Updated 03-Aug-2025 Note: I've replaced Fish Shell with Bash in my personal technology stack, as of March 2018. Ha ha, back on Fish Shell. Fish Shell is a very useful shell. I use it on OSX and Linux. Provides for some sanity at the command line. For an editor I use Nano. Note that there ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Bash being the most common shell, it makes sense to learn bash shell scripting. I didn't think this at first and later came to the conclusion, having spent time with Fish Shell. However, Bash is definitely old and creaky with some frankly ridiculous implementation details. Fish can be installed most everywhere, and is ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Here are some ways of getting things tweaked. Your mileage may vary. Mint-Y-Dark This theme has some hardcoded colors in PNG files. Grayscale them with ImageMagick, as follows: for file in /usr/share/themes/Mint-Y-Dark/gtk-2.0/assets/*.png; do convert "$file" -colorspace Gray "$file"; done for file in /usr/share/themes/Mint-Y-Dark/gtk-3.0/assets/*.png; do convert "$file" -colorspace Gray "$file"; done Edit the /usr/share/themes/Mint-Y-Dark/gtk-2.0/gtkrc ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Scrollbar usability is shoddy and slipping across wide swaths of the web and software in general. Of course I am getting older, which means this is more and more of an annoyance. We know already, and for some time, how to do scrollbar usability and accessibility. Putting aside voice commands, just the bare ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 OpenVPN on Debian is the second step in securing an operating system. Below we include ufw firewall installation and configuration as well. Related Artices in Debian Services and Applications Debian on AWS Lightsail OpenVPN on Debian + UFW Firewall Nginx and Letsencrypt on Debian PHP & MariaDB on Debian Grav CMS on Debian ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 This is a setup of several items, starting with Debian 9 on Amazon AWS Lightsail. This has server basics and apt, and then follows with links to additional articles. In general, after several years of running CentOS on Linode, and then Amazon Linux AMI on EC2 and Lightsail, I find that Debian 9 ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Well, it turns out, there is no such thing, per se, as an IPA Keyboard Layout, at least not in the sense that there are keyboard layouts for various languages and layout styles (e.g., English, Dvorak, etc.). This seems to me to be a tremendous oversight, though it obviously came about because someone ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 I'll come back and write more about this later (especially how to help with this with one's children), but for now here are some resources: Submenu Navigation - Nielsen Norman Group Seeking information online: the influence of menu type, navigation path complexity and spatial ability on information gathering tasks Online Spatial Reasoning Task ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Note: since Debian has Cinnamon built-in as a desktop choice on install, and since the rest of Mint is Ubuntu or Debian (LMDE), it seems a bit nonsensical to go Mint when I can go Debian +Cinnamon. For Cinnamon interface changes, see: LMDE Cinnamon Modifications This document will be somewhat regularly updated with ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 There are significant differences between high-achieving, gifted, and highly gifted children. When one recognizes unusual, advanced early development, understanding what one is seeing is important. There are different vulnerabilities and burdens for each of these groups: - The Burdens of Gifted Children - The Truth About Gifted Versus High-Achieving Students - Vulnerabilities of ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs have similar insights when it comes to hiring the best. This is equally relevant when one is building a school. Hire the best teachers possible, if you want a high-performing school. Three Questions When Making a Hiring Decision From the 1998 Amazon Shareholder Letter: It would be impossible ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 There are several white label options for search and if one considers advertising a viable business model to engage in, then consider Bing or Infospacehttp://www.infospace.com/partners/. Consider the case of Izito and related country code tlds, as well as MonsterSpace, both are pure play partner deals with nothing technical in their own right, with ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 For various reasons, now is a terrible time (in the world). (Note: this is 2018, and we thought that was terrible. 2020 laughs hysterically at you.) At the same time, my own time horizons have shifted due to having young children. My eldest may graduate from high school in 15 years, give or ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 This is a brief overview of ChromeOS Keyboard Shortcuts / Keystrokes. Hardware Key Differences No Windows key, no Command key However external keyboards can have these mapped to other keys Capslock Key replaced by Search Key Shft+Search = Capslock Remap Keys > Settings > Device > Keyboard Remap Capslock to Search key on ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Moving from OSX to ChromeOS can be complex because the ChromeOS ecosystem includes Android and Linux applications, though support for those platforms are not fully implemented as of July, 2018. Nevertheless there enough advantages to make a comprehensive attempt at such a migration desirable at this point in time. My personal reasons include ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Blast from the past, this request for smartphone/netbook recommendations comes from May, 2009. Updated below with comments from July, 2018. Note that we've updated the title from Netbooks to Chromebooks. Help! Too Many Choices > Jeff, I am in need of a portable device for accessing email when I'm on the road. Of ... Read more