Stupid Computer Tricks

In the late 1990s I had a static IP address, DSL, and my own domain. I got my email delivered to a PC running FreeBSD that I had built out of components I bought at Fry’s Electronics and which lived in my living room, right next to the other PC I’d built out of components

Rebuilding – Signaling

I spent the day in Santa Cruz, yesterday. I had several errands to run, most of which were uninteresting, but one which turned out to be fascinating. Since I had to be in the area for a medical appointment, I thought that I’d drop by the arena, where a bunch of county departments and some

Puzzlin’ Code

Okay, here’s some SwiftUI code: Why, why, do I need to prefix tipPercentages with ‘self.‘ once we’re in the third closure but not inside the second or even the first? What’s magical about this situation? I know there’s something, but nobody is saying what.

Specify Your Dream

I keep wanting to be able to write native apps for my devices, and it keeps being true that I can’t wrap my brain around The Way You’re Supposed To Do It. I’ve taken Coursera and Udemy courses on iOS and macOS programming, and I’ve even shipped a couple of toy apps to the App

Rats Got the Baby

Last year, I gave in to the family, admitted that we live in the woods, on top of a mountain, and we have a persistent need to haul large volumes of stuff from there to here and back again. We bought a pickup truck. Problem is, we live in the woods, on top of a

Well, duh

So, Iran has reconnected to the Internet, and there’s this quote way down in the Washington Post article about it: “Why did (the Americans) get angry after we cut off the internet? Because the internet is the channel through which Americans wanted to perform their evil and vicious acts,” Fadavi said. I’d say that this,

Regression

I’ve been ignoring Facebook for a few months, now, and my engagement with Twitter has mostly been retweets and likes. Yesterday, a friend who takes what other people say more seriously than I do decided he needed to back way off and go back to writing blog posts instead of tweets. Frankly, I would way rather

Why Monoculture

At some point, I don’t remember exactly when, I told my family that since I didn’t use Windows in a professional capacity and I didn’t use it personally, there was no way I was going to go to the effort of becoming and staying smart about Windows, and if they wanted me to do tech

Next Project

So, I’m writing a pantry inventory app.

Sounds Like a Job for Perl

In which I write a continuous build system for bagpipe music using Perl and a Makefile. The problem: the band has sheet music that everyone is supposed to memorize, the membership is geographically dispersed and not everyone can make it to every practice, and during practices and workshops and after competitions the music can get