Author Archives: luke

Denial

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You and [his son, who’s a doctor] are very big into truth, truth, truth, yes, yes, yes. But denial – respect denial. It’s very important in the human architecture. It’s what we do when we can’t face what the world throws at us. It’s what helps us get up in the morning, until enough mornings pass that we begin to walk upright in the world.
  —Ron Suskind, quoting his friend Max Pluskey

From a talk at Calvin College talking about the story behind his book, Life, Animated.

(Cross-posted from my other blog.)

ttf-mscorefonts

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I had to reinstall Linux on my laptop and ran into some trouble with the ttf-mscorefonts package. (It runs some text-mode click-wrap license agreement, except in my case, there was a problem where it didn’t run properly. I probably hit the wrong button at some point.) Anyway, this is not a new problem:

I picked the latter one because it didn’t involve dpkg.

 

I wouldn’t take it gift-wrapped

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Office 2016 for Mac now available as stand-alone software. I’ve been exposed to Office 2013/Windows, and to get anything done, I have to use Office 2011 on my Mac.

I wouldn’t even install Office 2016 on my Mac for $100 even if it left the old version intact. More likely, though, it clobbers the previous version. In that case, I’d only do it for the cost of a new computer—so I could throw out the old computer with Office 2016 on it.

System Admin Notes

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Windows 10 is, in some ways, worse(!) than 8.1 was. (Really!)

Since I don’t have time to keep sinking into Windows, here’s what I’ve been doing:

Once you’ve done all that, remember to install an ssh server:

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

Also, install rbenv (and ruby-build) and a ruby or two. Plus your favorite gems.

Tech Links

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OOPS. I periodically publish a tab sweep. Sometimes (like now) I draft and forget to publish it. This post should have been published in mid-June.

MuPDF is a better PDF reader because it opens large PDFs faster than evince.

Geeqie is an image viewer that offers side-by-side comparisons of images.

Apple announces Swift 2 with new language features, open source. I looked it over, and I think I still like Ruby better. But it’s clearly an improvement over [[Objective] C].

A gallery of everything new in iOS 9. The Podcast app might not be quite as aggravating as before. And they’ve realized that iOS 8’s version of a shift key was a disaster.

Cute: the old After Dark screen saver implemented in CSS.

Datamation: The best features of Libre Office Writer. After using Word 2013 with it’s worst-idea-ever “Ribbon” I’m thinking of switching.

Tech Tab Sweep

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Krita appears to be Gimp spelled sideways, but cross-platform, or more accurately, Gimp:Photoshop::Krita:Painter.

OpenSSH best practices. Mac OS X 10.10 “Yosemite” takes SSH security so seriously that after you upgrade, you can’t log in remotely. Even if you tell it you want to.

Use Ruby to make your graphs look hand-drawn, like the ones in XKCD.

Via RubyFlow: A set of step-by-step TDD tutorials, a library for importing real-world CSV data.

Gruff: a library for creating beautiful charts in Ruby.

Honeybadger.io: Use capture3 instead of backticks: capturing I/O from shell commands. I should be using pry instead of irb, and when I switch, here’s how to work with exceptions in pry.

Microsoft promises that you can clean install Windows 10 after upgrading. Hanselman confirms, but look at the questions in people’s comments. Someone at Microsoft should be asking, why don’t they trust us, and what do we have to do so they start?

Google’s new build tool: Bazel. What are the odds I’d switch when I’m still learning Rake?

Tab Sweep – June 19

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The most diverse place in America:

Remember Sarah Palin’s much-parodied 2008 interview with Katie Couric? One segment ended with this line: “Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.”

Five Thirty-Eight: Which Flight Will Get You There Fastest?

Compared with the OECD, America is a Violent Country. Is it getting worse?

Indie publishing tips: Get a Spine and Get a Blurb (for your book’s cover), and The Economics of Indie Publishing.

John C. Wright explains why he doesn’t worry about an author’s politics.

There are other authors (Milton among them) who were visited nightly by the muse and dictated to him. … But her voice is there, or the story is merely words without spirit. … I do not care that Leigh Brackett was a lady or Lord Dunsany a lord. I also care very little what the author thinks in his private life when he is speaking for himself. This is why I prefer the juveniles of Robert Heinlein over his seniles. His later books were too much Bob and not enough Bob’s muse.

Lifehack: John Brandon’s 7-minute routine to change your work life and a follow-up article about implementing it. (I hate the auto-scrolling at that site, by the way.)

Acton Institute: Why the Price System is One of God’s Artworks. (Which reminds me: I need to read Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.)

Dieting doesn’t shrink your stomach, quite:

The latest science suggests that chronic food restriction can actually affect how much you need to eat to feel full—with caveats. … Numerous imaging studies have shown that the stomachs of obese people are really not that different from those of the rest of the population, indicating that there is little relationship between body size and baseline stomach size….

Thoughts about effective logo design.

Kurt Schlichter says it’s not cool when a high school graduating class has 72 valedictorians.

Shut down the TSA. Really.

This deserves more than a mention in a tab sweep: The Founders’ Model of Welfare Actually Reduced Poverty. I don’t know how well things worked before the modern social welfare system (since Roosevelt’s New Deal, say) but today it’s hard to spend almost any effort trying to alleviate poverty without giving in to despair.