Note: I updated my Pebble review to mention that I got a replacement for my defective Pebble. The support process took longer than I would have liked, but the new Pebble works perfectly.
My roommate just moved into a new apartment about 10 miles away, and I plan to continue ...
I was just at Costco again today to get a crate of oranges and some laundry detergent, and was reminded of why I hate buying laundry detergent. I searched through the entire aisle of laundry detergents, and only found two that didn't have optical brighteners (Seventh Generation and Boulder ...
Update: A couple days after I posted this review, the display on my Pebble started flickering (video. Resets and firmware updates haven't had any effect, so we'll see what happens.
Another update: I returned the Pebble and got a new one. The RMA process took around a month ...
This is my one week update on my new quest to save a bunch of money.
In my last post, I talked about buying new flatware and my high demands. I decided that I've been happy with my mix of half-plastic flatware for years, so anything that's ...
My last update made this site render better on small screens, but didn't look right on Android. It looks like the problem is that mobile browsers do weird things on the assumption that website developers are idiots (generally a valid assumption). MDN has an article about how to fix ...
I decided a couple of days ago that this site really needed a responsive design, since it's the cool thing to do and stuff.
diff --git a/themes/brendanlong/static/css/style.css b/themes/brendanlong/static index 96a16b4..eb493b9 100644 --- a/themes/brendanlong/static/css/style.css +++ b ...
I've been reading Get Rich Slowly for around a year, and while it's sometimes interesting, I always felt like it was missing something (possibly because I started reading it after the original author ran out of material). This last week, they linked to Mr. Money Mustache, a blog ...
There's a popular question on the Programmers Stack Exchange site asking, "Are unit tests really that useful?" and the second answer seems to be responding to a straw-man version of automated testing. The comments show that a lot of people seem to think it's a reasonable description, so ...
A friend of mine recently convinced me to take a class on quantum computing. The class just started, but I'm already learning interesting things.
For example, one student linked to a lecture on quantum physics which explains it as a generalization of probability theory which allows for complex numbers ...
Today, I found an interesting article about password timing attacks. The basic point is that if you check a password one character at a time, the amount of time it takes to recieve a "bad password" response tells you how many characters you got right.
As an example, imagine a ...
The Baen Free Library is a collection of ebooks from Baen Books, designed to prove that marketing is more important than minor losses from piracy. The way it works is that Baen authors are encouraged to put the first book or two of each series they write on the free ...
This weekend, my roommate asked me to make a website for him. I wrote it in PHP so I could just make some templates and he could import them, but it bothered me that I was rendering a static website with PHP. The easiest solution seemed to be running every ...
Doing linear algebra homework reminds me why I love NumPy so much. Instead of doing a 2-page homework assignment and then finding out at the end that something is wrong, I can check at every step. For example, to reduce a matrix A to the identity, using only elementary matrices ...
I set up an SSL certificate for this site today and it was surprisingly easy.
Last time I wanted a free certificate, it was a huge pain. This time it was actually easy. A Google search for "ssl certificates stackoverflow" lead me to the Cheapest web certificates question, which has ...
My roommate's computer's clock has been broken since we first installed Linux on it. It was never a big deal, but it's been annoying me for a long time.
Recently, my laptop started to have a similar problem. A friend had used Windows on it, and so ...
In school this week, the idea of finding palindromes in Python came up, as a homework assignment in a class I took last semester. A friend asked me for some guidance in how to do this in Python, so I showed him my "simple" solution:
#!/usr/bin/env python import ...