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One of 2024's most popular bl.ag online posts was 'Getting Into It' by Lauren Kerbel. This profiled the journeys and experiences of different sign painters around the world, and this year she's added another five people to the list. Read on for their stories, and advice for those just starting out in the business.If your resolution for 2025 is to pick up the brush, and you feel inspired by the …

It does, actually. In Firefox. Sometimes. A major risk of using ARIA to define text content is it typically gets overlooked in translation. Automated translation services often do not capture it. Those who pay for localization services frequently miss content in ARIA attributes when sending text strings to localization vendors. Content buried in aria-label, aria-placeholder, aria-roledescription, or aria-valuetext can end up being presented to users in a language different than …

Could not put the damn book down! Very easy book to read, and annoyingly difficult to stop reading late at night. The story is told from Evelyn's perspective, a brilliant scientist working in the field of human cloning. There's a lot that goes on in the book, both from the story moving forward and driven by plot twists but also from Evelyn's own inner monologue. The clone aspect of the …

New Year, New Projects!I am taking this spring term off from teaching, partly to re-energize my batteries which have been rather low on account that I've been going full speed (🚌) since 2018; the pandemic didn't help because teaching increased around that time (not that I am complaining, the cosmos provided something I needed at the time). Another reason for the break is partly to work on a new course …

While waiting for a hot chocolate the sun was out blasting us with warmth on a chilly day. Nice break from the snow flurries. Note tags: halifax, BlackAndWhite, iphone, waiting, winter

In early 2014, I joined as an engineering manager for Uber’s Infrastructure team. We were responsible for a wide number of things, including provisioning new services. While the overall team I led grew significantly over time, the subset working on service provisioning never grew beyond four engineers. Those four engineers successfully migrated 1,000+ services onto a new, future-proofed service platform. More importantly, they did it while absorbing the majority, although …

The images coming out of Los Angeles this morning are heartbreaking. From the BBC: We don’t yet have concrete answers as to what started the LA fires, it is too early to tell and first responders are still focused on evacuating and tackling the blazes. But, officials have pointed to high winds and drought in the area, which has made vegetation very dry and easy to burn. An important factor …

A new report in The Atlantic focuses on the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) in contemporary Christianity and its growing influence in the political culture of the United States. Stephanie McCrummen writes: “A shift is under way, one that scholars have been tracking for years and that has become startlingly visible with the rise of Trumpism. At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, …

Stepping back into the conjurings of an imaginary soundtrack… Back in 2021 I started to post a series of “Songs for A Year In The Country”, which in some way was a form of Desert Island Discs… the selection included some of the songs during my AYITC explorations that I have variously found myself repeatedly returning to, ones that I’d “save from the waves” or bundle up to take into …

How can I feel I have arrived home in something that is in many ways so ­foreign to me? And yet beneath the surface it is not foreign at all, but a reversion to the sacred order of things. I sit in a monastery chapel before dawn. There is snow on the ground outside. The priest murmurs the liturgy by the light of the lampadas, the dark silhouettes of two …

In this edition: News: Two deaths dubiously linked to Bigfoot hunting Cryptid Media See This – Out There: Crimes of the Paranormal Cryptid Media Skip This – Lost Monster Files Update on naming taboo cryptids AI cryptid carnival Google Earth cryptids Hood cryptids meme Hello and welcome to the 2nd Pop Cryptid Spectator – my chronicle of observing the changing appearance of and attitudes towards “cryptids” in popular culture. My …

The gang marvels at Meike's new home.

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I was using my 5G router setup with Vanilla OpenWRT and QMI Cellular as a protocol for quite some time, but there were irregular disconnections etc. Updating the firmware of the modem didn’t help. Some days ago, I noticed that it’s also possible to configure with Modem Manager (which provides connection information directly in LuCI) and put the Quectel modem into MBIM mode. It’s running without hiccups now! Also updated …

18XX. This has been a year of 18XX games. Things started slowly in the Spring, but then 18 India hit us by a storm. I ended up playing various 18XX titles over 20 times this year; that’s more than a third of my all-time 18XX plays since 2006. Forest Shuffle. I still played a ton of Forest Shuffle on BGA. I’ve played the game over 200 times this year. If …