Tag Archives: Tech

Blood Pressure and Tattoos

Posted on 2022-06-30 by jcs

If you’re over 10 years old, you’ve almost certainly had your blood pressure taken and it is even more likely that it was done with a blood pressure cuff, a technology that dates from the 1800s. Its age notwithstanding, it’s … Continue reading →

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Having a Per Contact Email Address

Posted on 2022-06-25 by jcs

I recently had my own experience of the Baader-Meinhoff Phenomena. The other day I read Karl Voit’s post from 2015 on having a separate (from) email address for each correspondent. It seemed a little odd to me. Why would I … Continue reading →

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Sudo via Touch ID on the Mac

Posted on 2022-06-16 by jcs

A couple of years ago, I wrote about using Touch ID to enable sudo on the Mac. Someone just posted a link to the original article on Six Colors. It turns out to be incredibly simple—a single line added to … Continue reading →

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Rich Stevens

Posted on 2022-06-15 by jcs

One of my heroes, perhaps my greatest hero was Rich Stevens. The other day, someone posted a link on reddit to a Salon article about Stevens published a year after his death. It made me remember my huge debt to … Continue reading →

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The iOS Builtin Flight App

Posted on 2022-06-07 by jcs

This post is a bit specialized—to iOS—by Irreal standards but it’s so useful to those who have an iPhone that I’m going to write about it anyway. I’m not sure if this is new or has been in iOS for … Continue reading →

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A Clueless Journalist on Apple’s Self Repair Program

Posted on 2022-06-01 by jcs

Long time readers know that Irreal doesn’t hold journalists in high regard. Oddly, the worst offenders are journalists on the tech beat. It’s odd because you’d expect them to know the difference between a computer and a composter but they … Continue reading →

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Leslie Lamport

Posted on 2022-05-26 by jcs

Most of you probably know Leslie Lamport as the original author of LaTeX but within the computer science community, he’s mostly known for his work on distributed systems. Like Knuth, Lamport was trained as a mathematician but rather than pursue … Continue reading →

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Hints For Writing Unix Tools

Posted on 2022-04-25 by jcs

Marius Eriksen has a useful post for those not afraid to leave the comfort of the GUI for the command line. It’s long been noted that the ability of Unix to compose tools into pipelines is extraordinarily powerful and makes … Continue reading →

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How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Posted on 2022-04-18 by jcs

Well, not me: Tom Lyon. His post was actually entitled My Summer at Bell Labs and tells the story of his summer internship at the Labs. Regular readers know I’m a sucker for this type of thing so of course … Continue reading →

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Monorepositories

Posted on 2022-04-15 by jcs

One of the controversies—probably not ascending to the level of holy war—in our field is whether we should keep our version controlled source code in several repositories or a single monorepository. The correct answer is, of course, “it depends”. Still, … Continue reading →

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