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Barnaby Walters

Arranging atoms and pressurising air in a variety of manners, such as:

Pronouns: they/he

  1. Considering the only poisonous snake in Finland is the (non-lethal) adder, the Kalevala is surprisingly full of warnings about venomous snakes, spiders, insects, etc.

  4. Moving to Deutschland escapades: hired a van which is a bit too small, got it home to find that the back doors don’t open. Called the helpline and, after a recorded message telling me to exit the vehicle on the side away from the traffic (I was standing in the hallway at home), a mechanic is going to turn up and (hopefully) fix it.

  5. New release: php-mf2 v0.2.12 is out!

    In this version: bugfixes! Improved implied name parsing! Merged pull requests! Full details and contributor list in the changelog.

    In related news, the packagist website has been updated and looks very nice! Unfortunately all of my version links are now broken though. And apparently php-mf2 has been installed almost 3000 times (using composer, which is not even the most common installation method) — WOW! Here’s the to the next 3000, and more :)

  6. Apologies to anyone who I have accidentally “followed” on academia.edu — I had to make an account to download a paper (wat) and am now apparently an “independent researcher” (huh).

  7. Just finished reading Critical Race Theory: An Introduction and Towards a European Critical Race Theory as the former is very US-centric and not so accessible to someone not immersed in/familiar with that history.

    Both are highly recommended reading, the former especially (it contains an excellent explanation, with examples, of what intersectionality is).

  9. I’ve been back from Iceland for two weeks now, but Google Translate is still in Icelandic. Any ideas on how to fix this? Other Google services appear to have reverted to English again.

  10. Got some little bits of work done on my site today — fixed a spam archiving issue, got leaflet-based maps working again and made note locations editable. Lots more to come soon, hopefully…

  11. After four months I completed the Duolingo German tree!

    I have thoroughly enjoyed using Duolingo and would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn a language it supports. Having said that, there are many things it will not teach, for which I recommend and am using these additional resources:

    • The Memrise Beginners German (A1) course — the vocab complements the Duolingo course, is more strict about umlauts, and has proper native speaker audio
    • The Your Daily German Online Course is a collection of articles which explain a lot of interesting grammar points you will have absorbed from the Duolingo course. They also do a “word/prefix of the day” blog series which is extremely helpful. Don’t be put off by the weird, long-winded writing style, it’s a lot of fun and contains a lot of excellent explanations.
    • Deutsch, Warum Nicht? from Deutsche Welle, is an old radio course which I’ve been using to improve hearing comprehension. As well as being a good course, it has nice classical music breaks and endlessly amusing details. Anyone who enjoys Look Around You will love Deutsch, Warum Nicht.

    Online Deutsche Welle CEFR placement tests put me at A2 right now. Good thing too, as I’m headed for Germany later this month…

  17. Iceland treated me to some of the best views I’ve ever had of Hvalfjörður and Reykjavík on the flight out this morning, before the UK tried to bake me. Nice to be home after a long day traveling.