Hi, hope you're good! I just thought — you know — when I stop and think for a minute — i should maybe tell someone that there's always more writing occurring at wiki.secretGeek.net — featured articles here: wiki.secretgeek.net/home/features and "Wiki's RSS feed" is here (ask grandma if you ain't sure what that would be). Feedly to "subscribe...
(Technically they're called properties, but everyone calls them variables because of the var(--mycolor) syntax -- and I'm a descriptivist not a prescriptivist, so I'm gonna call 'em variables too.) Now... CSS Variables are COOL. The hooded figures who lurk near the Forbidden Dog Park don't want you to know about CSS Variables. The Sherriff's...
In my various websites and web applications, I often need to store some things and later retrieve them. Mostly for this I use a really simple key value store called "Stashy", that I built, oh, decades ago. Imagine I have a "plain old class object", and I want to save it. It might be an object called "myNewBlogPost". I will call:...
Now that everyone else has to work from home let me share my tips from 5 happy years of this way of life: Get some exercise! Measure your steps and make sure you do a healthy amount every day. Super important. With no incidental walking your fitness can really drop. Music! Music is crucial for me and maybe for you too. I bought a spotify...
I use a plain text file to manage my daily todo items. (Gina Trapani championed this idea with the "todo.txt" movement) and I use some little bits of console goodness to make it work my way. I like to jam with the console cowboys in cyberspace. At the start of each day I run a powershell script, "today" that does a bunch of calculations, opens up...
Well it's the roaring 20's at last and here's the blogpost where I look back on the annual output of a machine I call "me". I spend a lot of time berating myself for the things I didn't do, so it's pretty odd to look back and see that a lot of things did get out the door. Numbers in parens, e.g. "(3,2,1)", are the figures from last year, the year...
I challenged my twitter peeps: Challenge: you have a csv file and you need to import it into a new table in a database. You have 5 mins to get it done. What tools do you use? @secretgeek and was overwhelmed with the responses! So many different ways people approach the problem, and so many different tools. It reminds me of Miles' Law: Where you...
Unless you've been living under a rock like some disgusting sand-sneaking Seeker -- you're aware of the awesome sensation taking the gaming community by storm: Desert Skies. Here's a video of the game play in case you're not familiar. I recently sat down for an intense lunch with one of the minds from White Rabbit Games - the creative duo behind...
A good friend asked me the other day, "Wait a second, what's nimble text?" and I stammered out an answer. I'm not good at elevator pitches. Waving my arms around didn't make it any clearer. I tried waving them in bigger circles and pointing as I talked. It still didn't help. I decided to email him an answer. It turns out I don't have his email...
Inspired by a comment thread at hacker news I made this mini site: excel.secretgeek.net I often want to share Joel Spolsky's famous "You Suck at Excel" video tutorial with "important" business people inside the large enterprise where I spend a lot of time. But it would be easily misconstrued as trolling if I sent a business customer a URL that...
Some people invest in gold, others bitcoin. I put my money on ideas. The volatility can be wild. Take this idea -- the idea that "Contenteditable" attribute is a terrible basis for a Wysiwyg editor, as expressed by this article from medium engineering. 5 years ago, this idea was only worth 3 points and 1 comment. Why ContentEditable is Terrible 5...
Yesterday I was on a bus! Yes, a bus! I don't get to ride buses so often due to the working from home lyfe, but I took the opportunity to write some simple code (as I used to do on buses in the past... i even gave a talk about it once, when alt.net was a thing.) And the thing I coded on the bus was a html quine. Go and see this html quine It's......
Even though I'm polite and I click yes to let all the websites keep their cookies on my machine, for their own devilish surveillance purposes, even though I say yes and there are no doubt a million cookies filled with details about me, knowing everything i like and what i click on, and invading every ounce of my privacy, it seems that they can't...
Finally some exciting news on the TimeSnapper front. For a long time, the most requested feature for TimeSnapper has been a whole new version, for the Mac OS. Many of our customers and friends have moved from Windows to Mac over the last decade, and consistently told us that they miss the peace of mind and assistance that TimeSnapper provides....
Look how tragic this is.... You create your new react app with: npx create-react-app my-app And it spits out 907 lines of techno-babblicious output, scrolling scrolling scrolling in your console, ending at last with exactly one useful shard of information: Success! Created my-app at C:\example\my-app Inside that directory, you can run several...