Shouting into the void.
There's something about downloading books from the internet not being instantaneous that makes me feel something 1 . Downloading music, videos, video games and other media doesn't have the same feel to it, I just want it done as soon as possible. Especially when it comes to video games, I even feel a slight disdain given that I definitely won't be using the high resolution textures on my machine,…
May the gods forgive me for my puns. "Slow and steady wins the race", "patience is a virtue", "Rome wasn't built in a day" and so on, but there's something to be said about shutting yourself in and everything out (and off) for an indeterminate amount of time to just speedrun through something that's been on the back burner. Nobody expects to come out of such a reclusive episode speaking a new…
I was reading man pages the other day 1 when I stumbled upon this, and my initial reaction was how egregiously wrong it was, how did it even end up there? fread ( 3 ) Library Functions Manual fread ( 3 ) NAME fread , fwrite - binary stream input / output LIBRARY Standard C library ( libc , - lc ) SYNOPSIS #include <stdio.h> size_t fread ( size_t size , size_t n ; void ptr [ restrict size * n ],…
Recently my trusty old Nook Glowlight 3 stopped being able to sync with Dropbox 1 , even after a couple of restarts so I had no way of transferring my books onto it 2 . I don't even remember how many years ago (probably 10-ish) I installed Dropbox on it, along with a custom launcher and a file explorer, but it was working without a hitch up until a few months ago. I then got the bright idea of…
Don't you just love it when the source code you're reading looks like it was made to be read, as opposed to write-only code? When you're in the middle of working on something and you're not quite sure how to hold the thing in your hands (lest it breaks), one (hopefully) consults the manual. But if said manual isn't up to date (if it even exists), sometimes you just wish you could read the standard…
Note: this was an article originally published on a blog hosted by Microblink 1 , but has since been taken down. I'm publishing it again in a slightly modified form (no GIFs and some formatting touch-ups) for posterity's sake. But also to carry the torch that Bram Moolenar lit oh so many years ago. This is part one in our two-part blog on vim , a modal text editor optimized to perform the tasks…
I was doing the Advent of Code puzzles recently to have something to sharpen my zig skills on and I stumbled upon something that had me stumped for a bit. The task at hand was day 19 of 2015 (part two, though) where you have: a starting "formula" consisting of just one electron a list of transformations one can apply to the formula to get new formulas a specific resulting formula you have to reach…
Not everything one writes has to be for clout. Sometimes people do things just because they feel like it. And sometimes you might want to do something out of the ordinary, just to feel something different . Imagine walking through a park and seeing monkey bars, sometimes you just get the urge to use them. 1 Or running three flights of stairs instead of walking them like a sane person, just to…
You may have heard the saying "You are not your thoughts" (or a variation of it) in the context of psychology, most likely as an opposing stance to Sigmund Freud's claim that... I'm not even going to pretend to know what he claimed, but the term Freudian slip is a good enough example of what I need to make my point. Just a refresher, a Freudian slip is a term describing an unintentional slip that…
When writing C++ and having to interoperate with the C standard library I always get a somewhat nostalgic feeling; yearning for simpler times 1 , times that never were since I've never really written C for a living. And pretty much every time I think to myself - "But surely, there's gotta be a better way of doing this!" 2 One of such things I've come across several times already is handling files…