The Public Beta What is this? What’s going on here? Fivehundredwordsaday.com is web application which helps people grow in the practice of habitual writing. At its core, it’s really just a calendar and a rich text editor. It has some … Read more
Writing elsewhereI wrote for The Critic about the way the British Museum keeps closing galleries at short notice because of staff shortages. My salon about Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart is tonight. Can you think of a more … Read more
This is the third post in our Zero to main() series, where we bootstrap a working firmware from zero code on a cortex-M series microcontroller. Previously, we wrote a startup file to bootstrap our C environment, and a linker script … Read more
October 2015 Here’s a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language. Something comes over most people when they start writing. They write in a different language than they’d use if they were … Read more
When it comes to error handling, it truly is a team sport Error messages are part of our daily lives online. Every time a server is down or we don’t have internet, or we forget to add some info in … Read more
2019 May 2 As part of my investigation into scaffolding tools like Cookiecutter and Yeoman, I skimmed the documentation of alternatives like Slush and Hygen. All of them left me unsatisfied. It got me thinking about what makes this problem … Read more
I’m interested in writing a x86_64 Linux driver for my 15 year old photo printer. It looks like someone out there maintains 32 bit drivers for this printer, but I’d like low-hassle native support for my 64-bit install. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1324015/how-to-install-printer-canon-pixma-ip1800-on-xubuntu-20-04 Where … Read more
I am starting with my contrarians views that way I can get rid of 90% of coders that think that know what they are doing but end up building Frankensteins. This article is for that 10% of coders that want … Read more
Tor.com recently published my short story “India World”, and I went through my notes, to-do lists, revision history, and email to figure out what exactly went into writing and selling that story. Finding details and real numbers on how this … Read more
VisiCalc started as a reference card. The Nest thermostat started as a press release. AWS, seemingly, started as a 128-word memo. “Writing is a way of finding out,” wrote Kettering University’s Marvin Swift in Harvard Business Review, 49 years ago. … Read more