(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”) …
Category Archives: General
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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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 …
Bike park infrastructure
A new-to-me set of bike parking has been set up at Nobeltorget. They look ordinary, but since they were new, I wanted to show them off here. These larger things are nice, since you don’t have to press the front wheel of the bike into anything to make it work. Just lean against the pollard …
The short stories of Alistair MacLeod, and the difficulty of communication
Having read a handful of Alistair MacLeod short stories on the plane: he describes a hard life of the people of Atlantic Canada’s fisheries, mines and farms. Some of these stories hit you right in the feels. Literature is wonder. On the way to Canada, I read the very meta novel The Hour of the …
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Bryan Cantrill rereads Soul of a New Machine and has excellent comments
I talked to people about blogging this weekend. Words like The Golden Age of blogging were used. (That era passed, if you hadn’t noticed.) Is it quizzical to want to have the kinds of slow, async conversation blogging can offer? Is it tilting at windmills to just do it anyway? Even if my interlocutor group …
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