the Zork Standard Code for Information Interchange

September 15, 2013  🐪 🧑🏽‍💻

I always feel a little amazed when I realize how many of the things that really interest me, today, are things that I was introduced to by my father. Often, they’re not even things that I think he’s passionate about. They’re just things we did together, and that was enough.

random tables with Roland

September 10, 2013  🐪 🧑🏽‍💻 ⚔️

This post is tagged programming and dnd. I don’t get to do that often, and I am pleased.

Tabs Outliner for Chrome revisited

September 8, 2013

Earlier this year, I lamented the state of “workspaces” in Chrome. I said that I’d settled on using Tabs Outliner, but that I basically didn’t like it. The author of the plugin asked me to elaborate, and I said I would. It has been sitting in my todo list for months and I have felt bad about that. Today, Gregory Meyers commented on that blog post, and it’s gotten me motivated enough to want to elaborate.

managing GitHub Issues labels

September 6, 2013  🐪 🧑🏽‍💻

I’ve been slowly switching all my code projects to use GitHub’s bug tracking (GitHub Issues) in addition to their code hosting. So far I’m pretty happy with it. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough. It’s got a tagging system so that you can categorize your issues according to whatever set of tags you want. The tags are called labels.

my new daily agenda emails

September 4, 2013  🌀

I’ve finally finished (for now, anyway) another hunk of code in my ever-growing suite of half-baked productivity tools. I’m tentatively calling the whole mess “Ywar”, and would paste the dictionary entry here, but all it says is “obsolete form of ‘aware’”. So, there you go. I may change that later. Anyway, a rose by any other name, or something, right?

THAC0, armor class, saving throws, skill, and other applications of the d20

August 31, 2013

More than a few times, when I’ve told people that I play an older version of D&D, I’ve gotten a slightly horrified look and the question, “Is that the one with THAC0?” What’s so awful about THAC0? I ask, but the answers are vague. “It doesn’t make any sense! It’s bizarre!”

Yahoo!'s family accounts still stink

August 22, 2013

It is amazing how bad Yahoo!’s “family account” experience is. I want to make an account for my six year old daughter to use to upload her photos to Flickr. Googling for Yahoo! family accounts and flickr finds this text: