Weblog - page 4

Posts

  • Thinking, Fast and Slow

    Not a new book, and a fairly well known one. I’ve been meaning to read this for ages. Daniel Kahneman has become so influential if you’ve read anything much on economics and risk or psychology and rationality over the past few years you’ll have encountered his ideas if not his name. This book is a tour of his life’s work on how people make and rationalise choices.

  • Blackfish City

    I got two gifts in the work Secret Santa this year, an NROL-39 Mission Patch sticker and a copy of Blackfish City, a science fiction novel by Sam J. Miller. I’d not heard of the book, but then I’ve not been paying much attention lately to the SF/F scene I guess – I read a lot more non-fiction these days.

  • Destruction and Renewal

    After years of neglect I’ve spent a bit of time reviewing and updating this site. I first put up a page in around 2001, served from my home directory on a server run by my then-ISP. I added the personal domain in 2004 and moved to Mythic Beasts in 2008 (with whom I have been happily hosting ever since and highly recommend). The last post to appear prior to this was in 2012. The site was initially based on Blosxom but now runs WordPress.

  • BristolCon 2012

    A few days have passed since this year’s BristolCon and I thought I’d best get something down. I’m on the con committee, albeit in a fairly minor role, so I spent much of the day dashing about helping keep things ticking over. I like this; I think it’s a good way to see a small, friendly con like ours. So here’s my very personal and unofficial write-up - just some things that have stuck in my befuddled mind.

  • Flickrtweeter: automatically tweet your flickr pics

    A few weeks ago I decided to roll my own script to automatically twitter an update if I posted a photo onto my flickr pages with a certain tag. I know that there are third party services out there that can do this for you (e.g. Snaptweet, Twittergram) but I thought it’d be an interesting project to do it myself. As well as (obviously) requiring flickr and twitter accounts, it also requires a bit.ly account and API key as it uses this service to produce a shortened URL for the photo to include in the tweet.