Recently updated blogs

As a lifehacky person, I’m always on the lookout for items that might seem boring but secretly make life lots better. I’ve noticed people sharing similar lists to this, and I find them genuinely useful, so I thought I’d create my own. The method was simple: I went back through all of my Amazon purchases forever and picked out ones which have genuinely added to life. They are things I …

In the past week I had two people separately tell me what they thought the Python Software Foundation Conduct WG did and both were wrong (and incidentally in the same way). As such, I wanted to clarify what exactly the WG does for people in case others also misunderstand what the group does.⚠️I am a member of the PSF Conduct WG (whose membership you can see by checking the charter), …

Staff engineer onboarding is about building relationships, understanding priorities, and delivering early value while aligning with the organization’s goals.

Two years since becoming that much-elegized category of expat—the American in Paris—I’m starting to come off an early obsession: the near-constant comparison of my new cultural environment to my former one. It started benignly enough, as in my manic hunt for a Paris coffee shop channeling Brooklyn circa 2013, but soon my comparative mindset had alighted on an arena that involves much more risk for gross generalization and even grosser …

If you grow up in England, you know about rain. You know about heavy rain, light rain, drizzle, mizzle, and mist. You know about the kind of rain that slaps you in the face, the kind of rain that comes at you sideways, and the kind of rain that is invisible and still makes you wet. You know about the rain that makes you hot, the rain that makes you …

Fuck Time Fuck Space by Spooky Jaguar

The orange flavor of Tic Tac Orange Mints unfolds like the experience of eating an orange out of hand. Flavor chemists want you to think of the real thing even if the candy doesn't have the same form factor as orange fruit. The result? Candy plays pretend, and our brain consciously plays right along with it because candy tastes good, inspires memories and is fun to eat. Mass-produced candy

The first time I heard a critique of mediated experience, the critic was my dad. He was an avid photographer who, during our family’s year in India, when I was a young child, used his 35mm Exacta to capture thousands of photos that became carousels of color slides we viewed for many years thereafter. It was a remarkable documentary effort that solidified our memories of that year. But dad was …

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 …

A recent paper on housing, written with Mariana Mazzucato, outlining some ‘home truths’ about homes, and exploring the human right to housing alongside the rights of the environmentAny of the numerous so-called ‘housing crises’, at least those littered across the countries of the Global North, cannot be solved simply through that bluntest of tools: mass home ownership, based on the house as a financial asset, delivered predominantly by the private …

The Anne O’Byrne Centre that was part of the Launceston General Hospital was demolished in early 2024. The imposing building stood on the corner of a steep slope on the corner of Charles and Howick Streets, I always admired how challenging the steep site must have been to build on. I remember documenting the building around a decade ago when the facade was renovated, not this and the entire building …

Heeeeeeeere’s the Devil! TV show host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) needs to find a way to revive his flailing late night show. He’s in steep competition with rival Jack Carson and after the chart-topping episode where Jack brings on his dying wife Madeleine (Georgina Haig) his life has been in a downward spiral. Jack Delroy and his team come up with what will be a sensational special to help revive …

One of my fave beaches. And most of 2023 it had sand. All rocks again now but how lovely it was with the sand. I loved this photograph, so it's been a plan to cut it since I took the picture. The combination and strength of the foreground shapes makes it quite an unusual composition. I have found this my most confusing puzzle of a print so far. I got …

This limited edition A5 booklet of poetry is a curated collection of the work of the Yorkshire New Wave poet, Clifford Nicholas.Nicholas (1928-2021) was born in the North East of England, and his family moved to Leeds (West Yorkshire) when he was a small child. The University of Leeds is the site of the most complete hard copy collection of his previous work and is held in Special Collections.Nicholas’s poetry …

Self-hosted setup using docker-compose and importing of articles from OmnivoreThe read-it-later app which I had been using, Omnivore, recently announced that it was being acquired by EvenLabs and would shut down on 30 November 2024.1 Although Omnivore is technically open source (which was one of the reasons I selected it), the project is not mature. It does not actually support self-hosted installations at the moment and the mobile apps will …