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What is not portable
I had a small dispute this week about whether the Osborne 1 computer from 1981 could be considered a “laptop”. It certainly can't:Bilby, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia CommonsThe Osborne was advertised as a...
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Excessive precision in crib slat spacing?
A couple of years back I wrote:You sometimes read news articles that say that some object is 98.42 feet tall, and it is clear what happened was that the object was originally reported to be 30 meters...
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Quicker and easier ways to get more light
Hacker News today is discussingthis article by Lincoln Quirk about ways to get more light in your home office.Why?You might do this because you have trouble seeing.Or because you find you are more...
View ArticleOlaf's new menu item
When I used to work for ZipRecruiter I would fly cross-country a few times a year to visit the offices. A couple of those times I spent the week hanging around with a business team to learn what what...
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Disabling the awful Macbook screen lock key
(The actual answer is at the very bottom of the article, if you want to skip my complaining.)My new job wants me to do my work on a Macbook Pro, which in most ways is only a little more terrible than...
View ArticleChatGPT on the subject of four-digit numbers
Like everyone else I have been tinkering with ChatGPT. I doubt I have any thoughts about it that are sufficiently original to be worth writing down. But I thought it would be fun to showcase some of...
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ChatGPT on the fifth tarot suit
[ Content warning: frustrating, repetitive ]My first encounter with ChatGPT did not go well and has probably colored my view of its usefulness more than it should have.I had tried some version of GPT...
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ChatGPT on the namesake of the metric space and women named James
Several folks, reading the frustrating and repetitive argument with ChatGPT that I reported last time wrote in with helpful advice and techniques that I hadn't tried that might have worked better. In...
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Egyptian crocodile hieroglyphs in Unicode
A while back Rik Signes brought my attention to the Unicode codepoint with the long and peculiar name TELUGU FRACTION DIGIT THREE FOR EVEN POWERS OF FOUR (U+0c7e) and this inspired me to write an...
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Tiny life hack: paint your mouse dongles
I got a small but easy win last month. I have many wireless mice, and many of them are nearly impossible to tell apart.Formerly, I would take my laptop somewhere, leaving the mouse behind, but...
View ArticleMystery of the missing skin tone
Slack, SMS, and other similar applications that display emoji have a skin-tone modifier that adjusts the emoji appearance to one of five skin tones. For example, there is a generic thumbs-up emoji 👍....
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My favorite luxurious office equipment is low-tech
This is about the stuff I have in my office that I could live without but wouldn't want to. Not stuff like “a good chair” because a good chair is not optional. And not stuff like “paper”. This is the...
View ArticleWerewolf ammunition
This week I read on Tumblr somewhere this intriguing observation: how come whenever someone gets a silver bullet to kill a werewolf or whatever the shell is silver too. Do they know that part gets...
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