This spring, I moved for a new job, and I needed a new battlestation. I set one up from scratch so that it could work with my work laptop - a monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, Ethernet, and sundry other USB peripherals connected to the computer by a single USB-C connection. This …

In S.M. Stirling's classic science fiction stories, the Draka are held up as an example of ultimate evil from the perspective of a Cold War American: Royalists from our Revolution mixed with Confederates from our civil war mixed with apartheid South Africa mixed with aspects of National Socialist racial …

There have been several articles about the technical and political reasons for Roscosmos taking a stacked rocket with an integrated commercial payload off the pad, and so I won't get into that. I will instead discuss how those are all post-hoc rationalizations for the tiny vodka-drunk, knife-wielding gremlin wearing a …

I wrote once that WSL would kill the Mac. I completely missed the implications of Apple silicon. I'm writing this on an M1 Pro rMBP and it's wonderful. Other people have written about the objective performance, so I'll just say that Windows has been steadily declining in UX quality since …

Booting directly from software RAID is impossible in most operating systems. This is actually why "motherboard RAID" exists, as a layered storage driver for Windows that presents multiple storage devices as a single drive so that C: can be on mirrored storage. Linux doesn't support motherboard RAID, but Linux mdraid …

As much as the people selling big "cloud" technologies would like to tell you otherwise, physical place still matters very much. This is especially true when it comes to themselves. As much as they would like to sell you otherwise, you can't understand their software without understanding the people who …

In the time since Europeans realized Columbus had not, in fact, landed in India, the West has mostly referred to the Americas as the New World. Based on certain discoveries in geology, of relatively recent fossils, and of species still alive, it may be more accurate to say that the …

An abstract fake retro console for modern 2D cross-platform game development.

The Motivation

Modern game development sucks. More and more time is spent on extraneous bullshit like input handling, playing nicely with the rest of the preemptive multitasking SMP network-capable OSes that were originally written as Internet servers rather than …

or why work from home is Hell on men

Anyone who has ever owned a cat, or spent any amount of time looking at cats being silly on the Internet, knows that cats generally prefer to sit in tight spaces, so that they can physically feel reassurance that nothing can …

or, Win10, WSL, and the Impending Death of OSX

From its very beginnings, Apple advertised OS X as "Unix for people who don't want to deal with Linux on their laptop, that also runs MS Office and Adobe stuff." Given the rather dire state of laptop hardware support on Linux …