Author Archives: Stephan Sokolow

Tidying up Amazon wishlist printouts

Whenever I visit the used games store, I like to bring a printout of my Amazon.ca wishlist, since it’s easier to work with than a tiny screen. However, Amazon, for reasons that escape me, decided that print versions would somehow … Continue reading

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Sci-fi and Fantasy: Why They Differ and Why You’d Blend Them

I’ve been wanting to post more regularly, so I decided share some of the insights for the book on plotting out stories that’s been on my TODO list for a while. (Embarassingly, I’ve actually wanted to do that for a … Continue reading

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Splitting CamelCase without Regex lookahead/lookbehind

I’ve been working to port the brains of my game launcher experiment from Python to Rust for easier refactoring and to eventually offer language bindings other than Python itself and, at the moment, I’m working on the “filename to title” … Continue reading

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Getting Your Cheap Chinese USB Foot Pedal Doing Useful Things on Linux

UPDATE 2024-03-14: Just use xremap. It can remap or keybind things at the evdev level with only/except device filtering and, if you’re on X11 or supported Wayland compositors, it also supports applying only/except application filtering for your remaps/keybinds. UPDATE 2021-04-18: … Continue reading

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Home-made tamper-evident security seals for kids and adults alike

Suppose you need to keep siblings, roommates, children, or even friends with wandering hands out of something, but you can’t use a lock. Maybe you’re worried they’ll find the key, maybe you need something that has no metallic parts, or … Continue reading

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How To Extend A JavaScript API Based On Promises/A+

I was writing a little unsigned “dump my tabs”  WebExtension for my Firefox Developer Edition when I realized that, outside the jQuery world, I’d only ever used old-style callbacks before. “No biggie”, I thought. It shouldn’t be too hard to … Continue reading

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A couple of simple proofs, made easier to grasp

I’ve always felt a certain undercurrent of awe at how elegant and beautiful the idea of a mathematical proof is. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a math geek, but I can’t help but admire the beauty of the proving … Continue reading

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