Cover photo from Wikipedia Don’t think social media owes you a damn thing Over time different people get mad at things social media sites do and complain as if they are entitled some level of service or performance from the site. This has happened a lot in the last year. Twitter has shifted operational practices …

Read More

Signatures Image from Kurtis Garbutt. Putting data out in the environment allows everyone to access it. The problem is that it allows any one to alter and recreate that data in their own vision. Sometimes that is great, other times it is disastrous. I love the idea of someone using public data to make something, but I …

Read More

Remember when O’Reilly sold books? Books I know they still sell books, but try to find where. No really. You go to O’Reilly and try and find a book, just a single book. On that first page I find the word book once and it is a range reference implying that books are the low order item and conferences are the …

Read More

Like flossing, backups are something we should do all the time, but for many it is often overlooked for spans of time. Partly because it is a lot of work. Partly because it has been a moving target over time. Backups The basic idea is to take a snapshot of either your whole system or the parts that are important to you …

Read More

I’m not talking about having being more materialistic or going out to consume and shop. No, I’m talking about the things you think you already own, but do you really? Ownership There were a lot of things to worry about in 2021. I’m not going to touch most of the ones that come to mind. What we …

Read More

QOI, the standard Earlier this month I wrote about an exciting new image format that was an option for simple and fast encoding while also being on par with state of the art formats. QOI was lossless, compressed about as well as PNG and was about as fast as an image can get to encode and decode. Dominic Szablewski …

Read More

Why do I care what a celebrity thinks? We get blitzed with these messages all day long. Famous athlete/muscian/actor endorses X. Unless it is something that is directly part of their success story (like a work out technique for an athlete) why would I care? Why should I care? Any random person on the street can give me …

Read More

QOI There is a new image format in town. It is about on par with PNG for compression, and only encodes RGB and RGBA. What is interesting about it is how simple it is, and as a result of that simplicity how fast it is. So fast that it has achieved essentially O(n) which is the optimal performance scale for an image. …

Read More

Cover photo from Wikipedia Privacy or fraud tool? Apple and Google have been moving the state of the art forward in privacy enhancements for phones. Most of these have revolved around providing the user a finer grain of control over permissions. Does App A need access to the camera, or does App B need the microphone, …

Read More

View source, next chapter A few weeks ago I wrote about a travesty of technology where officials in Missouri shifted the blame for making a mistake to a reporter for finding it. To sum it up, People in their organization made a series of mistakes that resulted in hundreds of thousands of people in education having …

Read More