Make your sentences poorer, get out of the three comma club
There’s a running gag in the show Silicon Valley about a character obsessed with being in the “three comma” club. Being a billionaire, in other words. When he loses enough money to drop from $1.2 billion to “merely” $900 million, he’s “financially ruined” and despondent. Judging by the way...
Link-o-Rama: Google testing new targeted ads, FreeBSD’s big oops, Henry Rollins’ record habits & Robyn Hitchcock’s essential records
Some interesting bits this time around. If you’re a Chrome user you need to read up on Google’s plans for replacing third-party cookies. FreeBSD users, check out what almost made it into 13.0. Music nerds, read on for some gems from Henry Rollins and Robyn Hitchcock. From the EFF...
Digital crate digging: Searching Spotify by label, genre, year and more
Spotify is a great tool for music discovery, but some of the exploration tools aren’t obvious. If you want to search for something by song title or artist, that sort of thing, no problem. But there are other ways I like to explore new music, like by music label...
Link-o-Rama: Hunspell dict format, curl is 23, response to flatkill.org
A few of the posts I found interesting this week. 17 (ever so slightly) weird facts about the most popular dictionary format: “the dictionary format of Hunspell has a lot of peculiarities. Depending on your mindset, you might find the facts below curious, fascinating, ridiculous, or just plain boring....
Amyl and the Sniffers, Fraidycat web follower, Mogwai
Let’s shake some of my browser tabs and see what falls out. Fraidycat web follower / feed reader RSS has been on the decline since Google snuffed Google Reader. Many sites, these days, don’t even support RSS. It’s a problem. One solution that might fit the bill for many...
Using the Display Posts plugin with WordPress and custom CSS
In case this helps anybody else, wanted to share how I created the Top 100 Albums page here on Dissociated Press. I wanted to be able to automagically create a page from all posts tagged with the “100 albums” tag, rather than manually laying things out. The final result...
Using the Wayback Machine Downloader to rebuild Dissociated Press
This domain has been online since January 2001. A homepage or, more often, some type of blog has been here almost as long. I’ve been, often, lackadaisical about continuity of content and posting. The kind folks at the Internet Archive, or rather their web scraping bots, have been far...
Thoughts on Doom: Eternal
Doom: Eternal is a pretty good name for a franchise that keeps getting ported, updated, and rebooted more than 25 years after it first launched. Though I don’t do much gaming these days, the siren song of Doom was just too much for me and I caved and bought...
“Animals” by Pink Floyd (No. 38)
Pink Floyd responded in part to the punk rock movement’s fast, short, and aggressive tunes by… putting out an LP with five complex and relatively languid songs, three of which are longer than 10 minutes. And it is awesome. 1977’s Animals is an album that’s best experienced as an...
More open source is good open source
A few days ago, Microsoft announced that it has released PowerShell under the MIT license for Linux (and Mac OS X). Perhaps surprisingly, this has brought a number of folks out of the woodwork to gripe about Microsoft… releasing something as open source. Microsoft isn’t perfect, not by a...