book-1052014

reMarkable 2 and its unremarkable software: Substandard tools hobble excellent hardware

The reMarkable 2 is a nifty piece of engineering. It’s about the size of a thin college (U.S.) notebook, responsive and feels as close to writing on paper as a tablet is likely to get. The tools, on the other hand, leave a lot to be desired. reMarkable 2 and cloud services The reMarkable 2 is not the device to invest in if you’re avoiding cloud services. The reMarkable offers a desktop app and mobile app....

June 29, 2021 · 6 min · zonker
vintage-4178304

The reMarkable 2 needs reFinement: Writing, workflow and usability

I’ve been putting the reMarkable 2 through its paces since I got it a few days ago. In this post I’m going to jot down some thoughts about its overall usability whether it might replace my trusty paper notebooks. Spoiler alert: quite possibly! Making marks on the reMarkable 2 First consideration: How’s the writing experience? The tablet could have all the whiz-bang features ever, but if the tactile experience of writing on it doesn’t live up to writing on paper, then what’s the point?...

June 2, 2021 · 5 min · zonker
book-1052014

Test-driving the reMarkable 2 on Linux: paper-like or paper-weight?

Is the reMarkable 2 a suitable replacement for pen and paper? Does it work well with Linux? I hope to find out! I’ll be writing about my experiences with the tablet over the next week and beyond. If you’ve been on the fence, feel free to follow along. (Assuming I don’t absolutely hate it and decide to send it back…) Linux, reMarkable and the elusive paper-free future I’ve been hoping to get to a point where tablets would match the experience and ease of writing on paper since the first iPad came out....

May 31, 2021 · 3 min · zonker
Screen Shot 2021-02-17 at 9.00.37 PM

Link-o-Rama: FTP is 50, stick with email, FVWM(3) ...

The unintentional theme of today’s Link-o-Rama is, apparently, tech nostalgia and why old tools are the best tools. The File Transfer Protocol is now 50 years old. 50. FTP has outlasted quite a few protocols in that time, evolved a great deal, and been used to transfer Heaven only knows how many files. I hope that Abhay Bhushan is basking a bit in the knowledge that his creation is still widely used half a century later....

May 4, 2021 · 2 min · zonker
Bottle of Tres Comas held by Russ Hanneman, character on Silicon Valley

Make your sentences poorer, get out of the three comma club

There’s a running gag in the show Silicon Valley about a character obsessed with being in the “three comma” club. Being a billionaire, in other words. When he loses enough money to drop from $1.2 billion to “merely” $900 million, he’s “financially ruined” and despondent. Judging by the way some folks write sentences, they’re just as afraid to lose a comma. Me? I don’t want any billionaire sentences in my copy1....

April 11, 2021 · 3 min · zonker
Screenshot from 2021-02-17 11-44-37

Link-o-Rama: Hunspell dict format, curl is 23, response to flatkill.org

A few of the posts I found interesting this week. 17 (ever so slightly) weird facts about the most popular dictionary format: " the dictionary format of Hunspell has a lot of peculiarities. Depending on your mindset, you might find the facts below curious, fascinating, ridiculous, or just plain boring. " ( zverok with ruby) Q&A with John Kozubik: Long-form Q&A with the CEO of rsync.net on console.dev. Interesting for his discussion of personal technology / tools....

March 20, 2021 · 2 min · zonker
Screen Shot 2021-02-17 at 9.00.37 PM

Using the Display Posts plugin with WordPress and custom CSS

In case this helps anybody else, wanted to share how I created the Top 100 Albums page here on Dissociated Press. I wanted to be able to automagically create a page from all posts tagged with the “100 albums” tag, rather than manually laying things out. The final result is using the Display Posts plugin that lets you utilize a WordPress shortcode (" display-posts") with some parameters to specify how the posts should be displayed and how many of them should be displayed.

February 26, 2021 · 3 min · zonker
Screenshot from 2021-02-17 11-44-37

Using the Wayback Machine Downloader to rebuild Dissociated Press

This domain has been online since January 2001. A homepage or, more often, some type of blog has been here almost as long. I’ve been, often, lackadaisical about continuity of content and posting. The kind folks at the Internet Archive, or rather their web scraping bots, have been far more attentive and consistent. I’ve lost track, but I’ve probably wiped the slate clean and started over seven or eight times since I first registered dissociatedpress....

February 15, 2021 · 3 min · zonker
doom-eternals

Thoughts on Doom: Eternal

Doom: Eternal is a pretty good name for a franchise that keeps getting ported, updated, and rebooted more than 25 years after it first launched. Though I don’t do much gaming these days, the siren song of Doom was just too much for me and I caved and bought a PS4 and a copy of Doom: Eternal a few weeks ago and have been playing it off and on for about a week....

May 23, 2020 · 4 min · zonker
Animals by Pink Floyd album cover

"Animals" by Pink Floyd (No. 38)

Pink Floyd responded in part to the punk rock movement’s fast, short, and aggressive tunes by… putting out an LP with five complex and relatively languid songs, three of which are longer than 10 minutes. And it is awesome. 1977’s Animals is an album that’s best experienced as an album. I suppose you could play “Sheep” or “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” as stand-alones, but why would you? If you’ve never listened to this one, you need to clear an hour (actually about 45 minutes) and sit down and give it some attention.

September 3, 2016 · 2 min · zonker