âš‘ â’¶ Free Software developer, Black Lives Matter, abolish all prisons, 0xACAB âš‘
I wrote an essay in 2009 about the Internet of Things, before people were calling it “the Internet of Things.” When I re-read it this afternoon, in 2017, I noticed something rather queer. It wasn’t actually about the Internet of Things at all. It was actually a personal manifesto advocating Anarchism, and condemning techno-capitalist fascism. …
Continue reading “My 2009 essay kinda-sorta about an Anarchist “Internet of Things””
I recently announced that my blog archives will no longer be publicly available for long: Let me repeat that: while I am still “on Tumblr†and so on for now, my archives will not remain available for very long. If you find something of mine useful, you will need to make a copy of it …
A classic exchange from the WordPress Support Forum for one of my plugins: Them: Hi, When I first installed this plugin, there was an automatic horizontal scrollbar so that users could move to see all of the columns. However, it has now disappeared which means one of the columns is not fully readable. Can you …
Continue reading “The mystery of the disappearing horizontal scrollbar”
These days, mobile phones are basically computers. And not just any computer. If you have a smartphone, then it’s the same kind of computer as a regular ol’ laptop. Sure, the two look different, but once you get “under the hood” they look and feel remarkably similar.
My mission, which I chose to accept, was to see if I could turn my Android phone into a fully fledged web development console. Lo and behold, I could. And it’s not even that hard, but I did have to do some digging.
That’s because searching the ‘net for phrases like “web development on Android” mostly returns information on how to code and debug websites for mobile browsers, rather than how to use mobile phones as your environment for developing websites. Once I figured out which tools were suited for the task (and my personal tastes), though, everything else fell into place.
The Predator Alert Tool for Twitter is coming along nicely, but it’s frustratingly slow going. It’s extra frustrating for me because ever since telling corporate America and its project managers to go kill themselves, I’ve grown accustomed to an utterly absurd speed of project development. I know I’ve only been writing and rewriting code for just under two weeks (I think—I honestly don’t even know or care what day it is), but still.
I think it also feels extra slow is because I’m learning a lot of new stuff along the way. That in and of itself is great, but I’m notoriously impatient. Which I totally consider a virtue because fuck waiting. Still, all this relearning and slow going has given me the opportunity to refine a few techniques I used in previous Predator Alert Tool scripts.
Here’s one technique I think is especially nifty: template injection.
Here’s a topic I’ve been meaning to write about ever since I was deeply depressed last Fall and Winter. Back then, I was incredibly lonely, and despite my best efforts I simply found it damn near impossible to do anything to improve my situation. That’s because my “best efforts” consistently lead me to dead-end resources …
Continue reading “On Being a Social Cyborg: How iCalendar Helps Me Fight Loneliness”
If you’re anything like me, you always have a terminal window open. One of the reasons I do this, of course, is because it’s fast. If I want to know anything at all about my computer, all I need do is type the question. The answer, because it’s always text-based, comes back immediately. I don’t …
In some situations, like the odd one I now find myself in, the only way to get Internet connectivity is to use a solution that requires a fair bit of maneuvering. In my situation, I have temporarily obtained a Vodafone 3G mobile card. Unfortunately, the Vodafone Mobile Connect software for Mac OS X as of …
This video, which is one of the recent TED Talk videos, is of Steven Pinker’s talk called The Stuff of Thought. This is simply brilliant. So brilliant, in fact, that those who know me well are about to be utterly astounded by what I am going to say: I now understand the value of indirect …
From the everything-you-say-can-and-will-be-used-against-you department: Computer scientists will almost always be able to de-anonymize “anonymous” data, in this case thanks to movie ratings, Google offers users another way to store personal data, and all of this is old news I’ve been doing this for years, and my solution is pretty simple: no regrets. As an aside, …
Continue reading “We should re-instate that old USENET warning”