I spent a while failing to interpret this sign. It seemed to be saying that if you didn’t clear your tray… then you’d get ketchup poured on your wrist?
It turns out there’s a baby bottle warming station on the other side of the bins.
(It is possible they my brain is struggling from a lack of sleep.)
It’s been too damn hot out, so Ruth, the kids, and I took refuge at the snow park of an indoor ski centre!
My random Wikipedia article of the day was Milices Patriotiques, who were a 22,000-strong communist group and part of the Belgian resistance in the Second World War. Which sounded really interesting, but their article was tragically short so that’s pretty much all I have to say about them!
Hold your head up high and show some PRIDE.
My 12-year-old was interested in learning some HTML and CSS and making her own website. If she were anybody else I’d point her at something like Nekoweb as a starter host because their web-based (VSCode-based) “Nekode” text editor makes writing your first static site simple.
But I’ve got a NAS sitting at home on a fibre connection, so I figured: I might as well just host something similar here.
Here’s how I did it:
I pointed her domain at my static IP, plus a subdomain for the “backend” interface. Suppose her site would be at example.net (and www.example.net) with the admin interface at admin.example.net: my DNS configuration might look like this:
@ 10800 IN A 172.66.147.243 www 10800 IN CNAME example.net. admin 10800 IN CNAME example.net.
I’ve got a Caddy webserver acting as a static server and a reverse proxy already, so I just added a new static site with a configuration like this:
example.net, www.example.net { root /volumes/example.net/public encode gzip templates file_server }
templates directive means that, if/when she wants to, she could use Caddy’s built-in SSI-like
features. Or if she decides someday she’d prefer a static site generator then I can sort her out with shell access or something.
It probably wouldn’t be much harder to set up something like this from scratch on e.g. a Raspberry Pi: Caddy’s fast and easy to get set up.
I used the OpenVSCode Server Docker image to provide a browser-based VSCode interface in which she could edit HTML, CSS and JavaScript and drag-drop files from her local machine. I’m using Unraid on my NAS so I didn’t have to think much about running a new Docker container, but I guess that if I did then I’d have typed something like:
docker run -d \ # 7890 is the port on my NAS that I'll proxy Caddy to: -p 7890:3000 # /mnt/user/example.net is the path on my NAS; # /example.net is where it'll appear within VSCode: -v "/mnt/user/example.net:/example.net" \ # this tells OpenVSCode-Server to mount the directory to begin with: -e OPENVSCODE_SERVER_ROOT=/example.net \ gitpod/openvscode-server
Now all I needed to do was point Caddy at it. For the time being I simply restricted access to only “computers on my local LAN”, but it’d be easy enough to add authentication using basic auth and/or client certificates if she wanted to be able to work on her site from elsewhere:
admin.example.net { # Restrict access to 192.168.* LAN: @allowed { remote_ip 192.168.0.0/16 } # Proxy permitted folks to the container: handle @allowed { reverse_proxy http://nas:7890 } # Block everybody else: handle { abort } }
That’s literally all it took to put together a web-based editing environment that publishes directly to a static website. And because it’s on my own infrastructure, it’d be trivially easy to modify it in the future if she decided to go in a different direction, e.g. a PHP site, or continuous deployment from a repo, or static site generation from a shell.
Here’s a test site I threw together using exactly this stack, demonstrating the entirely browser-based editing workflow (not shown is drag-and-drop to upload, but I promise that works too!):
If the Romans played bingo, do you think the callers would have used ‘bingo lingo’?
Today‘s random Wikipedia article was Jim Marshall (photographer). I enjoyed reading about him and even looked up some of the many photographs that he took of musicians in the 60s and 70s, but decided that because I was literally just writing about a photographer that I learned-about on Wikipedia, it probably wasn’t the time to write about another!
But here’s a fact for you: Jim Marshall was the official photographer for the Beatles‘ final concert in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, and he was head photographer at Woodstock. There we go; that’s my Wikipedia article of the day!
It’s been 97 days since our house flooded and we had to evacuate. We’re now living medium-term in a “chicory house” a few minutes drive away, but there’s still plenty of reason for us to return frequently to the disaster site that is our actual house.
Today, for example, JTA and I went to show around some contractors who will eventually, we hope, be able to install new floors, skirting boards, remove and replace a wall, rebuild the kitchen, fix the electrics…
It’s been over three months since we had to move out. With the drying-out complete, it’s finally time to begin planning to start scheduling the start of the repair work that needs doing. What a painfully-slow process!
The day after the flood water receded, I took this photo while we were assessing damage – you can see the tide marks left by the water:
That picture shows part of our piano, which took in a lot of water and was significantly damaged. It’s off at a nice piano hospital right now being repaired, and I miss it much more than I expected.
After playing maybe ten minutes a day almost every day for years, I routinely get up from my desk to stretch my legs or heat up my lunch and my fingers itch to plink-plonk away at it. Of all the hundred inconveniences of our temporary living situation and everything that goes along with it, that’s the one that bites most-frequently. It’s a strange sensation.
But all the builders and the insurance company and everybody else seem confident that they can get us back into our home in the Autumn, and certainly by Christmas, so there’s something to look forward to. A light at the end of the tunnel.
This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.
To celebrate the site’s 25th birthday this year, Wikipedia is encouraging/challenging people to read one Wikipedia article a day for 25 consecutive days. I felt that I could do one better than that: not only reading an article but – where I found one that was particularly interesting – to write a blog post or record a podcast episode for each of those days, sharing what I learned. For each entry, I’ll hit “random article” a few times until something catches my interest, start reading, and then start writing! Everything I’ve written below came from Wikipedia… so you should check other sources before you use it to do your homework. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!
Today’s random article: Karsh (crater)
Today’s topic: Yousuf Karsh
The planet Mercury is covered with impact craters, which isn’t surprising because it has no atmosphere to slow down incoming meteors nor significant active tectonic or erosion processes to conceal them once they’re created. In 2015 the IAU ran a competition to name four such craters: the winning entries resulted in the naming of the craters Carolan, Enheduanna, Kulthum, Rivera, and Karsh.
This crater is named after Yousuf Karsh, who’s sufficiently famous that I’d actually heard of him, which was an unusual result from hitting “random article” on Wikipedia.
But in case you don’t know who Yousaf Karsh is – or if, like me, you just wanted to learn more about him – then you’re in luck!
Yousuf Karsh was an Canadian-Armenian photographer who took principally portrait photographs, some of which you’ve almost-certainly seen already. He photographed a huge number of famous and significant individuals of the 20th century. Like this one:
That photo, taken in 1941, is titled The Roaring Lion, and it’s got a story to it.
Winston Churchill posed for his photograph on his way out from delivering the “some chicken! some neck!” speech to the Canadian parliament (you can see his notes from the speech tucked into his jacket pocket). He had his trademark cigar in his mouth, but Karsh wanted it gone. He asked Churchill to remove it, but Churchill refused, and Karsh went ahead to take the photograph anyway. But then at the last second, Karsh said “Forgive me, sir” and snatched the cigar directly out of the Prime Minister’s mouth.
“By the time I got back to the camera, he looked so belligerent, he could have devoured me,” said Karsh later, of the expression on Churchill’s face. But it’s that expression that he captured with the camera, and that would go on to be described by the USC as a “defiant and scowling portrait [which] became an instant icon of Britain’s stand against fascism.” Absolutely iconic.
Churchill himself said, after the picture was taken, that “you can even make a roaring lion stand still to be photographed.” Hence the portrait’s name.
Or how about this picture of the Marx Brothers in 1948:
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Or how about this fantastic photo of the then Princess Elizabeth, aged 21 or 22, before her accession as Queen Elizabeth II:
Here’s some things I didn’t know about Yousuf Karsh, though:
Being born to ethnic Armenians in the Ottoman Empire could have been a death sentence in itself for young Yousuf. Ottoman and later Turkish Nationalist authorities and paramilitaries deported, confined, or murdered hundreds of thousands and quite possibly over a million Armenians, who they saw as a threat to their national identity (among other candidate causes).
Karsh and his family travelled with a Kurdish caravan to Aleppo in Syria in 1922, and a year later his parents took advantage of a humanitarian scheme to transport displaced Armenians to live with relatives in Canada: the then 15-year-old who “spoke little French, and less English” and “had no money and little schooling” moved half way around the world to live with his uncle.
Yousuf’s uncle was a photographer and taught him the essentials of early-20th-century photography technology and techniques, before sending him to apprentice in Boston under John H. Garo, a fellow Armenian whose studio hosted the still-running Boston Camera Club. He worked in the USA for a time then returned to Canada, opening his own studio in 1932. When his brother Malak was able to join him in Canada in 1937, Yousuf helped Malak break into a career in photography too: a career that would probably have been better-known were it not for being in the shadow of his older brother!
I don’t know whether he’d care about having a crater named after him or not. But he’d probably have been more proud of the legacy that lives on in the Karsh Award, given every alternate year by the City of Ottawa for outstanding artistic work in a photo-based medium.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
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A lot of the AI bubble – and that’s what it is, for all there are useful things inside there – is based on “Invest now, because when it works it’ll be fantastic!” rhetoric that’s like investing in a mainframe company in the late 60s on the basis that smartphones will take over the world. We’re moving a lot faster than mainframes went to PCs, but it’s important to invest in the things you can do with the system that work *now*.
There isn’t a good consumer use for AI right now. ChatGPT is a terrible source of information, confidently wrong in a way that sounds human enough to cause delusion and psychosis.
Things that AI/LLM tech is good for right now – pattern matching, repetitive tasks, logic flow – have some great business cases (It’s made some amazing breakthroughs in satellite and medical imagery, it’s got a bright future in automated transcription), and I think there’s a good case for it in content moderation (Yeah, it’s not great at it, but given the sick shit content mods on Facebook have had to deal with has given them cPTSD, I strongly believe it should be a machine job). It’s use for writing, music, translation, or art is still at the very least questionable and at the most utterly immoral.
…
Well-said, Aquarion!
The current generation of Generative AI isn’t useless. But its uses are quite specific and it certainly does more-harm-than-good that it’s promoted as an “everything” solution to every problem. I’ve used some form of agentic coding for several years, mostly of the “spicy autocomplete” variety1, and I mostly agree with Aquarion’s observations.
The whole post is an enjoyable tale.
1 My experiments with “vibe coding” have shown me that AI working alone can produce usually-functional code to specification, but that code is often of low quality and rarely maintainable, even by the AI.
This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.
To celebrate the site’s 25th birthday this year, Wikipedia is encouraging/challenging people to read one Wikipedia article a day for 25 consecutive days. I felt that I could do one better than that: not only reading an article but – where I found one that was particularly interesting – to write a blog post or record a podcast episode for each of those days, sharing what I learned. For each entry, I’ll hit “random article” a few times until something catches my interest, start reading, and then start writing! Everything I’ve written below came from Wikipedia… so you should check other sources before you use it to do your homework. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!
Today’s random article: Here & Now (Pop Shuvit album)
Today’s topic: Necker Island (Hawaii)
As I observed… what…? 15 years ago, it’s easy to get lost down a series of Wikipedia links and have to use the back button to remember how you got there. That’s very much what happened to me today.
My random article for the day was about Here & Now, the second album of Pop Shuvit, a Malaysian hip hop/nu metal band most-active from around 2002 to 2011. I listened to the album; the title track’s pretty good, and I enjoyed Old Skool Rocka and Put ‘Em Up too.
The band take their name from a skateboarding trick called a pop shove-it, presumably using the different spelling to aid their ability to protect their copyright on it.
And this is the point at which I briefly got lost in the depths of Wikipedia’s article about skateboarding. A pop shove-it, you see, is apparently a combination of an ollie and a shove-it, which still sounded like a foreign language to me, so I had to read up on both. Here’s what I learned:
That’s a terrible explanation. Here’s a terrible diagram from Wikipedia that probably doesn’t help either: (you’ll want to find a video if you really want to understand it, but that goes beyond what’s available on Wikipedia, so I’m not sharing it as part of this blog series!)
The pop shove-it was originally called the Ty hop, after its inventor Ty Page, a famous skateboard in the 1970s also known by the name “Mr. Incredible”.
I could list some of the other fifty-plus moves he’s credited with inventing (like the pay hop, daffy or yeah right manual, and the toe-spin 360), but it’d probably only be fun and interesting if I mixed-in a few fake ones I conceived of myself (like the nip trip, double pipe-tail, and the indo 180).
Skateboarding had been around since at least the 1950s and had exploded in popularity in the 1960s, but a major part of the reason Ty was able to invent totally new tricks in the 1970s was the result of a two new innovations that took off at that time:
Ty Page helped promote the kicktail as part of the Makaha Team, sponsored by Stevenson’s company MAKAHA Skateboards. And here’s where I jumped into a whole different rabbithole.
At this point in history – as skateboarding was just beginning to come into its own as a sport – there was an enormous intersection between surfboarders and skateboarders, many of whom would surf when weather and tide conditions were right and skate when they weren’t.
Larry Stevenson was such an individual. On his way to his deployment in the Korean War, he stopped at Hawaii where he found a particular beach to be excellent for surfing. That beach, which would eventually give its name to his company, was at the town of… Mākaha.
One thing I found interesting while reading about Mākaha is that it’s the home of Kāne’āki Heiau, Hawaii’s most-completely restored heiau. Heiau are temples of the indigenous religion of Native Hawaiians, a polytheistic and animistic belief structure itself seemingly related to earlier Māori practices brought over by Polynesian seafarers from 800 CE onwards.
According to tradition, heiau were built by menehune, mythological two-foot high dwarves who lived in the deep forests and hidden valleys, far from humans, and came out at night to build structures and dig fish ponds. The concept is comparable to the European idea of brownies or hobgoblins, in particular the pre-Christian idea of these spirits as being helpful to humans so long as they’re treated with respect.
Pressure from Christian missionaries in Hawaii from 1820 onwards led to the neglect and destruction of most heiau, except for the most-remote of them. One such remote temple was the standing stones on Necker Island (see: we got there eventually!).
Necker Island is named after Jacques Necker, France’s finance minister at the time that the first European explorer – Jean-François de Galaup – sighted the rock. We don’t know what ancient Hawaiian peoples called it, but reverse-engineering Hawaiian chants passed down by oral tradition that include descriptions of islands has led the Hawaiian Lexicon Committee to assign it the name Mokumanamana, which means “pinnacled island”.
We also don’t know when Necker Island was last inhabited, but it seems that its poor thin soil is likely to have prevented permanent settlement. However, there’s evidence that its caves were used for human habitation from time to time, and some have been used as tombs. Even landing on the island is difficult on account of its sheer stone cliffs around its edge (which is part of the rim of what was once a volcanic cone).
But do you know what archaeologists found on Necker Island, amongst the standing stones? Menehune figurines, carved out of basalt, one and a half to two feet tall. Tales in the oral traditions of the natives of the island of Kauaʻi describe Necker Island as the last refuge of the diminutive builders after they were chased off the main island by the newly-arrived Polynesians.
In the way that was long-traditional for European empires exploring the culturally-important sites of distant lands, many of the artefacts found on Necker Island aren’t there any more. But the standing stones are still standing, and human remains that were removed and put into a museum have been returned and re-buried, at least.
So that’s Necker Island! Which I learned about because Wikipedia randomly chose me an article about an album by a Malaysian hip hop band, whose name derives from a skateboarding trick that’s possible thanks to an invention by a man whose skateboarding company was named after a surf-friendly Hawaiian beach near a town that has ruins of a temple allegedly built my mythological dwarves who are said to have lived there. It’s been quite a journey! I wonder where tomorrow’s will take me.
This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.
To celebrate the site’s 25th birthday this year, Wikipedia is encouraging/challenging people to read one Wikipedia article a day for 25 consecutive days. I felt that I could do one better than that: not only reading an article but – where I found one that was particularly interesting – to write a blog post or record a podcast episode for each of those days, sharing what I learned. For each entry, I’ll hit “random article” a few times until something catches my interest, start reading, and then start writing! Everything I’ve written below came from Wikipedia… so you should check other sources before you use it to do your homework. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!
Today’s random article: Baikal seal
Today’s topic: Lake Baikal
The Baikal seal is a species of “earless” seal that lives exclusively in Lake Baikal in Siberia. It’s one of only a tiny number of species of seal that spends its life only in freshwater: others, like the much more-widespread harbour seal (that I’ve occasionally seen around the UK), for example, can and will swim up rivers to hunt but mostly live in saltwater. But not the Baikal seal.
The Baikal seal is confined just to this one lake. Which sounds like a small area until you realise quite how large Lake Baikal is. The seventh-largest lake in the world, Lake Baikal is just a little larger than Belgium, but that really doesn’t do justice to its true volume, because it also happens to be the deepest lake in the world. It’s so deep that a fifth to a quarter of all the surface freshwater in the world is found in this one lake.
If you count frozen water in the ice caps and glaciers too, then Lake Baikal still contains about fifth of all the fresh water on Earth. That’s just amazing.
It’s quite so deep because it’s a rift lake: it sits close to the boundary between the Eurasian and Amur tectonic plates, which are shearing away from one another. For the same reason, there are volcanic hot springs deep in the lake (although the lake itself is so massive that they have no measurable effect on its overall temperature). There’s a lot of not-fully-understood geology going on in the region, despite active research going back over a century.
The Baikal seal isn’t the only species unique to the lake. It’s also home to a kind of fish called the omul, a salmon-like fish that’s long been part of the cuisine of the area.
It’s used to make raskolotka (known as stroganina elsewhere in Russia): thin slices of the meat cut almost to the entire length of the fish’s body and served as frozen curls. The particular shape of a traditional skinning Yakutian knife, which is sharpened to a curve on one-side and left flat on the other, is especially suited to this task, apparently:
Lake Baikal also hosts the Baikal Deep Underwater Neutrino Telescope, whose acronym BDUNT makes me think of bundt cakes. Which – Wikipedia tells me – nobody’s certain of the etymology of!
Anyway, the neutrino telescope is an SK-variety neutrino detector, spotting neutrinos zipping through the Earth when they just-ocassionally interact with the water, resulting in the creation of a high-energy electron or muon and the resulting short burst of Cherenkov radiation. Operated from the surface of the winter ice, the experiment aims to search for evidence of relic dark matter in the sun, among other astronomical phenomena.
It’s all interesting, but if there’s one thing I’ll take away from this daily deep-dive into a random Wikipedia topic, it’s this photo of a cute young Baikal seal:
I wonder what tomorrow’s random Wikipedia article will bring me! If it’s interesting, I’ll share it with you!
Today‘s random Wikipedia article, which didn’t make it into a full blog post or podcast episode like a few earlier ones did, was The Bugler of Algiers. This 1916 silent film, based on a novel called We Are The French, has no surviving copies and it’s no longer even known what role some of the billed cast played in it!
Among others, it starred Kingsley Benedict, who would later go on to feature in Fast and Furious! No… not that one… the 1927 silent comedy (which you can watch on YouTube… it’s… about three times as long as it needs to be, IMHO).
Rubberdogging, verb: attempting to invent a solution to a technical problem by explaining it out loud to a pet. From “rubberducking”, the practice of doing so to an inanimate object, and “dog walking”.
This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.
To celebrate the site’s 25th birthday this year, Wikipedia is encouraging/challenging people to read one Wikipedia article a day for 25 consecutive days. I felt that I could do one better than that: not only reading an article but – where I found one that was particularly interesting – to write a blog post or record a podcast episode for each of those days, sharing what I learned. For each entry, I’ll hit “random article” a few times until something catches my interest, start reading, and then start writing! Everything I’ve written below came from Wikipedia… so you should check other sources before you use it to do your homework. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!
Today’s random article: Marcus Koh
Today’s topic: Yo-yo
One of the things I’ve discovered over my past few days of hitting “Random Article” on Wikipedia is that sometimes you get something that’s worth writing about. But more often you get something worth reading but not writing about. But more often still you get something that doesn’t interest you at all, and you just need to click “Random Article” again.
And that latter category is the one I thought I was in when I discovered Marcus Koh, who’s a Singaporean yo-yo enthusiast who came first in the 1A division at the World Yo-Yo Contest in 2011. The page almost felt like a stub… but then I started clicking and found myself learning much more about yo-yos than I ever thought possible.
Like… I knew that the yo-yo was an old toy, but I had no idea how old.
Obviously there’s a lot of pictures from around the end of the eighteenth century, which is when they became popular in Europe. In the English-speaking world at that point they were known as “bandalores”, which I think is a nicer name than “yo-yo”, frankly.
But their influence was clearly felt much further away and much longer ago than this.
I mean, here’s a 1770 watercolor from Northern India that clearly depicts something that, despite being held in two hands, is definitely something-like-a-yo-yo:
But we can go further.
If you lived in Greece in around the 5th century BCE and were serving wine to your guests, the popular drinking vessel to use was a kylix. Kylikes were pottery cups basically the shape of modern wine glasses but much more squat, having a wide bowl atop a pedestal that tapered outwards. Unlike modern wine glasses, though, they had handles, and these handles were used to play a game called kottabos: once you’d finished your wine, you’d use a handle to “flick” the sediment from your wine (I guess fining/clarification agents weren’t a thing yet?) at a target in order to win a cake or something.
Sounds pretty gross for whoever had to clean up afterwards, if you ask me.
Anyway: oftentimes the inner bowl of a kylix would be decorated. Depending on the kind of party you were throwing you might have a nautical theme where everybody finds a different kind of boat at the bottom of their cup when they drain it… or for a more raucous party perhaps you’d get out the cups where the faces at the bottom all had genitals hidden in them. That way, somebody gets surprised to find that at the end of a drinking session they have a penis in their face (I’ve certainly had parties like that before, if you know what I mean):
What I’m saying is… the Ancient Greeks liked to play drinking games, and they liked drinking vessels with pictures on. Which makes you look at the “Greek culture” of fraternity houses in a whole new light.
But the pictures weren’t always either (a) boats or (b) crude, of course. They could be anything. Here’s an example of the bottom of a kylix that was probably used as a drinking vessel in or near Athens around 2,500 years ago:
It’s not just novelty earthenware that tells us that the Ancient Greeks had the yo-yo, by the way. We’ve found actual examples of them made from bronze or terracotta, although archaeologists suspect that there were many more wooden variants that have been lost to time.
I guess it’s true that it’s a toy that just keeps making a comeback. Every few centuries it gets reinvented and improved, I guess! “Modern” yo-yos got their relaunch in the 1920s, when Pedro Flores (a Filipino businessman whose time in his birth country spanned a previous story) brought to the USA a toy that had been popular in his homeland but seemed to be mostly-unknown in the States. The name apparently derives from a Tagalog word that means “come-come” or “come-go” or something similar. He produced both traditional “tied-on” yo-yos and “slip-string” varieties that allowed the toy to “sleep” – to spin-freely at the end of its string – which unlocked a diversity of new tricks.
From here on, the yo-yo saw surges in popularity every 20 to 40 years. The full article’s worth a read because unless you’re a complete yo-yo nut I can guarantee there are things in there that you didn’t know.
I was also very interested in the article about the “Eskimo yo-yo”, which I’d love to see somebody operate! It’s basically a bola of two weights attached to a stick using strings of two different lengths, and the trick is to get them spinning in opposite directions but using only one hand. That sounds amazing!
I also got briefly distracted by clackers, a hyperlink-adjacent childrens’ toy that lends its name to the excellent lawsuit title United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls, which is going right up there in my list of favourite Wikipedia page titles alongside Salmon chaos, List of lists of lists, Thinking about the immortality of the crab, 2022 United Kingdom government crisis (disambiguation), Pope John numbering, and Pentagon pizza theory.
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