Weekly Head Voices #194: 136 words a day

Figure 1: From the oldies but goodies photo album, because I haven’t been getting out much: Sunset at AfrikaBurn 2017. Also due to nostalgia, as our AB 2020 adventure was utterly understandably cancelled (UUC). There’s nothing quite like ambulating amicably across that piece of desert with your homies. This post quite compactly gazes back at the week from Monday May 4 to Sunday May 10. It starts with a short summary of my work week, followed by a story which you will hopefully enjoy.

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Weekly Head Voices #193: COVID-19 part 3.

Another Stilbaai beach scene, this time in panaroma format, taken a day before the SA lockdown. The Weekly Head Voices #193 looks back at the three weeks from Monday April 12 to Sunday May 2. This post has a strong nerd flavour. If that is not your inclination, please use the table of contents (to your right) to navigate to the bits that you do find interesting. If you’re in a rush, and can only select one section, I would recommend the one on Niklas Luhmann.

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Drop-in replacement for Hugo figure shortcode with responsive img srcset

When I moved this blog over to Hugo slightly more than a year ago, I started using Laura Kalbag’s special img shortcode with img srcset support. To make a long and interesting story short, srcset enables us to tell the browser that we have for example 5 different resolutions of an image available, and that it should choose the best one based on the user’s device. Pretty neat actually! Anyways, I tweaked the code a bit over time, and most recently I combined it with the stock Hugo figure shortcode.

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Weekly Head Voices #192: COVID-19 part 2.

A scene from Stilbaai, my number one favourite new vacation destination, taken on the morning after the lockdown had been announced. We were extremely fortunate to spend our last day of freedom in a place like this. Greetings, fellow humans! It’s 16:15 (UTC+2) on Sunday afternoon as I sit here writing this. The post seems to be mostly planned out, with fragments of text strewn around the editor window right below this sentence.

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The Morgan McGuire Markdeep project Management Method: MMMMM.

This weekend, Morgan McGuire, graphics and game programming god, tweeted a thread about his text journal based method of software development project management. Here I single out three of the tweets, but you should really read the whole thread: When coding, I always maintain a journal in the repo (I happen to use Markdeep for this now) with a TODO list. Tasks are at the level of one hour for “today” stuff, one day for next week, and then week- or longer level tasks.

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Weekly Head Voices #191: COVID-19 part 1.

Welcome back everyone! I hope all of you are doing as well as possible. This edition of the WHV looks back on the two and a bit tumultuous weeks from Monday March 9 to Tuesday March 24. I am writing this for us here now, but I’m also writing this for readers in a few years’ time who might be looking into the more obscure corners of the web for additional impressions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Weekly Head Voices #190: 3=4.

Taking the new shoes for their first run in Betty's Bay. The zig-zag path was still mostly closed off, so I had to run in circles, which is probably ok, because that's how life is. Welcome back friends to the Weekly Head Voices! This is the 190th edition, covering the two weeks from monday February 24 to Sunday March 8, 2020. (I had made a good start on the post on March 8, but then the work week and a bunch of homing missile deadlines hit.

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Can machine learning or algorithms be used in an electoral process?

Guided by the “keystroke megaphone” principle, I decided to post this email reply I just sent. An anonymous reader emailed me the following question: Is it possible to use machine learning or algorithms in a campaign or in an electoral process? I wrote the following reply: I don’t have any personal experience with this, but I do know that all kinds of algorithms have been and are still used to influence elections, in the US and in the UK, and probably in other countries.

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Weekly Head Voices #189: All systems green.

The first Weekly Head Voices of 2020 is almost two months late. When there’s any sort of significant WHV hiatus, you can bet your lucrative blogging career that there’s something important afoot in the life of the person owning the head that mostly contains the eponymous voices featuring at the core of this blog’s business. If you prefer that I misuse a pet-related metaphor instead, WHV breaks are almost like dry noses in dog world.

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The 2019 to 2020 transition post.

Welcome to 2020 folks! In retrospect, I really should have written this post during the vacation, when it is substantially easier to wax all optimistic about the year to come. As it stands, we’re slightly more than a week of work into the new year, and most of that vacation naiveté has been brought summarily crashing down to earth as part of a sort of planetary body check. Perhaps it’s better this way after all.

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