I was out on a walk yesterday, listening to the ’70s Hits Radio Station on Apple Music, when “Don’t Leave Me This Way” came on. I pulled my phone out of my pocket to look at a text while the song was playing and was surprised at what the Music app told me about the song. I’m pretty sure George Benson never covered...

After I learned how to make a Mac widget with TerminalWidget and how to determine the locations of celestial objects with Astropy, the natural thing for me to do was combine the two into a widget that tracks the planets. I’m using the ancient definition of planet, which includes the Sun and Moon but not anything...

Through an odd coincidence, I started writing this post when the Sun was in Cancer, but by the time I’m done and get it published, the Sun will be in Leo. Don’t worry, this isn’t an astrology post—I don’t want to anger John Gruber—but it is a further coincidence that I’ve been puttering around with observational...

A few days ago, I posted this image on Mastodon: The code I ran to get this two-month calendar on my Desktop was bash: if [ $(date +"%-d") -gt 15 ]; then cal -A 1 else cal -B 1 fi |\ terminal-widget --target cal --font Menlo --bg "#eeeeee" --text - I have since updated a couple of things and need more room to talk...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] My fundamental rule is Don’t, but a single word wouldn’t make for much of a blog post. In what follows, I hope to explain how I’ve come to that rule and the exceptions I make...

I noticed today that the Cubs and Yankees have the same record. I knew that the Cubs have had some extreme ups and downs this year, but I wasn’t sure if the Yankees had, so I decided to plot their progress over the course of the season so far. A plot of how far above or below .500 they were seemed like the best way...

The indispensable Michael Tsai has an interesting post up today about Apple Park and whether its design isolates the people who work there, despite its having been designed—in part, at least—to encourage collaboration. As usual, Michael has collected a group of choice quotes on the topic. I won’t link to any of...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] Yesterday I watched the most recent Numberphile video, in which Ben Sparks explains a few finite series and the equations that simplify the calculation of their sums. He...

A couple of days ago, Casey Liss took a break from arguing about temperature scales to tweak me about the recent passage of the Sunshine Protection Act by the House. The Act would make Daylight Saving Time permanent, something Casey knows I disapprove of. A similar bill passed the Senate a few years ago, and Donald...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] You’ve probably seen somewhere that the density of Saturn is less than that of water. If there were a bathtub big enough to hold it, Saturn would float. I think I first read...

I saw this article at Inside Higher Ed this morning, guided by a Mastodon post from Techmeme. The title of the article is “Brown Professor Suspects Majority of His Class Used AI to Cheat,” so if you’re sick to death of reading about AI—pro, con, or caveated—don’t feel obligated to follow the link. I’m interested in...

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Mac application icons and “squircle jail.” Inspired by this post from Paul Kafasis on the Rogue Amoeba blog,1 many Mac-adjacent people have taken up his cause to “Free the Icons.” I agree, but Apple’s 50th anniversary has gotten me thinking a lot lately about the early days of...