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Showing posts from January, 2018

The Deadliest Catch

As bullets buzz through the African dusk and clink into the armoured SUV's flank, it becomes hard to believe that the tour operators have not lost a passenger yet. The most dangerous prey, we are assured by authors and fictional villains, is man, and the poachers shooting at us are determined to prove the point.

Bloomberg JSON data into Libreoffice Calc

LibreOffice Calc has no inbuilt stock market functions, and a popular plugin which offered those has stopped working along with changes to Yahoo Finance. Luckily, we can get the latest quotes from Bloomberg. [2018-12-15] Bloomberg Finance is, understandably, blocking multiple simultaneous requests. A more flexible solution is using a Python Stock Scraper .  

A Tale of Three Cities

Singapore, Adelaide (Australia), Tokyo. Asked by a friend about different lives in each, my pithy responses are: Singapore: progressive but controlled, cheap but expensive. Australia: ostensibly progressive, ostensibly fair. Japan: one man's exotic tradition is another man's foreign pedantry. But things weren't always like that.