Category: Uncategorized
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When do we teach kids to edit?
My 10 year-old recently had to write an essay for an application for a national scholarship program. He did great, writing 450ish words that were readable, thoughtful, and fun, with pleasantly varying sentences. And then we started editing. I remember feeling like giving up in my early editing experiences, out of sorrow for the perfect…
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Was the Cambrian JavaScript Explosion a Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon?
A kind of cliché-but-true complaint common among programmers in the late 2010’s was that there were too many new JavaScript things every week. Frameworks, libraries, and bits and pieces of tooling relentlessly arrived, exploded in popularity, and then receded like waves on a beach. My sense is that this pace has slowed over the last…
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Prevent Unoconv From Exporting Hidden Sheets From Excel Documents
At work we use unoconv—a python script that serves as a nice frontend to the UNO document APIs in LibreOffice/OpenOffice—as part of our pipeline for creating preview PDFs and rasterized thumbnail images for a variety of document formats. Recently we had an issue where our thumbnail for a Excel spreadsheet document inexplicably didn’t match the…
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Playing Marathon (via Aleph One) With Controllers on RetroPie
Bungie released Marathon in 1994, the same year Doom II came out. Marathon was also a first-person “run around picking up guns to kill aliens with” game, but had a comparatively robust plot with multiple conflicting AI characters, multiple settings, a relatively fleshed-out picture of the bad guys, effectively moody atmospheric music, and some additional…
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Adjusting the Rangefinder on a Seagull 203-I
I recently got a Seagull 203-I, a Chinese-made medium format folding camera with a coupled rangefinder. I haven’t seen results out of it yet, but I’m excited to use it. It takes a special occasion to get me out of the house with a camera larger than jacket pocket size, so something that just barely…
Intended Effect 