Tag Archives: Tech

A Graphviz Go-By

Posted on 2020-06-12 by jcs

When I want a graph like this: my go-to tool is the dot command from Graphviz. There’s a simple input language to describe a graph that’s easy to write by hand but most often I generate the input programmatically. It’s … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: iPhones and Sanity

Posted on 2020-05-08 by jcs

The other day, I wrote about Aaron Ogle’s experience in de-Googling his workflow. Although I didn’t mention it, he wrote that part of his de-Googling efforts were to replace his Android phone with an iPhone. It was, he said—undoubtedly tongue-in-cheek—an … Continue reading →

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One Person’s Take on Dark Mode

Posted on 2020-05-03 by jcs

This doesn’t quite rise to the level of a Red Meat Friday item—at least I don’t think it does—but some folks do take the light-mode/dark-mode debate very seriously. Over at Gizmodo, Victoria Song reignites the debate with an article telling … Continue reading →

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A Workflow For Writing A Book

Posted on 2020-04-18 by jcs

Vladimir Keleshev has an interesting post that details his book writing process. It is, in a sense, low tech in that it uses very basic tools: Pandoc, Make, and Vim. He writes in Markdown and uses Pandoc to covert that … Continue reading →

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Software Antibloat

Posted on 2020-04-13 by jcs

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was a Pascal development system for MS-DOS called Turbo Pascal. It was lightening fast, had a built-in IDE, and fit on a single \(5 \frac{1}{4}\) inch floppy. It even included the source for … Continue reading →

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COVID-19 and Data Caps

Posted on 2020-03-14 by jcs

One of the most annoying things that ISPs perpetrate on their customers is broadband data caps. It’s one of the main reasons Comcast is the company that everyone loves to hate but AT&T and others also have them. These companies … Continue reading →

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File Hierarchies

Posted on 2020-03-05 by jcs

A nice post from Karl Voit has been languishing in my blog queue since January and I realized that it was time to write about it. In the post, Voit argues that complex file hierarchies are the wrong answer. If … Continue reading →

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Regular Expressions in 30 Lines of C

Posted on 2020-02-17 by jcs

I recently saw a pointer to a nice article by Brian Kernighan that describes some beautiful code written by Rob Pike for their book The Practice of Programming. As an example of the power of notation, they wanted to show … Continue reading →

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Dark-Mode vs. Light-Mode Again

Posted on 2020-02-16 by jcs

You’d think this would be dead horse by now but we always have fun with it when I post on the issue so here’s another episode. Via Kontra we have an article by Raluca Budiu on whether light-mode or dark-mode … Continue reading →

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Digital Inheritance

Posted on 2020-01-21 by jcs

I know all you readers think you’re going to live forever—and if you’re young enough that might even be (approximately) true—or you at least think it’s way too early to be thinking about wills and other such unpleasant matters. Nonetheless, … Continue reading →

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