Category Archives: Digital Swag

Code for Christmas

Today our family gathered to celebrate Christmas on my wife’s side.  After the usual amazing food and gifts, we spent time making room for dessert, with some going for a walk on the newly snow-covered trails of the woods, and others sledding.  My eldest nephew and I stayed back so we could listen for my [...]
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On Tools and Tools()

My thinking often returns to tools.  Whether philosophically or practically, the idea of the tool fascinates me.  I first became aware of the question of tools through the writings of philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger, and Gadamer–tools, devices, equipment, the in-order-to, the ready-to-hand, the hammer vs. the hammering-hand.  One of the difficulties of tools is [...]
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Fixing subpixel rendering on OS X secondary monitors

Quite a while ago Apple did a 10.6 update which basically destroyed the rendering on my secondary monitor.  Beside my 27″ iMac I use a 24″ Dell U2410 turned vertically.  I like this orientation a lot for writing code or working through long pieces of text.  And because I use it almost exclusively for working [...]
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Compelled

Today, via Forbes, I read the following on the Nest thermostat: What Is It Like To Own A Nest Thermometer? … “It’s pretty satisfying. The more basic functionality is actually the most appealing. Twisting to change the temperature is more compelling and lighter weight than the standard thermostats, so I do that more often than [...]
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Learning to type

Learning to type, when I learned to type, meant learning to become a typist.  The premise on which typing was taught will, for some of you reading this, be foreign; there was a time when typing was a kind of suit that writers put on when it was time to go out into the world.  [...]
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What I’d do: software teams as indie bands

I’ve often thought that it would be interesting to see software teams do indie band style pictures along with their releases.  I’d like to see the people who write my software.  I know hundreds of people who release libraries and tools, apps, demos and games, drivers and converters and utilities–yet they never really show up. Long [...]
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The Canadian Apple TV Experience

For Christmas I bought my wife an Apple TV, which is the second generation of the device.  We’ve been using it for the past week, and I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on what it’s like. tl;dr It’s fantastic for movie rentals via iTunes, makes no sense for television. Living, as we do, in northern [...]
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Using LaTeX to publish a novel on Lulu

I’m going to blog about this because I can already feel myself forgetting key bits of the process.  You’re welcome to the information too, but please note, dear reader, that I’m sure there are more appropriate ways to accomplish some of what I did. My friend Luke wrote a novel for his children, which he’s self-publishing [...]
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On the Ethics of Virtual Endings

I’ve written previously about Webkinz, the toys and the game, and the experience of our children with both.  Recently, my youngest daughter came to my wife and me with a simple question: “How do I stop my Webkinz account?”  She doesn’t play the game, but remains very connected to her stuffed animals.  The thought that [...]
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An afternoon with pdf.js and CubicVR.js

This week my students have to submit their first deliverable for the Mozilla Open Source class at Seneca.  I try to practice what I preach, so today I sat down and tried something something similar in size to what they are doing. The other day I had had an idea that I couldn’t shake: wouldn’t it [...]
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