Tag Archives: Tech

Saving the Planet With Smartphones

Posted on 2019-09-11 by jcs

When the New Luddites aren’t hectoring us about our debilitating addiction to our phones, the loss of our ability to read maps or do arithmetic, or the extreme disservice we’re doing to our children by allowing them to use smartphones, … Continue reading →

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Curl Recipes

Posted on 2019-09-08 by jcs

There’s not much going on today so I thought I’d share this small list of Curl recipes that I recently stumbled on. If you’re like me, your first reaction when facing a problem like those on this list is to … Continue reading →

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Apple Secrecy and the Tech Press

Posted on 2019-09-07 by jcs

It’s no secret among those who have been reading this blog for a while that Irreal doesn’t hold journalists in high regard. Those that aren’t explicitly corrupt are mostly lazy and ignorant (yes, yes, of course there are exceptions). I … Continue reading →

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Seven Bash Tips

Posted on 2019-08-28 by jcs

Carrying on with yesterday’s theme of Bash hackery, I present to you Ian Miell’s Seven God-Like Bash History Shortcuts You Will Actually Use. If you’re anything like me, you read one of these articles and think, “Wow! That’s really neat. … Continue reading →

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Emacs For a Single Line of Text

Posted on 2019-08-27 by jcs

What if you could use Emacs to edit the command line? Wouldn’t that be great? Well, of course, you can. Not only can but almost certainly do. I’m not talking about invoking Emacs from Bash with Ctrl+x Ctrl+e; I’m talking … Continue reading →

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Paul Ford on Uses This

Posted on 2019-08-24 by jcs

Ever since I stumbled upon it back in 2011, I’ve been a big fan of Uses This (nee The Setup), which features short interviews with tech or creative people. Each interview is the same in that they ask the identical … Continue reading →

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The Truth About PowerPoint

Posted on 2019-08-19 by jcs

But then we already knew that.

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Six Useful Git Tips

Posted on 2019-08-15 by jcs

I feel pretty safe saying that the version control wars are over and that Git has won. To be sure, there’s Subversion and a couple of other distributed version control systems whose names nobody can recall but mostly it’s Git. … Continue reading →

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The DMV and NULL: A Cautionary Tale

Posted on 2019-08-13 by jcs

The other day, I came across an amusing story on the KNRS Website. It involved an IT worker named Droogie who thought it would be fun to prank the DMV by buying the vanity license plate “NULL”. It was, he … Continue reading →

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What Happened At Boeing?

Posted on 2019-08-11 by jcs

As the dismal story of the Boeing 737 Max fiasco drags on, it’s worth taking a look at how the disaster happened. Boeing, after all, has been around since 1916—to put that in context, the Wright brothers made their famous … Continue reading →

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