Unix Data Compression Shootout
I wanted to try a new-to-me compressor, lz4, but it turned into a full ADHD-fueled file compression shoot-out:
Dang, lz4 is crazy fast!
Data/setup
The corpus is a 2.29 GiB uncompressed tar file consisting of several years worth of GPS data in various plain-text formats.
The computer is …
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Gathering Hashtags from the Fediverse
Background
One minor foible of the fediverse instance I'm on is that searching (for accounts or hashtags) can be quite slow. As a workaround for now, I've saved a list of accounts I've followed for easy reference, but I also wanted some way of saving a list of hashtags to …
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Device mini-review: One by Wacom
Partially for the sake of my daily doodles, which I've been posting to the Fediverse, and also because I've been learning the Persian alphabet, I recently purchased a small USB pen digitizer, the "One by Wacom," by Wacom (great branding 😄).
For those of you not familiar with digitizers, think of …
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Used laptops are wonderful... except when you need batteries
When I was a kid, a new computer cost the equivalent of $3,000 in today's money, and a five year old computer was basically a dinosaur.
Nowadays you can get a brand new computer for $200 or less, and a ten-year-old computer can still be a viable daily-driver. You …
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Why I love Markdown
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Because it's cool! But first, a brief history of writing in the digital age!
Some History, or: I have ADHD and we're all aboard the unnecessary detail traaaaaainnnn!......
The very first computer I had at home was an Apple ][+ that my mom rented for a computer class in university. The …
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Blog Questions Challenge: Technology Edition
I saw this update to the "Blog Questions Challenge" format on jnv's blog, and without reading* it first (in order to not taint my own answers — I will definitely go back and read his), I thought I'd write down some of my own thoughts, for fun.
*I used curl …
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I miss the days of ubiquitous portable data storage
I was reading Clayton's blog post about his habit of buying larger and larger USB thumb drives back in the day (when they were getting rapidly larger every few months), and it reminded me of a wish I had in the 2000s that got only partially fulfilled.
As anyone who …
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The Case for AVIF
Disclaimer: Right off the bat, I am NOT an imaging expert, a compression expert, or really an anything expert. I'm just speaking from my own experiences as a relatively ordinary user of image formats.
When I was a young-un in the early, early 90s, PICT was the day-to-day image format …
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I kinda hate "apps"
I'm talking mostly about terminology, but of course, when in doubt, "I don't want your dumb app."
So, as I briefly alluded to in yesterdays blog post, most mobile apps are pretty terrible. They're generally chock full of spyware (trackers), and are inherently user-hostile.
But I want to talk about …
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How I Mitigate Horrible "Apps"
This morning, I enjoyed a blog post by James Ashford about whether or not it's good to use a bible app.
I commented on a tangential issue: the fact that bible apps have so many trackers!
I mentioned that I do use YouVersion, even though it has many trackers (including …
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