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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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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I really wish the Fediverse had more permanence
One of the things I hear people on the Fediverse celebrate is its incredible transience. There's no one big central network, so posts have nebulous reach throughout the network, depending on how well-"connected" your instance is, and many people set posts to auto-delete after a set period of time …
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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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A Toast to the Prolific ones
I wanted to take some time out today to acknowledge some folks on the fediverse that are remarkably prolific, just for fun.
Prolific blogger — Rubenerd
Oh holy moly. This fella has words. Lots of words. Many very fine words. Just look at bro's output for 2024:
~ $ curl -s https://rubenerd …
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