Recently updated blogs

It’s that time of summer holiday again: reading and reflecting on books read in the past year, having blogged reviews on and off since 2012. For this year, I’ve selected only two books, but I’ll spend a few more words on them: Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford (2021) FOCUS – The ASML way. Inside the power struggle over the most complex machine on earth by Marc Hijink (2024) (original …

The Ethiopian volcanic situation keeps escalating. A viral video is circulating of an eruption from the Dofen volcano: https://x.com/volcaholic1/status/1875137887160672670 To me, it’s an eruption because it’s throwing rocks and it’s on a volcano. It could be phreatic or magmatic. It’s phreatic if it’s driven by heated groundwater, or magmatic gasses from an intrusion, without fresh…

Hi. Happy New Year!I'm sure many blog posts today will start with a 'I haven't posted in a while' mea culpa, and mine is no different.But this is a post I've been thinking about, really, for months. Since I visited my family in Adelaide last March/April. Back then, my Dad was moving into a full-time care situation, and Mum was staying at home. Dad's vascular dementia and Alzheimer's had become

All caps, bold: MOVIE All caps, bold, asterisk: SHORT* All caps: TV SERIES Italics: Book Quotation marks: “Play” Italics, quotation marks: “Short Story” 01/02 Blaming, Elizabeth Taylor 01/04 THE CONVERSATION 01/05 PREDATORS, AMERICAN GREED 01/06 THE CURSE 01/09 THE CURSE 01/10 BREAK POINT (3) 01/11 BREAK POINT (3), Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, Benjamin Stevenson 01/12 CURRY & CYANIDE: THE JOLLY JOSEPH CASE 01/14 WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA …

Bobleplast!

Those we know about Lambrini Girls - Who Let The Dogs Out (10th January) Sophie Jamieson - I still want to share (17th January) Anna B Savage - You & i are Earth (24th January) Sharon Van Etten - Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory (7th February) Panda Bear - Sinister Grift (28th February) The Tubs - Cotton Crown (7th March) The Horrors - Night Life (21st March) Those …

After having thought about this for a while, I finally decided to start sponsoring some of the open source projects I regularly use. I set aside a monthly budget and I evenly divided the amount across the projects. Who am I sponsoring? So far I’ve started sponsoring these projects / people (in no particular order): iTerm2 - a terminal for MacOS I’ve been using for years Sebastián Ramírez - author …

“Shame I didn’t bring my tools” said Tony, the semi retired Peterman. The Bank of England museum was always on the list of geezers places to do! Turns out they watched us like we were

The riddle of steel So that was Christmas. The auditing fury of December gives way to new projects launched, ideals dusted off, promised resolutions, and a renewed drive to make life better, cleaner, more focused, efficient, slicker, or otherwise optimised. If you’re a hustler psychopath that is. For normal folk it just means a fucking hangover. There are many things I have considered doing with Hate Meditations in 2025. Stepping …

Microsoft's dream of a Windows computer running entirely in the cloud is finally about to come true.

This time last year I was dead set on launching a jobs board spin-off from my newsletter (and Steph did the hard yards in building it) but a combination of my struggles with my health and the TPX gig meant I ended up giving up on that. In my seemingly never ending mission to find a way to transition into some kind of recruitment adjacent role though I have decided …

My friend Ned Batchelder posted, "A list of commits is not a changelog!" and spurred this post.Summary: We'd all benefit from restoring the distinction between a detailed changelog and brief release notes, but that's hard …

It’s the new year, which means the majority of the developed world is thinking about cleaning up their diet. Here’s a simple rule: Avoid foods with any of these in the first three ingredients: Sugar, Corn products, Refined flour, And Potatoes. “Don’t eat the SCRAPs.” Almost every type of junk food or empty calories fails this test, and almost every nutritious food passes it. But how can I tell? What …

2025 has begun, and we are starting the year in Japan. This is the first book by Maki Kashimada to appear in English translation, and it collects together two novellas. I would say the main theme connecting them is family, with contrasting relationships in each. In the novella ‘Touring the Land of the Dead’, we meet Natsuko, whose family once lived the high life, but now her mother and brother …

A new year has begun and, despite the many tragedies unfolding across the globe, I cannot help but be hopeful. One future prospect buoying my spirits is the publication of Vernon Duke‘s Passport to Paris and Los Angeles Poems by Paul Dry Books. Already available for pre-order, the volume brings together Duke‘s lively memoir — in which he recounts, in his own delightfully idiomatic English, his charmed childhood in Ukraine, …