Recently updated blogs

It was just a little over a year ago that I briefly softened in my general disdain for Meta (which I held not only for their overall anti-web walled garden approach of the last 20 years, but especially for their role in the last decade’s rise of misinformation). Watching what was going on with their new Twitter clone, I raised an interested eyebrow as I followed their rapid progress in …

September 1937. Washington, D.C. "Capital Transit Locomotive 1135 on Pennsylvania Avenue at Post Office Department. Wheel arrangement: PCC." 4x5 glass negative by C.W. Witbeck from the Louis A. Marre Rail Transportation Photograph Collection. View full size.

What happened was, there was a pretty moon in the sky, so I got out a tripod and the big honkin’ Tamron 150-500 and fired away. Here’s the shot I wanted to keep. Sadly, the clouds had shiftedand Luna had lost her pretty bronze shading. I thought the camera and lens did OK given that I was shooting from sea level through soggy Pacific-Northwest winter air. But when I zoomed …

Elizabeth Lopatto, for the Verge, listened to Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast so none of us need to. Lopatto does a good job in this article of walking through some of the claims made by Zuckerberg and the conspicuous things he omits. It is a good piece. However, there is one paragraph for which I call for a correction. Zuckerberg spent considerable time complaining about Apple in ways …

The researchers showed participants four knots that are physically similar but have a hierarchy of strength. People were asked to look at the knots, two at a time, and point to the strongest one. The strongest is A, the reef knot. Credit: Khamar Hopkins/Johns Hopkins University “We’re just not able to extract a salient sense of a knot’s internal structure by looking at it,” Croom said. “It’s a nice case …

Morning all, here’s a quick Saturday round-up for you. If you watched Mikel Arteta’s press conference yesterday, you might have come away with the same conclusion that I did – which is that a January arrival is, while not impossible, more or less unlikely. The manager was asked what he’d be looking for if he were in the market for an attacking player this month, and said: First of all, …

Could a new, fifth force of nature provide some answers to our biggest questions about dark matter and dark energy? We’re working on it. The Standard Model is, for all intents and purposes, the supreme accomplishment of modern physics. It describes four forces of nature, a zoo of particles, and how they all interact. It is perhaps the most successful scientific theory of all time. And it’s fantastically incomplete. It …

I had an enjoyable little discussion with Joe Murray of The Human Podcast, part of his new series, called 10 questions in 10 minutes, in which he asks his interview subjects for short answers to ten quick questions on their … Continue reading →

If the case doesn’t settle, Smartmatic’s defamation trial could happen this year.

To make progress the Conservative Party needs to acknowledge some of the recent past and move away from it, faster Giles Dilnot “For better or worse, depending on your opinion, Badenoch is not Johnson, Truss, or Sunak. Those that say she’s completely the same just need to keep repeating it to help their own party’s cause. However, she’ll need to do more, soon, to show the difference, and if she …

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In my teens my Grandpa gifted me a first series of books from his collection. In this were the Paul Karau OPC GWR branchline series and I found Hemyock. It wasn’t much later that Dapol re-released the 14xx with improved motor and thoughts turned building my first solo model railway…It was Hemyock, my first love, that fuelled my first documented attempt at ‘proto-freelance’, Stapley. Paul’s book focused only upon termini …

Accidentally discovered something very interesting while messing around with the Photoshop remove tool, which on certain settings uses generative AI to replace out whatever you select with it. In this case, was just playing around removing stuff from a photo of our living room, and saw that the tool was inventing paintings or posters that don’t exist: That one in the corner, I zoomed in on and went through a …

Some time in 2020 I started collecting CD-ROMs from old Macintosh magazines. Whilst the discs are of Japanese origin—because the supply was plentiful during the extended spring clean of lockdown—they contain a great deal of software from all over the world and a lot of it is therefore in English. They’re an amazing source of old gold: sofware, images, demos, documentation, and many other files. As of today I have …

If you’re going to ask me my favorite foundation at the moment, I’d immediately tell you it’s the Kanebo Lively Skin Wear which I got in an event last 2023. After I tried that, most foundations just couldn’t compare. When I saw that Kanebo has launched another foundation, I knew I had to get it. […]