Recently updated blogs

In the network of narrow streets off Kingsway, you will find the campus of London School of Economics (LSE). The collection of buildings are used by 11,000 students each year. However, within the publicly-accessible streets there’s a plenty of architecture, names and details that reveal a hidden history of the area. Early HIstory of LSE Founded in 1895, the aim of the school was “the study and investigation of the …

In a new book, The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry, Stacey D’Erasmo asks half a dozen artists, “How do we keep doing this—making art?” I read it avidly, devouring D’Erasmo’s profiles of a painter, a composer, a garden designer, and others, especially enjoying the “fugitive, occasional memoir” (her words) that her disclosures about herself add up to. I did have a hiccup, however: I had to set the book down …

The post Central Park – USA 2024 appeared first on tourist wannabe.

A blogging update: I’ve just started posting regularly on Substack, and you can find and follow me there. My Substack posts/emails will duplicate my material here, so there’s no need to commit to following both platforms! However, I’m realizing that more and more fellow fragrance-lovers do seem to be migrating to other spots and I want to stay in touch with them and keep my scribblings up to date. I’m …

My side project Abot for Slack, has been around for ~7 years, i.e., since Rails 5.1. It’s now yielding passive income while running on an almost complete autopilot. But I’m still keeping its dependencies up-to-date. The recent migration to Rails 8 was arguably the most impactful in the app’s lifetime. In this blog post, I’ll describe features introduced in the newest version of the framework and how they affected my …

In the wake of the recent wildfires in southern California, Watch Duty—a simple, free app that provides real-time fire maps and alerts, and which prizes, and is prized for, accurate data, collated by its volunteer… More

Let's do it. (via Herman via Ava) 1. Why did you make the blog in the first place?Well, the first time I blogged ever, it was because it was 1999 and that's just what you did. Why did I make the bearblog? Well, according to my first post, it's because social media was making me sad. I wanted somewhere I can post and not feel bad about myself if I …

When it comes to Western languages, most long-form text you’ll encounter is either left-aligned (with an uneven, “ragged” right edge) or justified (with words spaced evenly across a line). But I’ve long avoided the latter in my web design work. Why? Hyphenation. To quote Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography, “if you’re using justified text, you must also turn on hyphenation.” But hyphenation on the web can be tricky. In On Web …

Wanna know one of the best ways to help someone? Identify some of their risks and remove it. In other words, take the risk… as in, take the risk away from them. Adopt their risk as your own, on their behalf. It works in situations small to large. It might be risky for a friend to go to a new book club on their own, but you can take their …

Welcome to my life. Seriously, this is an amazing likeness to some of the stuff I go through every day at work.

This one also runs Apple Intelligence… Apple, Samsung, and now Xiaomi continue to enjoy growth at the expense of smaller players in the smartphone market, which saw a combined 3% year-on-year growth in Q4 2024. However, looking back growth, while welcome, seems a little slower than in similar quarters suggesting Apple’s AI smartphones haven’t quite generated too much heat yet. Then again, those AI services aren’t yet universally available, so …

Now that fandom has become more acceptable and doesn’t make its practitioners social pariahs, and earlier fan generations now have children or grandchildren, you get some very interesting products for young ones. Previously disposable entertainment is often transformed so that adults can share their love with their kids (whether the kids are interested or not). Take, for example, the first in the Mini Mysteries children’s book line, Agatha Christie’s The …

The thing I worked on the longest, in my Echo Nest / Spotify time, was calculating artist similarity. In the Echo Nest days, when we didn't have direct listening data, we derived scores for pairs of artists based on patterns of shared descriptive words found in web pages about each of them. Or, more accurately, web pages maybe about them, because figuring out whether any given blob of text that …

The obsession with how my monitors fit my workflow (what workflow?) continues. Yesterday I went from a side-by-side horizontal setup to a vertical display on the left and a horizontal display in the center. Not sure what to put on the vertical display in the absence of documents that need the height, but for now I threw Apple Music and Dash over there. Using macOS’s new window tiling feature to …

[1989]Here's an old school Rage classic I'd forgotten about. Roddy was a mysterious minor cult celebrity in my house at the time. Here was a guy who'd been in The Scientists, Hoodoo Gurus, The Johnnys, The James Baker Experience, The Dubrovniks etc. but he always seemed to leave these bands after their first single, just before they became successful. I never knew if he was just a loose cannon so …