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Tag Archives: technology

LeGO talk: slides, how-to

I’ve posted the slides (3.1M download!) to my LeGO talk, on my publications page. A bit about how and why, and some technical questions maybe the laziweb will answer for me, after the gap.

Firefox frustration

I wanted to write a post explaining why I consistently confuse Spain with Israel and Japan in Greek, but for some reason Firefox won’t let me enter lowercase Greek letters. Anywhere. (No more searching youtube for rebetiko songs either, until I figure out what’s going on. Anyone got a clue? Weird thing is, uppercase works [...]

Gadget lust

I’ve been looking again at the iLiad11. When I thought the name was “Iliad” I could almost take it seriously, but the lowercase i is just a joke. [↪] ebook reader, and it just keeps looking better and better.

You can get shell access. You can make notes onscreen. There are LaTeX users using it, posting [...]

Customer abuse

In a rare example of plain-speaking in business, Apple uses the term “customer abuse” for the process whereby I pay €95 for a replacement power adapter.

Link dump

Quick links to a week’s worth of browsing:

Design: flowerlike lightbulb unfurls as it warms up. [via sensory impact] Craziness: every year two Greek monasteries bombard each other with fireworks. [via Nemo Ramjet] Life/art mutual imitation: A British explorer disappears in the Amazon jungle, while looking for a lost city. Attempts to find his remains, and the city he searched for, are [...]

LibraryThing again

Probably the last LT post for a while, but the recommendations feature just got augmented with a “Why?” link showing which books you own prompted the suggestion. It’s pretty neat. I seem to have hit basically two clusters: “Assigned for an English Lit. course” (The Great Gatsby, Dubliners, On the Road, Steppenwolf, Labyrinths, The Baron [...]

LibraryThing adds recommendations

LibraryThing has added a few different statistical recommendation lists (mine). This is really fun to play with.

Looking for friends! (Upcoming.org)

Is anyone using Upcoming.org? I just signed up (as user tikitu, naturally), prompted by the awesome potential of Peter Oliver’s Upcomingscrobbler. As you probably won’t have guessed from the name, this site takes the top artists from your last.fm profile (driven by the Audioscrobbler engine — the light begins to dawn!) and cross-indexes them with [...]

But we train software engineers!

The UvA is introducing a new system for tracking expense claims (travel, conference fees, &c.). Actually, they’ve already introduced it, a fancy web app which only runs under IE on Windows machines, and they’ve already decommissioned the old-fashioned paper system. If you send your paperwork to someone who can do anything about it, these days [...]

Emacs beginner tips

(All feedback about this gratefully received, beginners or pros. Leave a comment.)

Emacs (and its cousin XEmacs) are enormously powerful text editors. Not so great for writing letters to your grandma, but fantastic for editing programming languages or LaTeX. Problem is, they’re so powerful that it’s easy to get lost when you’re starting. Someone shows you [...]