Human Mental Games
Was watching Queen’s Gambit today (up to four episodes now), and realized how different the attitude to chess (and perhaps Go too) would’ve been back then. Today, in a post-Deep Blue, post-Alpha Go,…
Nostalgia corner: Urban Assault
Many games have come and gone, and I haven’t actually played anything for about five years now (!), and looking back, I can barely recall most of what I played. Some names that do stand out though (I…
Generally interesting links - Nov 2020
Computing * On making less software * On the microprocessor to the personal computer * On how there might be a lot of efficiencies up for grabs right now * On Gopher and Gemini (i.e. as alternati…
Monthly recap (Nov 2020)
Major updates * Tara turned six !! Minor updates * Lots of social trips * Ergonomic improvements (more on this soon) * Sleep schedule has not been great * Visited Barnes and Noble (after a ye…
The weirdness and awesomeness of long-form YouTube
I found myself listening to this recently: From the description: This is the ambient electromagnetic signal of our Sun and Neptune which have been combined with each other and then deepened and smoo…
Turtle graphics
Discovered the PythonTurtle library, reminded me of LOGO a long time ago (!) A sample session: $ bpython bpython version 0.18 on top of Python 3.7.6 /usr/local/opt/python/bin/python3.7 >>>…
Monthly Recap (Oct 2020)
Major updates * Gradual “actual physical school” transition for Tara * Halloween! Minor updates * Introducing card games to Tara: War, Go Fish! * Misc maintenance * replacing hood and r…
Generally interesting links - Oct 2020
Computing * A sobering reality: “the world runs on Excel, Java 8, and Sharepoint” * A trend toward the end of open source * Something cool: Pharo and the “Glamorous Toolkit” * Next, the “programm…
On Airtable and Numbers
I tried out Airtable for a year, for a simple personal spreadsheet that I’ve been keeping for a few years now. It’s slick, and quick to enter data, but in the end I’ve decided to go back to Numbers.…
My history with computers, part 4: The early internet
Context In my previous post I talked about how the realm of what was possible expanded when we got a better, faster computer … but it took a whole other leap with the first “on-line” experiences. Q…
Opening words
I decided to take pictures of the beginnings of three books at home. The first is from Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing. The second is from Maps of Meaning: The Architectu…
Youtube and Spotify
Youtube is always goiong to be superior to Spotify just because ... it has more stuff. The downside is that it's hard to know wtf is real any more, when searching for something. The upside is th…