Help me get my feet back on the ground
units is a Unix command line program that just doesn’t translate well to a graphical user interface. You have: 105 m/s^2 You want: g * 10.70702 / 0.093396667 You have: 240 cc You want: floz * 8.1153654...
View ArticleFeet down below his knee
Following up this post from yesterday, I downloaded and compiled GNU units to give it a test run. Although it’s feature-packed, it won’t let me use units like [\sqrt{\textrm{in}}]. Also, the inclusion...
View ArticleAck
At the end of last week’s post about trusses, I mentioned that I had found an old photo of a roof truss by greping for the word “truss” in a folder of project reports on my work computer. I should not...
View ArticleText files and me - Part 2
I ended the first installment of this reminiscence in late 1996, a time at which I was dealing with two sources of frustration: Everything I’d written in the previous decade was either lost or on the...
View ArticleText files and me - Part 3
I ended the second installment of this odd memoir in the early 2000s. I was using Linux, editing my files mostly in NEdit, and generating paper reports for my clients though a combination of SGML and...
View ArticleHard disk failures, past and present
When I woke up my office computer yesterday morning and looked in the upper left corner, I saw this: That’s the output of my SuperDuper! log file extractor being displayed on my Desktop by NerdTool....
View ArticleLabel printing scripts on GitHub
I’ve just created a GitHub repository, for my label printing utilities, one of which I used a few days ago to make labels for my new hard drives. What follows is the repository’s README, which should...
View ArticleAddresses, labels, and scripts
A few days ago I added a new script to my plabels repository at GitHub. This is the repository that contains my scripts for printing on Avery address labels, although the previous two scripts in the...
View ArticleDennis Ritchie, Unix, and clarity
Last week’s obituaries of Dennis Ritchie focused, naturally, on his creation of C and his co-creation, with Ken Thompson, of Unix. I want to talk about something else: the remarkable clarity of the...
View ArticleReturn on investment
Keyboard Maestro has been on my mind recently. Several bloggers I follow use it, and Gabe Weatherhead in particular has done such a good job explaining how and why he uses it—on both his blog and with...
View ArticleFinding man pages on the web with TextExpander 4
You know by now that TextExpander 4 is out and that its fill-ins feature comes with more options: default values, multiline text fields, optional sections, and popup menus. You can read about them on...
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