A Time-Traveler's Guide to Affordable Computing
Greetings! If you are reading this, it means you were selected by TODD (the Temporal Observation Directorate Division) for a temporal excursion. Since you're a member of the Computing Sciences History Reading Room, you will no doubt want to brush up on how to procure computing resources in your assigned …
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What is a blost, anyway?
Welcome to the PADDING.
This blost is a part of the interstitial spaces that make up my blog. It's here to support other blosts. Think of it as one of the glial cells supporting the superstructure of the twisted online brain that is https://rldane.space/.
Of course, that doesn't …
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Speedrunning life with a Rube Goldberg brain
There's a scene in The King's Speech at the end where he's finally giving his big, inspiring speech, and while you hear is the speech, what you see is the scribbled crib notes and the incredible mental gymnastics he has to go through to get each word and phrase out …
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Thinkpad X390 Yoga mini-review
About two and a half months ago, I bought a Wacom digitizer to do doodles with, but I found the process of sketching with a standalone digitizer a bit dissatisfying after using an iPad in years past. To be clear, the fact that the screen and digitizer are separate devices …
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Some thoughts on Android launchers, or, The Need For Spatial Regularity In Touch Interfaces
Background
I've used android as my main mobile OS for about four and a half years, and used it previously for about a year and a half before then. In total, I've spent eight and two thirds years on iOS, and six and one third years on Android (so far …
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Some thoughts on *Severance*
Content warning: This post contains some minor spoilers for Severance seasons 1 & 2, as well as a discussion of some religious and cultic themes.
I had seen many fedifriends discussing the Apple-produced TV series Severance, and after completing my watch-through of The Good Place (blog post on that is in …
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The Scenes that Made Me: Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Lars looking on wistfully while ingesting his sister-in-law's retort to his rant
Video clip
Content warning: this post unavoidably and briefly touches on some "mature" topics
If you had told me six months ago that one of my favorite movies of all time would be a bout a man who …
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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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The Scenes that Made Me: Star Wars
Luke looking wistfully out at the dual sunset on Tatooine as The Force Theme plays hauntingly in the background, beckoning him to his grand adventure
Having grown up in the 1980s, one thing random friends would often ask me (actually what family friends would ask my mom) was: "Has he …
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The Scenes that Made Me: Star Trek
I'm starting a new series where I recount the TV show and movies that were formative in my life. Not only in my childhood (although that will be heavily emphasized), but even recent days.
As I mentioned in a recent post, there were some scenes in Star Trek that deeply …
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