English settlers in America once grumbled about the taxes they paid to the King of England, but now the tides have reversed. A steady stream of Yank Tax flows into America.

When British schools use computers, they start by thinking about computers with a pre-paid Windows Licence for the classrooms, then fill the …

When coders use the GNU Public Licence, they have no obligation to give anyone credit for anything.¹ Despite this, coders almost always receive credit for everything they do, down to the exact line-changes.²

Meanwhile, the Creative Commons licences - far more popular with artists - have explicit stipulations, but don't …

Feature-comparisons always turn into a murky mess when people compare proprietary software to FOSS. The proprietary software tends to try to do everything, while the FOSS-tools try to do everything by doing nothing.

Office 365 vs Libreoffice

Office 365 advertises a chonky list of features:

• Powerpoint
• Word Processing …

The absolute fucking state of Linux documentation shows undeniably that nobody ever reads it.

Open a terminal, and just try, in earnest, to learn about what is happening:

 1$ ?
 2$ help
 3
 4
 5GNU bash, version 5.2.37(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
 6These shell commands are defined internally.  Type `help' to …

I switched to a left-handed mouse for the first time, at the ripe age of 38. It's unviable, so I've stopped.

Finding a mouse was easy - my mouse is already symmetrical. Reversing the keys was just one command.

But you can't use a computer with that mouse. All the GUI shortcuts - Ctrl + c, Ctrl + f - all focus on the …

I used to think of programming as something natively binary. 0's and 1's, [ True, False ], just like the Propositional Logic in first year Philosophy. And filesystems do work that way on the disk - every picture is made of 0's and 1's.

However, Philosophy, or Logic in general, has other systems. Some of them use 'True' …

I asked an older family member about old Scottish legends. She told me about what she heard when she was younger, from someone older still, and I suppose that puts the legend at least a hundred years back.

There are ghostly bagpipes that foretell death...there are banks of primroses, where, if you pick the wrong …

Among certain circles, there is a general agreement that university Computer Science courses don't teach practical basics, or equip students to work with actual computers. This begs the question, what would a reasonable course look like?

When I worked at an IT outsourcing company, I would test people's computer skills. …