The steps I took to recover data from some 30 year-old MS-DOS backup floppy disks.

Make sure that your SwiftUI View-returning methods return some View, not any View.

In the spirit of #showyourwork, and learning in the open, I’ve decided to document my journey as I teach myself about SceneKit on iOS and OS X, and modern 3D APIs.

Getting the --delete flag working with cwRsync on Windows.

Upgrade your Go installation to get the Delve and IntelliJ debuggers to work.

The Apple Watch is such a personal device that it’s very enticing to create little, personal, information dashboards for it.

If you’ve recently migrated a Ubuntu virtual machine file from one computer to another, or from one virtualization product to another, you might have discovered that networking inside the VM was no longer working.

As described in this Parallels KB article, what’s probably happened is that the random MAC address generated by the virtualization host has changed. The file: /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules contains a record of the matching MAC address from the previous host. When Ubuntu networking starts, a new interface, perhaps eth1 gets created, but is not listed to start automatically.

The magnificent set of snowflake photos by Russian photographer Alexey Kljatov (recently featured by kottke.org) make for some wonderful desktop images. Michael and I have both just recently updated our desktop images to these snowflake macros.

Michael’s Razer Blade features an 800x640 display as the trackpad. A resized snowflake makes an ideal trackpad background.

Pro Tip: If you’re trying to turn one of these images into a 16:9 or 16:10 wallpaper, Photoshop’s Content-aware Fill (Shift+F5) is your best friend.

Jason Fried asks “Would you pay $5/month for Google if it wasn’t free”?

Dave Winer says “Clone the Google API”.

I’d like to join those together and ask “Would you pay $80/month to own a part of the infrastructure that powered a free implementation of the Google API”? In other words, rent a dedicated (low-end) server from the likes of Layered Technologies, or EV1Servers, and use it to run a distributed part of the crawling, indexing, or querying part of a full-on search engine.

I’ve just spent the afternoon trying to get a simple TCP connection established.

The story is that I was configuring Nagios to check some HTTP services that are behind a Cisco PIX firewall. Nagios kept on getting timeout errors – when I tried by hand with telnet, I was getting the same problem, but only from the machine running Nagios. After setting up some logging on the firewall, I could see lines like: