Author Archives: David K.

Mastodon

So I’m just now realizing that Mastodon is a Rails 6.1 application. I just looked over the Gemfile, and it includes a lot of the usual gems, notably cocoon, right at the end. I have a love/hate relationship with this … Continue reading

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Why Not Mars (Idle Words)

Somehow we’ve embarked on the biggest project in history even though it has no articulable purpose, offers no benefits, and will cost taxpayers more than a good-sized war. Even the builders of the Great Pyramid at Giza could at least … Continue reading

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Don’t Get Involved with Things you Can’t Fix, and You Can’t Fix Stupid

Twenty-odd years ago, I was involved in a Product Data Management system implementation. This is just part of a much larger story, but the salient point from the epic saga is that I worked for a psychopath, and he tried … Continue reading

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It’s time for some hard truth – YouTube

OMG. How many times can the universe scream at me that I’m in the wrong business? “Ultra-fast capacitors.” Sigh. I’m no electrical engineer. In fact, I’ll admit that circuits were the worst part of my mechanical engineering studies. However, I … Continue reading

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37signals Dev — Vanilla Rails is plenty

In our example, there are no fat models in charge of doing too many things. Recording::Incineration or Recording::Copier are cohesive classes that do one thing. Recording::Copyable adds a high-level #copy_to method to Recording’s public API and keeps the related code … Continue reading

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Fallout 76 | Our Fallout 25th Anniversary celebration concludes with interviews, events and more perks!

Fallout finishes its month-long 25th anniversary celebration strong with a spine-tingling Fallout 76 event, behind-the-scenes looks, in-game rewards and more. Source: Fallout 76 | Our Fallout 25th Anniversary celebration concludes with interviews, events and more perks! Buried under the lede … Continue reading

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Fake CISO Profiles on LinkedIn Target Fortune 500s

“I shot a note to LinkedIn and said please remove this, and they said, well, we have to contact that person and arbitrate this,” he said. “They gave the guy two weeks and he didn’t respond, so they took it … Continue reading

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Cleaning the Griddle

When I “went to college” at Purdue, I stayed in the dorm all 4 years. What can I say? I liked the convenience of someone else cleaning the bathrooms and doing the cooking. For freshman year — and second half … Continue reading

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Something is wrong on the internet | by James Bridle | Medium

This, I think, is my point: The system is complicit in the abuse. And right now, right here, YouTube and Google are complicit in that system. The architecture they have built to extract the maximum revenue from online video is … Continue reading

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Audiophile Snake Oil

This video reviews an “audiophile” “tool” from back in the day to “improve” CD audio quality by cutting the edge of the CD at an angle, and marking it with a black marker, to prevent “light scattering” of the laser … Continue reading

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