I recently learned about the wcurl command. It’s a wrapper around curl , focused on making downloading files simple without passing options. It has some heuristics to figure out what to do with the given URLs, and in my testing it’s pretty good. For simple file downloading, I think this will replace regular curl calls for me.
I was muttering the abbreviation API (a, pee, eye) under my breath, and shifted over one phonetic stop to “ ape pee eye”. The puerile interpretation is right up front, which did make me giggle, but it also made me question if there was anything that actually existed with that sound. I searched Kagi for “Ape PI”, and the first result was the ancient Egyptian ruler Apepi . I…
Finished reading: The Dark Tower V Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King 📚 Things are really heating up, and boy does King go hard . If you know you know.
Today I learned about the Trivial File Transfer Protocol , and the matching tftp command. It’s like FTP, but much more simple, less secure, uses less memory, and is sometimes used in initial bootloading on low memory devices. It isn’t used over the internet, given the security concerns. This trivia brought to you by me mistyping something in the terminal and seeing this command in the autocomplete…
I saw Dan Deacon for the first time last weekend, and man does he put on a great show. The fans were genuinely kind and fun, very good vibes. No small feat!
I’ve really been getting into The Hellacopters recently. So far I’ve been working through their releases on Bandcamp, with Head Off and Grande Rock the primaries, but I’m looking forward to expanding my listening beyond that. 🎵
I used the unix look command to find every SASS variable in a file: look '$' my-file.scss . Kind neat, but the use case is pretty narrow. Anyone have a more wide use case for look ? 💽
I discovered the uuidgen command, which generates a unique ID like 3E7FE9F8-9D26-42BE-999D-43D2D34697BC . This seems like it would be great to use in some shell glue script or another. 💽
I think Corey Doctorow is right about the corporate motivations and economic implications of AI . AI can’t do the jobs it’s replacing : AI is predicated on the premise that the monopolies, duopolies and cartels that control the global economy can deliberately worsen their products without suffering economic or regulatory consequences, because they’re the only game in town. Give…
Thomas Frank writes about politically noxious nostalgia for Harpers. It’s connects the bicentennial in 1976 with our current impoverished political moment. I think it strikes a chord. Donald Trump didn’t invent the eternal return of nostalgia any more than Ronald Reagan invented the retro style of the Seventies and Eighties. Nostalgia is today a structural feature of our modern world, the…
I was randomly curious the other day, and looked up bands from New York City on Wikipedia. I noted down every one I recognized; it’s a very musically diverse list, and there were a few surprises, at least for me. Do you see anything that ties them all together? I’ll give you a hint: I don’t. A Tribe Called Quest Anthrax Beastie Boys Blondie Blood, Sweat, and Tears Blue Oyster…