Technology Commentary

Konrad Zuse was a pioneer in the creation of computing technology, a man whose destiny seemed to obstruct progress but couldn't prevent him from creating the first high-level programming language, one of the first computers, and the first book on digital physics.

Before I read The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya, I only knew about John von Neumann in two contexts: that computers use the von Neumann architecture, and that he appeared in a story ab…

Iteration is a fundamental concept in computer programming and software development. It refers to the process of repeating a set of instructions or a block of

Posted on Friday 5 Jul 2024. 372 words, 7 links. By Matt Webb.

The pandemic made a lot of things obvious, not the least of which is that humans need social interaction to maintain good mental health. Sadly, many of us spend our lives physically separated from our loved ones by great distances or inopportune circumstances. That’s why a team of researchers decided to explore remote co-presence design […]

This isn't an exciting idea, but since I know a lot of puts debuggerers who are probably accustomed to printing plain text into a sea of log noise, I thought…

Greening the company also applies to networks, and it could soon be linked to network manager compensation.

When I started my career as an engineer in the early noughties, I was very keen on developer experience (devex). So when I joined a company whose chosen language was TCL (no, really), I d…

Thoughts on a new phone keyboard from an organization that is making a convincing case we need to rethink our discussion around FOSS and self-hosting.

Home page of the Dead media Project

Developers are entropy machines

MicroOS is OpenSUSE's container-centric immutable Linux distribution. Here is how to set it up and give it a test run.

If you've ever said "soft skills" and felt weird about it, this essay is for you

How I use RSS on a daily basis

Pondering the compatibility issues and complications of a clever element of the audio CD hidden track boom: The before-album pregap.

An upcoming iteration of the Linux kernel could take a user-friendly direction: A Linux version of the Blue Screen of Death, complete with QR code.

Years ago there was a sharp divide in desktop computing between the mundane PC-type machines, and the so-called workstations which were the UNIX powerhouses of the day. A lot of familiar names prod…

Quality and productivity are not necessarily mutually exclusive One of my pet peeves is when people pit q...

On My Mind On the eve of our Independence Day, I can’t help but think of our current political challenges. It doesn’t matter which side of the political aisle you walk. After all, the reality of ou…

Thinking again about new concepts of agency in a genAI reality. And notions from last week’s news.

Jason Kottke: Walmart Is Switching to Electronic Price Tags Walmart is switching to electronic price tags that “allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds”. No one wants this!! No one wants surge pricing on ice cream and price increases on items already in your cart. The

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash Earlier this morning while reading The Wall Street Journal, I learned that Bruce Bastian, co-creator of WordPerfect, the word-processing software, had died at 76. …

There is a 1895 French short film called L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station in English) where a stationary camera was set up on a tripod and filmed a train, well, coming into the station. The story goes that