Updated 03-Aug-2025 I've been watching Real Humans and Humans, along with other robot movies. I'm a fan of these and other science fiction TV series and movies. My first science fiction novel was The Tar-Aiym Krang by Allen Dean Foster, who went on to write Alien, Outland, and a host of other fantastic books. So, ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 What is great about Life Coaching is that life is a generalized concept. Just as it appears sometimes that an astrologer or fortune teller can have insight, it is the generalized nature of that insight, combined with pattern recognition, that makes life coaching not only possible, but lucrative on a level completely divorced ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Note: This post is out of date. The AlmondPlus people sent a refurbished replacement to me, after charging $50 for shipping, and this thing doesn't work half the time, and takes 5 minutes to boot up normally. Piece of junk. Don't trust these hucksters. Oh, and the orginal device died a month after ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 We can now contemplate the departure of the CEO, whom frankly I always thought was supposed to sell it to Google, as he did Feedburner. Not meeting expectations, what can we see as obvious failures? More Jackass Attitudes A prime example of the ongoing jackass behavior is how Twitter deals with third-party apps. ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 It appears that for a good part of the world (the hot and humid part), the water problem will largely be solved. Combined with renewable energy resources (solar, wind, hydro, geo, tidal) this becomes a compound solution, both decreasing relative humidity and temperature, as well as generating clean water. Think of it as ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 There is some interesting device data if there is enough enthusiasm or boredom to find it. For one thing, it appears that the best Android visitors to sites use either Android browser or Chrome, and not Firefox. This is an area Firefox is failing fairly hard at. Another point is that for both ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 I've heard the accusations, that Apple is into anorexic design and that the 2015 Macbook is as powerful as a 2011 Macbook Air (though that is an i7 Macbook Air). Since I actually use every day a 2011 Macbook Air (4gb ram, i5, 256gb SSD), I want to comment on this. Performance and ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Buddhism is not some religion of quietism, although it is that as well. But rather, Buddhism as a lived practice (specifically situated, as I am, in mainland Southeast Asia) could potentially inform economic development in the same locale. Let's find out... The Language of Business As an aside, it is important to criticize ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 So, Etherpad is a thing (actually, Etherpad Lite, which is a NodeJS thing). That is, a real-time collaborative editing tool. Essentially the answer collaborative web-based text editors, free and open source. Last year a WebRTC hook and plugin was made available for Etherpad (!!). WebRTC WebRTC is real-time communication for the web. Firefox ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 fuser and lsof are two important tools showing which processes are using what files and/or sockets. Fuser is the simpler one focused on finding out what processes are using a given file (or port), while lsof can list processes without specifying, such as all open sockets Fuser fuser stands for file user and ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 A development server recently became compromised, and while this isn't necessarily a good thing, it does raise awareness and provides impetus to strengthen security measures. Access Control A few axioms: Access control is better through certificates (what you have) than passwords (what you know) Two-factor authentication is better than both (what you have ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 HTTPS Everywhere is a wonderful concept, but of course we need functionality first, which means dealing with the whole PKI issue. So, when stuff is located in countries with limited IPv4 addresses, how can this be accomplished? - Simply put SNI allows for any number of certificates to work on a single IP ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 When I was in a PhD program, and before that an MS, the academic researchers and the administration all talked about how important advances in science and scholarship will come from interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. Disciplinary boundaries had been mined through the decades and ages, and it is cross-disciplinary research where the findings ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 I received an email about Paymo v.3 which was recently released. Paymo is a time-tracking, project management and invoicing cloud-based app (with native applications for desktop and mobile). Paymo has been around a while (hence being on their mailing list), and they have an impressive feature set and really thought through usability. I ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 I've been engaged in thinking about education and professional development since encountering the fantastic difficulties (most vividly displayed as a university lecturer and student advocate in an advanced graduate program in the mid-2000s). Since then, I have developed a fairly good idea of the exact, largely intractable nature of the difficulties specifically in ... Read more