cloudflare-esque “prove you're human” captchas. That didn’t seem particularly abnormal. Lots …

The next big step in the boat project is buying the plywood that will be used to construct the hull. There’s a few things to note about the plywood: This isn’t the stuff you buy at the big box store. It’s marine-grade plywood, which is higher quality and more expensive than the normal stuff. The plywood gets CNC cut – think: a computer that controls a router to cut out …

Wow, so much has happened since #6. Where do I begin? Should I try to recap my travels to Portland or to Atlanta for WordCamp or FinCon? Should I summarize all of the progress we’ve made on the addition to our home? Should I write about my recent upgrade to an M4 MacBook Pro? Or, do I focus on the updates that have come to the ActivityPub plugin that has …

Like so many, I’ve been enchanted by Wicked since I was young. The musical shaped my childhood, inspired my imagination, and stayed with me through every stage of life (my dog is literally called Elphie!) When news of a film adaptation first surfaced all those years ago, my heart soared, though tempered with the hope that they would do justice to something so pivotal to me and countless others. It’s …

Well, it had to be this one I posted, didn't it? That macabre sing-song sample - "did you ever think / when the hearse goes by / that some day you are going to die?"Also on the themeYounger than me, by a half-decade... sobering, eh? I reviewed Depth Charge - or is it Depthcharge? - a couple of times in a Melody Maker Singles column, and each time the release …

In my last post (see here) I invited you to work on the following question:Find a \(d\) such that--There is a 2-coloring of \(R^d\) with no mono unit square.--For all 2-colorings of \(R^{d+1}\) there is a mono unit square. Actually I should have phrased my question as What do we know about d? Here is what we knowa) \(d \ge 2\). There is a 2-coloring of \(R^2\) with no mono …