Whis is the way it is: only now, in July of 1966, is Walter Cronkite beginning to get the credit that would, in years to come, seem to be his by right, or maybe divine fiat. Today we're conditioned to view every landmark in American history through the eyes of the Most Trusted Man in America, and yet just two years before, in August 1964, he had been removed from the lead chair for CBS's coverage of the Democratic National Convention. Back then, rumors were rampant that Cronkite's job was on…
Additionally, many upper-level SKUs saw increases. The Mac mini with M4 Pro got a $200 bump to $1,599, while the M5 Max MacBook Pro jumped from $3,599 to $4,099. As expected, increases really stack up when you start configuring higher-end options like larger SSDs and additional unified memory. Apple addressed the increases to The Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler: “We have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices,” [Apple] said in the statement. “We have never seen a…
Over at Hacker News, Claude Code’s Boris Cherney chimes in: Boris from the Claude Code team here. Some of the engineers working on the app worked on Electron back in the day, so preferred building non-natively. It’s also a nice way to share code so we’re guaranteed that features across web and desktop have the same look and feel. Finally, Claude is great at it. That said, engineering is all about tradeoffs and this may change in the future! There we go: developer familiarity and simpler…
Somewhere on this site there's a page I haven't linked to. Good luck finding it. Quick one today, I just really wanted to share this. I spent a few evenings this week building a secret page on this website. It isn't linked anywhere — not in the nav, not in the footer. You have to actually go looking for it, and I don't want to spoil the surprise. I used to love things like this as a kid. Finding a hidden room in a video game, a cheat code scrawled on the back of a magazine, a wall that wasn't…
FATALITY LIVES THE DEADLIEST TOURNAMENT IS BACK WITH ALL THE KOMBATANTS AND THEIR UNIQUE FATALITIES. We basically skipped this title for a lot because we had so much fun with the Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe fights, and by the time we got tired of that, Injustice was released and we spent a lot of time playing that too. After a while, I managed to snag this for like £5 from a boot sale, so basically free, and although it was a few years old, it’s still fun to play, especially in the 1vs1 couch…
Galactic Mutant Animals What Works Well? What Works…Less Well? Opportunities What’s Adaptable? Six Years Hence: Forgotten Coming Attractions This week, our Free Culture Book Club reads the first half quarter of Galactic Mutant Animals, Operation Nature Space and Anti-Human Commando plus their associated reference pages. To give this series some sense of organization, check out some basic facts without much in the way of context. Full Title: Galactic Mutant Animals Location:…
Happy weekend! And I’m glad to see it, especially since it’s going to be a pretty busy week ahead. Gotta soak up some relaxation now! Books acquired this week A couple of books I was excited about came out this week, but so far I’ve stuck to one — and everyone who knows me is very thankful I managed to get a copy, because when Bookshop.org didn’t have it on the release date and Waterstones turned out to not even be listing it as a book that exists, I was very pouty. Buuut Bookshop.org had…
Statue of Liberty during the Annular Solar Eclipse on 10 June 2021 (photo from Wikimedia Commons) 4 July 2026 Today we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776, 250 years ago today. We often hear a sentence or two from the Declaration but it’s worth a look today to see how well it holds up. I have transcribed the beginning below. NOTE: I added 1 paragraph break for readability. Beginning of the United States Declaration of Independence (first 288 words)…
Growing up, the game I watched along with my friends was cricket. And there was a familiar story about the Indian team — Sachin Tendulkar, the iconic batsman, would do well all the way to the finals, and then inevitably get out, and the team would fold. It took an entire changing of the guard before India became capable of winning in clutch moments. It was hard not to see the parallel in this year’s NBA Finals between the Spurs and the Knicks. The Spurs led in the first quarter of every game.…
Them Sugar Hill Gang bangers got everywhere in the 80's didn't they? Here replacing Grandmaster Flash with erstwhile lead screecher from The Pop Group, Mark Stewart. No subtlety here from absent lovers rock producer Dennis Bovell, who dubbed up The Pop Group's debut LP "Y" six years earlier, not with Adrian Sherwood at the controls there ain't. It's all there,distorted max feedback tape echo, Keith LeBlanc's thudding and crashing electro-industrial style drum samples, William S. Burroughs…
The weather certainly doesn’t help, but I’ve still managed to squeeze in a few interesting hacks this week in between work, flashbacks about the recent reorg (too soon to call it, but like everyone else, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop), and a new personal project of watching every Bond movie in chronological order (which is a surprisingly good way to spend a few evenings, even if it’s a bit uneven in quality). Home AutomationSince I have a love-hate relationship with air conditioning, I…
The difference between different groups of Jews arts with the Jewish Diaspora, the displacement of Israelites outside of the Southern Levant. Because Jews traveled to various parts of the known world and communication was not as easy as it is today, over time they developed their own customs, religious practices, language, foods, etc.The three major ethnic divisions are the Ashkenazi, the Sephardic, and the Mizrahi. (Much of the following comes from chabad.org.)The group most familiar to…
This was a little idea gnawing at the back of my brain. The humble barcode has been in use since the 1970s. In the next few years it will likely be replaced with a 2D QR Code. I couldn't find anyone who'd made a QR code with an embedded UPC - so I decided to make one. If you move your phone close to the code (so it can't see the squares in the corners) it should read the number in the 1D barcode. Zoom out and it'll read the URl in the QR code. The QR code has a high level of error correction -…
Reasonable people can disagree, but I thought this was a really fascinating take
switchedThe metal knobs were too large (IMO) for the dresser drawers. Decided to use one shaker knob per drawer. All of the tenons on the knobs were about a 64th over 3/8".quick jigThe tenon length was 3/4" and the drawer fronts were a 1/2". This jig allowed me to saw the length to a little less than a 1/2".doneI centered the knobs on each drawer front and it looks good to my eye. I found a site that sells shaker knobs. It is wood-dowel dot com. I was able to get three of the sizes I use the…
“Corpographies of Public History: The Sequester of Statues in Flagstaff Gardens, Barrackpore, West Bengal” Asian Review of World Histories ISSN: 2287-9811 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/22879811-bja10107 Abstract: Public history means contested interpretations in public. Yet complicated discussion of colonial-era events can be restricted behind heritage façades. At the same time, the question of whose history, and indeed what and who deserves commemoration and renovation in that history, raises…
By Scott_mFirst Era AdventuresOSRICLevels 2-4 Ten years ago, the new rector went insane and burned down the town chapel, killing his fellow priests. No one knows why he did it, but superstitious townsfolk just wanted the whole sad affair to go away, so they turned a blind eye. The scene of this terrible crime was abandoned, yet evil abides. Locals believe the site remains cursed, haunted by ghosts of the murdered priests. Now, after mysterious events have befallen the town in recent weeks, many…
The day after IndieWebClub Bangalore Special Anniversary Meetup, Ankur, Tanvi and I got together and did a retrospective on the event. We noted down what went well, what didn’t and what we should do the next time. This note summarized our discussion. What Went Well# We front-loaded many decisions, such as talk format, venue, date, topics etc., and didn’t second-guess them. This helped us later with our tight schedule. We were serious about the CFP from the get-go. We wrote a detailed CFP…
Australian schools all have their own 'values' even if they all circle around the same things. My school's acronym for values is RIVER. respect, integrity, vitality, excellence, responsibility. I have been thinking about what I value myself from a the same perspective. aspiration - not achievement or excellence, but aspiration, the drive to create goals to accomplish. relationships - in both the aspect of good relationships with your friends and peers and teachers and mentors, but also…
There’s a common understanding that we’re living inside a new digital world order – one that feels like enclosure, where people are “controlled” by platforms they can’t easily leave, where behaviour is shaped at scale, and where #AI intensifies this mess. That’s why #fashernista terms like #technofeudalism are being used to argue that we’ve moved beyond capitalism into something structurally different: a system based not primarily on profit, but on rent extraction through “cloud capital.” In…
When I recently interviewed DocWolle about his work on open-source Android, one thing became immediately clear: some of the most interesting developers aren't working inside giant companies or chasing millions of downloads. They're building software because they genuinely want to solve problems, share their work with others, and make Android a better place for everyone, and that feels especially important right now.With Google preparing changes that could make installing apps from outside the…
A partial list… 402 years ago, the first European outpost in our area started. 400 years ago, the town of Nieuw Amsterdam was created. 369 years ago, the Flushing Remonstrance, an early statement of religious tolerance in the North American colonies, was written about five blocks from where my elementary school would be built 291 years later. 362 years ago, geopolitics led to New Amsterdam becoming New York. 250 years ago, the creation of the United States started. 250 years ago, the Great…
On weekend mornings, I have the inescapable habit of looking at my website and seeing what I can change, what I can remove, what I can improve in terms of HTML, CSS, layout, links, etc. This Saturday, as I wanted to look closer at the way the period at the end of a sentence rendered when appearing just after a word in italic (I know), I noticed something curious. When I zoomed in the page, using “Command – Plus Sign” (⌘+), I could see that the line length was changing with the size of the text.…
This prompt comes from IndieWebClub Bangalore. I have had 25 minutes to pen this down. Frankly, logistics are the main constraint. I would hate to spend my period of invisibility on an airplane flying to a different country in order to optimise my experience, but thankfully there is much to do within the bounds of Bangalore. Something that would be very tempting to do is go somewhere with a high density of valuable goods and start stealing stuff, but I don’t reckon the prompt was about how to…
For the ninth installment in its 1970s ECM Special series, Trio Records in Japan presented its second of three artist spotlights, this time devoted to Ralph Towner, whose guitars have long served as measuring instruments for ECM’s most elusive cartographic spaces. The compilation begins where many listeners would instinctively begin, with “Icarus,” his most enduring composition, presented here in the version from Matchbook, his duo album with Gary Burton. Its melodic intelligence never…
I have begun this 4th of July listening to a variety of podcasts: an interview with The Rest is History British podcasters and David Remnick and a NYT Book Review podcast with Jill Lepore talking about history and good books for Independence day. I listened to this story on heartland rock, which didn't tell me anything I didn't already have figured out about Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." This piece on Octavia Butler's typewriter was disappointingly short. I have been re-reading Octavia…
Video transcript: Glengarry Glen Ross at the Old Vic Theatre sees the cast swap genders, so rather than it being an all-male cast, it becomes an all-female cast, and this is an interesting take on it. It somehow accentuates the aggressive masculinity of the play. They don’t swap any of the names; they use all the male names. It is literally just a change in actors. And I really liked how it just emphasises this, that aggressiveness in a way far greater than productions I’ve seen with an…
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It…
