(This post is sort of about how a reader’s mind works. By example.) Nordiska Museet did a collection for their 1973 anniversary, and asked people for a “birthday present for the future” in the form of “please write about your day today”. Robert, 12 tells the story about his day. In 1973. Young Robert (“Bäba”) …
Author Archives: olleolleolle
Scott Walker’s Bergman song
There are so many jokes on this Bergman scene. Scott Walker is not a joker.
The word “rubric”
In Swedish, headings are called “rubriker”. That’s also the word for news headlines. I learned that the name comes from rubrica, a Latin word that’s about the red ochre pigment. a word or section of text that is traditionally written or printed in red ink for emphasis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubric Then the text says: Rubric can also mean …
Practical: rust removal
(This is a post which had sat so long that it became… history. It has been a while since I used the magic of Evapo-Rust, but it exists, it’s there, and perhaps you should give a can of it to someone you think needs a nice birthday present.) It entertains me to remove rust from …
Foliate borders: An intricate illumination
Houghton Library has the manuscript from the 1400s, that has the small title part “Foliate borders” I zoomed in on this illuminated manuscript fragment, and it just kept adding more detail. I remain very impressed with these. Right, this is a time where one ought to use those “download the whole image” kind of tools …
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RSpec: Quiet a socketry/console logger in a test
You are writing a test. It raises a well-known exception, and you check for it. Suddenly, there’s log output, since you are working with some concurrent task. Your mood sinks. What’s the way to disable this library’s logging? In this case, I was kindly helped by the library’s author. Quiet a Console.logger in an RSpec …
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Pictorial sources in books
Nerd alert. I was reading a (modern classic) book about medieval costume in different centuries. The book was written in the 1960s, when pictorial evidence was hard to come by. “The British Museum has published a photograph postcard of the tomb effigy, which is rather good.” Now, the book mentions manuscript & effigy sources for …
Ossy: a maintainer’s CLI tool
ossy is a new release, by Piotr Solnica. Solnica releases a lot of software packages, most of it, as Rubygems. Doing that, in the small, one package at a time, is not very time-consuming, and can be wonderfully automated on places such as GitHub: author a Release text in a textarea, press a big green …
Ruby package maintainers in *nix distributions: thanks
A thank-you note to maintainers of Ruby packages in *nix distributions.
Ruby: Concurrent::ThreadLocalVar
An example from ThreadLocalVar documentation, illuminating what it can do.