Just recently, we had "Daylight Savings Time" something-something in California. I heard at least one person complain about software problems with this. The quantification of time remains a complex issue that you probably shouldn't ever try to write software for yourself unless you are a specialist with a deep understanding …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 107
Libraries of earlier times were primarily collections of (paper) books. Nowadays, many things which may have been previously stored on paper are found in databases on servers. A "digital transformation" is largely complete.
There are lots of different sorts of books
When modern people think of books, people often think …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 106
Corona Virus Diary, Part 105
I've been doing some learning on digital media—graphics, video editing and so on. There's tons of money going into this stuff because we're all being made to interface with the world through what academics call Computer Mediated Communication.
There's some more spooky angles to this—people in developed countries …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 104
I looked over this piece, "The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology" which I found on Hacker News (via skimfeed, a news aggregator). Indeed there are generic "personal computers" suitable for demands of school/work/etc. The Chromebook is a microcosm of the browser-based "subscription machine"—by choosing …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 103
You may have heard that it is often better to start slow and learn correctly first rather than jumping to (overly) advanced learning. How is it that we find out what it is to learn correctly? In modern times, sometimes this is tricky.
With respect to technology stuff, there are …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 102
Just a little rant on tooling today. I've been returning to some UNIX learning stuff, which has me again studying the problem of "personal computing" generally. As modern people, what relationship do we have with computers?
The tools we have affect how we approach problems. Windows is very corporate (as …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 101
Today I decided to try to make some old computers I have talk to each other.
The first thing I did was spin up a local web server. This gave me a website viewable over my local network.
Python web server
Using an old laptop running Linux (Manjaro), I ran …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 100
Is it time to throw a hundreth post party?! Nah; let's instead talk about how counting and numerical measures in general are used as (artificial) markers.
What is the significance of a 100th post? That a blog has been going on for a while? Why not celebrate a 98th post …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 99
A common thing you'll hear from people who've "made it" is that they didn't teach XYZ in school. For instance, who went to public school to learn personal finance?
Indeed, there are a great many things you don't learn in school because "good schools" typically prepare you to be a …
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