Oh, BBC, never change. Here’s a quote from an article on the latest recommendations from the IPCC: If you fly regularly, replacing flying with other forms of transport may have a bigger impact on your carbon footprint than changing your diet. A passenger’s carbon footprint from a one-way flight from London to New York isContinue reading “True But Misleading”
Category Archives: Practical Applications of Knowledge
Team of One
I have been writing programs of varying complexity since I was in the 6th grade, so, call it 39 years. For a portion of that time, call it 14 years, I worked on code that had other people contributing to it. During that, what, 36% percent of my programming life, I learned many lessons thatContinue reading “Team of One”
I Hate Your Bot
I dunno, something like a year ago, a guy I know started retweeting a client of his who was working on building a chatbot platform. Now, let’s be honest: in customer facing positions, a lot of interactions are going to be the same. People are way more similar than they are different, and so if oneContinue reading “I Hate Your Bot”
It’s Never Easy
So, the Internet of Things is a thing that’s mostly just a security nightmare, but there do exist some services that I find actually helpful. For instance, I put an Ambient Weather station on our roof and hooked it up to Weather Underground and that lets me get ad-free weather forecasts. Lots of people haveContinue reading “It’s Never Easy”
Here’s A Useful Testing Application
So, a few years back, I consulted at NASA doing some work on a really cool system for storing and retrieving documentation on systems in flight. Basically, it was a very customized Bugzilla that winds up saving the American taxpayer millions of dollars every year. There’s a post I wrote at the time about how toContinue reading “Here’s A Useful Testing Application”
VPN, part 2
Well, the configuration I’d put together before turned out not to work when I was at a hotel and trying it out. I got distracted and didn’t do anything about it for a while, but today I had some time and I started digging around. Guess what? Someone solved this problem ages ago and someoneContinue reading “VPN, part 2”
So, VPN
A couple weeks ago I read an article about a guy who set up a caching DNS server for his home network on a Raspberry Pi. The main thrust of the article was, “Hey, checkitout, Cloudflare has a public DNS at 1.1.1.1 and they pinky-swear promise not to write down what IP address originated theContinue reading “So, VPN”
Why Keybase Is Interesting
Unless you are a programmer, it mostly isn’t. Yet. However, if you are a programmer or if you want to send and receive secure messages, then it is kind of interesting. One interesting thing (for programmers) is that it gives you free encrypted git repos. That’s rad. Also, if you want to start sharing theContinue reading “Why Keybase Is Interesting”
Because of Course
Today I received the April newsletter from JetBrains, wherein they provide links to a bunch of Java news. Most of it is stuff that isn’t immediately interesting to me, but this time there was a swell one-two punch. One, Java 10 is out and Java 11 has been announced (what? 9 just came out, like,Continue reading “Because of Course”
TableColumn and ObservableValue
Today I learned a couple of things that they don’t tell you in the official documentation or on Stack Overflow. If you want to display some information in a table and that information updates and you want to display those updates, then you have to hook things up the hard way, and not the wayContinue reading “TableColumn and ObservableValue”