Why I use rxvt as my terminal
I’m a fan of Konsole and GNOME Terminal, and I use them both regularly. They’re great projects, and they represent modern terminals that meet the needs of users who spend their day in a shell, as well as users who only dip into a Unix shell every now and again. They integrate nicely into a desktop environment, bridging the gap between common GUI tasks and common shell tasks. I use GNOME Terminal at work and Konsole at...
Formatting NFL data for doing data science with Python
No matter what medium of content you consume these days (podcasts, articles, tweets, etc.), you’ll probably come across some reference to data. Whether it’s to back up a talking point or put a meta-view on how data is everywhere, data and its analysis are in high demand. As a programmer, I’ve found data science to be more comparable to wizardry than an exact science. I’ve coveted the ability to get ahold of raw...
How GNOME uses Git
“What’s your GitLab?” is one of the first questions I was asked on my first day working for the GNOME Foundation—the nonprofit that supports GNOME projects, including the desktop environment, GTK, and GStreamer. The person was referring to my username on GNOME’s GitLab instance. read...
How to make a Halloween lantern with Inkscape
The spooky season is almost here! This year, decorate your haunt with a unique Halloween lantern made with open source! Typically, a portion of a lantern’s structure is opaque to block the light from within. What makes a lantern a lantern are the parts that are missing: windows cut from the structure so that light can escape. While it’s impractical for lighting, a lantern with windows in spooky shapes and lurking...
My Linux story: I grew up on PC Magazine not candy
In 1998, the movie Titanic was released, mobile phones were just a luxury, and pagers were still in use. This was also the year I got my first computer. I can remember the details as if it were yesterday: Pentium 133MHz and just 16MB of memory. Back in that time (while running nothing less than Windows 95), this was a good machine. I can still hear in my mind the old spinning hard drive noise when I powered that computer on, and...
Pros and cons of event-driven security
Great news, everyone! Forrester Research says that 95% of all recorded breaches in 2016 came from only three industries: government, technology, and retail. Everyone else is safe… ish, right? read...
