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In the ancient times, when I was old enough to know better but young enough to believe it didn’t matter, when LiveJournal was the central focus of my socialisation, at this time of year my reading feed was dominated by a popular end-of-year survey. The questions were fairly standardised, though there was some variation as people replaced or skipped those they didn’t fancy revealing. I was far more invested in …

What does it mean to improve skills? How can you move beyond the basics and keep getting better? Please continue to my website to read the post. Sorry about that. If you're a technical person and you know how let Astro render mdx to an RSS feed, please let me know.

Needle felting is a trick worked on dry fabric, which melds together woolen fiber. I say woolen because actual wool from the back of a living sheep really is the only fiber with with structure and body for this form of fabric-torture. And torture it is: as used in knitting, needle felting involves plunging very sharp barbed needles through fabric to draw wisps of the top layer down into the

He was born Jeron Criswell King on August 18, 1907, and his first words, spoken at age four during a thunderstorm, were also his first prediction: “The rain will stop!” (“And a valid one!” the prognosticator crowed.) When the rain did stop (as it always does), the little boy’s own future (where we will all spend the rest of our lives) was thus assured. For Lo!, a Prophet was born! …

Last year, I noticed that routine programming no longer brought me the same joy it did decades ago. So, my New Year’s resolution was to engage in more “useless” programming – coding small, fun projects without any specific end goal in mind. Of all the possible topics, the one that captivated me throughout the year was retrocomputing. I didn’t have a computer until I was 14, but I remember seeing …

Who This Is For There may be a time, especially in the upcoming presidency, when you find yourself wanting to use online resources but not leaving any sort of digital “paper trail” behind. People in China do this to read news on websites that are blocked by the Great Firewall of China — news content that may differ from the approved government-run news sources within the country. As the US …

I started using Twitter before the dawn of the iPhone. Back then, in 2006, it was a fun, funky, fully functional (if barebones) beta messaging service used mainly by The People of the Web—the kind of folks who attended the SXSW Interactive conference and probably spoke on the panels. You know. You were there. You were one of us: Designers. Developers. Pioneers. Writers of blog posts, trade books, and all …

Do you know that 2025 is a composite, deficient, evil, odd, square, and powerful number? I collect properties of numbers at my Number Gossip website, where you can also find detailed definitions of these terms. Provocatively, 2025 is also an apocalyptic power, meaning that 2 to the power of 2025 contains 666 as a substring. Recently, Tamas Fleischer sent me an email discussing additional fascinating properties of 2025. While I …

Here’s my 21st annual roundup. Despite pledging to reduce this obsessive cataloguing, I continue to go all in because exceptional new music just keeps on coming. Appreciate these roundups? I work on this roundup through the year, and the final post takes several days. If it helps you to discover new music and you wish to show your appreciation, you can buy my music or buy me a coffee. Thanks …

A practice in bars across America is called the tab. Owners of bars, for trusted customers, will sometimes allow them to set up a tab and charge drinks and food to that tab throughout the evening to be settled at the end of business, that day! In the book of Romans in the scripture it is written that “all have fallen short of the glory of God”, in other words …

This is an essay in two parts.Neuschwanstein Concept Drawing by the stage designer (!!) Christian Jank (1869). There exist in architecture clear precedents to the McMansion that have nothing to do with suburban real estate. This is because “McMansionry” (let’s say) has many transferable properties. Among them can be included: 1) a diabolical amount of wealth that must be communicated architecturally in the most frivolous way possible, 2) a penchant …

Peter Jackson's King Kong, with David Monaghan and Grace Duffy. At time of recording, it was not ranked on the list of best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database. Show notes, including links: https://them0vieblog.com/2024/12/28/405-king-kong/ Follow us on twitter at @thetwofifty.

En garde: fencing frogs were noted on the desk of Charles Dickens Time flies. I’m astounded to see it is 14 years since I wrote ‘Sword-fighting frogs and Dickens‘. This popular post linked a tableau of sword-fencing stuffed frogs found in an abandoned French chateau to ‘The Empty Chair’ by Sir Samuel Luke Fildes, a print published in 1870 as a tribute to Charles Dickens. Detail of objects on the …

In post 16.29, we saw that the lowest energy levels in an atom are conventionally labelled, in order of increasing energy, 1s, 2s and 2p. There are three 2p levels that all correspond to the same energy; they are denoted 2px, 2py, and 2pz. Electrons occupy these energy levels according to the principles explained in post 16.29. For example, let’s remind ourselves of the energy levels occupied by electron in …