little bits of everything

 I've been tagged by Keith (aka adactio) , not personally, but figuratively. Only by answering these questions can I close the browser tab with his post on it. Why did you start blogging in the first place? Because I enjoyed reading other blogs and I wanted to join in. I love the idea of publishing to the world. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before? I use Google's Blogger. It's a bit of a backwater, and doesn't get much love from their developers, inasmuch as they're not developing the platform. But it's free though, and I can use my own domain name. Before that I used Dave Winer's editthispage.com. More on my 20 years of blogging post , which I wrote 6 years ago. How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog? The latter. When do you feel most inspired to write? If you look at the list of articles you'll s...

I've come across a couple of things recently that have blown my mathematical mind. The first is the Infinitely Large Napkin , a 1000+ page PDF of all sorts of maths. It's just at the level I'm at at the moment. I don't want to see proofs of stuff, I just want to furnish my mind with mathematical constructs. It has the right level of explanation and examples, with a few questions in case I want to dig a bit further. And it's free. 🤯 Secondly I was trying out ChatGPT with some maths questions. My experience of Google search results AI, which is the only AI I regularly use, is that it's unhelpful and sometimes completely wrong. ChatGPT has been useful on the odd occasion. I tried out its maths knowlege. When I asked it a factual question it seemed to get (according to my comparison with the §1.6 of Napkin) the right answer. I guess because the internet is full of concise and true statements about maths it's highly likely to get the answer right. Here's wha...

I know, so click-baity - right? But true. I got this text out of the blue one day: I braced myself for what came next. Here goes... Phew! I mean, I could have given him a list if he was struggling to think of some ways I'd failed. I had to respond though.  He replied: Hehe indeed. Since that day I've been thinking about how parents can not fail their children in similar ways. What are the essential albums that it would be good to force children to listen to? I didn't come up with many ideas. Then recently I came across this post by Jon Hicks, about Apple's 100 best albums . "According to Apple Music’s Ebro Darden , the criteria were albums that: represented a cultural moment for the artist or genre. were complete thoughts, not just collections of hit songs. thoroughly represent culture in production and lyrics. inspired a generation to want to create more music. represent the BEST in storytelling, musicianship, recording and production. are timeless and reached far...

 A couple of years ago I wrote about a record shop which had the Profil font on the front. Well, I wrote about music, but mentioned that record shop (Yates and Greenhough if I remember). I recently came across That mysterious font is festive  and discovered that it could have been one of a number of Egyptian italic fonts. What I didn't say about that font (because I was talking about music) was that I had a Letraset sheet of one of those fonts. There are people who can sing the praises of Letraset in better ways than me, perhaps you could point out an article you've come across? I don't remember just where I put those letters, but I do remember the excitement of being able to create your own professional quality typesetting on, say, an exercise book. Update: 28 May 2024. If you tag Ray Newman (who wrote that article about Festive) he'll help you identify which Egyptian italic font is which: Flattish O, little serif at the top of the A... Reckon that's Festive. — R...

Here's my pitch so I get booked for One Track Minds . Sometimes I think about the greatest artists of the various decades. So you've got Elvis for the 50s, The Beatles for the 60s, and for the 70s (and maybe the 80s) David Bowie. Then I think "but he's just a pop start who writes and sings great songs". Then I think "some songs aren't just great songs". There's no just about it, great songs are, well, so much more than just songs. This is where words fail me, so let's talk about Heroes. Some of you may know it as "the tunnel song". This comes from the film The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which was originally a book. I've read the book and it's different to the film; in ways which I annoyingly didn't write down. So I'll have to read and watch again, no great hardship. One of my children remarked when I said I liked the film, but it's a teenage film. I didn't have an answer then. I do now. I was a teenager onc...

 I saw this tweet from Rhianna Pratchett (Terry's daughter) today: Okay do I go and introduce myself to the lady on the train who was talking very enthusiastically about my dad and his work? — Rhianna Pratchett 🧙🏻‍♀️ (@rhipratchett) January 17, 2024 It made me think what Terry Pratchett did so well in his writing. The thing I remember from my early days of reading his books was a scene where someone was sweeping a stable. They were working out that by the time they'd done this bit here and that bit there they were almost halfway, by which point the worst was over. I've done that same thing myself. For someone who writes about trolls and goblins his depiction of humanity is the best I've seen from any writer. When it comes to those non-human characters, there's something so right about how they're depicted. I've never seen a troll talk to a goblin but those conversations they have are just how I think they would be. His plots are also watertight and the Di...