• Somebody over at USA Today seems to think that Colorado is just a little too high... (Thanks to Sarah Hoyt for the link.)
• Not new news, but startling: They're still digging up live, century-old ordnance in France and Belgium. I suspect they'll still be digging it up a century from now.
• Here's an overview of how to write custom components for the ( Read more... )

I haven't done any programming in so long I'm starting to hallucinate. Here is today's hallucination. Lor' help me, I would have written the whole thing if I hadn't already read somewhere that counting syllables in arbitrary words is hard.

Open Dictionary text file; Create new output text file;

WHILE NOT EOF(Dictionary) DO
BEGIN
REPEAT
( Read more... )

( Read more... )

• Lazarus 1.6 has been released. It was built with FreePascal 3.0.0, a first for Lazarus. Mostly incremental changes, but there's a new rev of the docked form editor that looks promising, even though it's not quite stable yet. Wish I had more time to play with it!
• Older versions of Lazarus have run well on the Raspberry Pi for ( Read more... )

• Yes, I know: I haven't posted an Odd Lots since late October. A few of the items here have been in the notefile for awhile and may be a little stale, but I've had other things on my mind than scanning the Web for links, heh.
• Forbes.com will not let you in if you're using an ad blocker. G'bye, Forbes. You were barely worth reading even ( Read more... )

• My collection Cold Hands and Other Stories is now available to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
• Well, judging by its website it may seem a little wobbly, but Heathkit has a new owner, and is actually selling radio kits. Let us wish them the best and watch what happens. (Thanks to Tom Byers, Michael Covington, and several others for alerting me.)
• Smart ( Read more... )

• This item may not be visible after a few more days, so catch it now: A very weird "hotspot" turned up in the satellite water temperature record at the far eastern end of Lake Superior. For a short while, water temps excursed from the 30s up to the 60s F. Instrument Error? Cargo ship on fire? UFO exploding? STORMY baiting and then rounding up ( Read more... )

• Intel's announced the Compute Stick, a complete $150 Win8.1 machine in the format of a fat thumb drive. Looks like the plug is HDMI, though, and the ( Read more... )

• Sales of the Raspberry Pi board are closing in on four million. Wow. I'm an optimist, but I'll confess that I wasn't that much of an optimist!
• Some ISPs have apparently begun blocking encrypted traffic (especially VPNs) because VPNs make it difficult to throttle traffic based on what that traffic is. Basically, a user of Golden Frog's VPN ( Read more... )

• Here's a nice rant about something that's always bothered me: that programming is more difficult than it has to bethat programmers revel in its difficulty, and ceaselessly ridicule ( Read more... )