Tag Archives: Tech

The Ebola Vaccine That Almost Didn’t Happen

Posted on 2020-01-20 by jcs

Unless you follow these things, you might not know that a vaccine for the deadly Ebola virus has been licensed in both Europe and the U.S. The vaccine appears to be highly effective and is a big deal. Although Ebola … Continue reading →

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Building a Personal Knowledge Base

Posted on 2019-12-12 by jcs

I’m a big believer in collecting and storing information: in building a personal knowledge base if you like. I do this, of course, with Org-mode but that’s not the only possibility. Sung Cho has a nice post in which he … Continue reading →

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How To Wrap The MacBook Power Cord

Posted on 2019-12-09 by jcs

While learning how to pour organge juice, I stumbled on a video that shows you the right way to wrap your MacBook power cord into a small neat package that fits easily in your backpack: Here’s another video that shows … Continue reading →

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BPF: A New Type of Software

Posted on 2019-12-07 by jcs

When I first saw the title of Brendan Gregg’s blog post—reproduced above—I had a small frisson of annoyance. BPF (aka Berkeley Packet Filter) has been around since 1992 as the kernel interface to tcpdump and here was Gregg appropriating the … Continue reading →

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The Myth of the Young Entrepreneur

Posted on 2019-12-05 by jcs

One of geekdom’s most cherished beliefs—especially among young hackers—is that of the 20 year old who comes up with a new idea, builds it into a fabulously successful business, sells it for millions after a few years, and retires a … Continue reading →

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An HTML Email Coda

Posted on 2019-12-03 by jcs

Last week, I wrote about Perry Metzger’s reasons for not using Emacs to read his email. His take on email is something on the order of, “These days, email is HTML. Deal with it.” Many of us would rather not … Continue reading →

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Claim: 95% of Users Prefer Dark Mode

Posted on 2019-11-29 by jcs

Over at Polar, they’re getting a lot of requests to implement Dark Mode for their application. They claim that 95% of users prefer dark over light mode. Actually, they’re a little more nuanced than that so you should follow the … Continue reading →

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HTML Email

Posted on 2019-11-27 by jcs

If you’ve watched Perry Metzger’s Emacs Conference 2019 talk, as I hope you have, you’ll know that Metzger believes that modern Email should be carried as HTML. He wants—needs, he says—to see his colleagues emails exactly as they were written … Continue reading →

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What Did They Think Was Going To Happen?

Posted on 2019-11-21 by jcs

I can’t stop laughing: Microsoft Office 365 down worldwide https://t.co/1uUw6fNN2B pic.twitter.com/Hi96L3JFnW — Newshub (@NewshubNZ) November 20, 2019 I’m evil, I know, but the schadenfreude is killing me. I don’t feel even a little sorry for these people. They’ve been warned … Continue reading →

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Ken Thompson Talks About Computer Chess

Posted on 2019-11-20 by jcs

Someone posted a pointer to a 2005 interview of Ken Thompson by John Mashey in which they discuss Thompson’s work on computer chess. It’s unusual, as far as Thompson interviews go, because it doesn’t mention Unix except to note that … Continue reading →

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