A week or so ago, I bought a cheapo remote electronic timer for my Canon Rebel XTi from eBay as a device to play around with creating animations. It was about $15, shipping included, so if it didn’t work or failed miserably, it wasn’t much of a loss. It is, essentially, a knock-off of Canon’s Timer Remote Controller TC-80N3 which, even at B&H, is $136, about ten times more. (Love you and your gear, Canon, but come on.) […]
READ MOREOne of the kinds of art I really enjoy is art that shows off the draughtsmanship of cartographers, especially from the early 1900s or earlier. We have a small collection of framed old maps from places we most closely associate ourselves with: London, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Normandy, Colorado. Road maps, railway maps, topographic maps. I find them utterly fascinating, tracing in my mind’s eye how the countryside has changed or the urban expanses filled out, squinting to read the names. […]
READ MOREIn 1897 a new bill was submitted to the Indiana General Assembly. It was written by an amateur mathematician called Edwin J. Goodwin whose ability to understand basic mathematics was so poor that he firmly believed that he’d squared the circle. (The proof that it can’t be done was published in 1882 by Lindemann.) The bill was presented as a contribution to education in Indiana and was titled “A bill for an act introducing a new mathematical truth”. The interesting passage is this one: […]
READ MOREHere we go, another grammar article full of the most awful bollocks. 20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Gets Wrong by Jon Gingerich. Go read it, I’ll wait. […]
READ MOREFor your jaunt down memory lane today, I present another calculator from my collection: the Casio ML-81. […]
READ MOREPersonally speaking, I find the usage of “I could care less” instead of “I couldn’t care less” to be a little annoying. I’d even go further: to my ear it sounds illogical: “hey, if you could care less then you must care a bit!” Much merriment and good-natured joshing ensue, ho, ho, ho. But, to be honest, life’s too short to start a grammar war over it. […]
READ MOREFor our wedding anniversary this year we went to the Peak District and stayed at a hotel in Baslow, just north of Chatsworth Park. Of course, since we were so close, we had to go visit the House and grounds. […]
READ MOREOn the day that Apple announces that they’ve sold a gazillion iPads in the last quarter (and that they can clearly see the near future when more iPads are sold than Windows PCs), I’m going to tell you about my Kindle Fire. Bucking the trend, moi? Wading upstream? Yep, that’s me. […]
READ MOREI was having a chat with a friend recently about the blog post I published on January 1, the traditional day for writing down on a napkin your resolutions for the coming year. He was saying that it didn’t sound like a bunch of resolutions of the form “I will do this new thing” or “I will change this existing behavior”. It read as more wishy-washy than that. […]
READ MOREI am slowly making my way through the Tintin comic books in the original French, just so I can keep my hand in. I’ve now got to number 7, L’île Noire, or as they say in English, The Black Island. […]
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