John Naughton's daily posts are always worth glancing through. Today’s more than usually so, because it pointed to an essay¹ by Justin E.H. Smith about the perils of hawking a new book. His point is that almost every conversation he has had trying to boost sales has been unencumbered by his inq...

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For months, I have had to change the name of a file from access.log.2022-04-14 to plain, simple access.log and every time dear old OSX asks me to confirm that I really do want to do that. In a fit of pique, I finally decided to automate the whole process with a tiny little Alfred workflow. Getti...

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Shocking revelations in this morning’s Guardian: The cello and the nightingale: 1924 duet was faked, BBC admits. The recording of a bird joining Beatrice Harrison’s cello on a summer’s evening in 1924 has legendary status in certain circles. That some people have long had doubts about the bird — n...

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Returning, after too long an absence, to some of my transport data, I discovered that the data analysis I was doing before was a bit fragile. Very short trips brought everything crashing down, and were always the result of me tapping an Overland icon in error. Today I finally found time to exclude a...

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Good tools do not guarantee a good product.

This was brought home to me this morning as I glanced at something I wrote on this day 16 years ago. I was moaning then about poor audio quality in many podcasts, likening it to the abysmal visual design that accompanied the democratisation of publishi...

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