Design-Affordances

1 2 3 4 5 +--------------------------+------------------------------------------+ | L2, fixable | L1, intention | +--------------------------+------------------------------------------+ | L2, fixed | L1, (fixable -> fixed) explanation | +--------------------------+------------------------------------------+ The above 2x2 layout for Anki cards, which I call a “comprehensible delta”, is one of the best things I’ve happened upon in a while for learning another language. Let’s say you are learning Finnish, and you want to say Lapset tykkäävät hillosta. (The kids like jam....

Earlier today on Hacker News Scrappy made the rounds, with the explicit tagline “make little apps for you and your friends”. I always like to see new projects in this vein. That’s why I’d like to outline my alternative approach, which Works cross-platform and on mobile devices by default, Doesn’t require any app store tomfoolery, Has great uptime built in, Gives you just enough data persistence to not get in your way, and Is owned by you, forever....

This works as of, at least, Anki 24.06.3. According to the Mozilla Developer Network, The <details> HTML element creates a disclosure widget in which information is visible only when the widget is toggled into an open state. In standard web browsers, absent any CSS to the contrary, a <details> tag starts closed until further notice. Since Anki is basically a local web browser on top of a timer, this also works there....

Below is a GIF of tsk, my pocket Finnish-to-English dictionary, running in my terminal emulator of choice under Linux. It’s what the kids call a TUI, a graphical program that just happens to drive its graphics using terminal graphics instead of graphics-graphics. Insert GIF here. You can probably tell that this program fits neatly into the “home-cooked meal” clade of programs. There is a very straightforward problem I want solved - fast, single-executable-portable dictionary lookup, with a few conveniences for the busy language learner layered on top....

This is a response to pid1.call’s “Siren Call of SQlite on the Server”, which itself is a response to articles like Wesley Aptekar-Cassels’s “Consider SQLite” espousing SQLite as a server-side technology. Cards on the table, I both love SQLite and think pid1 has the more correct take here. When I decided on a dime after college to move countries and be with my wife, part of the package deal was that I had to throw away my dreams of easing into the software industry by resting on the laurels of my strong, but not MIT-level-known-worldwide-strong, alma mater (sorry Wildcats)....

If you’ve been following my posts recently, you might have noticed that I’ve been working more and more with PHP lately. As someone who was curiously allergic to web dev as a teenager, it has been a strangely healing experience for me. I’d like to say it’s because my experiments with Laravel, the only OSS work of which I can point to is testing the Homestead VM’s compatibility for Shell Bling Ubuntu, convinced me....

It would have to be finstem, a simple command-line program I wrote to reduce Finnish words down to their root form. Finnish is a lot like Latin or Russian in that its words often become lumbering behemoths of rewritten consonants, suffixes upon suffixes, and this makes it hard to look up in a dictionary – that is, until you factor in its very regular orthography and the phenomenal efforts of the Finnish programming industry: finstem is basically a very specialized UI for the OpenOffice spell checker, and I have no shame in admitting that....

Consider the problem of “how do I run more than 1 terminal at a time”. At this moment, I have at least 5 different ways I can effectively solve this issue: I can, from a different physical computer, SSH in to a new session. I can, from the same physical computer, switch to a different tty session with … C-S-F2 through 6 or something. (Rare, but sometimes it comes in really handy....

I was 100% mouseless back before it was cool. Between dropping out of high school and enrolling in community college, I replaced my laptop with a $80 HP EliteBook I found on eBay; when I discovered its trackpad didn’t work anyway, I went all in on a no-X setup. I eventually concluded that going 90% mouseless got me almost all of the benefits, with almost none of the downsides. It’s almost as if returns are usually diminishing!...

Most of us work in companies with something approximating a shared online internal wiki, be it Confluence or MediaWiki or even a searchable, static website custom built for the task. A common problem with these sites is making what you write discoverable to other people on the site. Your chosen title might tell you, a person fully in the weeds of whatever you were just doing, exactly enough to know this is the article you were looking for....