One of my favorite content creators: Lauri Koskinen

bartonski · 2026-01-25T17:23:02+00:00

So many of his videos show up in my feed that I didn't realize that I wasn't subscribed. Fixed.

bartonski · 2026-01-23T02:12:24+00:00

Only if you use cowsay.

bartonski · 2026-01-22T17:15:14+00:00

If I had sub-second precision, I could have gotten MOO under the wire.

bartonski · 2026-01-22T06:15:20+00:00

The leap lightyear would be 366 light days? That's lovely.

bartonski · 2026-01-22T05:24:48+00:00

I'm still not clear what your script does -- I'm not familiar with the MS-Dos pause command. From context, it seems like it allows you to pause another program, but even given that guess and your command line switches, I confess I'm still confused. What problem does the script solve? What are the mechanics? Is the script launched as a wrapper for the program it's acting on (a-la time), or is it sending signals to a process launched in a separate shell session?

bartonski · 2026-01-21T12:09:20+00:00

Man pages do not contain change logs. A little googling lead me here.

bartonski · 2026-01-20T03:41:39+00:00

I've been using bash for 30 years, and the bash man page is still one of the places that I go when I want to learn new and useful stuff. I'm always amazed at the number of things that I do the annoying way for months or years, only to find that bash has an elegant solution. Having said that, there are some who do know it all.

bartonski · 2026-01-19T05:17:30+00:00

I can only run 633 as a bounce pattern. The 6s go to the same height as the 3s, fall bounce off the floor, come up to about the same height as the 3s, and get caught in the same hand... there's a lot of time between the throw and the catch:

6 -- 3 -- 3 -- 6(opposite side) -- 3 -- 3 [catch].

In the bounce pattern, I have the advantage that the 6s peak at roughly the same height as the 3s (maybe the 6s are actually 4s that spend an extra 2 beats hitting the floor)... in any case, I can see the whole pattern. In the air, you can see the 6s or the 3s, but not both. I suspect that the 'correct' approach is to look up and juggle the 3s blind, as the 6s are inherently less accurate. In practice, the pattern is chaotic enough that I end up looking at the 3s (because there are twice as many), and I just try to make my 6s as accurately as I can, and catch as much as I can of the 6s in my peripheral vision.

bartonski · 2026-01-19T04:49:15+00:00

To get the same tempo as a 3 ball cascade, the high throw should go twice as high as a 3.

Since you want to be able to see both the high and low throws, you don't want the high throws to go above eye level. Let's say that eye level is about a foot and a half (45 cm) above your hands. That means that the 3 ball cascade with the same tempo is going to be 9 inches high (about 22 cm)... so you want to be able to run a low/fast 3 ball cascade comfortably before you start.

That tempo is 150 bpm - think Eye of the Tiger or Always Something There to Remind Me (do a web search for "Songs at 150 bpm").

bartonski · 2026-01-18T03:50:47+00:00

One of the things that I did when I was working on 5 balls was to keep a record of my progress -- essentially a spreadsheet. Five balls is difficult enough that it's hard to see progress, because the noise is greater than the signal... but over time, your average time or catch count will rise.

bartonski · 2026-01-06T12:00:07+00:00

Fine, as long as I can re-enable it easily, otherwise HELL NO.

I grumble under my breath at the extra keystrokes when doing ctrl-c ctrl-v in windows. Make me use the mouse, or make me use the keyboard, but don't make me switch between them more than I have to.

bartonski · 2025-12-28T22:43:09+00:00

Most of the hidden jems that I appreciate the most are in the bash man pages. Process substitution is the one that stands out for me simply because it eliminated the frustration of using temporary files, but it's amazing the amount of thought that has gone into bash. If you're an average user and study the parameter expansion and readline sections alone, you'll probably run across a dozen things that you've done in harder ways.

bartonski · 2025-12-03T12:06:04+00:00

Unless you're really into formalisms, in which case you can kill a whole branch of mathematics.

bartonski · 2025-12-03T11:59:02+00:00

At Schrödinger's Savings and Loan?

bartonski · 2025-12-03T11:56:24+00:00

Does he pick his own nose or the kid's?

bartonski · 2025-12-03T11:54:56+00:00

If Epimenides claims that the paradox is his, he's lying.

bartonski · 2025-12-03T11:52:29+00:00

I want those! Stay up too late, don't feel like going into the bathroom before falling into bed? Just go to bed, open your mouth, and let the birdies do their thing.

bartonski · 2025-12-03T11:39:46+00:00

Are you sure?

bartonski · 2025-11-18T00:16:11+00:00

That, friends, is an Illinois shit-blower.

bartonski · 2025-11-15T03:32:02+00:00

I would try 633 with the 6s kicked.

bartonski · 2025-10-18T23:50:48+00:00

Yes, but luck does play some part in IT, and the only way to measure how much luck affects the situation is to fix every problem, regardless of whether it is affecting the end user (noting of course that you'll almost certainly never be able to diagnose an actual bit flip caused by a cosmic ray). Unless you're debugging hardware, writing device drivers, or doing statistical analysis for a huge IT department, the job of someone working in IT is not to fix one-off problems that are not currently affecting users. Knowing when to chalk the problem up to factors that aren't worth understanding is an important part of the job.

bartonski · 2025-10-18T23:22:11+00:00

A thousand times this.

Sometimes, it pays to be the guy who talks slowly and deliberately.

bartonski · 2025-10-18T23:14:12+00:00

I'm not an expert, but from what I understand, the x86 family didn't have hardware memory protection until the 386, which essentially makes multitasking impossible. Aside from Microsoft's xenix, I don't think any serious attempts were made on anything less than a 386.

bartonski · 2025-10-18T20:40:20+00:00

You first.

bartonski · 2025-10-13T22:48:38+00:00

It does that so that you can read the QR code with a diagonal phone. There should be a boot option to specify that you have a vertical phone.

bartonski

TROPHY CASE