Charles Petzold

I’m sure that some pictures are worth a thousand words, but others trigger a whole lot of puzzlement.

It was once possible to detect email scams by misspellings, sloppy grammar, messy formatting, and other blunders.

When a government engages in deviant behavior, it is the responsibility of the people to express their opposition.

Am I naïve in expecting Artificial Intelligence to be smart?

After all these years, I still get the dreams. ... more ...

Today is the 20th anniversary of this blog.

I’ve been going down some odd rabbit holes recently while researching my free online book-in-progress The Lost Art of Logarithms.

I recently saw an animation on Facebook that purported to show the “hidden beauty of the Moon’s orbit as it creates a flower-like pattern while revolving around Earth and Sun,” further referring to this motion as “celestial choreography” and an “intricate…

A friend from my PC Magazine days recently posted on Facebook a little mathematics anomaly that he encountered while trying to figure out the number of possible passwords under certain conditions.

This is a good-news-bad-news kind of day. ... more ...

I recently had a delightful remote chat with Tom McGrath of the DEX Show podcast (a presentation of the nexthink software company) about the 2nd edition of my book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software and some other issues.

The difference between misinformation and disinformation is the difference between ignorance and malice.

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but I do have New Year’s projects, and for 2025 I hope to spend as much time as possible working on my book The Lost Art of Logarithms. ... more ...

Like many people who turned 11 years old in 1964, the first record album I bought “on my own” — in other words by pleading “Mom, can you get this album for me?”

It might seem silly for a retired technical writer and obscure blogger to endorse a Presidential candidate.

I’ve been working on a graphical web project that requires an interactive roll of a pair of dice.