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In a video with terrible hair, blotchy skin, and a weird gold chain, Zuckerberg announced last week that Meta is making some shifty Trump-butt-kissing policy changes. (Sidenote: I don’t like to make fun of peoples’ looks, but he’s a billionaire and can afford a stylist.) They’re getting rid of fact-checkers. They’re removing restrictions around harmful speech about immigrants, women, and transgender people. They’re only focusing on “high-severity” violations such as …

I took the above photo on the 4th of January a few moments before boarding a coach south to Oslo. I’d been in the ski room collecting our bag of skis and caught sight of Muen in the morning glow. So, as I had done most mornings as I left the hotel for a ski tour, I took a photograph. I now have quite a collection of these pictures. We …

I did say I wasn't going to track this kind of tropery anymore - but couldn't resist reactivating for this beaut of a phrase "performative imperialism", in re. Trump's annexatory theatrics toward Canada, Greenland, Panana, renaming Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.... From an Atlantic piece by Jonathan Chait: "Since winning a second presidential term, Donald Trump has made a curious pivot to a kind of performative imperialism.... When …

Miscellaneous bits of news and fun stuff from around the Internet......Happy birthday to Tippi Hedren, who turns 95 on January 19th...."Coming soon" to Blu-ray from Kino Lorber Studio Classics: HOLD THAT BLONDE! (1945) starring Veronica Lake and Eddie Bracken...Dates have been announced for CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY (1952), coming March 11th; HI-JACK HIGHWAY (1955), aka GAS-OIL, out on March 25th; and the Dark Side of Cinema XXIV collection, coming on …

The short answer is: quite a lot. The long answer covers some accessibility issues, some new CSS, some slightly older CSS, some high level colour theory, a bit about SVGs, and some typography finessing; all of which I’ll cover in this post. Read more.

I first came across Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul simply by browsing in Waterstones Piccadilly. It was on one of those display tables, and I was struck by how beautiful it was. Jonathan Cape have done a lovely job. It’s a chunky hardback with thick paper, and a striking photograph on the front from Celia Paul’s studio. Everything about it feels luxurious and artistic and interesting – but …

A note before we begin: This week, I'm overwhelmed by the stream of news about Meta, ProtonMail, and other tech giants going mad. Instead of creating a humorous caricature or a long blog-post about it as I usually do when tech news goes chaotic, I'm shifting my focus to highlighting positive impact. This article was born out of this reflection (and also maybe, my coping mechanism). - - - As …

West India Dock welcomes a visit from a number of French Navy ships with the arrival of FS Leopard (A748), FS Lynx (A751), FS Guepard (A752) and FS Lion (A755). All the ships are Léopard-class training ships built for the Marine Nationale (French Navy) to train French officer-candidates in basic seamanship. There are eight of these vessels built. They were built by La Perrière in Lorient, Ateliers et Chantiers de …

The base game of Kingdom Legacy, Kingdom Legacy: Feudal Kingdom, has been one of my favourite solo experiences of 2024. As a small package of 140 card deck and some stickers, it is affordable yet packs a mighty punch. In 3-4 hours, you’ll build your kingdom from untouched grasslands to castles with knights, astronomers and merchants, mines and monsters. It’s a play-it-once legacy system where you use cards to produce …

Walter Pidgeon and his group of submarine sailors head down into deep waters in the 1961 action-adventure film Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, produced by 20th Century Fox. In this scene, Robert Sterling and John Litel share Walter Pidgeon's concern that the Earth will burn up and sync their watches as the Seaview races to launch a rocket to blow up the Van Allen belt before the Earth …

Bandying the word "apocalypse" feels a little off after the local events of last week, but here is Kieran-Press Reynolds on The TikTokalypse - a Pitchfork piece on the drastic effects of TikTok's potential banning in the USA on the memey end of music culture. And here's another K P-R report, this time for GQ, on hopecore - "the last gasp of a less-toxic internet?".This kind of thing brings

TikTok may or may not be banned in the USA within the next 24 hours or so. Here's a pattern you can use to download all of the videos from a specific account. Using yt-dlp directly After first publishing this TIL I found out you can point yt-dlp directly at an account page and it will download all videos for you: yt-dlp 'https://www.tiktok.com/@username_goes_here' -o "downloads/%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s" The rest of this TIL …

Near the end of 2024 I decided it was time to replace the Thinkpad X270. I still think the X2{6,7}0 is Peak Laptop. Unfortunately, as software gets worse, I need more CPU. Everything on the market seemed inferior in one way or another to the X270. I considered: Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 9 (used) Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 12 (used) Star Labs StarBook (new) Framework 13 (new) After about two …

Mid last year I bought a cheap Sonos speaker from Ikea and it was a huge upgrade to my home life. For the last decade or so I’d almost always listened to music only through headphones. Occasionally I’d airplay a bit through my TV but it sounded pretty terrible. One problem I’ve encountered is that fairly often the music would just stop and I’d have to restart apps and the …