or, how Ruby has changed the way I write Perl.

This post prodded into being by sawyer and moritz.

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or, how Röyksopp's album output ended unexpectedly.

As something of a follow-up to my last review of Do It Again, I thought I might also review The Inevitable End, which is currently in the “you can’t have it but you can stream it” part of it’s pre-release madness.

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or, the sound of me slowly losing my mind.

The advent of the computer algebra system (CAS) has been met at my university’s School of Mathematics and Statistics with the creation of a second-class, badly specified “Computing” strand in the syllabus, which ostensibly teaches us how computing works in the context of mathematics. Naturally, they chose the worst CAS to do so in.

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or, how Apple support are hopeless, how Apple's 'geniuses' are thick, and why I'll never buy Apple again.

While writing my treatise on the naming scheme I’ve adopted, a few funny stories came to mind. The first of them is the fun I had with elspeth and a dead motherboard.

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This was originally slated for release in The Turtalian; I'm reproducing it here.

Just hours before the magazine went to press last week, Do It Again, the well-anticipated collaborative EP from Norwegian electronic duo, Röyksopp, and Swedish pop-vocalist Robyn, was officially released after weeks of speculation about it.

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panic: make_dev_credv: bad si_name (error=17, si_name=dri/card0)

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wherein I explain my naming scheme.

I’ve often gotten interesting questions about my hostname scheme. I am, after all, one of the few people that most people meet who not only has many systems, but uniquely and meaningfully names most of them (instead of using default, mainly meaningless names like mac-mac-ii).

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wherein our hero lauds the beauty of a distro that he doesn't hate.

jaenelle, surreal and menolly all run Arch Linux, and I’ve come across some interesting quirks in the OS that deserve mentioning over the last few months.

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or, how Lenovo no longer annoys me.

I ordered a laptop on February 4, just over two months ago. It arrived on March 11 (at long last!) and I got it operating nicely within a day or two.

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or how Steve Losh inspired me to rethink typing.

I should probably begin with the fact that this is wholly inspired by Steve Losh’s fairly popular article, “A Modern Space Cadet”, and you should read that before continuing.

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wherein I buy a laptop, and Lenovo screws up.

I ordered a laptop on February 4, exactly a month ago now. And of course it’s not yet arrived.

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wherein our intrepid hero switches his website to use Sass/SCSS, not LESS.

I’m now long overdue to push my updated site, which is supposed to have been ready for the beginning of this year, live. The bottleneck is, as usual, styling and content mangling.

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GNOME has a disturbing, almost paralytic dependence on the GNU Autotools. I’ve already ranted about weird tools once tonight, and yet, here we go again.

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I’ve decided, then, to bite the bullet and learn the one programming language that I truly, truly hate: Python. And I’m going to implement Hellvetica in it.

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Towards the end of last year, I started to learn Vala, the next generation programming language of the Linux desktop, and I wasn’t overawed by what I found.

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I fed my (old) website into WebPageTest and PageSpeed Insights to see what performance improvements I could glean out of it. The results were interesting.

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This is my first post in quite a while, and my website looks fairly different, so I shall enumerate the many changes. And yes, there have been many changes.

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Science fiction is, by far, one of my favourite genres.

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So, half an hour in, I thought it best to start documenting what I was doing.

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unbeldi, which I’ve spoken about before, is a very, very nasty hack that pulls data from a variety of sources and aggregates them to generate content into my website. I consistently bemoan it because it’s a pain and really shouldn’t work at all.

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Problem

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The Dreamers: A Story of Sam Kullen
by Oliver Dahl

rated 6.9/10

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OK, so I’m going to sit here and write a bit to see how fast I can go with Dasher typing for me. The Leap Motion platform is actually an excellent assistive technology input method and once both the user and the software have come up to speed, the input is both fluid and functional. It’s quite easy to reach a pleasant cruising speed with some practice and I must say that the Dasher predictive engine performs very well indeed.

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So, I’ve decided to take Nightingale, the community fork of Songbird for a spin to see what it can do.

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I have a sneaky suspicion that Dasher will work very well with the Leap Motion, so off to download that to see if it does what I want. Or even works on OS X.

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Can I just say, interacting with a computer via a Leap Motion is an incredibly challenging task.

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Because of the way my website is assembled by unbeldi, I actually lose a surprising amount of control over the way I can put content into it, which upsets Jekyll.

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Also, a little bit of website backend work to make it all, well, work.

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One of the major features I love on FreeBSD is the ability to easily and painlessly configure interface failover between a wired and wireless network interface on a laptop, configurable with just a handful of commands. This has been around since around FreeBSD 6.3, powered by the lagg(4) driver.

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For the first in my series of Typeface Grand Tours, I had a look at the Oroton website and said, “hm, I recognise some of these fonts!”

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“using Zsh, cannot show progress, be patient…”

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Please be horrified after the tone.

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And now: the Australian Electoral Commission’s ability to understand and answer questions.

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Today’s new toy: Vox. It’s very nice, but doesn’t have the music library management niceness of iTunes.

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Today’s obnoxious pain in the ass: BOINC and Time Machine.

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Something that’s only just occurred to me (as I post my last long-form to social media and disappear into the noise) is, of course, devices that run other things entirely.

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As an Australian, I get to see the net results of what I will happily call the biggest, most wide-reaching artificial price inflation it has ever been my displeasure to have to live with.

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Having just gotten into a interesting discussion while procrastinating (yay!), I may as well expand my thoughts, since tweets are much to small for this. This is, thus, a sort of pseudo-complete set of ideas about what my thoughts on this topic are, replete with some analysis.

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So Apple just issued a “Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update” which I typically use to read over the ‘added compatibility’ list to go drool over cameras. Today: the Hasselblad Lunar.

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OHMYGOD DAFT PUNK

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-bash: ifconfig: command not found

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Oof, xz is slow on elspeth. I wonder why it’s threading is broken.

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There’s a Mandelbrot set renderer floating around; it’s currently high up on r/linux, because it’s entirely written in bash.

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While, on paper, Perl’s “smart matching” operator was the best thing since sliced bread, in reality it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

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In other news, while CPAN frantically installs about a million packages, I’ve finally made a breakthrough in understanding what Dist::Zilla is for.

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Here’s how Google Play Books works.

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Currently, I’m grappling with CPANMinus and Dist::Zilla, two acclaimed Perl modules for distribution management.

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Watched Johnny English Reborn. Hilarious.

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So, as part of my work on the guts of Pondr, I’ve decided to split apart the front-end and backend code into two separate applications.

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A brutal email to HSC Hub:

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