Computers have changed a lot in the last several decades, but I think the intended audience for their documentation has changed a lot more:
As stated above, the host area of a disk is structured as a vector of logical blocks. From a performance viewpoint, however, it is more appropriate to view the host area as a four dimensional hyper-cube, the four dimensions being cylinder, group, track, and sector…. Referring to our hyper-cube analogy, the set of potentially accessible blocks form a line parallel to the track axis. This line moves parallel to the sector axis, wrapping around when it reaches the edge of the hyper-cube.
Imagine a world in which “I know, I’ll compare this to a 4-dimensional hypercube” is a reasonable thought.
1 Note that “4-27” is the twenty-seventh page of chapter four, not a range. I wouldn’t have numbered the pages that way—but then my go-to analogy also wouldn’t be “four dimensional hyper-cube,” I guess.)
I’d never really thought about it, but this from Mat Duggan is absolutely true for me:
[O]ne big monitor is a a different experience entirely compared to 2 smaller monitors. I don’t use the two monitors as one large unbroken screen, I tend to use one of them for “less important static content” like a ToDo list or my work chat tool and my email and then the “primary” monitor for my terminal/tmux/browser which is how I do all my actual work. But windows “belong” to one or they “belong” to another. Grudin found in 2001 that people use a second monitor exactly this way, where focal work on one, peripheral glances on the other. Twenty-five years ago. The OS still doesn’t know which monitor is doing one role and which the other.
The whole thing is about his ideal UI, and I haven’t done more than skim it, but it definitely seems interesting.
I downloaded Mars Edit, and am writing this post in it. It was—under documented, let’s say—as to how to set it up with TextPattern. But one forum post later, it’s actually very simple:
Enable the XML-RPC server within TextPattern (Admin > Preferences)
For the blog settings in Mars Edit, choose the MetaWeblog API and system name “Other.”
For the API Endpoint URL use https://www.example.com/rpc/
For “Blog ID” use “articles” (or another section slug)
Now to find a desktop client for Linux as well.
Update: Better to set Mars Edit to use “plain text” in its editor rather than “rich text”—the latter being just HTML—since TextPattern is expecting Textile input.
Update #2: I had to re-save this post from the web interface to make the formatting work. This is looking more and more like a bad idea.
Entergy is my power company. Periodically, I get emails from them in the form of a net promoter score question, that is, how likely would I be to recommend them to someone else. This drives me bonkers.
The thing is, where I am, they have a monopoly. There is no one else from whom I can buy power. So would I recommend them? As opposed to what? Not having electricity?