Posts

Don’t need all of Xcode? Finally it’s easy to just install GCC & related tools

I’m not a programmer, but I am a UNIX nerd, & that means I sometimes need to use GCC to compile software. Specifically, I use Homebrew (which, in my experience, is the best & easiest way to install the UNIX CLI software that doesn’t just come with Mac OS X—like gsed, for instance, which I needed the other day), & that needs GCC to compile everything. … (Read More)

Philip Glass on creativity, technique, style, & change

Heard this fabulous interview that Ira Glass did with his second cousin Philip Glass, my favorite modern composer, on NPR’s Fresh Air, & I found this section particularly compelling: … (Read More)

BlueGriffon is SELLING its user manual, & that’s bullshit

First there was Netscape Composer, a WYSIWYG for creating webpages that was part of the Netscape suite. It was never great, just OK. It faded into irrelevance. … (Read More)

A reason for Marco Arment to try Instacast—& maybe you too

Marco complains about the behavior of the Back & Forward buttons in the iPhone’s music player. The Back button acts similarly no matter if you’re listening to music or a podcast/audiobook: in both cases, it takes you to the beginning of the piece to which you’re listening. The Forward button, on the other hand, changes depending on the audio: if it’s music, it takes you to the next song, but if it’s a podcast/audiobook, it takes you to the next piece while remembering where you were, so if you go back, you start up right where you left off. Marco wants the behavior of the Back button to change: … (Read More)

Term of the year: weblining

Good article in The New York Times about weblining: … (Read More)

Synesthesia: experiencing one sense as another, different sense

Fascinating post at PLoS on synesthesia & an iPhone app named Sonified that recreates the condition as augmented reality:  … (Read More)

Windows 8 on ARM will only support Metro apps…except for a few from Microsoft

All Things D reports: … (Read More)

How to block Wordnik (the annoying little popup that appears when you double-click on a word) on The New York Times

The New York Times is so essential that I actually pay for a paper subscription, & I use the website constantly. However, there’s a so-called “feature” that’s been driving me batty for a while. When you select a word, a little tooltip appears with a question mark in it; click on that, & a popup window opens with a definition of the word, provided by Wordnik. … (Read More)

The RIAA defends SOPA on The New York Times editorial page

If you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, “Self, I just haven’t read enough self-serving blather & disingenuous crap today”, then have I got the webpage for you! Cary Sherman, CEO of the RIAA, has an editorial in The New York Times that will satisfy your needs: … (Read More)

Path deletes all uploaded address book data

Path did the right thing: … (Read More)

Why Apple will continue to use both Intel & ARM for CPUs

TUAW has a great post today about the likelihood of Apple switching its desktops & laptops to ARM from Intel: … (Read More)

uTorrent makes darknet BitTorrenting easy

Saw this when I opened up uTorrent last night: … (Read More)

Do not install Path on your iPhone or Android phone

Why? Because Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers. … (Read More)

Wolfram Alpha’s new Pro service

Nice article in The Verge on knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha & its new Pro service & what you can do with it: … (Read More)

Microsoft doesn’t mandate a unified design. Surprise!

Interesting article in Co. Design about the pretty darn slick Metro interface in Windows Phones: … (Read More)

Adding & removing CSS classes to HTML via jQuery

The other day I wrote a post titled “How to highlight code on a webpage when you’re using Markdown to create that webpage” that discussed using highlight.js to make code displayed on a webpage show up in various colors. In that post I talked about a key feature of highlight.js: it automatically detects the language of the code & colorizes accordingly. … (Read More)

CCleaner for Mac OS X available … but it sucks

If you use Windows at all, you really need to use CCleaner, available at http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner. Originally short for “Crap Cleaner”, that’s exactly what it does: clean all the crap that accumulates on your Windows box, things like temp files, cookies, log files, & other detritus. It does more than that, however. You can clean your Registry (although the merits of doing so are debatable, to put it mildly1), uninstall programs, remove programs from the system startup list (helpful since they can be hidden in a variety of places in Windows), delete System Restore points (I keep three or four; anything older can be nuked), & more. It’s free, easy to use, and it works. That said, I still do it. It just bugs me to have that unnecessary garbage in there. I know, I know—OCD at its finest. ↩ … (Read More)

Toca Boca makes the best iOS games for little kids

Great, interesting article at GigaOm today about Toca Boca, makers of great games for iOS … (Read More)

Find out what your UNIX shell’s flags are & then change them

Today we enter the semi-arcane world of your UNIX shell’s flags, the variables that determine how your shell will function for you. I’m focusing on the bash shell, as that’s the one I know best. … (Read More)

How to highlight code on a webpage when you’re using Markdown to create that webpage

Here’s the situation: on my other website, I’ve been working on posting information for my course on CSS. As part of that, I have CSS & HTML code on various webpages. To create the pages, I compose in Markdown (using Mou, a fabulous Markdown editor for Mac OS X) & then paste the Markdown into a textarea of the CMS my company uses (Concrete5, which is simply the best CMS available today). The CMS takes the Markdown, runs it through PHP Markdown Extra, & the resulting code is there for the world to see. So, for instance, if I put this in my Markdown (yes, I know this is simple, but this is an illustration): … (Read More)