Category Archives: Geek Stuff

Nicer Terminal Commands For Flatpak-Installed Applications

Posted on 2021-04-29 by Stephan Sokolow

If you’re like me, you probably like to launch your GUI applications from the terminal at least occasionally… or from scripts… or from a quick launcher which doesn’t search .desktop names because you find it annoying to have your intent … Continue reading →

Posted in Geek Stuff | Leave a comment

RAR Test Files

Posted on 2021-04-04 by Stephan Sokolow

Quick question. How many people realized that it’s legally impossible to create a RAR file without using WinRAR, RAR for Linux, etc., all of which are shareware? At first, that might seem like no big deal, given that we have … Continue reading →

Posted in Geek Stuff | Leave a comment

Stripping Emoji from File And Folder Names

Posted on 2021-03-17 by Stephan Sokolow

There’s an annoying little problem that happens sometimes when you save stuff off the web, which the popularity of emoji has brought into the spotlight: Some tools still assume Unicode code points will fit within 16 bits and break with … Continue reading →

Posted in Geek Stuff | Leave a comment

Food For Thought

Posted on 2021-03-01 by Stephan Sokolow

I was making food and my mind got to wandering. “Broccoli… sounds like broccoly… same construction as shiny or smelly… what does it mean to have the characteristic of broccol?” “Cucumber… OK, If the vegetable is a “cucumb-er”, what does … Continue reading →

Posted in Web Wandering & Opinion | Leave a comment

Platformer Design Trends: Then and Now

Posted on 2020-11-27 by Stephan Sokolow

I started playing Celeste a couple of days ago and, while I was playing it, I started tallying up some of the ways that the average modern platformer, retro-styled or not, differs from its counterparts in the 80s and 90s. … Continue reading →

Posted in Web Wandering & Opinion | Leave a comment

Automated Testing for Open Watcom C/C++ and DOS

Posted on 2020-10-31 by Stephan Sokolow

UPDATE 2022-10-21: Added update on 86Box’s porting status One of the hobby projects I’ve been poking at again is written for DOS using Open Watcom C/C++ (v2 fork), and, being as averse to drudgework (and spoiled by modern tooling) as … Continue reading →

Posted in Retrocomputing | 2 Comments

Retrocomputing Category Announcement

Posted on 2020-10-30 by Stephan Sokolow

While working on an upcoming post (a run-down of C unit test frameworks that are easy to use under Open Watcom C/C++), I realized that I’m getting enough of these retrocomputing resource posts that mentioning them from each other is … Continue reading →

Posted in Retrocomputing | Leave a comment