Tech

Aug 28, 2023 — I’ve owned the book The Future Does Not Compute by Stephen Talbott for almost 30 years, but for a million reasons it was only recently that I focused on reading it. What I found was what I always knew I’d find: thoughtful and clear reflections on some problems with computing. I want to relate some of his main arguments, and give you an idea of what an eloquent writer he is.

Nov 30, 2009 — I use my iPhone quite heavily as an ebook reader. I read in various situations, but one of the most frequent is when I’m in bed. When you’re lying down, either on your back or on your side, it can be quite a strain on your hand muscles to grip the phone and also use your thumb to scroll the pages. So a while back, I came up with a super-cheap way to improve the situation by adding a strap that holds the phone to your hand (actually, it holds it to just your index finger). Whenever I show this trick to other folks, including seasoned, cynical tech folks, they seem impressed. So I thought I would post it for search engines to find. All you need are

Aug 17, 2008 — I have a long history with Infocom games (“text adventures” was what I called them as a kid, and “interactive fiction” is the new name). People still write these games, did you know that? There’s a big archive and an annual competition. I haven’t played any of the non-Infocom variety, though I think I ought to try one. I have copies of all the data files for all the original Infocom games from the 80s, and for years there has been an open-source program to load these files and let you play the games. It’s called Frotz. I’ve had a version of Frotz on all my computers for the last 12 years, including my various Palm PDAs. The only Infocom game I’ve ever finished in my life (making it one of like 5 games of any variety that I have ever finished) was “Enchanter”, which I played on the Palm. The latest incarnation of Frotz is for the iPhone, and so of course I downloaded it right away.

Jun 20, 2008 — Microsoft Excel was released in 1985 for the Mac and in 1987 for Windows. Today I was using the 2007 version. After 20 years of work by countless engineers, it cannot open two files with the same name, and the dialog is quite shameless about it. That’s a good word: “shameless.” Details are everything. Click to see the full size.

May 18, 2008 — As you know, I want to stream movies and music from my PC to my TV. I have an all-star lineup of tools: * PC running Vista with Windows Media Player 11 (WMP11), iTunes, and Zune software * Xbox 360 * PlayStation 3 * TiVo * Airport Express And a selection of Xvid, Divx, MPEG 4, MP3, and AAC files to stream. These are all extremely widely used formats, the most popular in their categories (the first three are video, the last two are audio). All the players I mentioned play these formats, at least after installing some popular codec packs.

Mar 16, 2008 — Robert X. Cringely, my favorite tech pundit, had an interesting aside in this week’s column (which is otherwise about Apple and Blu-Ray). He ran across a use of the term ‘bug’ to mean a glitch in a technical system in a magazine article from the 1930s. I found this fascinating, since we always assume “we” invented the term when computers came along. He closes with this:

Nov 14, 2007 — The Zune software turned out not to be so great at working with iTunes playlists. It’s not a dynamic synchronization, just a one-time thing. So after asking the Zune to read my iTunes playlists, it did so, but after I changed my playlists in iTunes, the Zune did not see the change. Also, the Zune does not attempt to pull in the smart playlists, just the static ones. Even just treating the smart playlists as regular ones and pulling in their current contents would have been great, but no.

Oct 8, 2007 — Microsoft includes a Windows-based desktop media player with their Zune portable media players, to manage your music and sync it with the Zune. It’s a lot like Windows Media Player, which I despise, but actually if you own an Xbox 360 there are two reasons to install the Zune software even if you don’t own a Zune:

Sep 27, 2007 — Recently I bought all the bits and pieces to build a new PC for home. My old one is a few years old now, and isn’t up for all the video transcoding I throw at it these days (mainly converting Xvid and Divx TV shows into MP4 for use on Xbox). I’m not a real hardware guru, but every few years I read enough to know what the state of the art is and roll up my sleeves for a few weeks. This time I had one small snafu which was that nothing powered on after I put it together. It turned out that the problem was the CPU was not completely seated. I had to twist it off of its heatsink, straighten a bent pin, and re-seat it. Wow, it worked!

Sep 27, 2007 — Ars Technica is a wonderful tech news site that’s fast becoming more and more like a real news source, with journalists and investigation and everything! Anyway, recently they reviewed Amazon’s new MP3 store. It sounded very positive because they sell straight MP3 files with no rights management, and so the files will play on my iPod.

Feb 4, 2007 — Within the last year, I’ve purchased both an Xbox 360 and an HDTV (a 37" Sharp Aquos LCD). I have a TiVo, a home network, a Powerbook, and a fast PC with lots of storage. Surely somewhere in all of that is a viable, clean, easy to use method of expanding what I can enjoy on my home entertainment center to include my iTunes music, any downloaded video files, saved TiVo videos, and personal photos.

Jun 28, 2006 — I came across this site while looking for card tables. It made me laugh out loud.

Apr 25, 2005 — For the last couple of months, I’ve been working on a new side project that my wife, brother and sister and I came up with, called ShelfCentered.com. I haven’t posted about ShelfCentered.com as of yet, because honestly I suspect it might be a good enough idea to really become something good, and I want to protect us from competitors! For example, there are a couple of shareware programs out there already that do what we’re planning, and they’ve created some limited buzz, but so far no one has thought to put the idea online in a nice web site. I won’t go into detail just yet, but it’s hard to maintain a blog without mentioning the thing that’s my primary occupation outside work!

Apr 16, 2005 — My friend and former coworker, Robert Miner, has written an article about MathML in the latest issue of Notices of the American Mathematics Society, which you can read online [pdf]. MathML is a standard XML representation of math notation and semantics, and has been adopted steadily ever since Robert co-created it in 1998. When I worked at Design Science with Robert, MathML was becoming a major focus for the company.

Mar 28, 2004 — I’m blogging this from my new Clié TH-55. It has wireless networking and a full web browser, plus email. I’m still looking fo a free instant messaging client.

Mar 14, 2004 — I’m blogging this from a Starbucks in Hollywood, near the big shopping center called Hollywood & Highland. Alison is out with a friend nearby, so I decided to try out the Starbucks hotspot system. Works pretty well, but only for 24 hours – next time I visit a Starbucks I’ll have to pay $6 for an hour, then 10 cents a minute afterwards.

Oct 12, 2003 — I’ve made two changes to my video game family. First, I bought a GameCube and a couple games (Zelda, Viewtiful Joe). Also, a friend with a vinyl cutter made a wood-grain applique for my Xbox. Click to see the new family!

Apr 9, 2003 — Bob Frankston, co-creator of the original spreadsheet VisiCalc, has recently written down a postmortem, 25 years later!

Apr 8, 2003 — Not that you care, but I’m going to merge in all my work content into a category, and see how it coexists with my main category.

Apr 1, 2003 — Boy, Bounceweb threw us for a loop. Our site went down so hard that when it came back up, various files and directories were gone! They had to restore from backups, and even so there was a lot of work to do.

Aug 14, 2002 — So langmead.info seems relatively stable at the moment. As of now I have tried three hosting companies. This latest one strikes a good balance between price and features. They are having trouble installing PHPlib, which is needed for IMP, which is a web-based email client Alison wants. I might consider moving if they never get around to that (or upgrading to PHP 4.1, which would be just as good).

Mar 14, 2002 — Good evening. Go-Gan is progressing, albeit slowly. It’s encouraging, though, to know that even though my job is largely programming, I still want to do it in the evenings.

Mar 6, 2002 — So the Paint-by-Numbers project, named Go-Gan, is proceeding. Absolutely no interface has been coded yet, just the representation of the underlying puzzle. Tonight I’ll write the logic that creates the list of clues from a row or column of painted cells.

Mar 4, 2002 — I’m going to get started today on a new piece of software. It will be a multipurpose “Paint by Numbers” application. Paint by Numbers is a puzzle game (I am not yet sure whether this name is a trademark or not) where you are presented with a blank rectangular grid of squares, usually about 20x20 or larger (the bigger it is, the harder it is). The goal is to reproduce the picture by deducing which squares should be colored. The clues are lists of numbers, one list for each row and one list for each column. Each number in the list is the tally for a consecutive run of colored squares. Visit this Japanese site for some examples to try.

Feb 28, 2002 — I’m starting to understand the news aggregator concept. It is the flipside of the blog. It addresses my earliest question about blogs: won’t everything I write just disappear into the void?