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Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout for Swype
An overview of my work on optimizing phone keyboard layouts for Swype and T9. There's some interesting history here as well as a novel simulation-based approach to keyboard optimization.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,417 posts.
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One line you should add to every makefile
If you're using GNU make and you need help debugging a makefile then there's a single line your should add. And it's so useful that you sho...
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“The GNU Make Book”: probably more than you ever wanted to know about make
So, it's finally here. My second book, entitled The GNU Make Book and published by No Starch Press later this month (electronically it's a...
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Make: Theory and Practice
make is a widely used and valuable development tool. It's a "build" tool: it builds programs and documentation according to a "recipe". It could really be used for anything where someone edits some files, and then runs a series of processing steps to generate some other form from the edited files. For the most part…
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Practical Makefiles, by example
The purpose of this document is to explain how to write practical makefiles for your everyday hacks and projects. I want to illustrate, how easy it is to use make for building your programs, and doing so, dispel the notion that resorting to big clunky graphical IDEs, or makefile generators such as autotools or cmake…
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I Will File Bugs for You (2014)
This post prompted by Aaron Klotz’s Diffusion of Responsibility and Sumana Harihareswara’s Inessential Weirdnesses in Open Source .
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GNU make insanity: finding the value of the -j parameter
The other day at work a colleague posed the seemingly innocent question "Can I find out the value of the GNU make -j parameter inside a Ma...
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Atreus – kit to build your own mechanical keyboard
My last post documented my initial exposure to the wild world of custom keyboards and the numerous ways it's possible to improve on the conventional design. As I dug deeper into the topic, I was struck with the simplicity of the underlying concepts. While the Ergodox is a notable and admirable achievement of…
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High quality GIF with FFmpeg
About two years ago, I tried to improve the support of the GIF encoding in FFmpeg to make it at least decent. This notably led to the addition of the transparency mechanism in the GIF encoder. While this is not always optimal depending on your source, it is in the most common cases. Still, this was merely an attempt…
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Notes on 416 Days of Treadmill Desk Usage
The personal website of author Neal Stephenson, unless it's been hacked.
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Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy
Possibly the one you're Googling about.
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Abandon your DVCS and return to sanity
I’ve pretty much always been a DVCS apologist. I know quite a few people who’ve been using DVCSes since Mercurial and Git, and a few who go back to BitKeeper , but I can totally out-hipster you. I was there for Monotone . I actually remember struggling to grok tla , and being happy that someone took the time to write…
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IBash Notebook
Did you know that there's a Bash kernel for IPython Notebook? It even displays inline images. Could it ever be a convenient environment for doing data science? Would it be worthwhile to publish my book Data Science at the Command Line as a collection of notebooks?
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If you are storing important info in Evernote, think twice
I assumed this was probably due to some shutdown corruption (though I rarely hit those in OS X). It just wouldn’t come back up and showed me some font error
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Mastering Git submodules
Hair-pulling. Helpless rage. Clusterfucks. They leave much to be desired, yet sometimes are the right tool for the job. Let’s tame them!
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Why I Don't Hate Git: Hidden Consistency
Some thoughts on why git’s complex user interface works so well in practice.
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On MicroSD card problems (2010)
The microSD ware for January 2010 was not an incidental post. It is actually snapshot of a much longer forensic investigation to find the ground truth behind some irregular Kingston memory cards.
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How to Write a New Git Protocol
I used to have trouble keeping track of my files. I often couldn’t remember whether I saved a file on my desktop, laptop, or phone, or if it was floating around in the cloud somewhere. Plus, with certain information, like passwords and bitcoin keys, I didn’t feel comfortable just sending that in an email to myself in…
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An Algorithm to Extract Looping GIFs from Videos
Yet another big problem of the Internet era tackled by Mathematics. Looping GIFs are a very popular form of art on the Web, with two dedicated forums …
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Paper sizes
Update Apr 22, 2016: I’ve made a video which explains most of what is in this blogpost:Two standardsYes, this blogpost is about paper. This has absolutely no...
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3D Printer Shootout – $600 Printrbot vs. $20,000 UPrint SE Plus
First, let's level set with a disclaimer. I am a smart enough person but a ...
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Super easy project planning and estimation
Add tasks to your project and break them down into subtasks. The tree layout highlights the structure of your project.
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A dead man's switch for your computer?
In the last few weeks, a lot of details have been disclosed around Ross Ulbricht’s arrest. For those not familiar with the matter, Ulbricht was arrested at …
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