Simon Zelazny's Blog

A small usability improvement If you are used to scrolling reading material with your spacebar and you dislike Emacs’ unhelpful default (showing Buffer is read-only: #<buffer blah.txt> in the minibuffer) when trying to do so in a read-only buffer, I have a

Reviving Dictionary.app on your iPhone (kind of) Desktop Macs come with a superbly useful application called Dictionary.app, which is slowly getting shuffled out of sight in favor of ‘integrated’ search in Spotlight.

The year in review To the extent that lack of free time permits, I try to do some recreational programming on the side, unrelated to my dayjob or any money-making concerns.

If you’re trying to play Mechwarrior 2 for Dos under dosbox and find that the game hangs after a mission ends, displaying the message “Press any key to exit” on top of the screen, this is the solution: Grab dosbox-x, compile it, and enjoy your Mechwarrior…

Picom compositor to the resuce I’m a big fan of grayscale color filters on computer screens.

A small hack with a large ergonomic payoff As I wrote previously, I’ve put away the SML# and got back to recreational programming in plain old Standard ML.

Review of chapters 9-11 & overall thoughts For Context: All the previous posts in this series Chapter 1: Setting Up an SML# Environment Chapter 2: The Essense of ML Programming Chapter 3: List Processing Chapter 4: Defining and Using Datatypes Chapter 5:…

Accessing External Data Before the year ends, let’s take a look at Chapter 8, titled “Accessing External Data”.

TLDR: When using defaultdicts to represent sparse data with large cardinalities, remember that reading values with [] is side-effecting and increases the size of the dictionary.

Polish schoolchildren learn the basics of coding in the MIT Scratch creative programming environment.