Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

On Ice

I’m shelv­ing this blog in favor of The Con­fusato­ry over on Tum­blr. The blog has had a good run, but it’s too much to man­age: I have to log in every few days to check for WP updates; I have to man­age back­ups of the MySQL tables and the blog itself; etc etc. Man­aged software […]


Briefly: Network Topologies

Things I learned today: net­work link-lay­er topol­o­gy makes a huge dif­fer­ence for wire­less. My file trans­fers via 802.11n from one lap­top to anoth­er were pret­ty slow: max sus­tained through­put was 3–4 MB/sec. As an exper­i­ment in solv­ing unre­lat­ed Air­Port base sta­tion asso­ci­a­tion issues, I plugged one lap­top (that’s already wired up to the TV as […]


SSDs and you: my dual-drive setup

I’ve been run­ning a dual-dri­ve set­up on my new Mac­Book Pro for the past two months. Here’s a bit of info about how I’ve got it set up, and how it’s work­ing for me A quick intro­duc­tion to SSDs The vast major­i­ty of a HD’s time is spent trav­el­ing from bit A to bit B: read­ing or […]


Switching databases with Things

[Sep­tem­ber 1st: updat­ed for Things 1.2. See bot­tom sec­tion for details.] I use Things for man­ag­ing tasks at work, and for track­ing my per­son­al to-do list. I did­n’t want to mix the two up, how­ev­er, so I use two Things libraries. To swap libraries, you need to hold down option at pro­gram launch, and choose […]


CouchDB, and achieving consistency

What hap­pens when you change the same doc­u­ment in two dif­fer­ent data­bas­es and want to syn­chro­nize these with each oth­er? CouchDB’s repli­ca­tion sys­tem comes with auto­mat­ic con­flict detec­tion and res­o­lu­tion. When CouchDB detects that a doc­u­ment has been changed in both data­bas­es, it flags this doc­u­ment as being in con­flict, much like they would be […]


Obsessive Completionism

I feel com­pelled to con­sume every last bit pro­duced in cer­tain dig­i­tal domains. Twit­ter users and RSS feeds are my lat­est vices; before that, it was Twit­ter and pod­casts, and before that, it was pod­casts and issues of The Econ­o­mist. And every yeah, the SxSW show­cas­ing artists tor­rents inter­rupts my music lis­ten­ing as I slowly […]


A few words about Fever

Shaun Inman’s Fever has been out for a lit­tle over a month, and I’ve been using it full-time since its release. I love it. By its very nature, a web-host­ed app means nev­er hav­ing to say, “I’m sync­ing”. When I close my lap­top at home, walk to the shut­tle, and open Fever on my iPhone, […]


Formatting digital text for ebooks

Pro­tip: don’t put any­thing in between me and the begin­ning of your ebook. Cred­its, info, ded­i­ca­tions: all that junk should be at the end, not stand­ing in between me and your first real words.


Quickly, with feeling

just so we’re all on the same page: This place, blog.cbowns.com, is for tech and social com­men­tary (see posts on Twit­ter, Rus­sia, et cetera). Post­ing fre­quen­cy: maybe once a month; things bake as a draft for a long, long time before they pop out. chyrp is my per­son­al blog. Thoughts, self-ana­ly­­sis, vague hints at angst, et cetera. […]


Excuses for @replies

Address­ing this briefly before any­one else starts echo­ing non­sense that @chockenberry said ear­li­er. Twit­ter can’t pos­si­bly have dropped the @reply choice (show all @replies, or show only @replies to users I fol­low) in the inter­est of load man­age­ment: It takes more work to take my list of fol­lowees, take each @reply post that one of […]


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