In the ’80s TV show Airwolf, Jan-Michael Vincent’s character, Stringfellow Hawke, played the cello. So it’s only natural that someone (in this case, Samara Ginsberg), has arranged the show’s ’80s-techno theme song for the cello. Eight, in fact:
Happy pub day to Jack Stewart and Chad Robichaux! 🎉
The latest in their Silent Horizons series, Riptide, is out today, and it’s fantastic! They took everything great from the first book and amped it to 11. Get this one, thriller readers! 📚
The democratization of Bible reading, a process begun by Martin Luther in Germany, became a potent force of liberation. Reformers soon wielded the Bible to confront oppressive political and religious regimes. The Protestant defenders of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1689, which deposed an autocratic monarch and established a constitutional government, were armed with a biblical text deeply rooted in Tyndale’s translation.
So, too, were colonial Americans. As the historian Daniel Dreisbach has observed, the King James Bible was “the most accessible, authoritative, and venerated text in early colonial society.” Thus in 1776, even Thomas Paine, a religious skeptic, drew from the Bible to make his famous case for American Independence. “That the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government is true,” he wrote, “or the scripture is false.”
Great article by Joseph Loconte celebrating 500 years of the first English translation of the Bible.
I’m a third of the way through @JosephLoconte’s incredible The War For Middle-Earth (yes, I’m calling it incredible even though I haven’t finished with it yet, because what I’ve read so far is incredible). This interview with @AndyAndrews is fantastic:
As with everything, the Law of Unintended Consequences (vis-a-vis government bureaucratic requirements in the power industry) remains undefeated:
Normally, you’d see a Star Wars-related “May the Fourth be with you!” from me today, but then I came across this greatness, and it’s now in my permanent collection.
First, thanks to a little bit of additional CSS added to the theme, I have three colored callouts: a light blue, a gold, and a red. You can see evidence of two of these in the post about Pure Blog. It’s simply usage of the notice-info, notice-alert, and notice-warning classes. I will note that the gold used in the alert callout is LSU gold.
I looked in to adding a dark mode for the site, and experimented with three different plugins. However, there wasn’t a single plugin that solved what I wanted to solve in the ways I was hoping to solve it, and I noticed some site performance degradation with each of them when reloading, especially force-reloading. In the end, I figured it wasn’t a big enough deal for me to worry about. The Twenty Twenty theme doesn’t have an included dark mode, though it worked just fine with the plugins. And if, like me, you use the Dark Reader or similar browser plugin, you can just get dark mode that way.
The realization was this: I should stop worrying about my theme.
You know how it goes: you’re browsing someone else’s site, and you really like the design, the layout. Their choice of fonts, how they’re using white space, the flow of everything on the page. Are they using WordPress? What theme is that?
I was using WordPress before the Gutenberg block editor became a thing. I didn’t like the block editor then, and I don’t use it now. I deliberately installed the Classic Editor plugin so I could keep using WordPress as I always had. Which has meant that when I thought about switching to another theme, invariably that would mean having to deal with the block editor in some fashion, and I wasn’t keen to do so.
A reason I have been drawn to Bear Blog, Pika, and Pure Blog was the simplicity of their default templates. They’re all so clean and aesthetically pleasing, very easy to read. During experimentation with Pika in particular, I set it up with monospace fonts, black text on a white background, and lo and behold, guess what it looked like for the most part?
This isn’t to say that I couldn’t switch to another theme, or even another platform or service in the future. But for now, it’s not something I’m going to allow to occupy my time and my thoughts.
In case you’re wondering if boys ever really grow up, they’re building new sport courts at our office campus, it’s happening right outside my window, and I’d much rather watch the excavator dig and remove dirt than stare at my computer screens for work.
So y’all know how a group of cows is called a “herd,” and a group of crows is called a “murder?” (Why crows get their own grouping and can’t just use “flock” like all the other birds, I don’t know.)
Well, I found out there’s a term for a really large group of people, and it’s called, “I’m not going.”
You’ve probably heard or seen a thousand different ads for a VPN, promising all sorts of security from hackers and the like. Josh has a really good breakdown here of why nearly all of that is a load of malarky, and what you should use a VPN for:
And if you don’t currently use a VPN, but would like to start, I heartily recommend ProtonVPN or Mullvad. I personally use both (depends on device and circumstance), and have been very happy with them.
Disclaimer: The link to ProtonVPN is an affiliate link, but I have been a paying user for their services for a decade.