• Mercury has a tail. Whodathunkit? With all that ( Read more... )

A week or so ago I bestirred myself and installed MediaWiki on my Web host. I'd been intending to do that for some time, but (as my friend Don put it) my life was ODTAA for a bit. Installing it was a snap. My provider has something called Installatron that did the job, no issues. The software, of course, is free and open-source.

I installed it in ( Read more... )

Well, it's the end of the month again, and I'm out of free ( Read more... )

24 years and some months ago, I published an article in PC Techniques, on the END. page, which was where I put humor, crazy ideas, and non-of-the-above. The article was "The All-Volunteer Virtual Encyclopedia of Absolutely Everything!and as I recall it generated a lot of mail. The idea was this: We ( Read more... )

• Grocery conglomerate Kroger is testing a driverless robot cart for grocery delivery here in Scottsdale. The service uses robots made by Nuro. (Watch their videos to get a sense for the ( Read more... )

Egad. Contra turned 20 when I wasn't looking. Actually, I was looking. What I wasn't doing was breathing. Enough. At night. I think I have a handle on that problerm now, and with any luck at all I'll be writing more of everything going forward. I'm 50,000 words into my new novel Dreamhealer, and tinkering the last bits of my free ebook FreePascal ( Read more... )

Yeah, I know: I been away a long time. Why is complex, but house ( Read more... )

• Hurricane activity is at a 45-year low, and no major hurricane has achieved landfall on US soil in almost ten years. Tornadoes have been pretty scarce recently as well. Then again, it's mid-April and snowing like hell outside right now. Two outa three ain't bad.
• The Food Babe gets her you-know-what handed to her. This, after all, is the woman who ( Read more... )

On more than one occasion, a reader has emailed me to ask why he or she couldn't see me on Twitter. My answer might have seemed inconceivable to them: I'm not on it. I never have been. I've researched it and thought about it and waffled about it almost since there was a Twitter. I still haven't gone there. And at this point, I'm unlikely to.

One ( Read more... )

Every so often I moderate a comment, and the commenter objects: "You're censoring me!" (Most of the time I just nuke it, and that's the last I hear.) Granted, it isn't often, though it's happening more and more over time. I'm discussing it today because of an interesting phenomenon that other bloggers may have seen, one I call comment harpies. It ( Read more... )