Recently updated blogs

When flames erupted at a house in Santiago, Chile, the dedicated firefighters of the Third Fire Company of Ñuñoa immediately responded to the call. Firefighter Joseth Abel Espinosa’s GoPro footage providees a rare firsthand look at what it’s like to be on the front lines of firefighting, vital work that...

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

this is the tracking doc for my talk on "Engineering AI Agents" for OpenAI DevDay Singapore. I'll add photos and notes and stuff when i'm done. note that the full slides contain a lot more info that i had to cut out of the ~~10~~ 9 minute talk.

Busy, busy, busy. But apparently not on this blog. I’m still making time for this month’s stats post, however. I only manages to two posts this month: ChatGPT Slow Cooker Chicken Curry October 2024 Book Reading List Google Analytics Users → 1,900 Sessions → 2,300 Views → 2,300 Google Analytics Graph for November Google Search Console Clicks → 1,330 Search Impressions → 78,200 Average position → 31.4 Google Search Console …

A great recent talk by Dr. Stefan Rahmstorf on what is going on with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Surfaced on Bluesky through The Ocean Commotion feed.

I was really happy to join Mal Minhas and Chris Evans on a panel at The SaaS CTO conference. Moderated by the excellent Jon Topper, we covered what criteria we use to differentiate between genuinely transformative technologies and overhyped trends, how we communicate the value and risks of adopting new technologies to stakeholders outside of technology, and what advice we’d give to a tech leader on how to get started …

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), …