Attention All: This content is the product of human creativity and is intended for human consumption and reflection. Using this content for learning, training, inference, or any other purpose without explicit permission undermines ethical standards in AI use. Furthermore, unless otherwise required, this content has All Rights Reserved. Your compliance is required to respect the integrity of human-created content and uphold ethical principles in AI research, development, and deployment. "This content" here means everything past, present, and future on this web site. You may ask: why don't you u ..read more

(We'll use JavaScript for today, running in the Firefox developer console.) No doubt when you learned recursion, you learned that each recursive function call uses stack space to do its work.  There's only so much stack space.  So unless your programming language has a special feature (called tail call elimination), a recursive function can eventually exhaust all stack space, leading to the famous stack overflow error (not the web site). For example, let's write a loop to sum up numbers from 0 up to some N like this: let sum = 0;for (let i = 0; i < 10000; ++i) sum += i;console.lo ..read more

The best ad blocker around (uBlock Origin [0]) is not available on iPhone iOS.  That's essentially because Firefox and other browsers on iOS do not have the ability to load plugins as sophisticated as uBlock Origin. A good substitute is Firefox Focus [1].  It's a content blocker on iOS, and can be set up that way so that Focus will block ads from showing when you use Safari! A weird thing though is that Focus will not block ads on the main Firefox browser.  Again, something to do with iOS restrictions on iPhones. That's ok, because Firefox has ad blocking built in (though as an ..read more

uBlock Origin [0] is a plugin for the best ad blocking available, and it's available for Firefox on Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux. However, Firefox on iPhone iOS (FF-iOS) does not have any plug-in support, so uBlock Origin is not available for it. FF-iOS doesn't support plug-ins apparently because it's actually using Safari's rendering engine underneath (a choice forced by Apple, apparently). What to do about ad blocking in FF-iOS then? Turns out FF-iOS has ad blocking built-in! You just need to go into "Settings" > "Tracking Protection". Then enable "Enhanced Tracking Protection", a ..read more

These are incomplete notes and thoughts on programming languages through lens of multiplatform support and coding GUI apps for platforms like Android, iOS, Mac, Windows, Linux, and web (front and back ends). JavaScript Lack type safety. Java, Go, Python, Ruby, C++, C, Elixir Not great for frontend web dev. D Not great for Android or iOS.   Can build web apps via compiling to WASM (pretty sure it's experimental), but lack mature frameworks for frontend web dev.  Not very popularly used, unfortunately. TypeScript It's JavaScript but with a brilliant aftermarket type system retrofit. If ..read more

I like ISO 8601 or RFC 3339 style dates.  That is, rather than "January 15, 2021", I like "2021-01-15". This is especially useful in a file manager, having all the year-month-day lined up vertically in a column. I also prefer 24-hr time format for the same reason.  But how to set this up?   macOS Finder For Mac's file manager, it's really easy to set the date/time format: Just open System Preferences > Language & Region > Advanced > Dates, then modify the date formats to whatever you want.  At the same time, you could go to the Times tab and set it to use 24-hr ..read more

3 Finger Drag (3FD) is not available on Windows, and not built-in on Linux On Windows, we can achieve something similar.  Let's call it:  3 Finger Tap to Drag Lock.  See Enable 3 Finger Drag on Windows for how. On Linux, it is apparently possible to have pretty good 3 Finger Drag!  See below. Pretty good but not as good as Mac's 3FD, but without Apple's tightly integrated hardware, software, OS, driver, etc., it's impossible to get Apple Mac's high quality 3FD. What's 3FD anyway? 3 Finger Drag refers to a Mac accessibility feature.  When enabled, if you place three fin ..read more

 Will we ever get built-in 3 Finger Drag (3FD) on Linux?  At this point, likely not. Non-libinput desktop Linux For older desktop Linux not using libinput for trackpad support, you can look into mtrack (no 3FD but...) and the p2rkw's mtrack fork which provides 3FD.  Marty's article [1] is older but explains it well for non-libinput desktop Linux. But non-libinput is on the way out. Libinput is basically standard in 2021 Everyone's using libinput now, pretty much.  If you're on a desktop Linux machine using Wayland, you're using libinput. If you're using X11 still, you still ..read more

Here we go again... profile vs bash_profile vs bashrc dot files. In Lubuntu I had figured previously [1] that: Desktop environment's graphical login sources .profile bash started in login mode sources .bash_profile, but if that doesn't exist, then falls back to sourcing .profile bash started interactively (hence in non-login, or interactive, mode) sources in .bashrc only Both .bash_profile and .profile should contain code to source in .bashrc So when does code in each file run? .profile has code you want to run only once, and only upon your DE graphical login. .bash_profile has code you want ..read more

It's been two years, and the Mac Finder still shows incorrect folder sizes --- on macOS 10.15 Catalina. A single screenshot shows how hilarious / sad this is:   The screenshot here shows the Finder thinking my "lol" folder is 17.92 GB. But inside "lol" are two sub-directories: "magic", and "movs".  Finder thinks those two folders are zero KB. Inside "movs" are a bunch of MP4 files that together are several hundred MBs. Bring up the terminal to check, and du shows "lol" is actually 211 GB !!! For the record, du is correct.  "magic" contains a lot more files. Oh Apple... I can't ..read more