My post about Firefox generated a lively discussion on Hacker News, with many good points raised. The top comment (as of this writing) summed things up well: “It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to push away users . . .” Overall, the passion...

“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” According to Wikipedia, it’s an adage that goes back to 1512 in Germany. People have known for hundreds of years that you should be careful not to throw out a good and vital thing in your zeal to get rid of a minor annoyance. I think about this when I see people dumping...

During the last week, 39 per cent of visitors to Newsonaut were using Linux. That’s about as hard-core indie as you can get when it comes to systems. And it was ahead of all the others. Although I’m on macOS myself, I’m glad to see that my small indie contribution is making headway among Linux users. I respect their...

I’ve been doing tai chi off and on for over 40 years. I’m at the point where I feel qualified to teach it. Yet I’ve never written about it until now. It’s hard to write about, not just for me but for anyone. I have read books and articles about tai chi and they are interesting to a certain extent, but always somehow...

A 1958 “Buy Canadian” promotion from the Canadian Advertising Association, found on Reddit.

Back in 2006, when I first started Thriftmac, it was hard to find free Mac apps. In fact, it was hard to find any Mac apps at all. That meant snapping up links to pretty much any freeware I could find. On the plus side, it also meant that those few apps were likely maintained by developers willing to stick it out...

/* Container - flexbox wrapper */ .image-container { display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; gap: 20px; justify-content: center; align-items: flex-start; max-width: 1200px; margin: 0 auto; margin-bottom: 20px; } /* Images - flexible but constrained */ .image-container img { flex: 1 1 200px; min-width: 0; /* <-- add this */...

I really wanted to stick with Sublime Text, and I gave it my best shot ever. But VS Code has pulled me back in again. This time is was format on save. It’s a must-have I forgot to mention — the code you mess up becomes tidy again when you hit save. Three packages and a few hacks later, I couldn’t make it work the...

It’s popular for certain news organizations to have their reporters ask politicians how many genders there are. The “right” answer, apparently, is two. But a question like this is not fair to the politician or to voters. A politician’s opinion about the number of genders is irrelevant. The number is what it is, and...

#julyreply Michael Harley prefers to read books on an e-reader, and makes sure he truly owns them by stripping off the DRM if possible. » I own my books This is not a problem for me because I mostly borrow books from the library with an app called Libby. The library system where I live has a great selection. If a...

There’s a steep hill at the end of the block that goes through a park with a nice view of the city. It’s the equivalent of about six blocks long. At one time, I would be huffing and puffing by the time I got to the top. If my wife was with me, I would jokingly tell her to leave me for dead. But after a few months of...

I took another stab at creating an 11ty site, and this time succeeded. Not only that, but I’ve decided to grow the Neocities blog I made into a work of fiction complete with story and character arc. There are many 11ty tutorials, but the one that caught my eye was this one from Flamed Fury: Create A Static Site...