Coyote Tracks

Back in the olden days, there was an Insert key on Mac keyboards. (There still is on PC keyboards, although in many programs it doesn’t actually do anything anymore.) If you were editing text, you had two different modes, overwrite and insert. If you were in insert mode, then when text was in front of the cursor, typing would insert text. If the | character represents the cursor: banana |crazypants And you typed plaid, you’d get: banana plaid|crazypants This is what you expect in modern…

In November of last year, I wrote about what I did and didn’t want to do in Emacs. It’s great for anything that involves text editing/processing, good for certain kinds of management tasks (it’s a great Git client, and even has surprisingly useful file management tricks up its sleeve); it’s not—at least to me—great for tasks that involve viewing, like RSS reading and PDF viewing. I’ve kept putting this to the test, and stand by most of what I said back then. Most of the time I’d rather view…

If you’ve been on the Internet in the last fifteen years and change, you’ve probably heard of Soylent, whether you wanted to or not. Nutrition drinks as a category have been around forever, pitched in various forms to dieters or weightlifters or people who just frequently find themselves rushing in the morning. Nobody gives their coworkers shit for grabbing a prepackaged smoothie for breakfast. Soylent, though, has a distinctly bad reputation. Partly, that comes from the fact that the original…

Technology needs another revolution. It's just not the one the industry seems hellbent on delivering.

It's a question I expect to be asked in the future. I have an answer, but I can't help suspect it's the wrong question.

On real restrictions in computing life versus imagined ones.