Recently updated blogs

This has been an unusual travel year for me. I’ve had two adventures that were – wildly against type – organized within weeks of going. My Alaska cruise was booked only 10 days before I left while I had a comparatively leisurely three weeks to organize my fabulous visit to Chicago. But what I did have planned from very early in the year was a restorative two week trip to …

There is relatively little of note this week, since work creeped into a couple of evenings and I tend to finish the days too tired to do anything too contrived–plus I’ve been lacking inspiration to write. Still, a couple of things came to pass: I managed to install Proxmox on the Terramaster NAS I got a couple of weeks ago. I am still trying to scrounge together enough cash to …

Last year I described how I syndicate my posts to different social networks. Back then my approach to syndicating to Bluesky was to piggy-back off my micro.blog account (which is really just the RSS feed of my notes): Micro.blog can also cross-post to other services. One of those services is Bluesky. I gave permission to micro.blog to syndicate to Bluesky so now my notes show up there too. It worked …

It’s our office Christmas party soon. The dress code is black tie. I’ve managed to avoid tux-based events for some time, but I didn’t realise quite how long for until I dug my old suit out of the cupboard. I now feel like Steve Martin in Father of the Bride.

Tune in at 12:45 pm Pacific for LIVE splashdown coverage of Apollo 12! by Fiona Moore Once again, greetings from London. The big news this month is that Britain is now a space power! Yes, thanks to the launch of the Skynet 1-A satellite, we now have our very own presence in orbit. Can regular … Continue reading [November 24, 1969] The Wind That Shakes The Snottygobbles O: New Worlds …

YBAM organised a game design competition this year, and several local designer friends and I participated. The prize-giving ceremony was 24 Nov 2024. The results were only announced that day. There was a public play event in the morning, and the ceremony itself was in the afternoon. The event was at Pearl Point shopping mall. There were tables where the public could play any of

Settings and control of the heat pump at 16WW. #heatPump #controls #DHW #spaceHeat

There are only eight episodes of the BBC Ghost Story for Christmas, produced between 1971 and 1978. That’s not enough. Here are some suggestions for where to go next. First, let’s address a technicality: the 1968 adaptation of M.R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ directed by Jonathan Miller was a standalone film in the Omnibus strand. It inspired A Ghost Story for Christmas and is …

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Polish-born Lee Wallace (1903-1989) was the head of public relations for Macy's in New York and therefore the boss of the store's hugely famous Thanksgiving Day Parade. In fact, 2024 is the 100th anniversary of this incredible parade!The Parade always took place around the time of Lee's birthday, November 24th, so I doubt she had time for any personal celebrations. Lee was my …

For those who don’t know, Kirkus is one of the major publishing trade magazines, and a starred review means that they are holding out your book as one of special note. And guess what? Kirkus gave When the Moon Hits Your Eye a starred review! (You may have already surmised this from the headline, mind you.) I am delighted, of course. Moon is a little different from most of my …

I was going to use the word “hoarder,” but it felt too serious for a lighthearted SQ. I decided to rephrase. As I discovered, various characteristics are attributed to this small furry creature and meanings of that comparison range widely (including quite cheesy pickup lines). I’m using it in a fun and lighthearted way to […]

Our review of The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East, by Nicholas Morton, first published in October 2022. The story of the Middle East in the thirteenth century - buffeted by the storm clouds of war unleashed by the Mongol Empire. Mighty empires were uprooted while the seeds of others were blown into new soil.An excellent book, giving you a wide range of perspectives - …

Last week William Woodruff wrote an excellent blog post about the implementation of PEP 740 on PyPI: digital attestations for Python package releases. Apparently the release of this feature was controversial because of decisions like using GitHub as the identity provider and using OIDC rather than PGP signatures. The specifics are interesting in the context of security engineering, but I wanted to highlight a major similarity between efforts to improve …

ROD MODELL - MUSIC FOR BUS STATIONS Anyone who ever travels by public transport knows the feeling you get when you just miss the bus or train and have to wait for the next one. And how it raises your blood pressure, not just from running trying to catch the one that just left, but also from irritation. With this release, you can comfortably retreat into the audio bubble that …