Tag Archives: Tech

The Real Point of All the Talk About Tech Addiction

Posted on 2018-10-13 by jcs

I’ve written at length about so called “tech addiction” and why I don’t believe there is such a thing—at least not for the vast majority of people not already suffering from psychological disabilities. It makes no difference. We continue to … Continue reading →

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Xmonad

Posted on 2018-10-09 by jcs

One of the reasons I enjoy working as much as possible within Emacs is that I have a consistent mouseless interface to all my applications. That means that I develop muscle memory for most of what I do and I … Continue reading →

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Little Languages

Posted on 2018-09-16 by jcs

Last month, I wrote about one of John Bentley’s Programming Pearls columns in the Communication of the ACM. Someone has posted another column, this one on Little Languages. I remember reading the column in More Programming Pearls; it instilled in … Continue reading →

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Languages for Text Processing

Posted on 2018-09-04 by jcs

The other day, Xah Lee, as he is wont to do, provoked a spirited debate on Mastodon about the usefulness of Emacs Lisp for text processing. Lee wrote that although he has used Elisp for text processing for many years, … Continue reading →

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How A Nerd Counts Stairs

Posted on 2018-08-27 by jcs

Tanya Khovanova recounts an amusing trick she learned from John Conway: how to count the number of steps in a stairway. The obvious answer is to just count them as you walk up the stairs but there’s an additional stipulation: … Continue reading →

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Bumper-Sticker Computer Science

Posted on 2018-08-23 by jcs

Back in the 1980s, Jon Bentley wrote a column for Communications of the ACM called Programming Pearls. The columns typically considered a programming technique or problem and were very popular. The columns were later published in book form as Programming … Continue reading →

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A Lisp Machine

Posted on 2018-08-21 by jcs

Sorta. Kedalion Daimon has a really interesting project in which he takes an old Brother EP 44 adds an Arduino Due and the very definition of a Rube Goldberg power supply to build a makeshift Lisp machine. It’s a Lisp … Continue reading →

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Storing Energy with Concrete Blocks

Posted on 2018-08-19 by jcs

One of the big problems with alternative energy sources, such as wind and solar, is that they can’t generate electricity all the time. That means that that they need a way to store the excess energy they generate when they’re … Continue reading →

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Solving 10 Common Git Problems

Posted on 2018-08-07 by jcs

Michael Kohl has a post on 10 Common Git Problems and How to Fix Them that new or casual Git users may find useful. There’s a lot of useful information in the post so it’s definitely worth reading. Unfortunately, for … Continue reading →

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Geek Trivia

Posted on 2018-07-29 by jcs

I'm probably the last geek on earth to discover that the model numbers of 3V CR button cell batteries describe their size. E.g., a CR2032 is 20mm diameter and 3.2mm thick. But if I wasn't, now you are. — matt … Continue reading →

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