Blogging about the things that bring me joy, making stuff, learning new things, and going on adventures. I aim to not let "perfect" be the enemy of "good", a...
Ubik (Phillip K Dick, 1969) I think this is the first Phillip K Dick book I've read and unambiguously liked. It's about a group of people who work for a sort of anti-psychic security company. The company is run by a man and his wife who is kept in cryogenic storage somewhere between life and death. This "half-life" state is depicted as a temporary, fleeting thing. This contrasts with the more…
Preamble In my previous post , I went through the first two chapters of the GNU tar manual. Now, I move beyond the beginners' tutorial. Observations Section 3: Invoking GNU tar The old style of invoking tar uses a single letter to indicate which tar operation is being used. Section 3 claims that arguments can technically be put in any order, though we saw in the tutorial that changing order of…
Motivation When I'm stumped by a problem in programming or computing, I generally find myself searching the internet. I haven't jumped on the LLM bandwagon for this. Not because I'm worried it'll be wrong, moreso that I suspect I'll get my answer, but I won't learn anything. I wondered if a programmer from a previous generation would feel the same way about my search engine/Stack Overflow method…
Part of what I enjoy about biking is exploring new trails, and getting out of my neighborhood. At the time of writing, my preferred tool for navigating on a bike in unfamiliar places is an app called Komoot, but I have reservations about recommending it to others. Why I Use Komoot While Gooogle Maps has a cycling mode, its routing algorithm prioritizes direct routes, generally on streets (though…