Viewing profile — ncphil

Thanks cketti, for all your toil on K-9 and Thunderbird for Android. Over many years K-9 was the only mail client that just worked for me. When I finally transitioned to a certain …

"Do Not Track" was a good standard, but on the today's global Internet, unenforceable without serious push back against non-compliant sites from either government regulators and/or…

Encouraged to see the skepticism here. Recalling when, after years of hype, the demand for corn-based ethanol as a fuel competed with corn for food, leading to even greater food in…

It actually is as simple as that. Well, if you could actually get funding. The number one problem with our legal system is that only the rich can afford to play. Before someone say…

"Developers should test their own code" is emblematic of a juvenile mindset in people who regularly fire up their "reality distortion field" to avoid the effort of educating themse…

Meritocracy is tyranny by another name. "Natural" aristocrats are still aristocrats, and being aristocrats it is their "natural" inclination to take power in their own personal and…

This is an enormously important distinction: security ne privacy. Although you can make your own Chrome install insecure, by default it really isn't bad. Transforming it into somet…

Depends on the model year. The one we bought in 2003 only needed regular oil changes and a new set of tires every few years. We did have to get a rebuilt transmission just before i…

Totally personal preference, but not a fan of the Brave UI. At least from my perspective they (like Vivaldi and Edge) are trying too hard to distinguish themselves from the outward…

Piketty's _Capital in the Twenty-First Century_, cited in the article, remains a fundamental resource for understanding how we got here. It's really essential reading. Given all th…

Love FiraCode. Have it installed and configured for all of my terminals, everywhere. Even on Windows. In fact, the one customization I've done to my work laptop (that I otherwise l…

Interesting idea, but I think I'll stick with DNS challenge and LetsEncrypt. Lazy me really needs to finally sit down and automate the process (all the pieces are in place on my re…

This is a good point. Of course anyone who thought the MSM, or print journalism, were in business to reveal the actual truth really needs to review their history. The worst part is…

This was really funny. Got lost in it, and the site, for a while yesterday. Made for an enjoyable week end. Many thanks to the author.

Although I'm not a fan of the common law system, it isn't the problem here. The problem is a culture that so elevates informality that there are no guardrails left to ensure carefu…

Under the Sonny Bono Act in the US corporate copyrights were extended beyond 100 years. The original US Copyright Act was limited to 14 years, and allowed a single renewal of the s…

Visited DC in 2010 or so. Kids were eager to see Nat Geo headquarters. Turned out to be a big disappointment. Lots of empty spaces where displays had been. We were told they were r…

It has been awhile (about 10 years or so), but I can recall at least two widely used enterprise access management systems that had trouble with some special characters. Access mana…

Netscape Navigator -> Sea Monkey -> Opera. It was a thing. Set aside mostly to improve performance of the browser. When Firefox was first released it seemed... lacking. But it _was…

Because they don't see technical debt as a bad thing. Go back to the original pitch for technical debt by Ward Cunningham. He was working for a finance company and used the debt me…

"I can't imagine that a deposition lasts more than a few hours..." Heh. No. A good litigator will be prepared with enough questions to keep him testifying for most of the day on ea…

Anyone who rarely uses python, or who uses it all the time, should take the time to read this article and its companions in the series. Good, solid, advice that will make life easi…

Probably the most painful home Internet experience you can have is a consumer router fail. Suddenly you really need all those basic sysamin features a business system provides. I u…

Because they'll (Microsoft and Github) ultimately be crushed by copyright infringement claims (even the most liberal oss licenses require attribution, which no one seems to be acco…