I just read a New York Times aricle about Leon Black and his company, Apollo. A nasty outfit by the sounds of it. The article states that some of Apollos best customers are pension funds. In 2016 Apollo used the pension funds to slash health and retirement benefits for the …
Reading
The third volume of Doctor Who fan publication Zerinza is available now as a print on demand book in both paperback and hardcover through the club’s DWCA Publications page on Lulu. It was already provided as a digital download to all DWCA members earlier this month. The publication contains all new interviews with K9 creator Bob Baker, non-fiction writer Robert Smith?, fiction writer Jon Blum and fan creators Dallas Jones and Roger Reynolds, plus (thanks to Antony Howe) interviews from the archives with Verity Lambert and Katy Manning. Also, the history of early fandom in Brisbane and a look at… Continue reading
Brexiters lament the fact that Big Ben will not ring for Brexit. But isn’t being thwarted just how they like it?
Why¶
I love puzzles! The little metal ones you have to disassemble and re-assemble, escape rooms (though I've only ever done online point-and-click ones), even Mastermind. I recently saw videos online of a guy solving 'sequential discovery' puzzles. These are intricate devices that, for example, require you to find a hidden pin, then use that pin to push a button, which releases a drawer containing a code that you can use to open the puzzle and find the treasure. Watching these videos I had the thought that I could create something like that in Backdrop CMS. And with Backdrop's 5th birthday coming up, I thought that'd be the perfect time to do it.
Fifteen years ago I was following the founder of the Moxie cinema as he tried to work out his business. He shared his plans and budget on his blog and asked for comments. This was one of the things I loved about the internet. Suddenly we could share our thoughts …
The new Doctor Who: The Thirteeth Doctor comic has a new-look for a good cause. Brisbane Comic store Comics Etc have asked well-known local artist Stewart McKenny to put his spin on the issue – producing an exclusive variant cover for their store. Limited to 500 copies world-wide the comic will support the NSW RFS as they battle with battle the on-going bushfire crisis. It is the second time comic store owner James Jagic has arranged for McKenny to produce a variant cover. Last year McKenny supplied an alternate image for the landmark #1000 issue of Detective Comics – the… Continue reading
Conscious Entities has gone quiet for some while now. Initially this was due to slowly worsening health issues which I won’t relate in detail; both the illnesses and the treatments involved cause serious fatigue. In November I had to spend … Continue reading
[ This blog post was also crossposted to my blog at Software
Freedom Conservancy. I hope you
will donate
now before
the challenge match period ends so that you can support work like this
that I'm doing at my day job. ]
I would not have imagined even two years ago that expansion of copyleft would become such an issue of interest in software freedom licensing. Historically and for good reason, addition of new forms of copyleft clauses has moved at a steady pace. The early 2000s brought network services clauses (such as that in the Affero GPL), which hinged primarily on requiring provision of source to network-remote users. Affero GPL implemented this via copyright-controlled permission of modification.
I wish I was on a beach in the Bahamas. There might be a cool breeze; it might not be quite so insanely hot and the cocktails, unike the one I just invented, would not be so disgusting. I stuck some coconut milk in …
The digital video subscription service BritBox, which currently serves the United Kingdom, United States and Canada, has added classic Doctor Who material to its streaming repertoire as of Boxing Day 2019. The service, which streams British television series and films from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, has added 627 pieces of Doctor Who Classic era content, made up of episodes, spin-offs and documentaries. Most notably for Doctor Who fans, this includes both animated reconstructions and telesnap reconstructions of missing episodes. The Tenth Planet, The Moonbase, The Ice Warriors and The Invasion were all added, featuring the surviving… Continue reading
<script src="https://gumroad.com/js/gumroad.js"></script> <a class="gumroad-button" href="https://gum.co/qlmGE">Buy my product</a>
Happy New Year – Happy New Who The Christmas season may be over but we have a new season of Doctor Who to look forward to – starting tomorrow (ABC TV, Thursday, January 2, 7.30 pm (6.55 am IView). We’ve all waited a year to see what Showrunner Chris Chibnall and his Doctor Jodie Whittaker can do in their second series together. And they are back with what, if the cast list is any indication, is looking-like a blockbuster two-part episode “Spyfall”. Surprisingly this episode marks the debut of Stephen Fry in the Whoniverse and he will be in some… Continue reading
2019 saw an abundance of world-class palindromes, and for that we are grateful. As I have made clear in earlier posts, a palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same forwards and backwards. Famous examples of palindromes include: “Madam,…
Podcasts are where the art of conversation meets the art of podcasting. This revolutionary new form of entertainment and information (podcasts) has never been hotter, and 2019 is the proof. There were more podcasts made and listened to in 2019…
Yesterday, I sent out a version of this blog post to Conservancy's donors as a fundraising email. As most people reading this already know, I work (remotely from the west coast) for a 501(c)(3) charity based in NY called Software Freedom Conservancy, which is funded primarily from individuals like you who donate $120/year (or more :). My primary job and career since 1997 has been working for various charities, mostly related to the general cause of software freedom.
More generally, I have dedicated myself since the late 1990s to software freedom activism. Looking back across these two decades, I believe our movement, focused on software users' rights, faces the most difficult challenges yet. In particular, I believe 2019 was the most challenging year in our community's history.
We will, perhaps, never know what inspires Man to travel. To go from one place to another using a plane, boat, or simple old-fashioned feet (walking) is an impulse as old as time itself. Perhaps it arises from the ancient…
After I learned to ride a bicycle my horizon expanded. I was soon pedalling all the way to the bus stop without stopping to touch the ground. Riding my bike was as close as I could get to flying. At school I had learned that the Mongolian horsemen lived in …
This site just got a bit of a makeover. I changed the layout and the theme, and I wrote about the how and the why in a Backdrop CMS Showcase article.
That got me thinking about the previous designs this site has had in the past. So I went hunting and found the different versions of my site over the years. The dates are approximate, generally the year that version was last used before I changed to the next one. The earlier versions I got from static HTML files I have backed up on my computer, the rest were from the Wayback Machine.
In May 2019, my research group was invited to give short remarks on the impact of Janet Fulk and Peter Monge at the International Communication Association‘s annual meeting as part of a session called “Igniting a TON (Technology, Organizing, and Networks) of Insights: Recognizing the Contributions of Janet Fulk and Peter Monge in Shaping the …
Continue reading "Reflections on Janet Fulk and Peter Monge"
I found what appears to be a “turtile” on the whiteboard in the Community Data Science lab at the University of Washington. [See previous discussion for context.]
Imagine … you enter a restaurant in 2019 … the ambience is wonderful, the music is perfectly inviting … you have a hunger inside you, and only one thing can satisfy that hunger: FOOD. Or, instead, imagine this … you…
Toilets are everywhere. Every American bathroom has at least one … and when you run the numbers, you quickly realize those numbers add up to a huge number (of toilets). Indeed, when it comes to using the bathroom (or, more delicately, “going…
