No matter how long I’ve possessed a Mac and how hard I try, there will always be a helpful keyboard shortcut hidden somewhere that I don’t know about. Today I learned about holding the Option key while clicking on the Copy command in Finder. It activates the super-useful (and super-secret) “copy as pathname” feature. I spotted this trick on Jamie Smith’s website, where other handy shortcuts (and the pretty gif above) reside....
Roumeli describes Fermor’s travels around Northern Greece and Macedonia. He visits secluded and remote areas and describes the rugged countryside and how people of these remote regions live. As he meets Sarakatsan shepherds and spends some time with them, visits the impressive monasteries of Meteora, attempts to track a pair of Byron’s slippers in Missolonghi and investigates Kravara and its secret language, he makes acute observations about these communities and their history....
If you understand Italian, the recording of my Playwright session at UGIdotNET’s WebDay 2022 is now available on YouTube1. Playwright is a phenomenal cross-browser, cross-platform, cross-language, single-API, mobile-friendly front-end testing tool. I’m looking forward to giving the same session in English sooner or later, but I should first win my laziness and start looking for exciting events with open CFPs. If you happen to know one, please let me know....
Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive....
Dan Goodin at Ars Tecnica, on multifactor authentication (2FA/MFA): Multifactor authentication (MFA) is a core defense that is among the most effective at preventing account takeovers. In addition to requiring that users provide a username and password, MFA ensures they must also use an additional factor—be it a fingerprint, physical security key, or one-time password—before they can access an account. Nothing in this article should be construed as saying MFA isn’t anything other than essential....
A few weeks ago, Giulia turned eighteen. As a birthday gift, she asked for a skiing weekend with me. Our family’s precious little thing has traditionally been spending the Christmas week skiing in the Alps. We haven’t gone as much as we’d like in recent years, so I was pleasantly surprised and thrilled that she wanted to celebrate adulthood at our special place with her dad. We left home Friday at five in the morning....
A few months ago I started my review of Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage with these words: Of all the stories of maritime adventures I’ve read, that of the Endurance, masterfully told by Alfred Lansing in this book, is the most incredible and shocking. And I meant that. As the book’s title suggests, that story is simply unbelievable, yet true. Imagine my astonishment this morning at the news that the Endurance was found in the depths of the Antarctic....
Quoting [Nelson’s weblog][3]: Goodreads lost my entire account last week. Nine years as a user, some 600 books and 250 carefully written reviews all deleted and unrecoverable. Their support has not been helpful. In 35 years of being online I’ve never encountered a company with such callous disregard for their users’ data. Ouch. A lesson learned the hard way: My plan now is to host my own blog-like collection of all my reading notes like [Tom does][2]....
This book stands up to its fame. It’s chock-full of precious insights on our decision-making and behavioral processes and how and why we humans are often capable of making informed yet awful decisions. The bad news is that we can hardly avoid most of these biases, no matter how hard we try and even if we know about them. So-called experts in the field are subject to these same biases: their short-term estimates and predictions can even be pretty good, but they will fail miserably in the long term, like any other man or woman....
In 2014, James Somers sat down to write a beautiful, entertaining lament about the state of today’s dictionaries and an argument in favor of the adoption of Noah Webster’s 1913 edition. I don’t want you to conclude that it’s just a matter of aesthetics. Yes, Webster’s definitions are prettier. But they are also better. They’re so much better that to use another dictionary is to keep yourself forever at arm’s length from the actual language....