V.H. Belvadi’s personal website and blog| vhbelvadi.com
V.H. Belvadi’s personal website and blog| vhbelvadi.com
Meditating on the colours in my life| vhbelvadi.com
V.H. Belvadi’s personal website and blog| vhbelvadi.com
V.H. Belvadi’s personal website and blog| vhbelvadi.com
Kev Quirk recently asked his readers what kind of blogs they like to read which made me scroll through my own feed reader to see what kind of blogs I subscribe to. There were a couple of interesting insights, but also a tiny idea: every once in a while (I am not yet sure of the frequency) I want to highlight a handful of recent articles from my feed reader that I particularly liked. Think of it as my way of ensuring the IndieWeb remains a rich, meaningful web (see my manifesto for more) or, a...| V.H. Belvadi
“I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important.” —William Eggelston Sawb’worth, Herts, June 2025 — Photowalks have always been an exceptionally good way for me to rejuvenate my photographic interests. I enjoy them for the knowledge they bring both about the place and about photography, the cameraderie with fellow photographers, and a strength in numbers. The latter is particularly important for someone like me who is q...| V.H. Belvadi
Incredibly vivid and utterly unforgettable| vhbelvadi.com
Before people around the world were connected by the internet the proliferation of new ideas and modern technologies was slow. This was bad for the originators who had no means of quickly gauging where their product stood without taking risks for longer periods initially. It was not until the dust settled as more people, across more continents, slowly took to using this new invention that the companies producing them could rest easy. Part one Consider the vacuum cleaner. A common household ap...| V.H. Belvadi
Long gone but still necessary| vhbelvadi.com
I stumbled upon this old response on Threads from Jim Richardson—one of my favourite contemporary photographers—which I found via a link to an entirely different, and unrelated, post on that platform thanks to a comment on Reddit that I came across as a result of a search on DuckDuckGo. So much for avoiding internet rabit holes, but at least this time I was led to somewhere meaningful. Commenting on yet another photography ‘tip’ discussing the rule of thrids, Jim asks— You know, for...| V.H. Belvadi
“The source of your disappointment changes but the constant is that you’re always disappointed.” —Kate (played by Leslie Bibb in Season 3 of The White Lotus) Returning with its recognisable traits of a strong cast, great writing, bold and baiting visuals, and a Scorsese-esque reliance on music throughout its eight-episode run, the third season of The While Lotus delivers, although with fewer pearls of wisdom and a lot more of what Namwali Serpell once called ‘new literalism’. Cove...| V.H. Belvadi
Perhaps about two years ago I came across John Gruber’s thoughts on Markdown. These were not his musings from back when he created the markup language but years later, in 2021, when he shared his thoughts on how Markdown was being used then. Because I would rather not link to Twitter, here are screenshots: This was his fundamental argument against the way Markdown is being used today. I am all for creators offering their opinions on their products, but I also recognise that some products—...| V.H. Belvadi
Fascist change does not jump on society, it creeps up on it| vhbelvadi.com
V.H. Belvadi’s personal website and blog| vhbelvadi.com
The best way to describe Strange pictures is to invite you to think of ‘reels’ on Instagram or ‘shorts’ on Youtube. Every review I have seen of this work praises it greatly, and as far as mysteries go there is much to like in this novel. Alas there is more to a mystery novel than the retelling, no matter how clever. And in that sense Uketsu’s Strange Pictures stumbles: its pace barely lets up but in a bad way; it opens a door then quickly addresses it, it refuses to let readers sit ...| V.H. Belvadi
“Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.” —Christian Lange, Nobel Peace Prize lecture (1921) All devices can be broadly classified into two types: devices that promise and attempt to do everything (or many things at least), and devices that promise or attempt to do just one thing but do it better than everyone else. Devices in the former class can get away with being good enough in enough things that the benefit they offer as all-in-one devices outweighs carrying a second...| V.H. Belvadi
V.H. Belvadi’s personal website and blog| vhbelvadi.com
Stellar, and offers lessons for other games| vhbelvadi.com
I have made no secret in the past about my stance on the use of plaintext in academia: we need more of it. Enough with proprietary formats like Word; surely academics can learn to use Emacs iA Writer or BBEdit or something of the sort with Git and Pandoc. Duke’s Kieran Healy has an excellent guide for social scientists to work in plaintext using just these tools. Although a bit outdated (just a bit e.g. --citeproc now exists and Sublime text 3 is in the past now) it is still a terrific, all...| V.H. Belvadi
“Unlike with regular PHP web applications, it can sometimes be hard to figure out what’s wrong [with WebDAV]. Error messages are often not displayed by WebDAV clients, so the only debugging feedback you’re getting is a cryptic error.” — Sabre documentation After skipping around many a reference manager I settled on Zotero for my academic needs. While Zotero is great (and not owned by Elsevier like a certain other reference manager) it comes with a storage size limit if you want to s...| V.H. Belvadi
Easy does not mean better| vhbelvadi.com