Recently updated blogs

My first serious foray into Oxon earlier this month yielded 32 ticks (well one was in Bucks but it is near enough to the border to be included). In true BRAPA tradition, I'm ranking them from worst to best across the next five blogs. Probably too early in my BRAPA career to rank all counties in a similar order, but if you imagine the current Championship league table, Oxfordshire probably …

Back in the early 2000s, there was this nebulous idea called the semantic web. It never really went anywhere, but I found it exciting at the time. One piece that particularly spoke to me was the notion of including data in websites so that web scrapers could easily get at it. This was supposed to make the web more open and interoperable. The problem was that the data needed to …

Dear Darling Ones, Recently, I had a social media that has been stuck in my craw since happened. On this particular day people are ranking their favorite Wilco go albums from best to worst. Since I stopped paying attention around “Sky Blue Sky,” I didn’t participate. Besides, everybody knows “Summerteeth” is the best one. However, I did jump in when one man said, “Hell yeah, dads are ranking Wilco.” Grrr. …

Book Now Available [limited] & Paperback Launching February 10, 2025. It took over a decade, but perhaps that timing is perfect? There is much concern and plenty of gloom-and-doom about the future. I’m reminded of one my favorite M*A*S*H episodes in which Hawkeye jumps upon on the table, bangs his tray, and leads a chant of “We Want Something Else.” This isn’t just another book about what’s wrong with capitalism; …

As usual, I am caught up in many things, including an article on Goethe's 1774 play Clavigo, which I am completing (the footnotes took ages) for publication. It is not a play that we in the U.S. hear much about, and at the time of its publication there were people in Germany who didn't believe it was by Goethe. It appeared in the same year as The Sorrows of Young …

Standing tall for centuries in the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan, the colossal Buddha statues were awe-inspiring monuments to the region’s rich Buddhist heritage and its role as a crossroads of ancient civilizations. Carved directly into the cliffs during the 6th century, these towering figures once symbolized harmony and cultural exchange along the Silk Road. Their […]

From 2008-2022, I aggregated every online year-end book list I discovered into one post. This year (like last year), I will collect essential and interesting year-end book lists in this post and update it daily. Please feel free to e-mail me with a magazine, newspaper, or other online list I have missed. Please consider making a donation or leaving a tip to Largehearted Boy to support posts like these, the …

Online reading“I feel connected to my organization’s culture.” Only 40% of leadership, 23% of management, and 19% of staff agree with this statement.My pal Jenny Zhang recently gave a superb conference talk on ways it might be more useful to think about values (fit/mismatch/tension) in the workplace, instead of culture.I particularly enjoyed this:The expected return of going to leadership with negative feedback is terrible. Risk alienating your boss for the …

Last year, we investigated a Dragon Touch children’s tablet (KidzPad Y88X 10) and confirmed that it was linked to a string of fully compromised Android TV Boxes that had also multiple reports of malware, adware, and a sketchy firmware update channel. Since then, Google has taken the (now former) tablet distributor off of their list of Play Protect certified phones and tablets. The burden of catching this type of threat …

Ideofoon 1 (1970-73) by Dick Raaijmakers (1930-2013)

I’ve created a 20 minute video based on my recently published slides. In this presentation, which is aimed at viewers who have heard little or nothing about amateur radio before, I try to explain what amateur radio is and what you can do with it. Please note that i am neither a professional video creator/editor nor that english is my first language. The video might be best viewed in 1.25x …

Happy Thanksgiving! If you celebrate, are you cooking anything? My mom is in town, and my dad arrives tomorrow (yes, both my divorced parents!), and we’re also hosting friends, including this party girl.… Read more The post Happy Thanksgiving! appeared first on Cup of Jo.

PC, Mac Sometimes you just need a really good distraction. That’s not faint praise – an average or bad distraction isn’t what anyone wants – the “really good” part is vital. Proverbs is a really good distraction. Things have been pretty rough personally for a bit, which is unfortunately reflected in a lower number of articles here, and today’s an especially rough one. But I’m not here to whine – …

I am frustrated by VSCode lately. I might share the reasons in another post someday. For the moment, I turned to PyCharm and try to adopt it as my primary IDE for Python projects. So far, many things are really wonderful, like the refactoring tools, the AI toolbox, the constant level of memory usage and the editor in general. But some things are at best called confusing, and I am …