Category: notes
- No longer hand-coded ()
For years and years, this website was hand-coded, and I was proud of that. I stubbornly stuck to my ways: writing HTML in BBEdit and uploading it via SFTP to a web host. It worked back in 1999, it still worked now. Why change? Well, because sometimes change is good thing and a good idea. […]
- 4AD and floppy hair ()
A label, with love I’m very grateful to Phil Gyford for creating this playlist on Spotify: Facing the other way: the story of 4AD. It’s given me a chance to remember some music I’d forgotten, and one or two haircuts I’d rather not think about at all. I wouldn’t say 4AD defined my music taste during the late […]
- Not looking at Twitter ()
Earlier this year, I deleted Twitter from my phone. More recently, Twitter’s own actions broke my Twitter client. That same week, there was a rush of people switching to Mastodon, and I went there as well, returning to my created-ages-ago but mostly-neglected account. I’m in 2 minds about all this. The main reason I deleted Twitter from my […]
- Start in the middle, write the beginning later ()
Matt Jukes tweeted about a familiar situation the other day: “Home early as I really needed to write a paper – but now I am staring at a blank text file and occasionally writing then deleting a title.” I know what he means. A lot of people do. That terror of the blank page is something I’ve […]
- Say no to notifications ()
The only way I’ve found to make Yosemite shut up pic.twitter.com/urJgRzcWsb — Giles Turnbull (@gilest) December 3, 2014 I switch off notifications from as many applications as possible, on as many devices as possible, as often as possible. I do it because I don’t want or need to know when I get incoming email. I’ll find out […]
- Bradford on Avon Flower Show ()
More photos
- Bookcamp / Papercamp ()
Two camps happened at the same time at a venue in King’s Cross. During the day they seemed to merge into one; I enjoyed bits of both. Lots of people from the internet were there. More photos
- Exploring London’s place names ()
I’ve been having lots of fun flicking through the Oxford Dictionary of London Place Namesby AD Mills. There’s some wonderful things about it that I wanted to note. The intricate links between place names and people names Places are named after people; and vast numbers of personal names are a reflection of the place they came […]
- Why photocopies are called photocopies ()
My stepfather was managing the library of South Bank Polytechnic (as it was called then) back in the 1970s, when the college’s first photocopier arrived. It was a huge Xerox machine, and it had quite an impact. Previously, to make a copy of a page in a periodical or book, people had to use a […]
- How chess has changed ()
Think of a chess board and you think of a place governed by the strictest of rules. Pieces are always laid out in a particular way, and move in particular ways. You simply can’t change the way chess works. Which is odd, because it’s changed a lot in the past. Ancient Arab or Indian chess boards had […]