Posts

Recommended Reading 10

Social Class and Marital Conflict “In both of these examples and many others I witnessed during my time as a couples counselor, no one is doing anything profoundly wrong or suffering from any serious psychopathology. The marital conflict is just a “class thing”, with each person living out the taken for granted world he or she knows. Unhappy American couples impressed me deeply with their ability to talk about how their marital strife emerged from their racial, ethnic and religious differences, as well as differences in personal experiences… But it was a rare couple who recognized that social class differences were a force which shaped their relationship.” … (Read More)

How to connect to an SSH server from Windows using PuTTY

I had to write these instructions up for an intern at WebSanity who uses Windows. We need him to SSH (& SFTP) to our Linux server & we only allow access via keys. On a Mac OS X or Linux box, this is a pretty easy process, as I’ll detail soon. On a Windows machine, it’s far more complicated. … (Read More)

Recommended Reading 9

From Iffy to Mulligan: Words American Presidents Made Famous “… there are hundreds of words that were made famous by U.S. Presidents — including terms we use all the time (and are not embarrassed to say in front of college graduates). So many, in fact, that a dedicated language guru has made a book out of them.” … (Read More)

Trying to use Screen Sharing & getting a gray & white checkerboard instead of videos? Here’s why.

I use a Mac mini as a media computer plugged in to my TV. I use it to listen to music & watch TV shows & movies stored on my Synology NAS. When I want to control the mini, I use Screen Sharing to connect from my MacBook Pro. I finally upgraded the mini from Lion to Mountain Lion, & everything went swimmingly. I thought. … (Read More)

Mini-Review: Grokr

Mini-reviews are quick reviews, sometimes just a few words, of apps for Mac OS X & iOS. … (Read More)

Mini-Review: Mailbox

Mini-reviews are quick reviews, sometimes just a few words, of apps for Mac OS X & iOS. … (Read More)

The best 2-bay NAS & hard drives to buy

I’ve written quite a few posts on this site about my Synology DiskStation DS411j, a 4-bay NAS. I’ve had a few friends ask me about a smaller option. What should they get if they just want a 2-bay NAS, ideally for setting up RAID mirroring for easy backup? … (Read More)

Speaking as a teacher, why we shouldn’t ask teachers to arm themselves to protect students

Yes, this is political, but I feel strongly about this issue, & I have a lot of experience & knowledge about schools & teachers. Please don’t assume that I’m “anti-gun”. I’m not. I’m just anti-bad idea. … (Read More)

Dr. Drang provides the best definition of Keyboard Maestro I’ve seen

Keyboard Maestro is one of my favorite pieces of software for my Mac. But how to describe it? The home page for the software doesn’t really describe it well, & I myself haven’t always done a good job explaining what it can do, beyond “OMIGOD it’s so cool & can do everything!” … (Read More)

Creating self-signed website certificates while acting as your own certificate authority

Those of us who host websites know why we create self-signed certs: we don’t want to pay for them. The only problem: the warnings that you have to respond to when you go to sites that use those certs. … (Read More)

Recommended Reading 8

For God’s Sake, Go Get A Flu Shot “Even if you think you are invincible, your elderly neighbors and infant children are not. People with weakened immune systems—those undergoing cancer treatments, for example—are not. Your parents and grandparents are not.” … (Read More)

Recommended Reading 7

Design Tip: Never Use Black “One of the most important color tricks I’ve ever learned was to avoid using the color black in my work. Mrs. Zamula, my childhood art teacher, first warned me about black when I was in middle school. And I heard the same again multiple times at RISD. It sounds weird at first, but it’s good advice.” … (Read More)

Recommended Reading 6

Rare Photo of the Mushroom Cloud Over Hiroshima Discovered in a Former Japanese Elementary School “In the center of Hiroshima, in a part of the city totally destroyed by the explosion and ensuing fires, a long-lost photograph taken shortly after the blast has been discovered among a collection of articles about the bombing.” … (Read More)

Recommended Reading 4

George R. Price “Price developed a new interpretation of Fisher’s fundamental theorem of natural selection, the Price equation, which has now been accepted as the best interpretation of a formerly enigmatic result. … Price’s ‘mathematical’ theory of altruism reasons that organisms are more likely to show altruism toward each other as they become more genetically similar to each other. … Unable to accept the selfish reasoning for kindness found in his own mathematical theory of altruism Price began showing an ever increasing amount of random kindness to complete strangers. ¬ Price committed suicide on January 6, 1975, using a pair of nail scissors to cut his own carotid artery.” … (Read More)

Recommended Reading 3

Dish Network, the Meanest Company in America “Much of the malice, and value generation, can be traced to one man: Charlie Ergen, 59, the founder and chairman of Dish. Although he turned over the role of chief executive officer to former Sirius XM Radio (SIRI) head Joseph Clayton in 2011, Ergen remains the core of Dish.” [Not a customer, & never an employee] … (Read More)

Recommended Reading 2

When a Robot Signs a Bill: A Brief History of the Autopen “The White House treats the presidential autopen’s security with the secrecy you might expect for the most powerful signature in the world. “I always heard the autopen was the second-most guarded thing in the White House after the president,” Jack Shock, Bill Clinton’s director of presidential letters and messages told the Associated Press in 2011.” … (Read More)

Recommended Reading

I’m starting something new this year on this blog. I read a lot of stuff that never gets mentioned here, so I’m going to start listing pointers to interesting articles that I come across. Some will be about tech, but many will not. I hope you enjoy them & find them useful. … (Read More)

How to batch change the Title metadata in a bunch of PDFs with a shell script

Recently I downloaded a large number of PDFs of an old magazine that I wanted to read. I’m particular about my file names, so I used A Better Finder Rename to fix them so they all looked like this: … (Read More)

Search AllMusic using Alfred & other launcher-type apps

AllMusic is a great website when it comes to content, but for some reason, they’ve never made it particularly easy for third-party tools to search the site. Like with the truly fantastic Alfred, for instance. Now, though, things have changed, & AllMusic has a senstible default URL scheme: … (Read More)

Why is the robot in the Apple Automator icon holding a pipe?

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