Fossil is a distributed Source Control Manager that claims to offer the same power without the complexity of Git. The article Fossil: Rebase Considered Harmful by D. Richard Hipp (Fossil SCM) is part of the documentation for the tool.

One of the main selling points of Fossil is that it does not support rebase. In the article, the author lays out the many ways in which rebasing causes no end of woes for developers using Git.

I’d heard of Fossil before and I’d even skimmed this document before. This time around, though, I... [More]

The airline Swiss needs to work on tact in its e-mails. Or they need to work on their QA process.

Instead of a boarding pass, they sent the following mail in response to a check-in attempt.

“Your boarding pass(es) could not be issued because necessary data is missing or because the immigration status does not allow boarding.

“Please note that it is your responsibility to hold all necessary immigration documents for this international trip. Click here to enter or amend your data and receive... [More]”

The article Z’s Still Not Dead Baby, Z’s Still Not Dead by Andy Clarke (24 Ways) is well-written, very interesting and taught me a few new CSS tricks of which I was unaware.

Granted, my work usually doesn’t call for fancy effects like those you can achieve with something like background-blend-mode, but it can happen. There’s not only background-blend-mode, there’s also mix-blend-mode and filter, all of which apply high-quality effects dynamically.

In the late spring, I had a two-month project where I had to use a... [More]

The 25th COP (Conference of the Parties) or United Nations Climate Change conference (Wikipedia) has come to an end in Madrid. Other instances of this conference were COP3 in Kyoto (the first agreement that the U.S. agreed to and which the Congress completely ignored), COP 15 in Copenhagen (where Canada and the United States worked together to torpedo any agreement) and, of course, COP21 in Paris, with the much-touted Paris Accords that Obama signed and that Trump officially left—and which all other... [More]

Marco’s Old Links

The following are links to old favorites, some of which are dead and others that are no longer interesting to me.

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.

The Congress (2013)... [More]

Bernie Sanders is doing extremely well in the campaign for presidential election in the U.S.

And he should be doing well. His basic message is:

Lets stop fighting over table scraps; instead, let’s get a real meal—take it, if we have to—stop being dicks to each other for four years, and see what happens.

There is still almost a year to go until the election in 2020. The campaign is already more than a year old. I can’t think of another country that starts campaigning more than a couple... [More]

This year’s list of books and reviews and notes got a little bit out of hand. As I’ve done in other years, I’ve included my notes and review of each book in this article as well as linked a separate article which includes the same notes and review, as well as citations and rough notes. So, this article weighs in at about 64 pages.

This was a big year, with 32 books and long essays/novellas/papers documented here, including seven long books about climate change and humanity’s future (2 in... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

The Book of Mormon is a musical created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of and writers for South Park. It is legitimately about the tenets and history of Mormonism and depicts the journey of a few young men as they go forth into the world on their “mission”, a rite that every Mormon[1] must pass.

Kath and I went to opening night in Zürich. The cast was excellent; several of the main characters had played in the same musical on Broadway. See the link for more information.

Synopsis

... [More]

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.

Hardware (1990) — 6/10... [More]

This is a fantastic and realistic super-villain origin story. It was beautifully crafted with a great soundtrack.

Hopelessness personified

Think of the simplest object in your apartment that gives you joy. Arthur Fleck didn’t have a single thing like that. His life was a misery at home, a dingy apartment filled with his mother’s madness and sadness.

When I got home from the movie, I dumped my remaining peanut M&M’s into a ceramic pumpkin. It made me think that Fleck didn’t have... [More]

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.

IT (2017) — 7/10

This... [More]

The article Here’s how much global carbon emission increased this year by Scott K. Johnson (Ars Technica) includes some sobering, if utterly unsurprising charts.

Not Even Close

This first chart is the most sobering one: it shows that we’ve most likely[1] slowed our CO₂ production from 2018 to 2019. But we’re still increasing. That is, it’s a positive development, but not nearly enough.

% increase in fossil-fuel usage

We need to get to zero CO₂ emissions by 2050 (or maybe even 2040) in order to avoid completely nightmarish scenarios. With the CO₂ we’ve... [More]

In the Storage Manager[1] on MacOS, there are several categories on the left-hand side, each showing the amount of space used for that category. I noticed that, for whatever reason, I still had the GarageBand base files installed. I haven’t ever used this application, so I had no qualms about deleting these files to recover 2GB of space on my SSD.

When I clicked “Remove GarageBand Sound Library”, the system asked for administrator credentials.

I entered my credentials but the credentials prompt... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

A couple of years ago, I wrote some documentation on How to browse pictures and albums on earthli. The article below extends those instructions to explain how to use a new mobile mode.

New Features

Mobile Mode

There is a new browsing mode on earthli that provides a read-only view of individual entries (like articles, pictures, journals, etc.) that is much more mobile-friendly. This mode is available for all applications (e.g. Recipes or News) but is most useful for the Albums where the mode... [More]

The article Mark Zuckerberg is a Rich Jerk by Dean Baker (Beat the Press) takes issue with the media’s love affair with plumbing the depths of billionaires’ minds.[1]

“It is bizarre that so many people look to the country’s billionaires to tell us how the world should be constructed or think that these people have any great insight into such matters. Being a billionaire means that you were successful at getting very rich. There is no reason to believe that billionaires have any more insight into major policy issues than... [More]”

The discussion React in concurrent mode: 2000 state-connected comps re-rendered at 60FPS (YCombinator) is illuminating mostly in that it shows how ego can impede productivity.

Ego-driven design

Ego can also be that thing that drives a talented programmer to create something of use to the rest of us, but that’s honestly a very rare case. More often than not, the best case is that a developer improves their skills—and perhaps learns to be more humble instead of shooting of their mouth about how “easy” it... [More]

The article In Defense of Utility-First CSS by Sarah Dayan on January 15th, 2018 (Frontstuff) is very long[1], so I’ve summarized a bit with notes and thoughts.[2]

I don’t really care about being pedantic without first knowing some facts. What are the requirements?

Requirements

• Can I quickly make a precise change to a single component?
• Can I make a global, thematic change?
• How quickly can I make changes?
• How maintainable is the result?

If atomic/utility CSS can deliver these things, then it’s probably a fine tool. But—spoiler alert—it... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]