Author: Michael Hawkes
Metrics
Watch how radically taxes on the wealthy have fallen over the past 70 years: (Full column: https://t.co/XP0a4Iljti) pic.twitter.com/dGxmOjQ1b5 — David Leonhardt (@DLeonhardt) October 7, 2019 There’s something inherently wrong with rich people. How do they see themselves? How do they judge themselves? Do they care who has the biggest boat or largest plane? Is five…
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Competitions
For the past few years I’ve been engaged in competitions with myself. The first competition, and the most important was the competition to stop smoking. I started smoking when I was 20 and as I approached 50 it seemed like a good time to stop. My employer offers smoking cessation help in the form of…
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Installing Linux Mint 19.2 on a Dell Inspiron 13 7375 2-in-1
Over the past few years I’ve noticed that my personal laptop has been showing its age. It is a Dell XPS 13 L321X, one of the original Project Sputnik laptops from Dell. It came with pre-loaded Ubuntu 12.4 and has a Core i7 CPU, 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD. One of…
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Goals
Gazing in my crystal ball and reading some tea leaves, it looks like the Fediverse is going to grow substantially over the next few years as people realize Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter act are acting against their interests. There are a growing number of websites that are federated and interconnected, on top of the thousands…
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Starting the 2019 garden
Today I just started a bunch of seeds for the 2019 garden. I put them in a plastic Jiffypot tray that has 72 small pots. I filled them with potting soil, added some water, then planted the seeds. These are: 6 regular marigolds 6 Eskimo marigolds 6 petite yellow marigolds 6 asters 6 Chinese forget-me-nots…
Read MoreJust Kids
Just Kids by Patti Smith My rating: 5 of 5 stars A few months ago I heard an interview with Patti Smith talking about this book and her time with Robert Mapplethorpe. I was aware of both of them, but didn’t know they had a history together, which intrigued me enough to buy the book.…
Read MoreWorking on Amore v0.2
Version 0.2 of Amore is shaping up but still needs a bit of work. It’s still alpha quality software, so it’s very unpolished, but it’s much better than version 0.1. To start, the software borrows heavily from uses w3.css to make it responsive to a variety of devices. It looks good on computer screens, tablets,…
Read MoreAmore 0.1
If you’re so inclined, you can get version 0.1 of Amore here. The only thing that’s missing from what I hoped to include in this version is the ability of users to delete or edit their own posts. It requires some restructuring of the code dealing with headers and cookies, so I opted to kick…
Read MoreThe road to Amore v0.1
Despite some fits and starts with coding Amore, I’m making progress towards version 0.1. I already see a bunch of things I want to change in future versions, but alpha software is a bit like a rough draft. It isn’t meant to be pretty or bug free, but should have the primary functions and mostly…
Read MoreProtocols
There are a lot of different protocols on the web (XKCD sums it up nicely). Basically, every big company has their own way of doing things making stuff easier to find, or putting stuff in context. The three protocols below are encouraged by different major tech companies, though they all kind of do the same…
Read MoreRabbit holes
Several years go I used to get sucked into the rabbit hole that is Wikipedia. I used to visit its Main Page, then click on some random link, go to an article, and get caught in this loop of clicking random links and reading random articles. It was exciting and it felt like I was…
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