Officially disguised as a Canadian
I’ve been following a site called Shady Characters, created by Keith Houston. In his own words, “Shady Characters is all about the stories behind different marks of punctuation”. Recently, Keith went into some detail about the history of Emoji, which I encourage you to check out. The brief history of emoji is far more interestingContinue reading A history of Emoji
I’m a regular user of Flipboard, the app that tells me what’s happening in the world that isn’t Twitter. I have a carefully curated list of interests. One of the things I do with my lovely spouse is share links using Flipboard. In the user interface on my iPhone (I don’t use it elsewhere), thereContinue reading Flipboard and the case of usability that doesn’t care about you
This is interesting. An anonymous message-sharing system for messages under 100MB, including full Unicode support. Hopefully the spammers won’t abuse it like they did with my site ncane.com. Created by Jason Irwin, who writes: The content can be text of any reasonable length and the password can be of any reasonable length and include multipleContinue reading 10 Centuries Locker
This post is not long enough to be a fully-fleshed out post on my technical blog, so I’m putting it here. Understanding Optimizer Timeout and how Complex queries can be Affected in SQL Server by Joseph Pilov is a worthy read if you’re at all interested in how query plans are built.
[Last edited 5 December 2018.] A few weeks ago I started limiting my time on Twitter significantly, although I reactivated my account a couple of weeks later and it was like I never left. One network I feel more strongly about is Facebook, a company I describe as evil without a hint of irony. IContinue reading Wither social media?
In June of 2018 one of my favourite Canadians, Melody Zacharias, invited me to write a chapter for a book she is publishing later this year called “Let Them Finish”. [Edited 17 November 2018: You can buy the book on Amazon.com, and all proceeds go to charity.] [Edited 4 July 2021: You can read the fullContinue reading On writing important things
Apple is about to release iOS 12, probably in two weeks when they have their annual phone (and watch) refresh on 12 September 2018. I’ve been a registered Apple developer for a long time, paying my $99 every year, and waiting for the second or third beta to put on my phone. It’s true, IContinue reading Beta software and ghost updates
Last year, my friend Sarah Gibbs was telling us a funny story about something that happened to her when she worked in a bookstore. That and two other embarrassing anecdotes made me want to make them into a trio of short films. As luck would have it, Sarah decided to leave Canada in September toContinue reading SUBURBAN TRAUMA is a go
Recently I reinstalled macOS, and discovered that the search feature was not working properly in Outlook 2016 for Mac. Using these instructions from Victor Sachs on this page, I was able to get it to work after Spotlight reindexed everything: sudo mdutil -i off / sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight* sudo rm -rf /.metadata_never_index restart the computerContinue reading Repair search in Outlook 2016 for Mac
By now you will have heard about ICOs and blockchain, and these buzzwords are making you wish you’d invested early in Bitcoin. I’m here to remind you that this post was written specifically to attract traffic through the use of the word “blockchain”, with a few more words thrown in, like Bitcoin and Ethereum. IfContinue reading Blockchain and you