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Bloomberg published a big article last year about Chinese infiltration of American computer hardware. Reportedly, servers at Amazon and Apple were manufactured with a covert chip that could report back to China anything that passed through the server. It was explosive and widely publicized, but also a little suspect. Now
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A couple of folding cameras we inherited. The one on the right is an Agfa. I don’t know what the one on the left is. The lens is a Rodenstock. The shutter is a Pronto, made by Gauthier. The AGC logo apparently stands for Alfred Gauthier Calmbach, and also
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Via the National Institute of Health, a 1991 study from the British Journal of Sports Medicine identified horse-riding is more dangerous than motorcycle riding. Horse-riding carries a high participant morbidity and mortality. Whereas a motor-cyclist can expect a serious incident at the rate of 1 per 7000h, the horse-rider can
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From the fish shell design document: Every configuration option in a program is a place where the program is too stupid to figure out for itself what the user really wants, and should be considered a failure of both the program and the programmer who implemented it. If any program
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Scott meyeres is one of the foremost experts on C++. He recently had this to say regarding bug reports on the code in his books. I retired from active involvement in C++ at the end of 2015, and in the ensuing two and a half years, I’ve forgotten enough
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I’m in a period of Japanophilia. Recently the Austin Film Society showed all six installments of Lone Wolf and Cub, which were excellent. This weekend they’re playing Lady Snowblood. I have never seen it but am very excited. Apparently it’s an inspiration for Kill Bill, but I
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We recently cancelled our cable TV. We’re an Apple household, so we get most our stuff from AppleTV apps now. In addition to the usual Netflix and Amazon, here’s what we use. iTunes: We purchased episodes of The Expanse (which airs on SyFy) on iTunes. We’ll have
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As everyone knows, the number one reason for poor craftsmanship is poor tools. To that end, I am addressing my poor blogging output by changing the blogging platform. I have moved from Wordpress to Jekyll. Joking aside, WordPress is powerful in lots of ways, but it does require care and
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If you’ve ever tried to research web hosting, you’re probably noticed the disreputable nature of hosting reviews. Most review sites are riddled with affiliate links, which calls into question all the reviews and ratings. When I was shopping for managed WordPress hosting, one site I’ve come to
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Ready, Fire, Aim: The Science Behind Police Shooting Bystanders | TIME.com: According to a 2008 RAND Corporation study evaluating the New York Police Department’s firearm training, between 1998 and 2006, the average hit rate during gunfights was just 18 percent. When suspects did not return fire, police officers hit
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Jia Tolentino at the New Yorker laments that blogging is over: Blogging, that much-maligned pastime, is gradually but surely disappearing from the Internet, and so, consequently, is a lot of online freedom and fun. As evidence she cites the closing of * Grantland * Toast * Gawker * Gothamist * Awl & Hairpin Those are
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Michael Tsai on Swift: I like Swift. But, having programmed in probably more than a dozen languages, I would not classify Swift as easy to learn. It’s at the end with the harder ones like C++. People see the var declarations and think, “Javascript!”. Type inference hides a lot