Viewing profile — mturk

I bought a Pixelbook during the middle of their product lifetime, and it was one of the best laptops I ever had. I genuinely don't know how broadly that sentiment was shared, but t…

I am genuinely delighted that `dcc` (the system I play with my friends) is in the list of systems currently supported: https://rpg.actor/systems and I might participate as a result…

Ghidra is a very impressive piece of software with a deep bench of functionality. The recent couple major releases that move to a more integrated Python experience have been very n…

Kaitai is absolutely one of my favorite projects. I use it for work (parsing scientific formats, prototyping and exploring those formats, etc) as well as for fun (reverse engineeri…

Larry Smarr recently spoke at NCSA and they wrote up a fair bit about the history of the institution: https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/homecoming/ It has links to some of the panel re…

That's the one! And all this time I'd been holding on to something I read on a mailing list or website back then, attributing the reading to Brian May "just because he liked that b…

I read this in high school, but not because it was assigned. At the time I was really into "rare" Queen MP3s, and there's a studio recording of the fast version of "We Will Rock Yo…

I do so love the TI-99/4A. I've been going through some TI-99/4A disk archives from the Chicago Texas Instruments User Group (which streams its meetings every month) and one of my …

I don't think that it's fair to compare the rendering to what is currently in use in the scientific community, for two main reasons: The first is that different types of rendering …

This is really impressive.

Not a dumb question! Markwhen has a CLI: https://docs.markwhen.com/cli that I used.

I used Markwhen recently to make an interactive Gantt chart for a proposal to a collaborator and it went swimmingly. (We got the gig!) So, thank you! For the record, I used the Obs…

One feature of DOSBox-X I've come to really appreciate when reverse engineering is that you can toggle the debug log on and off. Additionally, it can display the current VGA palett…

Sure -- the other comments have done a good job of explaining my usage of "sentence fragment" (which was what we referred to it as in my composition classes in high school, althoug…

My now-spouse, then-new-SO, proofread my thesis for grammar, clarity, etc. At the time, I had written my acknowledgments, but after the proofreading, I added a thanks to her to it …

I've worked at NCSA (to one extent or another) for about a decade. It's pretty remarkable to hear (from people who both pre-dated and post-dated the browser work) about the suite o…

The TI-99/4A community is really (and somewhat surprisingly) still very active. Among other things, the monthly stream from the CTIUG on YouTube ( https://www.youtube.com/@chicagot…

I was listening to the audiobook of "The Future" by Naomi Alderman, and it spent a fair bit of time talking about MENACE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_Educable_Noughts_an…

This has been my experience too, and it has reached the point that my (young-ish) children have commented on how poorly they understand and respond to things. I suppose it doesn't …

The answer to your first question is more philosophical, and I think outside the scope of what I am able to reply to here. But for the second, I think while there are similarities,…

I am genuinely surprised they did not even mention J. Allen Hynek [1], who was department head at Northwestern for a long time. There was even a TV show (sort-of) about him a few y…

A project I work on is currently working through a bunch of performance issues that arose because we had inlined functions in `pxd` files that we did not declare `noexcept nogil`. …

I kind of dislike the "Google graveyard" discourse, but ... I started using Pocketcasts after the demise of Google Listen.

I mean, I guess I should have been more obviously self-aware in my original post, but yes, my intent in that comment was explicitly to bemoan that I was not able to take the deal t…

I'll be honest and say that I - not even that long ago - held similar attitudes and slowly made a series of compromises (to myself) that led to this point. While I'm not sure I ful…