Jerry Stratton's Blog, page 27

Buttery foil-baked potatoes for National Potato Day

National Potato Day is tomorrow. And it’s a great day to grill. Here’s a simple foil-wrapped potato and onion recipe for the grill or the oven.

Apple’s spinning mirror: exploiting children for dictatorships

Apple has decided on “child porn” as the root password to disable privacy on their phones. But the system they’re using appears to be mostly worthless at detecting the exploitation of children, and very useful for detecting dissent from authoritarian governments.

The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln

As the founding president of the Republican Party and the man who guided the United States through the incredible sacrifices of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, Abraham Lincoln deserves more than adulation. He deserves to be read.

Gain-of-bureaucracy disease

Bureaucracies do not admit they’re wrong; scientists are always trying to prove they’re wrong. Government funding is diametrically opposed to the advancement of science.

Using version control with AppleScripts

AppleScripts aren’t stored as text, which makes it impossible to track changes in AppleScript files using version control software such as Mercurial or Git.

Why should everyone learn to program?

Anything that mystifies programming is wrong.

Automated Scribus Daredevils NPC character sheets

Part 2 of 2: the free Scribus page layout software makes it easy to automate the creation of NPC character sheets.

The Star-Spangled Banner in MIDI

What could be more appropriate for the fireworks of the Fourth of July than a song about bombs bursting in air, illuminating a great flag rippling defiantly to a hostile world?

Childish things: the decline of toys and the fall of man

The old admonishment to put away childish things misses, in a very important sense, a critical point: we can never put away childish things. The way we interact with toys as children is how we interact with life as adults. If your toys have not taught you to sift evidence, weigh risks, and make decisions, the world becomes a very frightening place.

Daredevils NPC generator

Part 1 of 2: a script to calculate Daredevils attributes, talents, skills, and stats from a text file of initial values and character development.