Denseman on the Rattis

Denseman on the Rattis

An Old Harbour Where Strange Ships Still Dock ❦ Formerly Known as the Widmann Blog

  • About this blog
  • The Language Creator
  • Codeberg
  • LinkedIn
EN · MEDIA · WEB

Make movies without leaving your computer!

2009/10/30 22:45

I found a new website today called Xtra Normal.

It lets you make movies like this, and it’s quick and easy:

EN · HUMOUR

I want to park my car like that!

2009/10/29 18:25

EN · HUMOUR · LINGUISTICS · SWG

Schwäbisch schwätza uff Youtube

2009/10/26 14:03

I was raised bilingually. However, it wasn’t Danish and standard German I grew up speaking, as some people might think, it was Danish and Swabian (Schwäbisch). These days even my dad hardly ever speaks Swabian any more, and Swabian speakers aren’t exactly ubiquitous in Scotland, so it often feels like I’m the only remaining speaker. So imagine my joy when I realised that Youtube is positively full of Swabian videos, such as the following parodies! Obama: Star Wars: John Wayne:

EN · POLITICS

No respect for engineering

2009/10/23 15:18

Abandoned factory in Lurgan Originally uploaded by slinky2000 There’s a post on John Redwood’s blog, which has comments that largely are more interesting than the article itself. Do read through the comments if you’ve got the time. Here follow a few excepts. “Bill” wrote: “There are some exceptions of course, in the aerospace industry in particular, but manufacturing does not attract the brightest and the best, they go into the law, medicine, the city. Not so in Germany […]” “Mick Anderson” wrote: “As for “careers in engineering” […]

DISCOVERIES · EN · GADGETS · JA

Folding T-shirts

2009/10/19 08:14

This is an impressive way to fold your T-shirt: Unless you’re an engineer, in which case this is the way to go: If you like that idea, but don’t want to build it yourself, it seems to be available here. However, it seems that if you’re in the US Army, you don’t fold, you roll:

ECONOMICS · EN

A different perspective

2009/10/17 15:11

Illustrations, … Originally uploaded byCornell University Library John Redwood today is trying a new approach to explaining the scope of the financial crisis: Let us look at the financial plight of an imaginary Mr and Mrs Public Sector. They are on a good income of around £50,000 a year. They don’t feel it is nearly enough, as they are spending this year £67,500, financing the extra £17,500 from borrowing. They are lucky, because they do not have to pay any tax on the income, so what they […]

ECONOMICS · ELECTION · EN · POLITICS · SCOTLAND

Who to vote for in spring

2009/10/12 18:29

Vote Originally uploaded by Dean Terry I had been planning to blog this just before the next general election, but now that the main party conferences are over, I think the picture is clear. It’s obvious that Labour is an unmitigated disaster, especially under Gordon Brown. They claim to be progressive and prudent, but they’re centralist authoritarians that waste our money. Also, they’re dependent on public-sector votes to a degree that makes it unlikely that they’ll ever be able to shrink the public sector to any meaningful […]

EN · IT · PHOTOGRAPHY

Is this iPhoto?

2009/10/28 22:51

iPhoto ’09 oddness: Broken UI Originally uploaded by Chris Devers I’ve been playing around with iPhoto on and off ever since Complexli bought the Mac mini for me. In particular, I’m interested in face recognition. It would be so nice if all your photos could be tagged correctly to show who’s in them. However, I’m less than impressed with iPhoto’s performance in this area. One thing is that the face recognition on its own is quite bad. I appreciate it’s a hard thing to do well. It […]

EN · NEIGHBOURHD

Our new local shop

2009/10/27 20:20

Waitrose, Otley Originally uploaded by reinholdbehringer They’re building a lot of houses, business premises, a school and some roundabouts on some fields between us and the motorway. (That is, they started building them a couple of years ago, but most of them seem to have put on hold when the recession started to bite.) The posters also seemed to indicate that there would be some kind of shop. I always thought it was a great location because it’s so close to a motorway onramp, but I didn’t […]

ECONOMICS · EN

If the pound collapses…

2009/10/25 23:32

Few Pounds Originally uploaded by René Ehrhardt Of course the financial problems are not restricted to the UK, but as the recent news that this country is contracting shows, it’s definitely worse off than many similar places. That means that it’s not impossible that the pound will fall even further. So it’s worth asking what the effects will be if the pound collapses, e.g., to €1 = $1.50 = £2 (it’s £0.92 at the moment). Obviously, holidays and many importing goods will become unaffordable to most Britons, […]

DA · HEALTH · PREGNANCY

Stor baby

2009/10/21 23:11

Baby scan Originally uploaded by viralbus Som jeg sikkert har nævnt tidligere, skal Phyllis efter planen føde den 9. januar. Det betyder, at afstanden fra skambenet til toppen af livmoderen gerne skulle være 28-29 cm. Men da de målte hende i dag til et rutinetjek, var afstanden 34 cm. De sagde først, det sikkert bare var for meget væske, men de sendte hente til scanning for at tjekke. Men nej, det er rent faktisk pigen derinde, der er kæmpestor: De vurderer hende til at veje mellem 2500 […]

ECONOMICS · EN · POLITICS

Should only public-sector workers own houses?

2009/10/20 18:30

Mortgage Originally uploaded by Rev Dan Catt The FSA yesterday made a proposal to make it harder to get a mortgage. While it’s clear that some people have been allowed to borrow crazy amounts, I’m not sure that their new rules would help. First of all, for those of us who already have mortgages, what’s the consequence if we can’t remortgage? We’ll be left on the Standard Variable Rate, which at times can be much dearer than the deals on offer. So rather than protect consumers, the […]

EN · FOODDRINK · REVIEW

Modern curries

2009/10/18 08:18

I’ve already written about the wonderful Curry Secret cookbook, which shows you how to cook Indian restaurant food. Not only will it give you the recipes for dishes you’ve encountered in restaurants, but it will also teach you how to pre-cook the sauce and the meat, so that you can cook two curries in half an hour after work. So when the New Curry Secret was published, I bought it immediately. I assumed it would just contain more recipes and better illustrations (the old one was a […]

DA · GD · LINGUISTICS

Dyrø, Skid, Bredvig og andre skotske stednavne

2009/10/15 18:30

Islay-Sunset1 Originally uploaded by flickrbug De norske vikinger har haft en meget stor indflydelse i det vestlige Skotland. Det kan bl.a. ses på, at mange stednavne går tilbage til oldnordisk. Tag fx den lille skotske ø Jura. Dens navn kommer fra oldnordisk Dýr-ey “Dyreø” (med den østnordiske sideform Djúr-ey), hvilket blev lånt til gælisk som Diùra, og det ord blev så til engelsk Jura (på gælisk udtales ‘di’ foran vokal ca. som engelsk ‘j’). Det samme gør sig gældende for hundredevis af andre stednavne, som fx Skye […]

EN · IT · TYPOGRAPHY

TECkit

2009/10/13 18:17

After the Mac arrived last week, one of the first programs I installed was TeXShop. That caused me to play around with XeTeX, which – although it’s also available for Linux – I had never really got around to playing around with. One interesting feature I noticed immediately was the maps: When loading a font one can specify an input mapping like this: \setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Gentium} and this will cause — to be mapped to – etc. I wanted to play around with this, but there didn’t seem to […]

ECONOMICS · POLITICS · WEB

Exchange rates

2009/10/11 18:28

Most people are probably aware that the pound has fallen a lot over the past two years, but it can be hard to visualise. I was therefore very pleased when I discovered this site, which plots the movements of currencies within a user-defined time interval graphically. To demonstrate, I asked it to plot the movements against the pound of five currencies (the US dollar, the euro, the Swiss franc, the Japanese yen and the Kiwi dollar) since the beginning of 1999 (when the euro was introduced). For […]

Earlier stories »

RSS From the Internet

  • Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass - The New York Times 30 May 2026
  • Digital arson spree by ‘AI Bonnie and Clyde’ raises fears over autonomous tech | The Guardian 29 May 2026
  • Emergence World — Where AI Agents Build Worlds 29 May 2026
  • Someone Shared a Real Monet Painting as AI and Asked for Critiques | PetaPixel 18 May 2026
  • Brexit & Brexitism: Britain’s post-Brexit ungovernability 15 May 2026
  • Industrial policy for the Intelligence Age | OpenAI 7 April 2026
  • What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain? | The New Yorker 28 March 2024
  • Brexit has completely failed for UK, say clear majority of Britons – poll | Brexit | The Guardian 30 December 2023

RSS Arc of Prosperity

  • Penrose and Schrödinger 7 May 2026
  • The next Holyrood parliament 22 February 2026
  • Medieval advice on Greenland 19 January 2026
  • 13 Simple Predictions for 2026 31 December 2025
  • Politics isn’t management 14 September 2025
  • Make Our Nation Great Again-ism 5 September 2025
  • Green, Orange and Turquoise 2 September 2025
  • The Shrinking of the Scottish Lion 30 August 2025

RSS Our Recipes

  • Fru pastor Meldgaards karamelrand (Caramel Milk Mould) 19 March 2026
  • A Recipe So Fine 5 January 2026
  • Orchard Mincemeat with Quince & Calvados 27 December 2025
  • Sambar Powder 27 December 2025
  • Sambar 27 December 2025
  • Madeira Herring 27 December 2025
  • Pernod Herring 27 December 2025
  • Curried Herring (Karrysild) 27 December 2025

RSS Last Revolution?

  • The End of the Age of Labour 29 May 2026
  • The Resumption of History 26 May 2026
  • The Pope, Prince and Golgafrincham 25 May 2026
  • Non Scholæ, sed Vitæ 21 May 2026
  • The Robot Dog in the Orchard 14 May 2026
  • The AI Elephant in the Room 11 May 2026
  • Antarctica 10 March 2026
  • On Shumer, Citrini and the Question of Stability 24 February 2026

Related Posts

  • Nuntii Latini 13 April 2013
  • Paying for journalism 26 March 2013
  • Nuisance calls 30 December 2011
  • The Times has been disconnected 2 July 2010
  • The Murdoch Tax 26 March 2010
  • I’d just play it 17 December 2008
  • I'd just play it 17 December 2008
  • Music store for Linux 4 December 2008

Tags

  • althist (12)
  • architecture (3)
  • arcofprosperity (5)
  • blogging (81)
  • brewing (15)
  • clothing (2)
  • crime (4)
  • culture (105)
  • denmark (58)
  • discoveries (4)
  • DIY (31)
  • dreams (2)
  • economics (141)
  • education (25)
  • election (104)
  • environment (14)
  • europe (1)
  • evolution (1)
  • family (69)
  • featured (46)
  • fooddrink (151)
  • gadgets (32)
  • games (12)
  • gardening (29)
  • geography (27)
  • health (25)
  • history (18)
  • humour (40)
  • IT (116)
  • kids (168)
  • lang (1,725)
    • ca (2)
    • cs (2)
    • da (369)
    • de (18)
    • en (1,346)
    • eo (5)
    • es (8)
    • fr (11)
    • gd (7)
    • ja (3)
    • ka (9)
    • la (1)
    • mi (1)
    • nb (2)
    • nn (4)
    • ru (4)
    • sco (12)
    • sv (3)
    • swg (1)
    • tlh (1)
    • yi (2)
    • zh (6)
  • linguistics (227)
  • love (8)
  • media (111)
  • military (2)
  • music (4)
  • neighbourhd (20)
  • obituary (20)
  • pets (3)
  • photography (65)
  • politics (511)
  • predictions (3)
  • pregnancy (12)
  • psychology (4)
  • religion (13)
  • review (26)
  • science (43)
  • scotland (156)
  • sign (24)
  • sport (7)
  • transport (45)
  • travel (56)
  • typography (7)
  • urbanplanning (5)
  • weather (18)
  • web (80)
  • work (9)

Months

  • May 2026 (1)
  • April 2026 (1)
  • March 2026 (2)
  • January 2026 (1)
  • August 2025 (1)
  • February 2021 (1)
  • September 2020 (1)
  • June 2020 (1)
  • April 2020 (1)
  • January 2020 (1)
  • December 2019 (2)
  • July 2019 (1)
  • June 2019 (2)
  • April 2019 (1)
  • March 2019 (2)
  • August 2018 (1)
  • June 2018 (1)
  • May 2018 (1)
  • January 2018 (1)
  • December 2017 (1)
  • October 2017 (3)
  • January 2017 (1)
  • November 2016 (1)
  • October 2016 (1)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • June 2016 (3)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • January 2016 (3)
  • October 2015 (1)
  • July 2015 (2)
  • June 2015 (1)
  • February 2015 (1)
  • January 2015 (1)
  • September 2014 (1)
  • August 2014 (1)
  • July 2014 (1)
  • May 2014 (1)
  • April 2014 (1)
  • March 2014 (3)
  • February 2014 (3)
  • January 2014 (2)
  • December 2013 (5)
  • November 2013 (3)
  • October 2013 (2)
  • September 2013 (5)
  • August 2013 (4)
  • July 2013 (3)
  • June 2013 (6)
  • May 2013 (6)
  • April 2013 (8)
  • March 2013 (9)
  • February 2013 (7)
  • January 2013 (14)
  • December 2012 (13)
  • November 2012 (12)
  • October 2012 (12)
  • September 2012 (15)
  • August 2012 (10)
  • July 2012 (9)
  • June 2012 (16)
  • May 2012 (14)
  • April 2012 (9)
  • March 2012 (13)
  • February 2012 (14)
  • January 2012 (19)
  • December 2011 (15)
  • November 2011 (17)
  • October 2011 (17)
  • September 2011 (28)
  • August 2011 (15)
  • July 2011 (10)
  • June 2011 (10)
  • May 2011 (18)
  • April 2011 (13)
  • March 2011 (14)
  • February 2011 (17)
  • January 2011 (15)
  • December 2010 (15)
  • November 2010 (14)
  • October 2010 (16)
  • September 2010 (17)
  • August 2010 (20)
  • July 2010 (11)
  • June 2010 (11)
  • May 2010 (15)
  • April 2010 (15)
  • March 2010 (22)
  • February 2010 (22)
  • January 2010 (20)
  • December 2009 (19)
  • November 2009 (21)
  • October 2009 (20)
  • September 2009 (22)
  • August 2009 (19)
  • July 2009 (23)
  • June 2009 (21)
  • May 2009 (23)
  • April 2009 (13)
  • March 2009 (23)
  • February 2009 (15)
  • January 2009 (22)
  • December 2008 (18)
  • November 2008 (21)
  • October 2008 (28)
  • September 2008 (23)
  • August 2008 (21)
  • July 2008 (20)
  • June 2008 (21)
  • May 2008 (22)
  • April 2008 (22)
  • March 2008 (23)
  • February 2008 (22)
  • January 2008 (30)
  • December 2007 (8)
  • November 2007 (23)
  • October 2007 (24)
  • September 2007 (26)
  • August 2007 (35)
  • July 2007 (20)
  • June 2007 (27)
  • May 2007 (32)
  • April 2007 (31)
  • March 2007 (21)
  • February 2007 (30)
  • January 2007 (26)
  • December 2006 (22)
  • November 2006 (28)
  • October 2006 (29)
  • September 2006 (54)
  • August 2006 (33)
  • July 2006 (5)
  • June 2006 (29)
  • May 2006 (45)

© 2026 Denseman on the Rattis  ·  Set in Cormorant Garamond & Cardo  ·  Powered by WordPress