Larry Hosken: New: 2015

Book Report: Everything is Bullshit The Priceonomics blog wrote a book with a rude name. It's pretty interesting; a lot of it was stuff that I'd already read. (I wasn't subscribed to the blog, but other folks kept forwarding links&hell...
I'm lahosken on ello.co I joined that social network ello.co. https://ello.co/lahosken, that's me. If you're on there and we know each other, we should "follow" each other. Or whatever it's called on this thing. If you fol...
Link: Photoset of Chicago 2013 Puzzle Hunt It's 2015. Why am I only now seeing these photos of a 2013 Chicago puzzlehunt? Because I'm a nerd even when touring (touristing?), I recognized those library stacks. ...
Book Report: Managing people across cultures This book tells Human Resources folks how to take company culture into account when setting company policy for, e.g., performance reviews. That is: there's no one-size-fits-all policy that makes sens...
Link: "The Best API Documentation" A blogger blogs about goals for API Documentation. He starts with the important two questions: Who is the audience? What are they trying to do? …though he doesn't phrase it that way. ...
Urban Morphology is Everywhere, even San Francisco's Mission District We built this city on rock and roll; I built puzzles on this city. Tonight I made a rare journey out to the Mission District to meet friends and listen to shoegazy music. But on the way over, I stopp...
Urban Morphology is Everywhere, even San Francisco's Union Square Neighborhood A lamp post is gone. That's not surprising—it was surrounded by construction for the new subway line. But that post was special, a "landmark" for a photo walk puzzle in the 2-Tone Game. That co...
Book Report: The Shirley Letters Letters from an 1852 California gold-panning camp. Speculation, risks, lack of gender diversity… maybe not much has changed. Oh, but back then there were more murders and dirt floors. And, tra...
>> There's a National Puzzle Day (but I'm not sure which nation it's for). There's an International Puzzle Day. I think I planned something for one of those Puzzle Days. At some point in the past, I se...
>> This evening's Adventure Design Group was the San Francisco Institute of Possibility. This was about as far from puzzlehunts as you can get—they run events that might be described as awesome pa...
Overloaded Name If you say Gordon Moore, as in "Moore's Law" …now we have to ask if you mean the Intel co-founder's rule of thumb about computer hardware advances or the San Francisco beat cop. ...
Book Report: Original Copies It's a book about new housing developments in China, specifically those which have been made "Western-style". Why put up a copy of the Eiffel Tower in a newly developed Shanghai suburb? Why not? Ther...
>> I finally figured out there's no great way for me to walk south off of San Bruno mountain, a.k.a., the dramatic hill from the end of the WHO game. Ages ago, when I wanted to take a long walk, I used...
Link: Braille Notation for Complex Cello Music "Feldman’s piece in particular, which uses geometric figures over the course of a graphically represented x-axis of time, cannot be transcribed at all into standard braille music encoding." ...
Book Report: Line Screw Memoir of a poet/executive whose migraines force him out of such intense-thinking pursuits and into prison guarding. He was guarding Canadian prisons back when there was a higher ratio of guards to p...
>> "I was really proud of my jar of teeth…" ...
Zara's Big Adventure Puzzle Hunt: it was fun, you should play it next weekend I'm fresh back from Foster City, CA, where I played in Zara's Big Adventure puzzle hunt. It was fun! It's happening again next weekend, on Sunday! You should play! Sign up at that link! (I'm not sur...
>> Some non-spoilery 20/20 hindsight logistics advice for ETPH#3: Given a nudge that there's a choice of driving or walking between locations, driving is awesome. Walking is scenic… but you can...
>> Kinda wonder which rent-board-mandated alarm went off for a few seconds just now. Carbon monoxide alarm? Probably-a-smoke-alarm-but-who-knows? I'm pretty sure it wasn't the definitely-a-smoke-ala...
Link: Things & Movies Fiji's TV and internet evolved, uhm, out of order. At least from an American point of view. The embrace of video takes on more significance when one considers that television was not available in F...
>> MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle idea: Code of Conduck Conunudrum. I don't know what to do with it, though. ...
Book Report: Dataclysm The OKCupid blog is pretty amazing. Way back when, it caused a stir talking about trends in USA interracial dating. Plenty of USA folks say they don't care about race. But when the OKCupid folks look...
>> Who's running Puzzled Pint in San Francisco? (Yeah, I guess I could have found out by going. But that would have required remembering to look up from the computer. Ha! As if.) ...
BAPHL has a wiki! Nathan Curtis mailed the baphl-announce mailing list with good news: …I wanted to let you know about a resource that Hubert set up for us. The BAPHL website now has a wiki. Visit http://www....
>> They're not exactly self-fulfilling prophecies, but they're self-something somethings. I got an electric hot-water kettle. I'm just that lazy, I wanted it to be easier to boil water; it seemed extra...
>> It's like the opposite of the sunk cost fallacy. I've put hours into roughly prototyping this puzzle. Now I'm hoping that playtesters think it's totally boring so I don't feel obliged to put in the t...
Book Report: Creatvity, Inc. It's a book about risk-taking at Pixar. If you're creating new things, you're taking risks: some of those new things won't work right. They almost certainly won't work right on the first try; you'll ...
Link: Law Offices of Lowell Finley If you're into election technology, a new blog to follow: Law Offices of Lowell Finley. Remember when California was reporting folks trying to sell us so-bleeding-edge-it-aint-really-working-right-ye...
>> If someone asks you for a cigarette, you hand one over. That explains the guy I overheard: If you smoke on the bus, nobody asks you for one. I hope that remains the most antisocial thing I hear t...
Book Report: The Long Way In this memoir, Bernard Moitessier sails around the world solo. By the end, he either achieves some enlightenment or goes kinda loopy from being on his own for a few months. There is sailing. There i...
>> "The city you love disappears But not before leaving Its mark on you" –"The City Disappears" Aaron Cometbus ...
Link: Documentation, Support, and Customer Success Anything worth documenting is worth documenting well. But not everything is worth documenting. And I think this guy would agree with me: Recently I’ve started to see documentation as a psychologic...
Milestone: 27 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 27 millionth it. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits s...
Book Report: The Impossible State It's a book about North Korea taught me how far to go when running a kleptocracy. Can you starve your population, as long as you keep your army fed? Yep, you totally can. It doesn't backfire. Is ad...
Book Report: Freda It's the third book in the young adult post-apocalptic trilogy that started with Semper. The story didn't go the way I expected, but instead [spoiler redacted] the [spoiler redacted]. I enjoyed the s...
Puzzled Pint @ Zeitgeist Puzzled Pint has been around for years, but until tonight I hadn't been. It was always far away. It was a monthly puzzling get-together. Folks would gather at a bar to solve puzzles. A few days ahead...
Do Not Be Alarmed I'm trying out a new way of syndicating my blog posts to Twitter and Facebook. Maybe everything will go smoothly. Or maybe I'm about to start spewing FB updates and tweets like an absurdly literate f...
>> IFTTT users, I am newly amongst your ranks. Any recipes I should use? (I used it to syndicate my blog to FB, Twitter, and Tumblr…but I know it's a generally-useful doohickey. Which I'm current...
Book Report: Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails How the electric telegraph affected the course of the USA's Civil War. Historically, generals had a lot of leeway: whoever was in command out in the field made decisions out in the field. You wouldn'...
>> Trying to figure out how many days I want to stay in Austin. If I liked hanging out in interesting bars, the answer would be "Forever." But as it is, I'm browsing travel sites. ...
Book Report: What the Dormouse Said When I blogged about The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Daniel Fennelly (@danielfennelly) replied @lahosken I've heard good things about Markoff's "What the Dormouse Said" if you wan...
>> The friendfeed social networking site is going away. My best experience on a public social network was a few months on friendfeed. But that was years ago, before they got acquired by Facebook and fol...
Book Report: Because I Said So! It's a book by Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings debunking and/or bunking varius bits of folk wisdom. It's a funny easy, breezy read. On the other hand, I don't think I retained much of it. Other than: eye...
Over-Engineered Walks: Pittsburg Yesterday, I walked from the Pittsburg/Bay Point BART station to Old Town Pittsburg and back. This was my last walk chosen by that "Geocaching Vicinity" system. It was a good system. It was a good...
Book Report: How to Puzzle Cache How to Puzzle Cache teaches you how to decode/decipher/unpuzzle many, many ways of hiding secret messages. I'm a puzzlehunter, so I was reading it and thinking it's useful for puzzlehunting. It's int...
2Tone, OpenID The 2-Tone Game web site has players "log in" so it can keep track of them. E.g., This player has solved these puzzles, has those puzzles open, and hasn't even seen those other puzzles over there. In...
"Indexing" When I reported on the book How to Puzzle Cache, I mentioned The book uses "indexing" to mean something other than what my local puzzling tradition calls "indexing". …you might have wonder...
Book Report: 400 Things Cops Know The number in the title makes this sound like an absurdly long listicle but this a really good listicle. Get a glimpse into the thinking of someone who's often lied to, deals with folks which other f...
Bazel is an anagram of "Blaze" Well dog my cats: http://bazel.io/, an open-sourcing of the Blaze build tool. (But I guess it doesn't build your code on Google's internal cloud machines.) The BUILD Dictionary (which I worked on) is...
Link: Why Chromium has code owners One fun issue with working in a biiiiig codebase is that nobody knows it all. Something that can help: have "local experts" own parts of the codebase. Give them a chance to say how to make some code ...
LJ People: Do Not Be Alarmed On LiveJournal, I have a new account, lahoskensf. And I'm going to friend you and you and you and you… Why a new account, you ask? My lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us account was OpenID-based, ba...
Book Report: Livesaving Lessons This book by swordfisherwoman Linda Greenlaw is different—it's about adopting a teenager. This feels like higher stakes than life-or-death actions out on the water: Greenlaw and her daughter ha...
It wasn't the BUILD Dictionary Correction. I said that Bazel's BUILD Encyclopedia used to be the BUILD Dictionary. A Googler gently corrected me: But in fact, it was the encyclopedia back then as well. : ) I apologize for the ...
>> Stayin' up late hearing about stayin' up late at Cafe Feenjon back in the 60s, listening to music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcY0_erT9yY ...
>> While the tourist rubes gawk at Lombard Street's twisty stretch across the street, serious scholars Bob Wilhelm and Jerry Hosken look over the Osbourne-Stevenson house (a.k.a. Robert Louis Stevenson'...
Going to the Doubleclicks Show Thursday night? Maybe get there early One of my neighbors puts weir—uhm, thought-provoking stuff out in front of his apartment every so often, ephemera of the El Fornio Historical Society… e.g., fliers announcing Father Serr...
>> Twitch.TV channel idea: Like unboxing videos, but for people opening envelopes from the IRS tax folks, live. Hang on, why am I posting this here instead of on halfbakery? ...
Copy photos from Android to Ubuntu Connect w/USB cable. On the phone, choose PTP. On Linux machine, run Shotwell. Shotwell can then import the photos. Yes, I'm basically jotting notes to myself on my blog. Sorry, here's a gratuitous ...
Book Report: The Peripheral Ages ago, probably back when I was a teenager, my dad told me some reasons why "time machine" stories in sci-fi movies/books/etc. don't work so well—that time machine also has to be a teleporte...
>> I finally tried a Detour audio tour. These tours are like a neighborhood audio tour that you listen to on headphones, but use your phone's geolocation to figure out if you're at the right place to he...
Book Report: The Innovators It's a book of mini-biographies and mini-histories from the history of computing. The angle: it's about people worked together to make things happen. I wish I'd read this book a while ago. Mostly, I...
>> Something to do in Austin: You can, of course, bring your own desk with you to the Oval Office, as did Lyndon Johnson. The Johnson desk is now in the replica Oval Office at the LBJ museum in Austin...
Book Report: The Hard Thing About Hard Things Real-life Tech CEO worst case scenarios from Ben Horowitz. What to do when there's no clever fix for the company's problems. Choosing the least-bad of awful choices. Layoffs. Failures. Perhaps this b...
That time I walked most of the way around the bay I took eight days and walked most of the way around the bay. I wrote down some things that happened, took some photos. Let's hope I left out the tedious parts and included only the interesting parts....
Book Report: Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies It's like a pattern language for software development organizations. This isn't a design pattern language; it's more of a catalog of emergent patterns. You will encounter these situations as you make...
>> Caught the play "Fanny" at Fort Mason this afternoon. It'll be playing for the next week. It hearkens back to a simpler time, a time when ruination was darned simple and common. A time when everyone ...
Book Report: This is Improbable It's a book collecting and compressing "Improbably Research" topics. This book convinced me to go back to reading the Improbable Research blog. A chapterful of this stuff is a lot to get through in a...
Which Comics for the Silicon Valley Comic Con? Folks are organizing a Silicon Valley Comic Con. The idea is: there are plenty of nerds around here, enough for a con. Then again, there are already some bay area cons. But what if the Silicon Valley...
>> Why did I say "sort-of parable" when I could have said "parabloid"? Did I really wake up just to type that? OK back to bed ...
Book Report: Rolling Nowhere It's a journal about riding the rails—hopping freight trains and living with hobos in hobo jungles (at least the hobos that were still around in the 80s). I don't want to hop freights; and this...
>> Wondering why California doesn't raise water prices during a drought? You might enjoy The King of California, the history of a California family farm; though this "family farm" was more of an agribus...
Another Silicon Valley Comic Today I picked up a physical copy of Terms of Service, a non-fiction comic about how we decide to expose our private information to each other and/or to conglomerates. But I could have read it online...
Book Report: Ancillary Justice Zombie space opera science fiction. It was fun. ...
spoiler-free Shinteki Decathlon preview Yay! Today's playtest was fun! ...
>> Today, I got to see 12 Angry Jurors, a.k.a. "12 Angry Men, but NOT ALL MEN." I was glad to see it, since I'd alluded to it before but only bluffingly—I didn't know anything about it. I'm still ...
Book Report: Time Bandit: Two Brothers, the Bering Sea, and One of the World's Deadliest Jobs It's about crabbing and fishing and nautical life in Alaska. There's some tough bits to slog through: bragging about having survived some harebrained stunts; an attempt at a framing story that makes ...
>> I think Europe is ahead of the USA in birdsong recognition smartphone apps. Chirpomatic. Warblr. ...
Game: Broken Age The Broken Age game is pretty; it's like playing a painting; and it has funny jokes! There are also some not-so-funny jokes; one challenge in the game is a puzzle in which you have to set up a funny ...
>> Happy Free Comic Book Day! If you find yourself making an annual trek to your local comic book store and wonder "Should I buy something while I'm there? What comics has Larry been liking lately? Mayb...
Book Report: The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian Conan stories were influential, but I hadn't read any. I'd always been curious: how could a stupid barbarian interest folks so? (Yes, yes, Conan's actually a smart barbarian; but the cliche I'm used ...
>> An article about a "Sleep No More"-like immersive play in China: Director Meng Jinghui Brings First Full-Immersion Play to China. Not exactly a pervasive game, but kinda pervasive. ...
Further Around the Bay I walked more of the way around the bay. You may recall that my walk most of the way around the bay last month skipped a few parts that seemed too dangerous for walking; and a part that didn't seem t...
Book Report: Russians: The People behind the Power I went into this book thinking If Russians are so smart, why do they keep voting for the corrupt Putin? This book answered that question nicely. If I'd lived through what the typical Russian had, why...
>> Some people are surprised to hear about someone playing the trumpet while driving. I'm not; if that bozo tried that on public transit, the other passengers would have kicked him off. ...
Team up for SF Puzzled Pint? Puzzled Pint is tomorrow evening.* I wanna play. Would you like to team up to play in San Francisco? If so, I'd love to hear from you. (I went a couple of months ago. That time, I trusted to my luck...
Book Report: Cop in the Hood A sociologist became a cop in Baltimore's Eastern District and lived to write about it. It's a good book, whether you're looking for some background on The Wire or just want some reminders about why ...
Link Tagging and graffiti as corporate team-building exercise. 1AMSF ...
Link: Double Fine Adventure! I've been watching this serial documentary about how a computer game got made. It distills the thrill and the angst of game development. I've mentioned it before, but back then to see the videos, you...
Book Report: Give and Take This book makes the case that you can behave nicely and still get ahead in business. Is this surprising? Does this need saying? Maybe; the author says that many folks don't think they can give others...
Wanted: Mnemonic for Proper Coyote Hazing What this photo is failing to show you is a coyote peeking out from amongst the eucalyptus trees uphill from UCSF Parnassus Heights, i.e., really really close to where I live. That's from my walk ...
>> Shinteki Decathlon 10 is today!* Wow, it made it to 10. It's kind of a big deal. So excited to be volunteering today. *Or next weekend, if you signed up for the second weekend. ...
Google Streetview knows Muir Woods trails Why walk the Steep Ravine trail like a chump when you can traverse it virtually through street view? There's the Steep Ravine, the Matt Davis, much of the Dipsea… I was thinking of walking ...
Book Report: The Man with the Getaway Face It's another "Parker" crime novel. A quick brutal read. ...
>> If even numbers were odd, then there's a 50/50 chance my idea would have worked. ...
>> Today's Shinteki Decathlon 10 volunteering plan: don't run my camera out of battery power like last weekend. Or… run it out later, at least. I still want to take plenty of photos, though. Shin...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Maybe even Ten Places Ten Times Shinteki Decathlon 10 was on Saturday; and on the Saturday before that. And a month before that was the playtest. Ten of something like this is an impressive milestone, so I got extra clicky with my ...
Book Report: 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5 + RND(1)); : GOTO 10 It's a book about a little "one-liner" Commodore 64 BASIC program. What happens when a bunch of academics want to talk about the good ol' days of 1980s home computer programming? A book like this, th...
>> Team Archimedds Boogs did not win the bar trivia. But we didn't come in last place, either. This was especially impressive since (a) we missed the first round and (b) there was a whole round of golf ...
Puzzlehunts are Everywhere, even Austin Once again I site-volunteered with the first DASH GC who responded to an email. This year: DASH 7 in Austin TX. This was my first time in Austin, so I took a few days to wander around and gawk a...
>> WE CAN BEAT THIS THING i hope anyhow here's an animated GIF Original Image: Pear & Walnut Strudel, Kitchen Ghosts ...
>> From February through this morning, I have had the high score at the ClueKeeper Palace of Fine Arts puzzle hunt. Just mentioning that now in case it's no longer true this afternoon… ...
>> Home internet is out. Phone wifi tethering not working. Guess I will sit and fill in crossword puzzles with a pencil like a caveman. ...
Puzzlehunt Pacing I bumped into Allen Cohn on BART yesterday. We got to talking about puzzlehunt pacing. If you have some easy breezy puzzles and some tough slog puzzles, how do you order them so that players have fun...
Book Report: The Great A&P A surprisingly interesting story about selling food in the USA, featuring lots of government regulation. I said "surprisingly", right? The story of the USA's first big chain store, the food merchant...
tough question Someone asked me how to authenticate a painting. Put your contact information on your web site; you'll get some interesting, albeit misdirected, questions. ...
Novice, Novicer, Novicest I was site-monitoring at a puzzle hunt. Things were quieting down at the site: Most of the teams had solved and gone on. Not all, though. Those that remained were novices, still learning the puzzlehu...
obscure joke What does one say to an urban drifter who lacks snacks? "You're" a "flâneur" without a "flan". ...
Link: Someone Else's Book Report Dennis Bianchi of the SFPD reviews books. He reviewed Days of Rage, a book about violent extremists in 1970. ...
+1 415 868 4629 is still my phone number I'm switching my mobile service over to Project Fi. Along the way, I'm fiddling with approximately a bazillion phone settings. But in theeeory, I'm set up and the Larry Hosken Contact Information pag...
Link: Confronting New Madrid St Louis and environs for earthquake/disaster nerds ...
>> I drew five letters in chalk, one letter in each of five sidewalk squares. I drew slowly, deliberately, neatly. Maybe ten seconds per letter? So figure it was about a minute before the security guard...
Book Report: Infrastructure If your memory is very good, you remember that a few years ago I reported on Infrastructure, a gorgeous book about the systems of industry, agriculture, transport, information, and waste that surroun...
Link: Chanrio How did I struggle along before I knew about Chanrio, the Sanrio-style avatar maker? ...
Jotting Notes on Gruen Day 2015 In this gathering of the Bay Area Infrastructure Observatory, we learned about Victor Gruen, early shopping mall developer and San Leandro's Bayfair Center in particular. I didn't take notes during t...
>> Link: From Haight Theater To Goodwill, The History Of 1700 Haight Street An article with some San Francisco history showing that local politics makes some pretty $&#*ing strange bedfellows. &he...
>> My butt used my phone's Foursquare app to review the Vacaville Premium Outlets mall. Its review: ".aqx .aq X" 19 people have read that review. On the internet, nobody knows you're somebody's butt. ...
Book Report: Countdown to Zero Day The story of Stuxnet, the little virus that crept into Iranian control systems and convinced them to destroy some centrifuges. I already knew the basics, but I learned from this book. Over time, ther...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even BRC "Aug 30-Sep 7 Puzzle Hunt at Burning Man Black Rock City, NV If you go, you'll know it when you see it." –Puzzle Hunt Calendar No, I'm not going to Burning Man. But if you are, now you can re...
>> Last night's playtest of the Black Rock City playtest was fun. I collaborated with folks I knew but mostly folks I didn't, as you might imagine happening at Burning Man where you're wandering around ...
Milestone: 28 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 28 millionth it. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits so...
Hipster Bingo: Puzzle Hunt or Not? This Shinteki Hipster BINGO Puzzle Hunt on ClueKeeper thing at the Come Out and Play festival sounds puzzle-hunty. Then again, it's not announced on Puzzle Hunt Calendar, and maybe that's because it'...
Jotting Notes on Sara Thacher's ADG Talk She designs experiences. She worked on the Games of Nonchalance, Futurecoast; nowadays she can't tell us about her exciting work in Disney Imagineering. Barthe's Death of the Author: just because yo...
>> The Cluekeeper/Shinteki game going on now at 19th and Mission in SF is fun, albeit not super puzzly. A couple of "How did they find that?" environmental features, fun wordplay. Give it a whirl. ...
>> This morning, I did a sort of whaddyacallit… phone-guided walk of the Berkeley hills with a back-story. Following SMS and voice instructions, I walked and climbed and saw some things to a narr...
>> Power outage reminds me how few of my hobbies don't require light or power. Uhmm, none of them? ...
Follow-Up Links If you envied my opportunity to play that Shinteki Hipster BINGO Hunt in San Francisco's Mission District, cheer up: it's now available as a ClueKeeper self-guided hunt. You can play it the next time...
>> Interesting snippet at the Bay Area Night Game wiki: "Ghost Patrol BANG 2 (BANG 37?) is scheduled for May 28th 2016." ...
Link: "We Value Experience": Can a Secret Society Become a Business? A few days after this article about it was published, the described art project shut down. Which might say something about artistic vision versus collaboration or something like that. ...
Link: How to Host a BANG A few days back, someone added some good material to the How to Host a BANG wiki. I've since made some little edits on things I had specialized knowledge about—e.g., if you're running an el-che...
>> Has anyone asked the Burninators puzzlehunt team for their reaction to StrongBad's imagined Escape Room in the latest homestarrunnerdotcom video? ...
Question for GCs: When to take team payments? I asked a question on the Puzzlehunts Google+ community. ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Francisco's Telegraph Hill Over the past few months, some folks and I put together a Telegraph Hill puzzlehunt, the Hill Hunt BANG, which you can read about. Thus we ended a three-year BANG dry spell, yay. ...
Book Report: The Quantum Thief Yes it's been a few weeks since my most recent Book Report. I've been busy. Also, my shelf of New Yorkers filled up. I keep around old issues of the New Yorker to read on occasions it doesn't make se...
Book Report: Bossypants It's a biography by Tina Fey, writer/actress on the TV shows Saturday Night Live and 30Rock. I hadn't watched those (except for some SNL sketches where Fey played awful politician Sarah Palin), so I ...
>> I'm thankful for the internet. Because when my parents' oven was confused to find itself both locked and opened, I didn't know what to do. But someone knew, and they'd written it down. Oh, and I'm t...
>> Update: This was a false alarm. This was an old text buried in my inbox; not a new text accidentally deleted. Whoopsie. If you recently sent me a text that starts "Barbarians at the gate", I lost t...
>> That "Barbarian" missing text was a false alarm, sorry. It's actually an old text, months old. When I switched to this new messaging app, I imported my old messages into the new app. A while later, t...
Book Report: Being Mortal It's Atul Gawande, thoughtful writer/doctor, on end-of-life issues. Gets into the question: why does society pressure doctors to make our last days miserable? Maybe because folks don't want to think ...
>> It's like someone started to bedazzle this lamp post. And then someone labeled some stones for a phone keypad before noticing that there weren't enough. Or something? It's like something, that's for ...
Book Report: The Old Ways It's a book of philosophical meandering ramblings about walking and sailing old routes. It starts out with a great deal of meandering musings, but if you can get past that, there are some interesting...
>> The Sawzall programming language has been replaced by Go? That means some documentation I worked on back in the day has gone obsolete. The fate of a software technical writer: Here tells the truth on...
GEOS-SC vs SC-GEOS If you worked at Geoworks, you might remember that one of our products was GEOS-SC, an operating system for early-days smartphones. And you might remember that in Japan, the GEOS trademark was held ...
Book Report: Lean In I heard a bunch of bad things about this book. I read it so that I could make fun of it. But now that I've read the book, the bad things I've heard seem like they were about a strawman version. I'll ...
kloak looks interesting Kloak is a social network in which your friends can see what you're up to, even though the folks running the service can't. To "friend" someone, you meet them in person and each use the app to scan t...
You can "friend" someone on Kloak without meeting them f2f. I thought the only way to "friend" someone on Kloak was to meet and scan each others' phones. But Egnor played with the app enough to figure out it's got UI to use other means, e.g., email. That's n...
Book Report: Revision In this sci-fi novel, the coincidences are part of the plot. A fun quick read. ...
posted my kloak contact info I posted my kloak QR code with the rest of my contact information. I mailed that QR code to a bunch of folks. But when I was looking for lists of people to mail it to, I used social networks. So I di...
Book Report: In Defense of Flogging What if prisoners could shorten their sentences by choosing to be flogged instead? This sounds cruel…but then you think about how many prisoners would take that deal. Which gets to the book's ...
>> I'm liking Signal, a text-messaging app. It was darned easy to set up. I replaced my phone's built-in text messaging app with Signal. Now when I text another Signal user, Signal encrypts the message ...
Book Report: Hipster Business Models In which the Pricenomics writers report on some small and/or modern businesses. These folks didn't necessarily set out to be hipsters. A writer who sat in the park and wrote stories on demand. As he ...
>> I'm kind of embarrassed about how long it took me to install Signal. I assumed it would take a while to set up. It's a security app written by security people. Surely there would be questions I didn'...
Book Report: The Everything Store It's a history of Amazon. That's Amazon the company, not the Amazon region of what-have-you. As near as I can tell, mean people thrive as Amazon negotiators. In various areas, Amazon will start out w...