Recently updated blogs

By IlmariI bet that “sail” is meant to be taken literallyWould this do the trick?Apparently notSo, here I was in front of a shack. I still had no idea where I was supposed to be heading and Nada suggested I should take a look at who’s living there. I knocked on the door and an old lady called Ma Anathe (get it, it’s like anathema) let us in.I guess Christmas …

I'm slowly getting back into the swing of things after a welcome Christmas and New Year break. I mentioned last week that I had sidelined myself into writing a probably unnecessary article on the history of newsprint rationing during and just after the Second World War (1940-56). Well, that came about because I wanted to write about why newspapers were still dramatically reduced in size all the

Illustrations by Michelle Perez.It’s odd that a movie like Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) should have an unsettling climax. Mike Leigh’s film stars Sally Hawkins as Poppy, a bubbly kindergarten teacher who takes a few driving lessons with a curmudgeonly Scott (Eddie Marsan). He dispatches conspiratorial rants, replete with right-wing dog whistles, and berates her for her clumsiness. He is, in the language of professional wrestling, the heel to Poppy’s face. Poppy’s life …

Posted on January 10, 2025 Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:painting, medium:acrylic A few days ago1 I wanted to paint, but I didn’t know what to paint, so I did a few more colour tests to find out which green combinations I can get out of the available yellows and blues (and greens) acrylic I have (from a cheap student grade line). I liked the cool grey tones in the second to last …

Update (Jan. 13): Readers might enjoy the Bankless Podcast, in which I and Justin Drake of the Ethereum engineering team discuss quantum computing and its impact on cryptocurrency. I learned something interesting from Justin—namely that Satoshi has about $90 billion worth of bitcoin that’s never been touched since the cryptocurrency’s earliest days, much of which (added: the early stuff, the stuff not additionally protected by a hash function) would be …

Photography as part of book cover design is a relatively recent addition to book cover designers’ and marketers’ toolboxes. It was not until the late 20th century—as camera equipment became more accessible—that photographic book covers began to gain popularity for their ability to convey realism, emotion and immediacy to the audience.Now that designers are able to blend graphic design, photos and typography freely, the possibilities are endless when it comes …

I recently was messing around with the HTML <dialog> element. It’s really handy for native dialogs without a ton of JavaScript. If you want to see a decent quick example of them in action, you can check out my game Jumblie and click the Settings gear button at the top. Anyway! There’s a couple tricks that you might find handy when you’re implementing your own <dialog>s on your websites! Blur …

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 …

6 years back I posted the Simplest Way to Load CSS Asynchronously to document a hack we'd been using for at least 6 years prior to that. The use case for this hack is to load CSS files asynchronously, something that HTML itself still does not support, even though script elements have supported both defer and async attributes for quite some time. The hack takes advantage of browsers' built-in behavior …

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 …