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Tonight we’re gonna log on like it's 1979
Teletypes may have killed a lot of forests by emitting every line to hard copy instead of a screen, but there's something to be said for t...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,944 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
7622
Perfectionism is optimizing at the wrong scale
At the risk of stating the obvious even more obviously than I usually do: sometimes the perfect approach involves tolerating imperfection. Imperfection?! Yes. Specifically, the more macroscopic one’s view becomes, the more microscopic imperfections may need to be tolerated — if they don’t matter to the goal, or the
7623
Getting Started with Lockpicking
The basics: where to learn, what lock picks and practice locks to buy, where to get them, and resources, including how to find local regulations.
7624
Of Money, Responsibility, and Pride
Fate has made me the “money guy” for OpenSSL so I’m going to talk about that for a bit.
7625
Leaving Google
After seven years at Google, I'm leaving. Cue the inevitable 'what's wrong with you?' Before I get to the gripes, though, there are a few popular narratives I want to push back on: that Google has gone evil, that the good engineers are all defecting to Facebook, that 20% time was always a myth. Part one of three. The…
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Even when you do succeed, sometimes it pays to try again
If at first you don’t succeed, goes the old saying, try, try again. Good advice, up to a point. But let me offer a modification: even when you do succeed, try, try again. Tempting as it is to decla…
7628
I Don't Do That Job Anymore
Something has changed, permanently, in me. I’ve been trying to figure out how to express it, because the transformation has been so interesting, unexpected...
7629
Terms and Conditions, the Graphic Novel
When artist Robert Sikoryak put the iTunes Terms and Conditions into graphic novel format, he tapped a familiar problem. Most of us don’t read the terms
7630
Coding with gumption
The first and only mention of Gumption Theory in modern writing is found towards the end of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The author sets out a plain and uncomplicated approach to attaining and maintaining the state of mind required to repair a motorcycle. It takes about 20 pages. And the…
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Your body of work thinks back at you
I’ve been taking photos of benches for years. Sometimes on purpose because I find them intriguing and I have an thing for objects designed for people but without anybody using them, sometimes just because they were there next to my subject. Last year, looking at these photographs, I noticed something I didn’t know…
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The longest train journey in the world in 2021
IMPORTANT : this blog post is correct as of 15 December 2021, and all the text below is unchanged since then. At that time two borders - Russia to China, and China to Laos - could not be crossed due to COVID. The outbreak of war in Ukraine has also meant that trains
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The Joy of Dumping
These are 80's-era erasable programmable read-only memories, or EPROMs. They were an immensely popular way to store firmware for embedded systems when the
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The end of Pepper&Carrot and my next project
Hey, I feel like I'm at a big crossroads and this is an important blog post, but you probably already guessed that from the title.
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New Car: An Accessible Minivan
We have a new vehicle, a Honda Odyssey Elite customised for my wheelchair, and for me to drive with hand controls.
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Two types of C programmers
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
7643
Running Linux on My MacBook
thoughts
7644
What Should You Work On?
David shares how to make the best choices of what to work on in your life. Read here.
7645
The Schizoid Difference
something not often talked about is the barrier that seemingly exists between the self and other people. that almost impermeable barrier, where you try to co...
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Gmail really wants me to say yes
Works for me. I’m down. Absolutely.
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The power of ignoring mainstream news
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." - Thomas Jefferson