Stick your dependencies in a Makefile to make it easy to install. My scavenger hunt repo only has a few dependencies, but the Makefile still has each one. It works like this: 1 [ ~/scavenger ] $ make 2 3check Check you have the project dependencies. 4clean Remove generated files. 5help Print the help message. 6hunt …

My laptop is slow, my tower-PC is fast. Sometimes I want to execute a program using the tower's hardware, but remain using the laptop. Attempt 1: The Normal Way Copy the project files from the laptop to the tower. Connect to the tower with ssh. Install the program on I need to execute on the tower. Execute the program …

Terms of Service are complete bunkum. We all know this, because nobody reads them. And because people often can't read them, because someone else signed up for them. During my time on the IT helpdesk, I set up people's computers for them, including the software. So when Margaret from Accounts opened her new laptop, the …

Elwood P. Dowd has an imaginary friend called 'Harvey', and he's terrifying. Harvey may be pleasant, but Elwood is a man in his thirties, talking to an invisible rabbit, and asking respectable people to also talk with him. Elwood has the air of someone with an acquired brain-injury. With a mixture of fear and sympathy, …

Alan Turing invented the primordial computer, and people felt so eager to imagine that the ticker-tape might come alive and have a chat that he immediately had to invent a test to stop them waffling about 'what it means to be conscious'. Nothing has ever passed this test, but chatbot companies do love to say their …

A mild ride looms. It looks like action will commence at any moment, but those moments turn into a sensible withdrawal or a short book review. Ghost Dog is a samurai, because he read a book on how to be a samurai. This makes no sense in the modern USA, so he must create sense out of it. The film quotes extensively from …

Recfiles let you write and check plain-text notes. They look like this: %rec: Book %key: slug %sort: year month slug: thinkingexperience author: H. H. Price title: Thinking and Experience year: 1953 publisher: Harvard University Press, Cambridge slug: yugocaves author: Dr Neven Krešić title: Karst I Pećine Jugoslavije …

Git servers like Github and Gitlab are a complete mess, because they try to appeal to every use-case. If they were a person, they would be someone who says 'yea, me too' so reflexively that everyone gives them pitying looks. Each could do better as a more specialized service for a particular use. But we don't need …

I bought a book called 'Thus Space Zarathustra', full of turgid language, making it a challenge to read. Nietzsche wrote the book in the 19th century, so he's old, and the book is old, but why translate it in faux-archaic English? People of the past didn't say 'here we are, living in the olden-days'; Nietzsche …