KC8ZKF

2,940 karma · joined February 27, 2009

rich at walnutbeach.com

KC8ZKFon Mexico’s take on the Cornish pasty

I love pasties. The upper peninsula of Michigan used to be full of mom and pop pasty stands. I hope it still is, I haven't been there in years.

KC8ZKFon Show HN: Pocket Puter

Another battery hint. Turn off wifi, bluetooth and location services when they are not in use. These can be a huge drain.

KC8ZKFon A Linguist Explains Why 'Laurel' Sounds Like 'Yanny'

I've heard all possible permutations (Laurel, Yanny, neither, and both) depending on the putative source. All on the same machine. Compression and transcoding might be a bigger variable than psycho-acoustics or age.

KC8ZKFon Finland offers free online Artificial Intelligence course to anyone, anywhere

Or a legislator or a citizen.

KC8ZKFon Batch editing files with ed

  sed -i.bak s/baz/"baz\\n  - elephants"/ *.txt

KC8ZKFon Batch editing files with ed

  sed s/baz/baz\\nelephants/

KC8ZKFon Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

I agree with almost everything you write here, but I just want to make clear that my comment was about the term "fake news", and not reactionary outrage, FUD, attack TV shows, Reddit, or anything else.

KC8ZKFon Introducing extended line endings support in Notepad

To be fair, U*nix editors in the 90's had problems with line endings other than strictly newline. Even agnostic editors like Emacs had problems. It was a three-way mutually cultivated impedance.

KC8ZKFon Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

"Fake news" has become a cure for cognitive dissonance, but it started out as "pizzagate" and its ilk. That certainly was fake, somewhat effective, and toxic. It's still around. Check out qanon, spirtcooking, etc.

KC8ZKFon CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized

Radio-Canada is the french language arm of the CBC. It is television and radio, not just audio.

KC8ZKFon Cripes, a bumbershoot

Lynne Murphy was recently a guest on the Allusionist podcast.

https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/across-the-pond

KC8ZKFon Facebook Employees Are Quitting or Switching Departments Over Ethical Concerns

Or perhaps, over time, they have changed their minds. The principle of charity, it seems to me, requires that we take them at their word in the absence of evidence otherwise.

KC8ZKFon Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

So you have to join Facebook in order to not be tagged on Facebook?

KC8ZKFon Fred's ImageMagick Scripts

Try 'info bash', it's a lot easier to browse. 'info' by itself gives you a menu of installed info documentation. 'C-h i' in Emacs.

KC8ZKFon Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

Yes. Maybe it's time we quit obsessing over headlines, and realized that actually reading the article might be necessary.

KC8ZKFon Fountain pen inks: the good, the bad, and the ugly (2011)

I've had good luck with De Atramentis Document Ink. Dries very quickly, won't smear when I set my beer can^W^W coffee cup down on it. I have been using it for years, and it hasn't screwed up my pen.

I don't know if it is as safe on fine pens as the article would want, but since I use it in a $30 Lamy, I'm not too concerned.

KC8ZKFon Agatha Christie’s life rivaled the mysteries she created

After you read "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd", I recommend "Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" by Pierre Bayard. (spoiler alert: Please don't Google this book until you have read the Christie.)

Bayard writes "revisionist readings" of popular mysteries, in which he exonerates the killers. He mixes in a fair amount of literary criticism. I have a hard time deciding how serious he is.

KC8ZKFon 132 year old message in a bottle found on West Australian beach

I assume the bottle was corked.

KC8ZKFon What We Found When X-Raying Some MLB Baseballs

Exit velocity and launch angle of the ball have only been recorded since 2014. 2015 league-wide. That's why this latest change is causing all this analysis.

KC8ZKFon What We Found When X-Raying Some MLB Baseballs

He might be a little biased, but Justin Verlander tweeted some R analysis on exit velo and launch angle 2014 v 2017:

https://twitter.com/JustinVerlander/status/96939000476931686...

Seems the balls are flying farther?

KC8ZKFon Peace for Triple Piano

From Vi Hart's FAQ

Q: How do you pronounce “Vi”? A: Usually “Vi” rhymes with “Hi”, but the non-English pronunciation is often like “Vee,” and I consider that also correct. I will also answer to “Six” and “Not-Emacs”.

KC8ZKFon Usenet, authentication, and engineering: early design decisions for Usenet

Same with the scary devil monastery. You could post, but you needed to know the "chicken."

KC8ZKFon ‘Lede’ vs. ‘Lead’ (2011)

Quick glance at the results prior to 1900 shows that "lede" is not being used in the sense under discussion.

KC8ZKFon Regarding the Em Dash

"When your goal is to make something that looks like it was typeset by someone with an awareness of typographical conventions..."

If by that you mean typesetting, I agree. Typing and typesetting are two different activities.

LaTex, for example, will typeset both ".(one space)" and ".(two spaces)" into the same white space that is somewhat larger than one typed space and somewhat smaller than two.

KC8ZKFon Regarding the Em Dash

Hacker News eats the second space. Which is fine. I'm not saying that typesetters should show two spaces between sentences, rather the edict against typing two spaces between sentences is wrong. Two spaces even has a (small) amount of semantic information. i.e. "This is a full stop and not part of an acronym or radix point, etc."

KC8ZKFon Regarding the Em Dash

I am an unapologetic curmudgeon who uses two spaces. Or rather, my right thumb does. I learned to type on an IBM Selectric, I use mostly mono-spaced fonts, and two spaces after a full stop makes perfect sense. I went thirty years between learning it and thinking about it, and then some point-and-drool twee bloggers made it unfashionable.

KC8ZKFon SQL Keys in Depth

No he didn't. The "first name/last name" constraint is a straw man for didactic purposes. He's explaining why it never made sense.

KC8ZKFon FCC Fines Sinclair Broadcast Group $13.4M for Running Sponsored Content as News

The electromagnetic spectrum is a limited and crowded part of the commonwealth, and citizens can require that it is being used in their interests.

KC8ZKFon The Rise and Fall of the English Sentence

But verbing weirds language...

http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25

KC8ZKFon Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs

Steve Jobs