Year: 2021
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MacOS tip of the day: Dictionary
If you’re like me, you find yourself looking up words in the dictionary fairly frequently. For me, this is particularly true, since I am an American living in Germany, and even though I speak German quite well, there are few days that go by where I don’t need to look up a word or two.…
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UNIX tip of the day: pushd
I am frequently surprised by the number of colleagues I have who do not know about the BASH builtins pushd and popd. I myself remember seeing them for the first time in a script about 10 years ago, and had to look up the commands. At first I didn’t quite understand the point, but now…
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(mostly) Unplugged weekend
Last weekend I decided to try an experiment in which I didn’t use any screens at all. I made a couple exceptions for some video chat meetings I had already had scheduled with some friends and family, and there were a few very brief things I had to do on my computer for the kids.…
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What is a professor?
Yesterday at dinner my 12-year old son asked me if I used to be a professor. “No, I didn’t.” But I did teach at a university, right? “Yes, I did.” And thus began a 20 minute explanation of what it is to be a professor. I thought I would summarize it up here, since it…
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MacOS updates are slow
I remember a time 10 or 15 years ago when you could install a system update on your Mac without rebooting. I always chuckled at the Windows users who seemingly had to reboot every time they installed a new program, let alone a system update. I don’t remember exactly when Macs started requiring reboots for…