News about BenHollis.net and articles about Ben's interests
Animals in the Ocean Evolve into Crabs In evolutionary biology there’s a concept called “ carcinization ”. Put simply, there is a trend towards different crustacean species evolving to have crab-like bodies, even if they started out more like a shrimp or lobster. Over time, given the advantages of a crab-like body, they flatten out, tuck their tail, and in just a few million years you have an…
Running content blockers in your browser is a good idea–yes, you block ads, but you also block malware, cryptominers, tracking, and more. In general, the experience of using the web with a good content blocker should be noticeably faster, as you skip downloading and executing many megabytes of code, images, and videos that provides you with no benefit. I’ve run content blocking extensions since…
Early in August, my partner, Eva Funderburgh texted me from her bronze casting class: Hey! I’m one of only two people in the class. I get as many investments as I want. Can you come up with a good plan to make an apple of Eden model by the time I’m home? Until recently, I’ve been a big fan of the Assassin’s Creed series of video games, especially since it intersects with my interests in parkour…
A few weeks ago I finally released Maruku 0.7.0 after a short beta that revealed no serious issues. This was the first release in four years of the venerable Ruby Markdown library. I inherited Maruku over a year ago and I’m very proud of the work I’ve put into it during that year. I’m glad that I was able to fix many of its bugs and update it to work in a modern Ruby environment. However, I want…
My partner Eva Funderburgh is a professional artist, and has been making sculptures full-time since we both moved to Seattle in 2005. I don’t have much talent for clay, so my main contribution is to help with her website. A few weeks ago we launched the third iteration of her site, which we’d been working on for several months.
I’ve just pushed Maruku 0.7.0.beta1 to RubyGems.org. This is the first real release of Maruku in over 4 years. I released version 0.6.1 exactly one year ago, but that included only a single fix on top of the 0.6.0 code (for Ruby 1.9+ compatibility). Last year, I said in “ I own Maruku now ”: