Inside Blog
[md]Use macOS Media Keys for Third-party Apps
Do you use an app other than Apple Music to listen to music on your Mac? Personally I use Feishin, sometimes TauonMusicBox or Manet.
Book Review: Klara and the Sun
I recently read Klara and the Sun, my third Ishiguro novel. Halfway through, my impatience got the better of me; I was ready to label this the worst Ishiguro novel I've ever read. But I eventually came around. While Klara lacks the nostalgic charm of Remains of the Day or the punch-in-the-gut reveal of Never Let Me Go, it nevertheless feels like an important statement about technology, science, faith, and technocracy.
Revive Single-Key Keyboard Brightness Shortcuts on macOS
Do you use a Macbook or an Apple Keyboard with backlighting? Was your keyboard made after 2016?
Ban Large Language Models
Not another AI blog post! Unfortunately, I've seen a lot of (sometimes grudging) AI acceptance from holdouts in the tech space lately. You can only fight back against top-down directives and endless UI 'suggestions' for so long. I gave LLMs a serious shake earlier this year, so I wanted to add a slightly different take to the conversation.
Book Review: The Neverending Story
Occasionally I revisit fantasy novels that I read, or that I wish I'd read, in my childhood: A Wrinkle in Time, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Dragonriders of Pern, The Phantom Tollbooth. Already this year, A Wrinkle in Time both impressed and disappointed me: it was somehow simultaneously both much weirder and much more simplistic than I had hoped.
Improve macOS Finder SMB Share Performance
I've been using a Raspberry Pi 5 as a home server for years now. Simultaneously, I've been using Apple's Macbook Pro series as personal and work laptops for essentially my entire life. Normally, this grants me access to a proper Unix command line, no AI garbage or ads in most system menus, and the best ratio of energy usage to computing power in the home computer industry. But ever since I started building my collection of home media -- music, movies, and TV shows -- I have discovered that Finder is horribly, terribly, no-good at browsing samba (SMB) shares. Performance is incredibly inconsistent and laggy. Just browsing between a few folders can take tens of seconds.
Book Review: The Diamond Age
The Diamond Age: Or, a The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer has gotten a lot of attention lately in the tech community. That's largely a result of one very important object: the Primer itself, which is basically an interactive Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy-esque ereader, but with physical, turn-able pages that rewrite themselves. The Primer was specifically designed to teach a young woman leadership skills and a hacker ethos, but it also includes the ability to monitor and teach the reader basically anything it deems necessary for survival, including how to kill someone with a screwdriver.
Book Review: Cryptonomicon
I first read Cryptonomicon back in college. The book impressed me by introducing me to all kinds of weird ideas, from Linux nerdery, to the first seeds of cryptocurrency, to the optimal way to enjoy Captain Crunch, to the general gist of World War II cryptography.
Book Review: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
I recently re-read one of my favorite classic sci-fi tales, Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. While TMiaHM remains my favorite Heinlein novel, some cracks started to show on this re-read: notably, characters (especially non-male characters) and character development. Modern science fiction has really surpassed the classics in this regard. But Heinlein's worldbuilding and storytelling remain a masterclass.
The macOS Quarantine Bit Error Message is Bad
Whenever you download a file in macOS, your computer automatically sets a special bit called the quarantine bit. Apple has a complicated system that makes this precaution invisible for popular apps, involving developer certs, code signing, a system called GateKeeper that evaluates trustworthiness, and surely plenty of 30% mafia-style protection fees. For many users, this system acts as an extra sanity check before running a potentially malicious application or script. For those of us who dare to occasionally peek over the garden wall, the quarantine bit (sometimes) presents an annoyance.
Post-Social Social Media
There's been a lot of talk lately about Meta's antitrust trial. But one discussion subject subject in particular has been stuck in my brain for weeks now, ever since early May. Specifically, Mark claims that the average person:
The Crossland CC1 Review
I've been using a Crossland CC1 just about daily as my home espresso machine since 2020. The CC1 is my first "real" machine, having begun my home espresso journey with my Delonghi EC155 back in 2013 (and having begun my espresso journey in general when I got a job at Chrissy Beanz in Sackets Harbor back in 2012).
Install the Pebble App Persistently on iOS
This guide explains how to permanently install the Pebble app on a new iPhone, assuming you already downloaded the Pebble app from your Apple ID/Account at some point in the past.
Book Review: The Power Broker
The Power Broker is probably one of the largest books I have ever read. I suspect it's one of the largest books anyone has read, since it likely stretches the physical bounds of 'pages attachable to a book spine'. Spread across 1156 pages, the 700,000 tiny tiny words of The Power Broker measure up to:
Not a Bicyclist's Guide to Bicycles
All bicyclists ride bikes. But not all bike riders are bicyclists. I'm a bicycle enthusiast: someone who spends enough time riding and repairing bikes to know a thing or two about them. But I'm not a bicyclist, because I don't race my bike, or care about power meters or pacing or compete in events.
Some Thoughts on Malazan Book of the Fallen
I just finished a very, very, very long read of Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series. This is the second-longest series I have every read, second only to The Wheel of Time. But Malazan stands out as perhapas the most unusual, most unique, and most impactful series I have ever read. It has been a long time since a piece of writing made me think this much. Allow me to explain...
Book Review: The Lost Cause
I recently finished reading The Lost Cause, by Cory Doctorow, which asks (and answers) the question: Do some people seriously want to watch the world burn?. Here are my thoughts on the book.
Review: Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of Oxford Translator's Revolution
I recently finished reading Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of Oxford Translator's Revolution, by RF Kuang. Here are my thoughts on the book.
Review: Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact
I recently switched to a "new" smartphone. This post explains why and how.
Review: Onyx Boox Nova 3
Technology alone is not enough β itβs technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.
Optimizing a Jekyll Blog Containing Lots of Images
This website features blog posts with many images -- often more than 20 per post!
You Don't Have to be a Developer
I originally wrote this post a short time into my first tech writing job on MongoDB's Server Docs team. I never ended up sharing it because, for a while, I wasn't sure if I would end up staying in the docs world or switching back into software development.
Natopia
Over the past few years, I've slowly tried to reduce my dependence on big tech. I know this is popular in some circles right now, and I've made all the standard moves:
IDID-3210
Recently I made the mistake of attempting to log in to my Spectrum account. As a conscious human being with not-so-fond memories of Time Warner Cable, I'm aware that using Spectrum for internet is a fool's errand. But I have no choice in the small New England town that I now live in. Thanks, FCC.
Make a Bootable USB in macOS
This post explains how to make a bootable USB drive for installing Linux, macOS, Windows, or... whatever else you want. From macOS. Using the command line, mostly. And unlike every other article on the internet that explains this concept on the internet, it's not blogspam, it's not filled with ads, and it's not written in broken English or with so much fluff you give up halfway through.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Kotlin
Lately I've been doing a lot of work in a relatively new programming language: Kotlin. From my experience, I've concluded that Kotlin is pretty rad. If you've considered learning Kotlin, or just using it in a personal project, this post might help you with your decision. Below, I hope I'll (attempt) to tell you a little bit about my experience with Kotlin, and describe what I liked about Kotlin and what I didn't like.
Site Redesign!
When I originally created this site, I had no clue what I was doing. Some friends told me I should think about creating a personal website, and I thought it would be fun to write a few blog posts. So I threw together a few basic styles with GitHub's static site generator, broke Jekyll a few times, and eventually figured out how to get things working!
Five Months with the 15-inch 2017 MacBook Pro
I have now spent about five months with a work-supplied Macbook Pro 2017, complete with discrete GPU and the infamous TouchBar.
Peter Kovak's Flash Boys: Not So Fast
Last week, I read Michael Lewis' Flash Boys. I was unimpressed. I had quite a few complaints, all of which you can read about in my post from last week. If you're looking for a summary, however, it boils down to this: Flash Boys was bad enough that I decided to read a book that is literally just a rebuttal to Flash Boys from the perspective of a former high frequency trader -- one of the many that Michael Lewis didn't bother to interview for his book.
Michael Lewis' Flash Boys
Just last week, I finished reading Flash Boys, written by Michael Lewis. This book can be summarized pretty easily by a single statement: "High Frequency Trading".
Looking Forward to 2018
It is now 2018, and I've been thinking about what I intend to accomplish this year. I've never been one to embrace New Years resolutions or anything like that, but I do appreciate the value of outlining some goals for the year, however inconsequential.
Reflecting on Six Months at Bloomberg
I'm an adult now -- at least, that's what they tell me. I've been working as a ssoftware developer here at Bloomberg for almost 6 months now - I started June 19th, so it's actually 5 months 29 days today. Since it's the end of the day and programmers start counting at zero, let's just call it 6 months and be done with it.
Why "Lambda Latitudinarians?"
Since I created this site, I've received many questions about the name. As a result, I've created this blog post to try to address the issue. In short, the name of this site stems from Alonzo Church's Lambda Calculus. Lambda Calculus was a highly influential mode of computation invented in the 1930s that eventually influenced a great deal of programming. This is most obvious in the form of the Lisp family of languages, where lambda functions have been present from day one, and where the very structure of code is based off of lambda calculus. However, the Lambda Calculus has now managed to seep into other programming styles-- most famously, C++ and Java have variants of lambda functions.