Recent content on rdnlsmith
Last weekend, I was showing off this website to a friend who hadn’t seen it before. I clicked a link to the Git server I set up two years ago; but rather than a handsome list of repositories, I was greeted only by an Nginx error page, glaring white save for the text “502 Bad Gateway.” I thought that was weird, seeing as I hadn’t changed anything recently.
8BitDo makes some very nice third-party controllers for Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, PC/Xbox, and a variety of vintage systems. They also partnered with Analogue to produce the official controller for the Analogue 3D: a modern two-pronged Bluetooth gamepad that nonetheless preserves the N64’s button layout; an artifact whose exquisite blend of past and present speaks to me so much that I added…
For a long time, I was very skeptical of wireless earbuds. They’re far more expensive than the wired kind; you have to keep them charged; the batteries will eventually wear out, and typically can’t be replaced; and it’s much easier to lose one wireless earbud than it is to lose a wired pair.
“They” say that em dashes are a sign of AI writing. Well, “they” can pry my em dashes from my cold, dead fingers.
Partway through writing my last post, my beloved ThinkPad T480—henceforth referred to by its hostname, zephyr—developed a fault.
This may come as something of a surprise, but: back in high school, I was kind of a nerd. (To be clear, I still am a nerd; but the point is that I was also a nerd then.)
It’s something of a trope that when a programmer starts a blog, an inordinate number of their blog posts will be about the act of blogging, especially with regard to their chosen tech stack.
Yes, you read that right: in the year 2024 C.E.—sixteen years after the advent of GitHub, whose reign spans not just my entire professional career but even my (formal) computer science education—I’ve decided to take a step backwards in time and host my software projects independently.
If you had told me two years ago that Twitter would be effectively dead within… well, two years, I would have found that rather hard to believe. Sure, Twitter’s user metrics were small potatoes compared to the behemoth that is Facebook, but it was a popular service. While I’ve never bought into the whole “town square” argument, Twitter was great for more text-oriented people such as myself to find…
I’m a curious person by nature. Any time I pick up a new hobby, or get invested in a TV show, or start using some new (digital) tools, the first thing I do is read everything I can find about it. How does x work? Who came up with it? Why is it called that? How has it changed over time?
A few weeks ago, I read a blog post by Drew Devault about the declining relevance of the Free Software Foundation (FSF)—despite the flourishing of free software itself—and what Drew believes the FSF should be doing to regain its former glory. On the whole, I’d have to say that I largely agree with his assessment; but that's not what I wanted to write about.
Okay, yes, that’s a pretty obvious thing to say, but bear with me for a moment.
Inform is a programming language whose syntax closely resembles natural English; its original purpose was to make interactive fiction (IF) authorship accessible to authors of the traditional sort, though in theory it is now possible to use Inform to write other, more general-purpose programs if you really want to.
Interactive fiction (or IF) is one of the oldest forms of computer games, dating back to the 1970s; and yet, there is a certain magic to the experience that I feel other, more modern formats would be hard-pressed to replicate.
Four months ago, I set out on a possibly-ill-considered expedition to complicate my life by simplifying my website.
In my previous post, I described the not-inconsiderable lengths I went to in order to bring a small piece of Linux functionality to which I was accustomed—the man program—to my Windows computing experience, albeit as a shallow facsimile of the real thing. This time, I’m bringing to Linux a small nicety from Windows: (an aspect of) the Snip & Sketch tool.
This is a post which, I suspect, will be of very little interest to anyone besides myself. Then again, the target audience for this blog is the hypothetical collection of people, however few, who happen to be Weird in many of the same ways that I am, so here we are.
Visual Studio Code is my favorite software application. (Is that weird?)
Lately, I’ve been re-watching Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, including seasons 1–5 for the second time and season 6 (and now, 7) for the first time.
For some time now, I’ve wanted to start a blog. I first registered this domain two years ago! But, something always stopped me: fear.