In today's blog post, I'm just going to ramble loosely around the theme of "abstractions and reality". Gotta keep up momentum writing stuff, even if some pieces are much better than others...
Today SpaceX didn't get to launch a manned spacecraft into orbit because the …
read moreIn the season of COVID-19, many people are struggling with "keeping occupied" or fighting boredom.
Taking a look back at bygone eras in faraway lands, we can study activities that people spent a lot of time on for some guidance on how to handle these difficult times.
In short, I …
read moreToday I spent some time shuffling around items to prepare for the summer heat. Arrangements of stuff that may be comfortable in cooler times may be unpleasant in hotter times. Adjusting stuff with changing seasons venerable behavior with a history older than air conditioning.
Life on earth often …
read moreUsing old hardware, having swap space in addition to RAM can make your computer operate more smoothly.
After a fresh Lubuntu on an old machine (with only 2 GB of RAM), I followed the directions on "Create a Linux swap file" (Rackspace 2018) to create …
read moreThis is a "long weekend" for many Americans as Memorial Day, which is observed on the last Monday of the month of May. There will be fewer picnics and barbecues this year as policies in response to COVID-19 are still in place. Law abiding citizens have still not recieved "the …
read moreIt is trashcan pickup day where I am, which means walking around outside in circles is less pleasant. Sometimes I have to step off the sidewalk or otherwise navigate around an obstructing trashcan. Sometimes I have to move to dodge some stink. On top of that, there are leaf blowers …
read moreIn this post, we will introduce xargs, which allows you to pass in
arguments to a command via standard input.
For example, to do
echo "$HOME" | xargs ls -la
is like doing
ls "$HOME" -la
We can think of xargs as a kind of "keyword" or "syntactic feature"
of shell …
The morning air is refreshing—getting up and moving (location) makes stuff feel better. Staying in the same room, even if doing exercises like pushups and stuff, is not the same as using one's feet to move about. The explainers of the world may speak of Vitamin D or Serotonin …
read moreIn this post I will discuss a relatively straightforward command:
cat. The cat command is used to concatenate files. So if I had
three files, I could do something like
cat file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt
...and this would display the concatenated content of all these files to standard …
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