Tag Archives: Tech

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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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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