Recently updated blogs

The holiday season is a wonderful time to catch up with friends and family, who inevitably ask me what kind of woodworking I’ve been doing lately. With some chagrin, I have to say that I’ve been so busy that I’ve barely touched my hand planes and hand saws since this summer. I haven’t been doing any woodworking at all. But that’s not entirely true. In fact, this fall I’ve been …

Filtered sampling from sorted values with incremental binary search Published 2024-12-03 I had a problem recently that I solved badly. As is traditional, I figured out how to solve it well in the shower this morning. The solution is obvious in retrospect, but I thought I’d share it anyway as it’s an interesting algorithm that I’d not seen before. def filtered_sample(random, values, lower_bound, upper_bound): """Samples a random value `x` from …

Ok I’ll admit it, the title is a bit dramatic. Makefiles and shell scripts are here to stay, and that’s fine. I’m wouldn’t make the argument that any tool is the perfect tool for all tasks all the ...

"A Charlie Brown Christmas" wasn't intentionally created to be timeless, but because of its simplicity and sincerity, timeless it is. Miraculously, it avoids every cliche associated with children's animation and is a perfect blending of music, words and images that clearly conveys one man's vision and philosophy -- Charles Schulz, who drew "Peanuts" from 1950 until his death in 2000.Sources:Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography, by David MichaelisA Charlie Brown Religion: …

This evening I made a Timeline of Discovery, listing historical inventions, discoveries, events, etc. that I find personally interesting. I started doing it because I saw a project, Markwhen, on Hacker News, that turns a simple markdown-like format into HTML timelines and I wanted to try it out. It turned out not to be exactly what I wanted, because it makes a page that is "too interactive", and I couldn't …

I had some spare time recently as I waiting for the lacquer I'd sprayed on my current batch of acoustic guitars to cure in readiness for polishing, and as I'm becoming a big fan of headless guitars, I put the guitar pictured together while I had the opportunity to do so.I've had the maple neck blank and the Queensland maple drop-top cap in my tonewood stash for what must be …

I know from personal experience that if you work with an artist or band, you very frequently end up liking, or even loving, their music. This is true even for music that is wildly out of your comfort zone. This is also partly why whenever you see a flotilla of music execs in a industry magazine choosing their favourite music of the last year — or their tips for next …

Glassy headers have become a core part of the “slick startup” UI toolkit, but they’re all missing that final 10% that really makes it shine. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create the most realistic lush frosted glass anywhere on the internet. Keep reading.

Yaowarat (Chinatown)

Matt and Sam talk to Luke Mayville of Reclaim Idaho about progressive organizing in rural and red America.

Well, after a first cup of tea finished off by Lucie, we set off for our earlymorning walk to be greeted by a beautiful dawn with the sun not even over the horizon, a little chilly but as yet no ground frost to speak of and wildlife still dozing apart from the odd rabbit and alerted pheasant. When we set off for the evening walk the sky was pretty much …

The emergence of a bird flu infection in cattle in the United States (US) in March 2024 was unprecedented. Until the US event, mass infection of herbivorous mammals with avian influenza had never been described, although there have been occasional infections seen in different mammalian species across the world. For example, infection of farmed carnivores (for example foxes and mink) and mass mortality events in some marine mammals has been …

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. […]

The holidays are upon us once again. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older or maybe it’s because we’re much more settled in Chicago this year and not dealing with moving or Covid as we had been for the last few years but I think it snuck up on me faster than I can ever remember it in the past. Usually the holidays are one of my favorite times of year …

I was back in hospital today. I needed an echocardiogram to check my heart was OK and that my lungs were clear of blood clots. It was, and they are, so all good. This is the account – primarily for future me – of how I ended up there. Read more.