Software History

On Thursday, Aaron noted an idea for a service that would, given a URL, return the profile photo associated with the h-card on that URL. I found the idea intriguing, noting my interest in building it. I agreed that it would be great to have an API to call to retrieve a photo, similar to Gravatar but using h-cards.

One of my favourite patterns in the Python programming language is the

This is the tenth post in the Advent of Technical Writing series, wherein I will share something I have learned from my experience as a technical writer. My experience is primarily in software technical writing, but what you read may apply to different fields, too. View all posts in the series.

I have enjoyed crafting my daily update that is printed with the thermal printer. So far, my daily update includes, among other things, my schedule, the weather for the day, my RSS feed, a news update from The Guardian, and a tech news update from The Guardian. But I wanted to keep experimenting with the printer. Then I got an idea: why don't I try to add an IndieWeb word of the day to the update?

I spent some time last night quizzing myself on the AP Style Guide, a topic on which I have never specifically studied but about which I am curious. My scores varied between the tests I tried. I certainly learned a thing or two. It got me thinking: to what style guide does the Guardian, the newspaper I read most regularly, adhere? I found in a Google Search that they have a series of articles in which they outline their style guide, divided into individual articles for each letter of the alphabet ^1 [^2].

I am writing a blog post every day from December 1st to December 24th, 2021, about a blogger whose writing or site I follow. My aim for this series is to help you discover new blogs and to help get the word out about content creators whose blogs I appreciate. You can read more about this series in the inaugural Day 1 post.

In 2021, I embarked on a journey to print out the content on my blog. The scope of the project was limited. I decided to print all of my coffee posts published both on this blog as well as Steampunk Coffee, for whom I had written numerous blog posts. I decided to print only the coffee posts so that the printed version would have a theme. I was excited by the prospects of being able to hold my writings on coffee in my hands, and looked forward to a day where I could print another volume. That time has come.

As I write, I am sitting next to a speaker in a coffee shop, after having read the newspaper and enjoyed a fulfilling breakfast. I am writing on my phone. Not my preferred tool for writing, but inspiration can strike anywhere. I need to get my thoughts on the proverbial notepad.

Last night, I was experimenting more with word surprisals (entropy), which are calculated using the probabilities of a word appearing in a specified corpus. For my analyses, I was using a corpus of articles from the New York Times to calculate word surprisals, which has proven effective for my blog [^1]. I started to think about whether you could use word surprisals for authorship verification.

I read

I was in a discussion yesterday about introducing young people (17-18) to generative text models. I noted that

Pocket Casts, the application I use to listen to podcasts, released a Pocket Casts Wrapped feature. This feature creates a Spotify Wrapped-esque slideshow featuring the highlights of one's year in listening to podcasts. According to my Pocket Casts Wrapped, I listened to 24 different shows and 364 podcast episodes in total. If I were to listen to all those podcasts back-to-back, I would spend seven days and three hours listening.

When I first started implementing my Micropub endpoint, the tool I use to post content such as likes and bookmarks on my website, I decided that I would show a brief message stating how I had reacted a post. The format for these posts was

The rain outside here in San Francisco is unyielding. This is perhaps a sign that I should let my feet rest after two long days of walking outdoors. While the rain falls, I have taken an opportunity to do a bit of writing and design. I decided to make a poster that shows the IndieWeb principles. The poster, sized for A4 paper, is available in JPG and PDF forms.

The topic of this month's IndieWeb Carnival is self care. This prompt comes at an apt time. One week ago, I was considering about what I could write. I hesitated, pondering whether the subject matter would be too difficult to tackle. That very sentiment encapsulates, in a round about way, how I feel approach self care: it is complicated.

I've been enjoying the Missing Bean Peruvian Direct Trade beans for about a week. I got a small box of the beans from my local coffee shop when I ran out of beans at home. At first, I did not know what beans I was drinking. I recently popped back into my local coffee shop to find out. The beans are from Missing Bean.

Below is my recipe for brewing coffee with the Aeropress. The Aeropress is my primary brewing device.

On Monday, my Acaia Pearl scale arrived, the latest addition to my home brew bar. I decided to purchase this scale because my previous scales were not as accurate or responsive as I would like. The Acaia Pearl scale has a reputation for being the best scale for professionals and home brewers so I decided it was worth a look. After further research, I found the scale met my needs: the Pearl was advertised as fast and accurate.

Spotify Wrapped. A year of one's music in review, packaged into a delightful, colourful interactive experience. I saw someone post their Spotify Wrapped and almost immediately went to Spotify, wondering if mine was ready. It was. I skipped through most of the review, searching for the headline statistic: who were the top artists to whom I had listened.

Within my first day or two of arriving in San Francisco, I saw Cruise driverless cars on the road. The cars are allowed to drive during the day with a driver at the helm. After 10:30pm the cars can drive in autonomous mode without a driver. I forgot that driverless cars were allowed on the streets here. Later, a friend asked whether I wanted to take a ride in a driverless car.

Identify the signature of an unresponsive app terminated by the watchdog, and address the issue.

null

This is the Windows installer for version 5.1.7 of the Safari web browser, the last version released for Windows.

U.S. Atlas is a computerized world map with thousands of facts and statistics for US counties. Software Toolworks also produced a World Atlas, and a multimedia CD-ROM atlas.

A community specifically dedicated to the study, curation, celebration, documentation, and...

CommonMark fork could end up better for users... but original creators seem to disagree.

Explore the milestones in the history of web design: Twitter in 2006.

Donald Trump Jr. on Saturday criticized The New York Times' decision to add Sarah Jeong to their editorial board despite the revelation of her many racist, anti-white