Weekly digest 21
Sunday, March 30, 2025Good day, and happy Mother's Day to those applicable.
- Left my coffee cup at home on Monday, somehow this disruption to the routine was enough to make me forget to make a coffee all day. It was dreadful.
- We finally had Mr Three's birthday party yesterday after several postponements due to illness. It was a success.
- Got a new phone, and very disappointed to find the todo.txt app I used to use is no longer listed on the Play Store. I contacted the developer and was told Google had demanded a security audit costing over £1000, and hence he'd had to close the account. This one was the best todo.txt app because it had a great home screen widget as well, but other todo.txt apps also seem to have been delisted. I'll use the todo.txt feature built into Markor in the meantime.
- Ran an Only Connect game for year 7s house matches. They enjoyed it but got very few of them right.
- I've begun turning the notes from my "GCSE introduction to algebraic curves" sessions into something a bit more publishable. Now that they've been tested on some real students, I can more clearly see what bits can be streamlined, where I potentially added complexities unnecessary at this level of analysis, and so on.
Links
- Blog by Cogdogblog about overcoming writers block
- Meh... Another Comment System — bookmarking this for if I eventually want to add comments to this site.
- The Future Is More Stuff. Any of Westenberg's posts could be a bookmark, this one reminds of us the absurdity of the consumerist treadmill that "marginally 'better' stuff while almost every other aspect of our existence as a species worsens."
- Why Signal Is More Secure Than WhatsApp. WhatsApp is by far the most popular social app in the UK, penetrating pretty much every demographic. Sure, it's E2E encrypted, but Meta is not running it for charitable reasons — they get plenty of personal data from your use of WhatsApp, just not the literal words you type. On the other hand, Signal actually is a charity (well, a 501(c)(3) non-profit), and collects only the bare minimum data required to run the service.
- Post-apocalyptic computing — what would it take for a computer to survive for 100 years?
- The complete idiot's guide to world affairs. Contrasting leftist, liberal, and rightist views of the global order.
- More work for teacher — The ironies of GenAI as a labour-saving technology
Listening
Today I finished listening to the audiobook of Ash Sarkar's Minority Rule. It's a good book. Like many non-fiction books, I felt the later chapters were less forceful in terms of contributing tightly to the book's overall arguments (that the right has successfully weaponised the left's identity politics to divide the working class — and that the left has made it extremely easy for them), but found them to be interesting essays in their own right.
This week I listened to Lana Del Rey's 2012 album Born To Die. She is not an artist I have followed closely but I remember enjoying the singles at the time (when I did a music technology course I had to write an analysis of a current randomly selected chart song; I was assigned Video Games and still think that song is marvelous). Lana Del Rey features prominently in one of the recent audiobooks I listened to, Love In Exile by Shon Faye, so I've been revisiting her music.
That's all for now, have a good week.