Knee injury
Was helping transport KB and T from one place to another, so I carried three-year-old T down some steps. Safely...
Archive for Software
Probability and Dice Wars
There's this Flash game that I play called Dice Wars. It's sort of like a stylized and abstracted version of...
See cats instead of ads, and support sites you like
Google Contributor is an experimental system that allows you to directly financially support websites you visit. If you sign up...
Thanks to Matt at Things tech support
I've been using the task-list-management app Things since 2009. It's far from perfect, but it's the only to-do-list software that...
Attacking the compiler: Xcode and “Trusting Trust”
The Intercept recently published a long but interesting article about (among other things) CIA-connected researchers' attempts to subvert Xcode, the...
How to install Unix-like software
How to install Unix-like software: A text adventure transcript. Based on a true story. Or rather, several remarkably similar true...
Ingress: Augmented reality game
I've been playing Google's augmented-reality game Ingress intermittently for a few months now. Yesterday, I reached level 7 and (coincidentally)...
Ruby on Rails: Not as easy as it sounds
I've been making small database-backed web apps for years now, after learning how by reading the PHP code generated by...
Neat sliding-number-puzzle games
There's a nifty iOS game called Threes, in which you slide numbered tiles around on a board and combine them...
When the Internet of Things fails
For the past three or four weeks, I've had a blizzard of technological failures. There was a period when my...
Coraline and the perils of DRM: A case study
In 2003, on the evening when Hugo votes were due, I bought a copy-protected PDF ebook of Coraline from the...
Debugging principle of the day
Say your code is suddenly wonky, but the only change you've made recently didn't have anything to do with the...