Your First Day of Snowboarding
Who convinced you to go snowboarding? Tell them off and go back home! No, really, try it out and follow useful guides like this one… Snowboarding is popular, snowboarding is fun, snowboarding is painful. Who’s right? All of the above! Here is a short guide to your first day on the mountain. Continue reading
How Good Is Duolingo At Teaching Languages?
I have been long fond of Duolingo, an app that teaches languages for free. You can use it on the phone, you can use it on a web site, it teaches language in a playful way that people call gamified. You get points, you compete with others, and you get constant positive feedback. More than just that, Duolingo has a series of courses for less common languages. I am particularly fond of the Esperanto and Hawaiian courses, as I love both languages and because there really wasn’t a good alternative for Duolingo before. Continue reading
Gender Treatment in Nova vs. Esperanto
One of the more political attacks against Esperanto in current times comes from the idea that Esperanto is inherently sexist. Nova is different, although the difference is less political and more due to language simplicity and consistency reasons. The end result is anyway that Nova, unlike Esperanto, is entirely sex-neutral in a way that is easier to learn and comprehend. Continue readingAdding Search to a HUGO Site
One function that is harder to do without a database backend, as static sites don’t, is search. With WordPress, search is baked into the core and all templates have to do is not get in the way. But on a static site, there is no backend to call, no infrastructure to invoke, and no user interface to show. Static sites have gotten around this by using third party search providers. Basically, you add some third party code to your site and then magic happens. Continue reading
Good Bye, Shasta
I was perusing the articles on here and found the one I wrote when my older cat, Mondo died. When the younger one, Shasta died, I wrote a private one but nothing to commemorate her publicly, so here goes. Cats are weird animals, but they are weird in a way very similar to how humans are. Both of us are social, but not too much. We like interacting with other members of our species, but we also know we are competing with them. Continue readingMoving on again: Joomla to WordPress to Hugo
It’s that time of the century again: I need to move on from one platform to another and carry (almost) all the content with me. This time, the move was not necessary and I could have continued working with WordPress. But updating the software every few days added up in time, the concern that eventually I’d be caught by a WordPress flaw that allowed remote execution, and ultimate takeover of the server, and the resources required to run PHP and MySQL were all too much. Continue reading
The Great Annular Eclipse of 2023
I am still remembering the Great American Eclipse of 2017 with fondness and surprise. Even to a trained physicist like me, the sudden disappearance of the sun for a few minutes in the middle of the day was surprising, even startling. It’s probably my fondest memory of a natural event, together with the sight of lava falls on Hawai’i, the Big Island of the state. But there was a much more convenient eclipse happening in 2023. Continue reading