I grew up reading science fiction. Although I enjoyed the genre a great deal, most of my reading was confined to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke...
Mon 12 August 2024
I wrote a while ago on reading articles offline by printing them on paper. The benefit was reduced eye strain and a superior reading experience,...
Fri 26 April 2024
Why are entertainment UIs so bad? Here are some examples: You’re watching a recorded tennis match. At the end of the first set, you hit “Pause” to...
Sun 04 February 2024
Moderating online forums is labor intensive. Burnout is common. It’s almost a given that if a subreddit gets to a certain size, the quality will...
Mon 15 January 2024
My friends often ask for use cases for GPT. Below I provide one recent example. I attend a weekly educational seminar where real estate...
Thu 07 December 2023
$ genlop -l -f emerge.log |head -n20 using logfile emerge.log * packages merged: Sun May 18 14:24:00 2003 >>> sys-apps/portage-2.0.47-r10 Sun May...
Thu 18 May 2023
For the last few days I’ve been playing with AI Chirpers - a Twitter-like social network where only AI bots are allowed and they chat with...
Wed 26 April 2023
Once I got used to browsing Info manuals in Emacs, I wished I didn’t have to go look at online docs all the time. Of all the manuals out there,...
Sun 19 March 2023
Yesterday was the first time I interacted with any of the GPT flavors. I interacted with it via Bing Chat. I think by now many have read about the...
Thu 16 March 2023
I recently needed to read a detailed summary of the first 20 or so chapters of Bleak House. I came across this site that fit the bill perfectly....
Thu 16 March 2023
In an earlier post, I listed all the technical courses I took in my undergrad, and which ones I used on the job. Of the 40 courses I took, I used...
Thu 12 January 2023
My undergrad degree was in electrical engineering. Since then, I’ve worked in industry for over a decade - both as an electrical engineer and as a...
Thu 12 January 2023
A few years ago I introduced opel - an Emacs package that allows one to write all their Pelican posts in one Org file. It was inspired by ox-hugo....
Wed 14 December 2022
On Mastodon I follow a number of folks at the Mathstodon instance. Because that instance is about mathematics, they’ve enabled the rendering of...
Thu 08 December 2022
I suck at art. As such, my blog has been mostly text with few images. Recently I started playing with Stable Diffusion on my PC, and it occurred...
Sun 27 November 2022
For most of my life, I’ve done my own taxes - using paper and pen. If you have the standard W-2 income, it’s fairly easy. Thrice, though, my tax...
Wed 23 November 2022
Back when I was at university, a friend mentioned to me that he wanted to read The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan. I had been a fan of Sagan...
Tue 19 July 2022
If I delete a file and sync, can I recover the deleted file? Is there a deadline (e.g. only within 90 days)? Or will they keep it forever? If I...
Thu 14 July 2022
Here I’ll discuss various ways I’ve tried to reduce my soda intake - primarily to avoid sugar. [1] [2] If you want the quick summary of what...
Thu 30 December 2021
My desktop is my portal to the Internet. [1] Lately, I’ve needed to spend significant amounts of time away from my machine. So I took to printing...
Sun 19 December 2021
I recently read an article on Oliver Heaviside. He’s one of those scientists whose work touched several disciplines. Apparently, Maxwell’s...
Tue 13 April 2021
Pelican is a static site generator. Out of the box it supports two formats: Restructured Text and Markdown. There exist plugins to support the Org...
Thu 19 December 2019
New Year’s Resolutions. It’s that time of year again. Below I’ve accumulated some resources that give interesting tips on how to think about them,...
Tue 01 January 2019
My last post got quite a few comments on Hacker News. They did force me to think a little, and here I’ll gather some of my thoughts. “I have an...
Sat 29 September 2018
. Email is not a messaging protocol. It’s a TODO list. Or at least my inbox is a TODO list and email is the protocol for putting stuff on it....
Fri 28 September 2018
At some point in the last year, I switched to the xonsh shell. It is a bash-like shell written in Python. The nice thing about it is you can write...
Sat 21 April 2018
Lately I’ve been reading the book Influence by Robert Cialdini. The chapter on Social Proof reminded me of an episode of This American Life I had...
Tue 16 May 2017
There are two types of people: Those who are uncomfortable with their own ignorance, and those who aim to understand. The former will be quick to...
Sun 23 April 2017
Lately I’ve been reading the book Influence by Robert Cialdini. In it he talks about the principle of reciprocity. We tend to repay, in kind, what...
Sat 22 April 2017
Some months ago I bought a new Android phone. The internal storage was only 16 GB, so I put in an external SD card of 32 GB. As I started...
Sun 24 January 2016
I recently came across this comment: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “oh, I just COULDN’T stare at a computer all day lol”. If you want...
Tue 19 January 2016
A nearby photography club has annual county wide competitions. The judges select their favorite photos and display them in a mall for a month....
Thu 24 December 2015
The following scenarios are ones many of us run in to: Lumped Sum: I suddenly got $30,000. Should I put the money towards my mortgage, or should I...
Fri 18 December 2015
It has been a long time since I was a college student. In those days I took all my notes in the classroom with a notebook. One notebook for...
Sun 06 December 2015
When I first got into photoediting, I started off with the free software GIMP. I was a student and couldn’t afford Adobe Photoshop. While GIMP...
Tue 06 January 2015
A friend of mine recently took his bird watching hobby to another level. Armed with a 400mm lens, a scope and a sturdy tripod, he and his wife...
Fri 15 March 2013
First, watch this TED talk about oxytocin - the “moral molecule”: Then watch this segment of another TED talk:
Fri 21 December 2012
In the old days of DOS there used to be a great graphical, but text based, file manager called Norton Commander. These days the name “Norton”...
Tue 18 December 2012
From the Merriam Webster online dictionary: Definition of LITERALLY in a literal sense or manner : actually. took the remark literally, was...
Wed 22 August 2012
The upcoming transit of Venus across the sun is often mentioned in the news these days. It’s a rare event—-the next one will occur over a century...
Sat 02 June 2012
I just learned that Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg has passed away. I met him once in April of 2006. He gave an overview talk on...
Thu 08 September 2011