“Hey, pop quiz! Which of these languages is the best Lisp dialect?

  1. Java
  2. Objective C
  3. Perl
  4. PHP
  5. Emacs

“The answer, of course, is Perl, because it’s the only one of those languages that has both lexical closures and first class anonymous functions.”

— JWZ speaks in tongues

Power Girl


Yuumi auditions for the next DC ensemble movie…

(via)

Dear Apple,


Will you ever figure out how to sync data between devices?

Seriously, how long have you been shipping the Reminders app now, which is, I note, one of the single most useful features of your watches, now in their fourth generation?

You know, the one that constantly gets out of sync if you own more than one device, like, say, a Mac, an iPhone, and an iPad?

That’s right, the one where the only reliable fix is to open the Calendar app on each device and manually refresh your list of Calendars.

Hell, you could buy 2/3 of the third-party sync solutions in the world out of petty cash, and your entire iCloud platform would benefit.

Mapping our Japan trip...


On previous trips, I’ve carried an old Sony GPS logger that I could sync up with the timestamps on my photos, both for geotagging and just figuring out where all we went (“remember that little backstreet temple where you wanted pictures of the fallen leaves, but those kids kept playing in them?”). Sadly, since the GPS epoch is about to roll over again, and Sony hasn’t supported that device in many years, it’s e-waste now.

The fallback plan was to just snap phone pics whenever I wanted to remember where I’d been, but my new camera can use Bluetooth to pull GPS from my phone, and Sony just replaced the flaky PlayMemories app with one that promises to be a lot more reliable. Incidentally, since this isn’t a serious photo trip, I won’t be taking big lenses or a tripod, just the a6500 body, the 18-105mm f/4 G lens, and a new find, an Eighties-vintage Minolta 100-200mm f/4.5 (with mount adapter). I was considering the big old beer-can 70-210mm f/4, but I’d have ended up leaving it in the hotel a lot; this one is a lot easier to keep with me, and the effective 150-300mm zoom range is perfect for hand-held use. Also, it was under $40 at Green’s Camera World in Monterey, which I visited during my iPhone-replacement woes.

But I still needed to decide how to share map bookmarks with my sister, as mentioned previously. With perfect timing, Trello came to the rescue with their brand new map power-up. I was already doing all our trip planning in Trello boards, so it was pretty easy to add location data.

And since you can always export a Trello board to clean JSON, I was able to trivially generate a matching Google Maps/Earth KML file.

Since this is the first version of their mapping support, there are a few issues. First, it leaks memory like nobody’s business, crashing the app if you try to add too many locations in one session. Second, it only works in the Android/iOS apps at the moment, not the main Trello web site. Third, the search functionality is quite crude, and had a lot of trouble with non-English names; I spent a lot of time trying to outsmart it, and eventually had to give up and manually place about 10% of the pins (basically, switch to Google Maps, look up the location, find something nearby that’s less obscure, search for that in Trello, and then move the marker to the right spot).

The result, however, is a very clear overview of our options every day.

Nhung Nguyen


Okay, I think I’ve found my next vacation destination…

(via)

"Oh, I Wish I Were A Robert Mueller Jingle..."


(with apologies to Oscar Mayer…)

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶
Your baloney has a first meme,
it’s ‘Rus-sian Col-lu-sion’.
Your baloney has a second meme,
it’s ‘Or-ange-Man-Is-Bad’.
Oh we’ll laugh in your face every day,
and if you ask us why we’ll saaaaay,
“​…cause Loony Leftists have to pay
for screwing up the USA.”
🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Oppai Seijin!


Every anime girl ever…

(via)

…well, except for the ones suffering from A-cup angst.

On the bright side, anime girls won’t infect your laptop during a software update like ASUS. Unless you download them from one of those sites…

Yūsha and Yuri


This week, one Princess thickens the plot in Endro!, and two others may be separated forever in Manaria Friends (or, y’know, not).

The MF episode kind of feels like a season-ender, but since nothing really happens in this show, it’s hard to tell. I wouldn’t mind at all if it continued, especially since Grea clearly hasn’t thought through the consequences of her decision.

MyNoise favorite


I mentioned earlier that the only app that lost all its data when I restored from backup onto a new iPhone was MyNoise. Fortunately I only had one that really mattered, and I was able to reconstruct it from the version on my iPad.

The web version of it is here; it’s a simple mix of Japanese Garden, Temple Bells, and Wooden Chimes, and it does a great job of masking annoying noises that interfere with getting to sleep.

Well, for me, anyway; for all I know it’ll do the exact opposite for anyone else. 😁

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”