Learning to Type

2020-01-13 6 minute read

One day in the early nineties when I was around eight or nine years old, my dad came home with two mysteriously acquired computers. Living in a tiny Dutch country town of about 1500 inhabitants, I wasn’t exposed to much in the way of high-tech, so this all felt very special and a bit magical. I had seen a computer before at school and on TV, but never actually used any, so this was all very exciting. I loved the way these machines looked: one was massive and square, a Commodore PET model 4016, the other rounded and much smaller (this may have been a simple dumb terminal like a Lear Siegler ADM-3A, I don’t remember).

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How to Unlike All Liked Tweets

2020-01-06 less than 1 minute read

Happy New Year! So you want to delete everything you’ve ever liked on Twitter?

Open up your browser’s developer console and paste this one-liner:

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Hello Again, Macbook

2017-06-16 1 minute read

Well, that didn’t take too long.

If you’ve been following along, you know that I’ve been trying to use Linux for my local development purposes on an Intel NUC (as well as a Lenovo laptop). I have to say, I still love the NUC and am going to find another use for it somehow, I’m just not sure what yet. However, Linux was somewhat of a disaster for me.

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PortAudio Panic and No Devices Found

2017-02-14 less than 1 minute read

Leaving this here for the poor souls on Linux systems that run into errors accessing the default input or output devices using PortAudio and get nothing back.

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Getting Rusty Code and Racer to Work Together

2017-02-14 less than 1 minute read

While installing the Rusty Code extension in Visual Studio Code is pretty straightforward, Racer wouldn’t work out of the box after clicking the “install dependencies” (or whatever it was called) button. In fact, I never received a confirmation message that the dependencies finished installing.

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Bye MacBook, Hello Intel NUC

2016-10-30 4 minute read

For a while now, my 2011 13” i5 MacBook Air which I use for development purposes has been showing signs of pending death: flickering screen when moving the lid, excessive heat, inability to be charged, killing 2 replacement batteries and 3 chargers, slowing down with new OS X/macOS installs, etc. etc.

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Elementary OS First Impressions

2016-10-30 4 minute read

It’s been about a week of using elementary OS and I’ve compiled a few of my first impressions. First off, I want to start off with that I understand that elementary is still somewhat immature, so don’t take any of the criticism as me putting the project on blast. Far from it, in fact, but more on that later.

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RSpec be_truthy, exist, or be true?

2016-10-14 1 minute read

The documentation for RSpec is amazingly detailed, but sometimes falls a bit short on when to apply certain matchers. In many of the specs that I’ve reviewed, incorrect matchers were used to test for pure Boolean values.

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C++ PImpl Template

2013-02-23 less than 1 minute read

If you’re not familiar with the PImpl (private implementation) idiom, read this Wikipedia article first. While this is more or less “syntactic sugar” since the templates are expanded during compilation, but I think it makes for cleaner looking code.

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C++ Events with lambda expressions, and std::function

2011-07-05 4 minute read

One of the things that C++ doesn’t have out-of-the-box is events, which is not necessarily a bad thing. However, with the additions to the C++0x/C++11 specification, we can implement something like an event system found in higher level languages such as C# using relatively easy to use code.

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