Category: Uncategorized

It’s 2008, so what better way to celebrate a new millennium’s twist on the summer of love concept than by remixing 1968 vs 1988? Break out the bittorrent and chill out to the stylings of Buffalo Springfield VS 808 State VS Deee-Lite VS Prince VS Duran Duran…

Sorry about the lack of bloggage lately. I’ve been busy buying a house. We closed escrow and everything, and we’re moving next week. Can’t wait until next weekend when it’ll all be over, relatively speaking. In other news, Mike Vanier’s Foundational Programming Languages made the front page of Proggit today. Reading it was oddly familiar.… Continue reading Update

Another book sale last weekend. A bit light on technical books this time, but I did snag quite a quantity of old SF paperbacks, and a box set of software engineering classics. Of late, I’ve had some unsolicited interest in RotateAVI. There is a reported bug that causes it to hang on 0% though –… Continue reading Miscellanea

I’ve been reading some noise on the wire lately about anti-features. Benjamin Mako Hill, who seems to have coined the term, writes: “Anti-features are sold to customers as features but are fundamental or unavoidable aspects of systems that can only be removed or withheld through technological effort.” In other words, anti features are things that… Continue reading Antifeatures, and two requests to Google

My regular gas station in West LA is running just under $4.40 a (US) gallon right now. My dad’s regular petrol station in South London is £1.30 a litre, which is about $9.70 a gallon.

Catching up with family and friends on the UK side. Weather’s not bad at the moment, and I must have a sort of reverse jet-lag because I’m up at 6.40am on a Saturday (and nobody else is yet). Yesterday, went to a whole other hemisphere.

It’s come to my attention recently that my library of video games contains some that are now quite rare, sought-after, and therefore valuable. Many of the video games that you can’t buy new any more are available through eBay or Amazon sellers, although frequently (at least on Amazon) the items are without original manuals and… Continue reading Unexpectedly Valuable

I want to share with my US readers a little known thing (at least over here) that goes by the name of teletext. This was (still is) a system in the UK that was sort of like the Internet before the Internet. Way back in the 70s the BBC invented a system for transmitting textual… Continue reading Nostalgia corner: teletext

I’ve recently been reading about the elements, and particularly about the rarer ones. Radioactive elements tend to be among the rarer ones on earth. In my life, not counting glow-in-the-dark radium dials/paint, radon emissions from e.g. granite, or other household traces of radioisotopes, I’ve had two interesting encounters with radioactive elements. The first time I… Continue reading My Experiences with Radioactive Elements

Sorry for the relative blog silence recently. Here’s what I’ve been doing lately: Buying stuff at the local library book sale last weekend. Old maths textbooks FTW! Puzzling over how to approximate spirals with Bézier curves. Or otherwise thinking of a way to draw them. Having lunch with Gary. He actually exists in real life!… Continue reading Miscellanea