Practically Efficient is Eddie Smith's personal blog.
Math fonts from six different type systems, courtesy Chalkdust I’ve always felt like constructing printed math was much more of an art form than regular typesetting. Someone typesetting mathematics is less a “typist” and more an artist attempting to render abstract data on a two-dimensional surface. Mathematical symbols are themselves a language, but they are fundamentally a visual representation…
Subscription-based app pricing is a thorny issue that’s far from resolved, but one of the very worst arguments I hear whenever a company like Ulysses switches to a subscription model goes something like this: “Why do I have to pay (again) for software I’ve already purchased?” This is a flat out lie that people usually create for themselves to help support their negative reaction to a perceived…
Via Hobo Signs : An artificial intelligence system being developed at Facebook has created its own language. It developed a system of code words to make communication more efficient. Researchers shut the system down when they realized the AI was no longer using English. The observations made at Facebook are the latest in a long line of similar cases. In each instance, an AI being monitored by…
Gabe whipped up a great list of checklist tools. My favorite aspect of his post is that there’s no clear winner. There shouldn’t be. Checklists can come in all forms, and the ideal format depends entirely on the application. For me, checklists make sense when I need to see not only what needs to be done, but also what I’ve already done . Apps that automatically “vanish” completed tasks fail to do…
Since moving to Jekyll last year, I’ve done relatively little to tweak the inner workings of this site. After all, one of the most appealing things about having a static site is that it doesn’t need to have a lot of moving parts. It just works. But today I finally got around to a couple of housekeeping items that have been on my list: image captions and MathJax. Image captions For image captions,…
Even though Gabe and I sometimes have slightly differing views on the iPad’s productivity value compared to the Mac, with his latest post , I think we are completely in sync—metaphorical Chris Farley falls and all. In particular, he nails a massive friction point for me with the iPad: I can type more comfortably on my iPhone than I can with my iPad Pro on the couch, in bed, or even just reclined…
Tim Cook’s entire commencement address to the MIT class of 2017 is an instant classic, but this is the part I want to echo forever: Technology is capable of doing great things. But it doesn’t want to do great things. It doesn’t want anything. That part takes all of us. It takes our values and our commitment to our families and our neighbors and our communities. Our love of beauty and belief that…
PCs lead us indoors. Smartphones lead us into isolation. The Apple Watch is—sort-of—leading us back out into the real world again by encouraging movement, keeping phones in pockets, and most importantly, looking up again . I’ve owned an Apple Watch since the Series 0 started shipped 26 months ago. I can’t imagine ever not owning one again. Actually I can, but only when some higher form of…
I’ve been meaning to talk more about my “Sublime Text and BBEdit” workflow, and this is a powerful (if mundane) example. I don’t write a ton of scripts on my Mac and generally don’t spend much time in Terminal. But when I need a script, I really need a script . My work is very file-heavy. I juggle large numbers of .tex (LaTeX) files across several large folder structures. Every so often I need to…
Like many other parents, I’ve struggled to make sense of the current president in the context of parenthood. How do you even talk about it? But I’ve realized that much can be taught by studying the commander-in-clown’s example. After all he’s the perfect anti-role model for young kids, teens, and adults of all ages: someone we should all aspire not to be when we grow up. Here are the top five…