Technology, Trends, Politics and Nonsense
I purchased an Amazon Fire HD 7 Kids Pro tablet for my son in the summer. The tablet has a lot of cool kids features and apps, a simplified interface and a rugged case. But the ecosystem is locked down to Amazon. This means no YouTube and a slew of other apps that my son was using on his old Nexus ...
The astounding success of Wordle had me thinking about the BASIC program that it very closely resembles. In my copy of BASIC Computer Games from 1970, it is simply called Word. A player guesses a five-letter word and the computer tells the player which letters are matches and whether they are in th...
I was checking in on the status of my website in Google PageSpeed Insights using the Lighthouse scanner built into Google Chrome. I wasn't happy with the results. Why The Scores Dropped The scores were all green last time I checked. I hadn't made any updates to theme since then. However,...
Over the course of 2020 and 2021, different countries and regions imposed various levels of restrictions on gatherings. In Canada, employers were required to have employees work from home where possible. I have been working from home since March 2020, and work for a small business that has managed ...
I sometimes find I need a simple script to backup one or multiple folders and databases. This script just takes a list of pre-defined folders and databases, compresses the folder contents, and executes a database dump. A maximum of seven backups are kept, any older ones are deleted. Customize t...
One of the things about older houses is that they often have strange spaces. One of ours is under the stairs, where there is a closet with a low ceiling and not much space. Rather than storing boxes and coats, this space would be better storing our board games and some of the larger toys. To get...
It can be helpful to have a dedicated phone to put a few educational games and pre-approved media on. Most parents repurpose an old phone, which presents a few problems. Maybe other parents had a smooth experience with Family Link, but I couldn't get it to work correctly. I was able to set up most ...
One of the challenges with development is that tools and libraries evolve over time. It often becomes necessary to either upgrade to a newer library or change libraries entirely. The update from Grub 3.x to 4.x required a bit of refactoring. Neither script is overly complex but there is enough ...
If you evaluate your website using Google PageSpeed Insights, you may find it complaining that you're not using the WebP image format. First Scan The first scan with PageSpeed Insights gave me pretty good results for desktop, and somewhat poor results for mobile. The highest rated opportunit...
ReddyEddy is an application share a draft email with one person without, view and accept suggested changes, and update your draft copy seamlessly. It is intended for users who want to run an email by someone before sending it, accepting some or all of their suggestions, and then update their draft ...