Recently updated blogs

Recently I was toying with the somewhat new GitHub feature that allows you to create a repository with the same name as your GitHub username and host in it a README.md file that then is displayed in your profile and visible to whoever visits your profile page. While this feature is good, it’s not too dynamic, but there are two things in our favour: a) GitHub Actions are free for …

“Three soldiers of the Coldstream Guards were walking in Montgomery street. Onegavean opinion in which all concurred. It was the woman, they said; he showed himself a man afterwards.” James Joyce ‘Finnegans Wake’ At around midnight on Tuesday the 3rd October 1922, a married couple Percy and Edith Thompson were walking back to their house on Kensington Gardens from Ilford train station. They had spent the evening in London at …

Just a quick update on my new workbench: I have attached the slab top (with pegs like a Moravian workbench) and oiled it a few times (with untinted Danish Oil), which I think looks super neat. I’ve also bored holdfast holes in the top (12″ back from the front edge of the bench and 14.5″ […]

Suhas Hey o1, I was reading a blog post from Lonza titled “Better, Faster Pharma Manufacturing with Lonza’s AI Route Design” and I was wondering if you could help me understand the synthetic steps in drug development. In the post, the author says: Over the past two decades, I have witnessed a dramatic evolution in the landscape of active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) and drug substance development. While the usual synthetic …

By the late 1930s, Ernst Lubitsch had firmly cemented his status as one of the top directors working in Hollywood. After starting his career making silent films in Europe, he came to the United States to direct Mary Pickford in 1923’s Rosita. From there, he built a reputation for his distinctive brand of sophistication and easily made the transition from silent films to talkies. Over the years, Lubitsch directed, wrote, …

In the final act of Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, Matt Woods’s John Belushi ice skates in his bee costume in an empty rink in Rockefeller Plaza, as Ella Hunt’s Gilda Radner and the iconic gold statue of Prometheus look on. Wondering if John “ever had nostalgia for a moment while [he was] still in it,” Gilda proceeds to talk about being in the moment and simultaneously being in the future …

A Christmas tree-t in the form of various trees to cut out & make. All by the paper artist Maho Motoyama. More here.

There’s been a few viral posts about how harmful chemical sunscreens are. The latest one is a post about “Sunscreen Swaps” from @a.glimpse.of.amelia (an Australian “low-tox” consultant) and @jordiepieface (a nutritionist from New Zealand), claiming that “some conventional sunscreens can do more harm than good”. Unfortunately, most of the post is inaccurate, and it’s likely scaring people away from using ... Read more Source

I get up, get dressed, and meander into the kitchen rubbing the sleep from my bleary eyes while the morning sun reflects off sides of buildings. I grab the portafilter from the espresso machine, give it a clean wipe, and place it under the grinder. I pull out 18 grams of pre-measured beans and pour it into the machine, turning it on, watching the chocolate-coloured fines shoot out. I spread …

Gipsy Wedding It comes down to kegs, Sam McMeekin says. In an era of spiralling costs and deep-pocketed big-brewery rivals, kegs provide the simplest explanation as to why the brewery he co-founded in 2014, Gipsy Hill, has decided to enter a “strategic partnership” with a group called Sunrise Alliance Beverages.

As the 250th anniversary of America’s founding approaches, museums and other heritage destinations have a unique opportunity to come together and create unforgettable experiences for visitors. This milestone offers not just a celebration of history, but a chance to deepen collaboration across sectors, amplify shared stories, and strengthen communities through meaningful partnerships. Here’s how museums,… Continue reading 250th Spark: Collaborating Across Heritage Sectors →

Recently I’ve been thinking about how everything that happens in the terminal is some combination of: Your operating system’s job Your shell’s job Your terminal emulator’s job The job of whatever program you happen to be running (like top or vim or cat) The first three (your operating system, shell, and terminal emulator) are all kind of known quantities – if you’re using bash in GNOME Terminal on Linux, you …

watch out!Some sections of this article make nail biting sound appealing. If you're currently avoiding biting your own nails, please be careful reading in case they make you want to bite. Remove sentences from the article?For a long time, I haven't been bothered enough about nail biting for me to try to stop. Sometimes I felt guilty about it, but only a couple of times have I tried seeing if …

Over the last few days, I’ve released my Top 2024 Games Of All Time, At Least In My Opinion, At Least Right Now. This year, I decided to release the list primarily on BlueSky, with a seperate longer article here on the blog. For those of you who still use RSS readers somehow (and apparently there’s at least one of you!), I apologize for the massive two day flood of …

Are the machine learning tools and chatbots that work with human language creating, or just impersonating? I spoke this week to Rob Booth, the Guardian’s UK Technology Editor, about the latest interfacing between AI and human language interactions, a topic I am only just beginning to explore. Rob’s perceptive analysis with contributions from my friend Professor Rob Drummond, is here… https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/dec/11/ai-tone-shifting-tech-could-flatten-communication-apple-intelligence A few days earlier French business journalist Jacques Henno …