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I am late to post today because I had a dentist appointment today (big sadness, but at least I should have a clean bill of dental health again), so I’ll make this quick! I recently posted my 20 Books of Summer list, but there are some others I’d love to get to… The first five are non-fiction, and the second lot fiction! It’s a bit of a random selection, but there’s a bunch of library books and recent purchases here, so I really ought to make time!
The last thread had fewer entries than earlier ones, but several months have past, perhaps readers can supply some new links. The instructions, as before: In light of the growing number of these volumes, I am going to run a thread periodically in which I invite authors or readers to share links to philosophical works that are currently or permanently “open access.” Please use your full name and a valid email address (the latter will not appear) and include the URL for the...
Scenes from America’s State Fair. Here we see a beautiful example of a Trump-l’œil. Many such artefacts. Sadly, too transient to be saved for posterity.
O Mountain Goats, uma banda que eu conhecia apenas tangencialmente, lançou um novo single chamado "Charlie Sheen Reaches Out to the Feds", e por acaso isso me foi sugerido no Apple Music. Escutando a letra fiquei com a pulga atrás da orelha: que diabos essa letra quer dizer? Tipo, ela é extremamente específica e, sabendo que é Charlie Sheen, pode parecer uma piração da vida real. Tiro e queda. A letra fala de quando Sheen assistiu, em 1991, ao filme japonês de terror...
The Field “Another Day” “Another Day” is an anomaly in The Field’s catalog: A track with a fully intelligible vocal part; the closest thing to a proper pop song in Axel Willner’s body of work. But it’s not Willner’s voice, and it’s not quite a guest either. The vocal is sourced from Tracklib, a subscription service that provides legally cleared samples. It’s more or less anonymous, and it’s just sort of lucky that he found this vocal part that suited his composition so...
Low Sun over Tetons – Grand Teton NP, WY – Fujifilm X-E4 – Ferrania Solaris FG 400 Among Fujifilm’s 20 Film Simulations, Eterna Bleach Bypass might be the second least popular, only ahead of Sepia. In my opinion, it is the most underrated and under-appreciated option. Introduced on the Fujifilm X-T4 in 2020, Eterna Bleach Bypass remains exclusive to newer-generation cameras, so those with older models don’t have it available to them. Of the recent Film Simulations—Reala...
Recent versions of Delphi (starting with Delphi 10.3 Rio) have a “Tabs” entry in the main menu that lists the files currently open in the editor and lets you jump to any of them. It replaced the older “Window” menu that earlier versions had. If you work in one of those earlier versions, you don’t get that convenience, and the editor tab bar’s drop down has no keyboard shortcut either. This new GExperts expert refits that newer-IDE feature to the older ones: it adds a...
I am starting to learn about Linux firewalls because directly exposing Bocia to the Internet, without a VPN, makes it crucial to secure the machine as much as possible. The first concepts I got familiar with are the ones explored in the following podcast episode. https://youtube.com/live/YJZV79C-rNU Blocklist automation #TODO I have stumbled upon nftables-blacklist, a nifty tool to block malicious IP addresses via nftables. Once I’ll have understood enough of how...
you set the scene so expertly there is no way I can win give in and let you have your way only lose what I've been fighting for to keep the threads that hold me together stand my ground and accept the part you cast me in the selfish, the ungrateful the greedy, the inconsiderate and you the victim
Today I scanned some photos taken by my grandfather, possibly during the late 1920s/early 1930s in California (at a period in his young life where he ran away from home and travelled across the country on the rails as a self-described hobo) or slightly later in Pennsylvania (when he was dating my grandmother). My grandmother said he raced in Pennsylvania, where he would drop her off at a dance and he would go to race. She didn’t know for the longest while that that’s where...
Brendon posted today about how to design levels which players can easily "read" - basically, how to avoid unintended visual ambiguities which confuse and thwart players. In Skin Deep, it was super important for us to avoid unintended challenges. We were already stuffing these levels with enemies, goals, readables, and hidden loot. If the player is distracted trying to figure out where they can and can't physically fit in a level, they're not gonna be focused on the stuff...
Enabled IPv6 access to my sites today. Back to the future!
The Publishers Weekly review for my investigative memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment.About I My Book | Consulting I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Email
This book is simply incredible — epic in its scale; a scale matched only by the darkness of the veil, the brief glimpses you get of its vastness. Like soft wan milky starlight illuminating the corners and edges of a building so enormous you can't quite comprehend its size. This is what Le Guin does so well. I read once that if you write 600 pages, somebody will read 600 pages. But if you write a thousand pages and edit it down to 600, they will read a thousand pages —...
I saw that there was going to be a Microsoft Windows Insider meetup in London. I registered for it, thinking ‘why not’. A while later, I got an invite to the event (probably due to someone else cancelling). I was unsure if I actually wanted to go (is it really the kind of thing I want to go to?), but I was free at the time of the event, so I confirmed my attendance (now thinking ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’). The event was a two-hour affair yesterday evening in...
“Saw these solar panels on the roof of a church in Missoula” - https://bsky.app/profile/volts.wtf/post/3moxvi5e3j22o
The view out of the rabbit’s run at dusk. Status: Heatwave started properly today and there’s no denying it’s hot out there. So far our brick terraced house is a sanctuary, at least downstairs, but that probably won’t last the week. Lots of experimenting with flannels and fans for optimum cooling. Rabbits are doing OK today but we might have to bring in over lunch tomorrow. While they have plenty of shade there’s no escape from the air temp for them. Not many links today....
[The car was purportedly on “Autopilot”, though Tesla claims otherwise.] Do you know where a vehicle really ain’t supposed to be? Inside of a brick home, causing the death of a 76-year-old woman, that’s where this Tesla wasn’t supposed to be.Link: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/1-person-killed-tesla-autopilot-crashes-texas-home-rcna350982
I polled you, my social media peers, on what irked and irritated you when it came to paying for things on the web. This is what you said...
We spent a week exploring Franconian Switzerland, starting with a Lego exhibition and a visit to Nuremberg Zoo.
Mark Thompson introduced me to the The Bean Soup Theory: Feedback from outsiders can tempt you to reshape work not meant for them. Write a bean soup recipe for girls needing iron, and someone will ask, “What if I don’t like beans?” Then comes the temptation to tweak it. Replace bean soup with creative work and the principle still applies. My first product was an intermediate video course on unit testing. When I asked an ex-coworker for feedback, he asked: “Did you include...
In 2019, Andrew blogged about collinearity in Bayesian models. In the comments, he pointed to an example from Bayesian Data Analysis, 2nd edition (BDA2). I think it is a useful example to keep in mind when extrapolating from sample to population. Since folks (like me) may only have BDA3 on their shelf, I thought I’d talk thru it. Pretend it is 1980 and we are at the US Census Bureau. We just revamped the occupational coding system, and it’s so much better ! We want...
I went for a 9.39km run. It felt good. My average pace was 9 minutes 2 seconds per kilometre. In running terms that is quite slow but a huge improvement for me since starting this training journey back in January. Back then I was running 11 minute to 13 minute kilometres. So my pace is improving which feels really great. I saw this reel or YouTube short (fell back on it a few times this weekend) that in order to not get cut off for a half iron man you need a 3 min twenty...
Sorry, the blog post title is a lie. This blog post was not written at noon. It was written during June. But I decided to do a little word play. Weather The weather has been pretty nonsensical. As usual. More frequent is weather warnings for yellow-level thunderstorms, which then end up just being rain that happens suddenly and lasts for 10 minutes. Then the weather continues to be sunny. Yeah, various levels of nonsense continuing in the summer. I wrote that at like, the...
I have had exactly two conversations this week about denormalization, which is a sign that it is time to write a blog post. If you already know what denormalization is, you will likely find this blog post uninteresting. That is okay! It is meant more to be an artifact that I can point to when people who haven't been burnt by the fires of sad databases (or, perhaps, sad ETL pipelines) ask what I'm talking about. The well-behaved schema Imagine the data behind an art...