This time ’round, my Book Of The Month is actually two books: Mary Robinette Kowal‘s The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky. Dr. York, the protagonist here, is a smart, hard-working survivor of an immense environmental disaster. Along with a team of brilliant and talented — and often petty, sexist, and condescending — scientists, pilots, […]
Natural Born Heroes, by Christopher McDougall – Book of the Month Nov ’18
November’s #book recommendation, a true-life adventure, a detective story to uncover it, and more: “a story of remarkable athletic prowess: On the treacherous mountains of Crete, a motley band of World War II Resistance fighters—an artist, a shepherd, and a poet—abducted a German commander from the heart of the Axis occupation. To understand how, McDougall […]
grep, in PowerShell
Here is a sample of a PowerShell script that I use for finding text in files, having “grown up” with a more Unix-like syntax. I know, this isn’t exactly a clone of grep‘s functionality, but it gets me closer than having to remember exactly how to wrangle PowerShell’s Select-String commands to my liking. Note that […]
Most Wanted, by Rae Carson
Yay! Another new Star Wars book – this one in support of Solo: A Star Wars Story. That movie gave us some backstory to Han Solo; this novel gives us more and sheds light on the history between him and Qi’ra as well as (the first?) mention of an ancient Jedi manuscript, The Annals of […]
Darktown, by Thomas Mullen
Atlanta Georgia, 1948 – quite a different city than we know today. Darktown is a historical novel telling the story of the first negro police officers here; men with what has always been a difficult job, made even tougher given the racial bias of the time. Many pages were, like those of Colson Whitehead’s Underground […]
Getting highlighted text from the Amazon Kindle [update]
on October 25, 2011 I wrote a post on Getting highlighted text from the Amazon Kindle. Most of that still applies, but Amazon has changed several pages’ address and formatting. The info formerly at “your books” is now read.amazon.com, and “your highlights” is now “your notes and highlights” at read.amazon.com/notebook.
Enabling FTP Server on Windows 10
Almost every article “out there” on setting up an FTP Server on Windows 10 starts with using the “Windows key + X keyboard shortcut to open the Power User control panel” – which doesn’t seem to work/exist on my computer – or to some “Administrative Tools” control panel applet – which also doesn’t exist here. […]
The Women of Easter, 1916
Easter Rising, Enniscorthy 1916: writing about a revolution (Irish Times, 26 Mar 2016): Three writers remember three women – George O’Brien his grandaunt Greta Comerford, Roddy Doyle his grandaunt Una Brennan and Colm Tóibín his neighbour Marion Stokes Una Brennan, about whom Roddy Doyle writes in this article, was my great-grandmother. My mom was named […]
Searching Evernote
I use Evernote. A lot. I’d consider it to be a backup for my brain, except that often it’s more like the primary storage instead of backup. Recipes, lists of books, notes on projects, and much more gets dumped into Evernote for future reference. Of course, reference requires good methods for browsing and searching. The […]
Using datatables.js with Get()
It’s been a while since I’ve posted in the Software Development category, but here’s the solution to something that’s been a thorn in my team’s side for a few days. We’re working with datatables.js, which provides a nice interface to tabular data. We’re using it to Get() data from an API we’re building, and out […]