Recently updated blogs

riving white oak Twelve-thirty-one. What better time to look at what’s what. I’m not going to write “in 2024, I did this/that/the other…” – mostly. Or maybe that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m still working in the shop, making carved boxes, ladderback chairs and some other odds and ends. And waiting/hoping for the next large commission to come in so I can make some larger joinery projects. I had a …

So here we are, about to shuffle 2024 off into the euthanasia booth (for its own good), and how did I get on with my goals for the year? And those projects I was trying to finish? Er... Let's do the projects first: Maps for [REDACTED]: well, this didn't go well. [REDACTED] is out, my maps are not in it, and the whole situation has been a bit of a …

I love a beer festival. Many of my faves are now sadly defunct (Walsall and Birmingham spring to mind) – however there is so much great beer variety in pubs these days that it could be argued that these festivals aren’t needed any more. And yet it always was nice to see the same faces at these festivals every year. And that’s what makes beer festivals so special. They are …

The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians (1981) This imaginative, quirky fantasy/ comedy by director/writer Oldrich Lipský (based on a novel by Jules Verne) recalls the work of fellow Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman (with a heaping helping of Terry Gilliam). The opera-singing Count Teleke (Michal Docolomanský) embarks on a quest to find his lost love, Salsa Verde (Evelyna Steimarová), who was abducted by the shadowy Baron Gorc z Gorcu (Milos Kopecký). …

Taking the new year holiday to try and prepare for the upcoming year. Trying to review the last year and figure out where I’d like to do something different. I am going through my social media feeds and trying to konmari1 as much as I can. Being selective on people with good signal to noise. Removing people who are (often quite understandably) reacting to something frustrating, rage inducing, etc. I …

Years ago, Teller performed a magic trick.1 First, he’d have you pick a card. He would attempt to produce the card, but fail, indicating the card may have travelled elsewhere. He’d then lead you on a short walk to a nearby park, and then be inspired to dig a hole. Buried there, beneath undisturbed grass, was a box. When opened, the box would, somehow, contain the card you’d chosen. An …

In the most exciting news since the introduction of the Pocket Catheter, it's time for another installment of Screen Capture Theatre! Here for your edification is the 1945 film...This is the hard-hitting, totally true, no really story offamous gangster John Dillinger. We first meet him onthe day he has stolen a new suit from a five year old. Dillinger then holds up a candy store with a Twizzlerhe has shoved …

Have you ever had one of those times when you think you're doing everything right, yet still you get an unexpected bug in your application? Particularly when it is state-related and you thought you did everything you could to isolate the state by making copies instead of mutating it in place. Especially when you are, say, building a game that copies a blank initial state when you create a new …

Documents from and recordings of all presentations at the Lunar and Planetary Institute's Planet Characterization Conference, held in February 2024, are available for reading and viewing here.My presentation on February 21 was one of several under the heading, "The Impact of Taxonomy on Public Perception of Science and Our Universe: Advantages and Pitfalls. All the presentations are worth watching. Mine is titled, "Impact of the IAU Planet Definition on Public …

We live our lives never truly knowing when the day comes that something remarkable happens. I was doing totally normal errands today in the middle of town when I saw a sun dog, a common enough occurrence, but it was so bright I decided to snap a shot. But as I got out of the car, I realized something more complex had become visible, something I'm fairly sure I've never …

2024 was another lite reading year for me. The fact that it was an election year probably didn’t help, and one of my resolutions for 2025 is to spend a heck of a lot less time keeping up with the dreary treadmill of the 24-hour news cycle. Even videogames proved to be a better use of my time, and I wouldn’t mind plugging another 100 hours into Slay the Spire …

The post Same thing, kinda. appeared first on Indexed.

I’ll never forget hearing Paul Simon’s album Graceland for the first time. As a kid growing up in West Texas surrounded by country music and perpetually drowning in the blood of Christ, the South African musicians on that record blew my world apart. At the same time, Paul Simon’s songwriting pulled my world together. I find every song on the album to be worthy of discussion. (Except “Crazy Love,” which …

I’ve just released a huge update to the Theme Machine. This is a tool a first put online last summer for building color palettes and exporting them as CSS custom properties. If you haven’t played with it yet, go a head and give it a try. Note: I made the tool responsive, so you can play around with it on mobile and see what it does, but it’s really designed …

I'm cross-posting again. This was posted on izzzzi yesterday, but's really an astrid dev log post I guess! I started reworking autotriggers in astrid again this weekend... I think this time they're nicer, simpler: basically just an array of structs in shared memory. The structs have an interval, a phase, and a payload field with a corresponding enum that indicates the type of the payload. There's a thread whose sole …