Tea vs. Coffee
I’ve recently switched from coffee to tea for dietary reasons. (I need to drastically cut down carbs.) Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a bit of a coffee addict — one of my favorite lines from a TV...
View ArticleThe Race to Replace Illustrator: Affinity Designer
Just as Core Graphics created a race to replace Photoshop (at least for the great unwashed masses who don’t care about Color Spaces, CMYK, Lab Color, HDR, Stitching, Content-Aware Resizing and...
View ArticleSketch 3
While writing my previous post it struck me that life is too short and $80 is too little to get worked up about, so I bought Sketch 3. As usual, I broke out my texture map file from iDraw, exported as...
View ArticleNode-Webkit Development
I’m in the process of porting RiddleMeThis from Realbasic (er Xojo) to Node-Webkit (henceforth nw). The latest version of nw allows full menu customization, which means you can produce pretty decently...
View ArticleObama’s Missed Healthcare Opportunity
When Obama was first elected, I opined that the first thing the Democrats should do is pass a simple measure requiring pay stubs to show the real cost of people’s health cover. This would make a...
View ArticleClifford Simak, Flying Houses, and Self-Driving Cars
When I got into SF in my teens, it was divided roughly into three broad phases, each dominated by an influential tastemaker. Hugo Gernsback (of the eponymous “Hugo” awards) essentially built a genre...
View ArticleCommon Core Comprehension
My favorite joke about the mathematically inclined goes like this: A mathematician, a physicist, and an astrophysicist are attending a conference in Scotland, and between sessions walk through the...
View ArticleDell P2715Q Display
So, I came across this Dell 4K display while visiting the new Nebraska Furniture that has opened close to us. (It’s quite an amazing place — retail’s revenge on Amazon.com — and it sells a lot more...
View ArticleThe Second Amendment
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. As a result of the sideshow over the Confederate flag...
View ArticleEmail E. Neumann
How stupid is email? Actually, email is great. It’s robust, widely-supported, and highly accessible (in the 508 and economic senses of the word). The problem is email clients. Security A colleague of...
View ArticleAffinity Photo — First Impressions
Note: if you’re interested in using Affinity Photo for processing RAW photos (i.e. its “non-destructive workflow”) you’re probably going to be horribly disappointed. See my followup article. Affinity...
View ArticleAffinity Photo — No Good For Photography
This is a pretty important addition to my first impressions article. After reading a comment thread on a photography blog it occurred to me that I had not looked particularly hard at a core feature of...
View ArticleThe Myth of the $500 FX Sensor
Disclaimer: I am not an electrical engineer and have no special knowledge about any of this. Some time ago Thom Hogan estimated the cost of an FX camera sensor to be around $500 (I don’t have the...
View ArticleThe Graph with a Trillion Edges
After looking at this thread on Hacker News about this paper from a bunch of Facebook researchers, and this excellent article by Frank McSherry, I tried to understand McSherry’s approach (since I found...
View ArticleGoogle’s New Logo
Let me begin by saying that I don’t hate it — and I like it a lot more than the old logo which seems to have been the word “Google” in Times New Roman or whatever browsers showed by default as Serif...
View ArticleA Modest Proposal
I think if we’re going to have guns they shouldn’t be concealed. They should have day-glo grips, stocks, and cases — mandatorily lurid pink I suggest, have built-in GPS sensors, and make wah-wah noises...
View ArticleElectronic vs. Printed Books, Gun Control, and Moral Panic
Back in the early days of the Internet you’d frequently find sensationalist stories along the lines of “teenager learns how to make bomb from internet” in the media. Similarly, we’ve seen headlines...
View ArticleWhat does a good API look like?
I’m temporarily unemployed — my longest period of not having to work every day since I was laid off by Valuclick in 2010 — so I’m catching up on my rants. This rant is shaped by recent experiences I...
View ArticleLearning to write Unity Shaders
Unity has replaced Photoshop in terms of adding features faster than I can assimilate them. It’s been possible to write custom shaders for years, but every time I tried to do something non-trivial I...
View ArticleUsability on the Underside
I’ve always thought it ironic that Apple makes the most usable computers and the least usable APIs. I’m referring, of course, to AppleScript — just kidding. At first I thought it was a huge failing...
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