Recently updated blogs

As has been proclaimed in various areas of my website, the third Difficult Dukes book, My Inconvenient Duke, will be released on 21 January. After all the frustration, and the fighting with characters (those strong and rather secretive personalities!) and delays and delays, Alice & Blackwood’s story will finally reach my readers.It’s won some thumbs-up early reviews, including a starred advance review in Booklist in December, which included the following:With …

Diagonal double crochet waves traced with surface crochet are surrounded by a thick border in this striking crochet block. The High Tide Square is suited for crocheting in a single color, or in many colors. See what combinations you can come up with and create and entire blanket, or choose just your favorite and combine it with other crochet square patterns. Maybe you noticed that things seem to happen a …

Many of us use phones that are a couple of years out of date. As the phone industry insists on removing useful features while at the same time inflating new phones to a seeming minimum of $500, older phones have become increasingly attractive. Using an older phone is good for your wallet and good for the environment (the most environmentally-friendly phone purchase is no new phone purchase), but not good …

After 1983’s ‘The Final Cut’, it looked as though Pink Floyd were unlikely to release an album of new material any time soon, if at all. ‘The Final Cut’ was essentially a Roger Waters solo album and even though it was commercially successful, each band member spent the next couple of years releasing solo records. This included the no longer officially a member even though not everyone released it until …

Powerful reminder of the underlying action required to address disasters like the L.A. 2025 fires. The chronicle of a fire foretold | Rebecca Solnit no personal preparation can compensate for the lack of the collective preparation that is meaningful international climate action. The current fires are reminders of the costs of forgetting

Today's entry is something of a catch-all of recent updates. First, thanks to Bill Wall for sending the above photo showing Public Service Coordinated Transport 5173. This is what remains of a four-wheel snow sweeper from the Newark subway; it burned in a fire in the subway in 1972 but its frame has been owned by the North Jersey Electric Railway Historical Society since 1980. It's been stored in Phillipsburg …

Nicolas Nova left us a few days ago. I, and many many others, will miss his wit, his generosity, his intelligence. Here’s a review of the last book he sent me. I was planning to publish it on Monday, but it’s only now that i’ve accepted that he’ll never get to reading it…. Persistance du merveilleux : le petit peuple de nos machines, by anthropologist, design researcher and writer Nicolas …

Countless geos, mysterious statues, and a leap of death - quite a day! Continue reading →

The first in a series of some quick looks at some gear or gear-adjacent items we still use over the years. Read More ... Continue reading Gear over the years – A look back, Part 1 at PMags.com.

What is xdg-settings? xdg-settings is part of the xdg-utils and according to its manpage it can query, check for and set different properties of an XDG-desktop. Running xdg-settings --list reveals that it only ever got implementations for setting the default web browser and for setting URL-scheme handlers (which is the more generic case of setting a default web browser). The reason I started looking into this is because someone opened …

The UK has been attempting to build a high-speed railway line called HS2 for years. Its development has been dogged by all sorts of problems, but perhaps the most farcical was the revelation that it had spent £100m on a 1km long tunnel for bats, in an area that was home to around 300 bats – an insane £300k per bat. In this great post, Sam Dumitriu talks about why …

Students exit the city bus, catty-corner from Washington High SchoolA walking audit is a good way to assess walkability in a specific area. Walking enables anyone to see how easy or difficult it is to walk there, not only for yourself, but also for others who may not be as experienced or able-bodied. Daniel Herriges of Strong Towns argues: You see how your neighbors go about their needs, how they …

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others. Stuart M. Ross’s novel The Hotel Egypt is equal parts a funny and irreverent satire of late-stage capitalism. Ben Tanzer wrote of the …

Started this one the day after Xmas and wrote most of it before NYE, but I kept putting off the regular expression part because that’s always a headache. Messed with it today and got the regex figured out and the right answer to part one within 15 minutes, followed by part 2 in about half that time. Figures. It might be faster to use regexp.FindReaderSubmatchIndex and calculate the values as …