Category: Tech

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: 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...