Recently updated blogs

I share a few thoughts on Troll: A Love Story by the Finnish science fiction and fantasy writer, Johanna Sinisalo “Its juniper-berry smell plays in my nostrils. Its own species didn’t want it. It was too much ballast, a burden. They abandoned this light, slender, supple being, worthy of being immortalized in black marble.” A Finnish troll it may be, but not of the familiarly endearing Tovian variety – since …

I was never worried about TikTok being banned. I’ve had my own website for years, and being literate I prefer to write instead of making videos. Therefore, I have no sympathy for anybody in the US who found themselves locked out of TikTok as the ban took effect. You lost your audience? You lost your community? You lost your livelihood? Too bad. You should have seen this coming. Remember MySpace? …

Setting up a media server on a PC or using a computer as a network audio renderer (endpoint) is easy nowadays. But the problem with computers is that they were never designed with audio in mind. While there are improvements for USB-based playback available (such as our JCAT USB Card FEMTO or JCAT USB Isolator), the network controller part of a PC remains noisy. JCAT delivers the solution with the …

I went out last night to see Stamptown with Danny b/c he has become a huge fan of Zach Zucker. Aside from a few moments when he made me watch tiktok videos of Zucker and thinking “Oh yeah the guy with the sound effects, pretty funny” I was not super familiar with him. But wow the show blew me away! The videos don’t convey the physicality of what was going …

Heavy Metal is a 1981 Canadian adult animated science fantasy anthology film directed by Gerald Potterton (in his director debut) and produced by Ivan Reitman and Leonard Mogel, who also was the publisher of Heavy Metal magazine, which was the basis for the film. It starred the voices of Rodger Bumpass, Jackie Burroughs, John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Don Francks, Martin Lavut, Marilyn Lightstone, Eugene Levy, Alice Playten, Harold Ramis, Percy …

Big news for me: after 6 years, I’m leaving Salesforce to join the folks at Socket, working to secure the software supply chain. Salesforce has been very good to me. But at a certain point, I felt the need to branch out, learn new things, and get out of my comfort zone. At Socket, I’ll be combining something I’m passionate about – the value of open source and the experience …

Welcome to the weekly Perfume Chat Room, perfumistas! I envision this chat room as a weekly drop-in spot online, where readers may ask questions, suggest fragrances, tell others their SOTD, comment on new releases or old favorites, and respond to each other. The perennial theme is fragrance, but we can interpret that broadly. This is meant […]

Enjoy soup like never before — Progresso, your go-to for comforting, premium soups, is innovating beyond expectations this cold and flu season with the launch of the first-ever limited-edition Soup Drops. What’s a Soup Drop? Well, it’s a soup you can suck on, of course! While most folks flock to the cough drop aisle at the first sign of a cold, Progresso says, “Hold my spoon!” Progresso Soup Drops deliver …

"Six Men Getting Sick" was Lynch's first exploration into film, made during his second year of study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in Philadelphia. Lynch describes it as "Fifty-seven seconds of growth and fire, and three seconds of vomit."1 The transition into film came from a desire to make his paintings move. "I was painting very dark paintings. And I saw some little part of this figure moving, …

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.