malvasia bianca

When we bought our most recent computer, my plan was always to install Windows on it eventually. And now, with the VGHVI’s LOTRO symposia on the first week of every month, I’m thinking it might be time. But I could use some advice from people who have done this before. Some context: I’m only planning […]

When Apple released a version of iOS with a limited form of multitasking, they also added a way to switch directly between apps by double-tapping the home screen. I almost never used that feature, however—I don’t have so many apps on my phone that it’s hard for me to get to the one I want […]

I (along with a lot of other people) was curious about Diaspora when it was first announced, though I can’t say that I’ve been too excited about its initial release. (Incidentally, feel free to add me if you’re already on Diaspora, and I also have invites available if people want them; I don’t currently plan […]

I was using one of our laptops on New Year’s Day, and it froze with an odd graphical pattern on the screen. I force-rebooted the computer, but it hung in the middle of the reboot; repeating the attempt showed that this was not a one-time coincidence. Whoops; I have bad luck with computers these days, […]

Earlier this evening, I wanted to dust off some JavaScript code I’d written a little while ago. The editor I’d used while writing it initially was TextMate, which I’d liked okay but not enough to convince me that it was worth spending fifty bucks on once the trial period expired. So I opened up the […]

Scott Rosenberg has recently been making a case that web sites (news sites, at least, but I think the argument applies more broadly) should make the revision history of stories public. Which makes sense to me, and to enough other people that a Post Revision Display WordPress plugin is now available. Which I’ve just turned […]

I promised a post on why I created my linkblog, but then I forgot to talk about it in my recent Reeder post. The primary trigger was in fact my increased iPad usage: I find it annoying to read others’ link roundup posts on the iPad/iPhone, and it’s also a bit of a pain to […]

As I mentioned before, I love using my iPad as an RSS reader, and in particular I think Reeder is a great program. I liked it enough that I figured I might as well download the iPhone version, and I gave it a try when I was recently visiting my parents. And I enjoyed using […]

A couple of months ago, I was poking around and noticed that online backup options were rather cheaper than I’d thought. Amazon S3 is 15 cents / month / GB; that, unfortunately, has a bit of an impedance mismatch with my previous backup-via-ssh strategy. But my home directory on my home server is only a […]

I don’t intend to do too much iPad blogging here, but a few experiences we’ve had recently: Liesl’s dad visited us last month, and spent quite a lot of time playing with the iPad. He probably spent more time playing Flight Control HD than anything else, but he also clearly enjoyed using it for web […]

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning. Scary; I’m very glad Miranda is now a competent swimmer. Epic Wimbledon reporting; start at around 4:05pm or so. (Via @dan_schmidt.) Memory hierarchies and algorithm analysis. (Via @mfeathers.) Interesting point of view on hyperlinks and footnotes. (Via @scottros.) For all of you Plato fans out there: (Via here and now.) […]

I had a great time at GDC this year, with one exception: halfway through the conference, my back started really hurting. My laptop isn’t that heavy, but it’s heavy enough, and something about the way it was sitting in my backpack put more strain on my muscles than they wanted. So I decided that, the […]

The reason why I got an iPad as early as I did was so that I could travel to GLS without a laptop. I’ll blog about how that went later, but I want to talk about one particular aspect of iPad life separately, namely using it as an RSS reader. I first tried to use […]

Watch this illusion: Why can’t we make another Shadow of the Colossus? Super Mario World camera behavior. (Via @danbruno.) An Apple //e really does make a good iPad stand. Jupiter loses a stripe. (Via @stephentotilo.) Ruby Ramen? (Make sure to look at the different product pictures.) (Via @yukihiro_matz.) I’m not exactly happy to learn that […]

I was quite late to the music download party, but my experiences on that front have been good; that, combined with my desire to not run out of wall space in my house, suggests that I should start buying books electronically as well. My initial hardware device for this will be an iPad, but I’m […]

As I mentioned previously, we’ve relaunched the Vintage Game Club under new game selection rules. And I’m very pleased with how it’s gone so far: after about a week of feeling out what games people might be interested in playing, two games emerged with champions, and in both cases we’ve had enough support that the […]

Daniel Floyd and James Portnow on Video Games and Moral Choices. Ryan from 37 Signals on applying Christopher Alexander to everyday work. Seth Godin’s April Linchpin session. A cat and an iPad. Which I find totally fascinating in a non-cat-youtube-video way. (Via @Laralyn.) I am a biotic god! (Via @truffle.) Amazing clouds. (Via @marick; also, […]

It turns out that yesterday’s attempt at setting up caching for the blog didn’t work: my feed was broken. (Or rather, one out of the three feed formats.) Sheer luck that I discovered it so quickly—I’d e-mailed the Akismet folks about a reader whose comments were regularly getting flagged as spam, and as part of […]

I’ve turned on caching for the blog: it gets little enough traffic that 99.9% of the time I don’t need it, but I had one incident a month or so ago where traffic overnight overwhelmed the machine a couple of days in a row, requiring a reboot both times. So, since I want the blog […]

There’s been lots of discussion recently about the fact that certain computing platforms are less open than some people would prefer, with many people being up in arms about this fact. Once, I would have been one of those people; these days, I’m not (though seeing the reduction in openness does make me sad), and […]