Some of my favourite programming writing is Brent Simmons’ Vesper Sync Diary. Brent does an amazing job of describing the challenges encountered while implementing sync: one of the hardest things in programming to do well. Sync is often talked about in the abstract, but Brent discusses the specific tradeoffs of various solutions in concrete examples for the late notes app Vesper. The sync diary made a huge difference to the way I think about programming and writing about programming. I’m going to experiment with doing something similar.

For the last four years, I’ve been working on a little…

From a compelling article by Professor of Chemisry Jose-Luis Jimenez on the argument that COVID is transmitted via aerosols:

The visual analogy of smoke can help guide our risk assessment and risk reduction strategies. One just has to imagine that others they encounter are all smoking, and the goal is to breathe as little smoke as possible.

When I’m in uncomfortably close proximity, I naturally hold my breath. It’s nice to know that’s not entirely insane.

I propose the following: Avoid Crowding, Indoors, low Ventilation, Close proximity, long Duration, Unmasked, Talking/singing/Yelling (“A…

I’m trying to get better at setting up email rules. If you’re not going to use Hey or something like it, you have to do some work yourself to not be buried.

I recently discovered that both Fastmail (which I use for personal) and GMail (which I use for work) support a flow to quickly create a rule from an example email.

In Fastmail, this option is “Add Rule from Message” in the hamburger menu:

This then pre-fills the sender and the subject:

GMail has the same option as “Filter messages like these”.

If you get into the flow of doing this regularly, this can quickly help get recurring and…

I was looking for an easy way to import my Kindle highlights into Bear, as I’ve been using Bear as my knowledge management system (Zettelkasten). I want to be able to put my highlights in the same place as the notes for the books I read.

Two things made this really easy:

1. Bookcision is this amazing bookmarklet that can take the Kindle highlights from Amazon’s highlights page (read.kindle.com) and dump it into a text file, or XML, or JSON so you can save it. This is good in case the Kindle site ever goes away, and it gives us a document we can work with. No matter where you’re putting your…

Reading this article I can’t help but think of a preschooler who desperately needs a time-out.

Mr. Trump is facing about as dire a run-up to a presidential election as any incumbent could imagine: the worst quarter in the economy on record, an unceasing health crisis, protests nationwide and a country paralyzed by the lack of a financial recovery plan with no solution in sight — all compounded by his own inability to curtail his behavior.

Sometimes 4-year-olds find curtailing their behaviour challenging.

Aides have described him as pained by the widespread rejection he is seeing in public…