Category Archives: General

A Disingenuous Mistake in Dan Ariely’s Talk About Dishonesty

Posted on 2013-07-01 by Stephan Sokolow

I ran across this post draft while clearing out old notes and, since I don’t think I’ve ever blogged about the instinctual underpinnings of “piracy” before, here you go… A few days ago, I saw RSA Animate’s video for The (Honest) … Continue reading →

Posted in Web Wandering & Opinion | Leave a comment

Emptying “Deleted” Files

Posted on 2013-06-05 by Stephan Sokolow

A few days ago, I woke to find my home partition 100% full and programs erroring out because of it. “No problem,” I thought and fired up ncdu to figure out what had eaten up the 12GiB I’d had free … Continue reading →

Posted in Geek Stuff | Leave a comment

A little tool for command-line playlist building

Posted on 2013-05-24 by Stephan Sokolow

For the last few years, I’ve been amassing a collection of little scripts I use every day to build playlists, both for Audacious and for MPlayer. About a week ago, I realized that they’d started to duplicate each others’ functionality … Continue reading →

Posted in Geek Stuff | 6 Comments

Trifles Make Perfection

Posted on 2013-05-10 by Stephan Sokolow

TL;DR: When you’re doing something creative, look for details which, with only minimal change, could greatly broaden your work’s appeal and staying power. (Also includes examples.) Every now and then, I run across a creative work which frustrates me, not … Continue reading →

Posted in Otaku Stuff, Writing | 2 Comments

Making Coveralls work with PyPy and skip Python 2.5 on Travis-CI

Posted on 2013-05-01 by Stephan Sokolow

I have a couple of projects that get tested on Travis-CI and I just discovered Coveralls, a tool which integrates with it to provide a code coverage badge to go alongside your build status badge. (and is also free for … Continue reading →

Posted in Geek Stuff | Leave a comment

How To Invert Your X11 NumLock LED

Posted on 2013-04-18 by Stephan Sokolow

TL;DR: numlockx off; xdotool key Num_Lock I like to leave NumLock on all the time but, with my current keyboard, the indicator light is a blindingly bright blue. I noticed that the numlock light would sometimes get confused, so its … Continue reading →

Posted in Geek Stuff | 2 Comments

Error 400: The Web’s Most Under-Appreciated Response

Posted on 2013-03-09 by Stephan Sokolow

TL;DR: You should respond with Error 400 if the URL is malformed or the parameters fail validation rather than with Error 404. If you’ve ever run a website which reports 404ed requests to the admin, you’ve probably noticed that, every … Continue reading →

Posted in Geek Stuff | Leave a comment