I thought that I had nothing for the two weeks from Monday January 18 to Sunday January 31, 2016, but my notes begged to differ. They suggested the following items for your reading, listening and viewing pleasure:

Party trick

If you’re like me, you stop two to three chips short of finishing the packet so that you can explain to your conscience that you didn’t finish the whole thing. However, once or twice in my life, I’ve been faced with the terrifying conundrum of a partially finished packet of chips, but no way to seal the packet for later utilisation. Readers, agonise no more! Learn from this animated demonstration:

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On Ubuntu I mostly use Gnome Flashback with Metacity, along with the brilliant Synapse app starter / file finder. I do this in spite of having a beefy NVIDIA GPU in this Core i7 workstation, because the OpenGL compositing on this 2560×1440 display makes video conferencing really slow, and because I do OpenGL development and need to have maximum performance for the app I’m working on.

However, it irritated me to no end that the window borders were so thin that I was not able to grab them for a resize. Adding insult to injury, there were only the four standard themes in Settings | Appearance, namely Adwaita, Ambiance, Radiance and High Contrast, none of which has usable borders.

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The week of Monday January 11 to Sunday January 17, 2016 got off to a brilliant start with a business lunch at Bodega, a restaurant that finds itself on the Dornier Wine Estate. The view looked something like this:

… and the company was suitably awesome. (This is not the first time that Bodega makes its appearance on this blog, or in the blog-free suburbs of my social calendar. The company might be different every time, but so far its level of awesomeness has been quite consistent.)

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In the week of Monday January 4 to Sunday January 10, at least the following things happened:

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Swift is a new high-performance compiled language designed by Apple. I’ve had some experience using it for an IOS development project, but the language is open source and is already available for Linux.

Some of you are probably able to appreciate the irony of me writing a blog post about Apple’s new programming language Swift, but here we are. :) I am, grudgingly, really impressed by Apple’s good work.

In this post I’m going to chat about closure expression syntax, in the process showing you IBM’s Swift Sandbox, an online tool for experimenting with Swift.

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Today as I was configuring some build settings in Qt Creator, an otherwise really great product, I was faced with this extremely frustrating situation:

I absolutely, definitely needed to configure the debugger. However, the controls required to do so were disabled, as can be seen by their greyed out visual state. Although it was easy to find the controls for configuring the debugger (good discoverability), it was impossible to find out exactly why the software would not allow me to do so.

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I’m probably what one might call an obsessive note-taker.

I’ve talked in the past about the importance of keeping a lab journal. Initially I produced a stack of books filled with hand-scribbled notes. Although this is my favourite authoring modality, the fact that such notes can’t be easily indexed and queried (maybe one day?!) soon leads one to try electronic solutions. Over the years I’ve experimented with a number of different tools (see under “Nerd News”) to do this.

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Most Android launchers are  small variations on the same concept: One or more screens of widgets and icons (sometimes grouped) which can be used to start various different apps. It’s usually up to the user to place these icons on the screen, much like we’ve been doing for ages on our computer desktops.

If you too are in the mood for a more innovative take on the launcher, you could do much worse than installing Nokia’s (yes, they live!) free Z Launcher app.

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I wish you a truly happy 2016, filled with learning and helping other people! Neil deGrasse Tyson, exemplary human, said it best:

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.

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(Post updated on January 8, 2021. See section at the end.)

The whole world is using WhatsApp to message each other. I often do too, because I want to inter-operate with the rest of the world.

However, WhatsApp belongs to Facebook.

Although Facebook has promised otherwise (fast-forward a few years: Yes, they did break that promise. See updates at the end of this post.), the temptation to link all of your WhatsApp messages with Facebook logins (a straight-forward process, as they have the mobile phone numbers of a great number of their users) must be quite tempting to the people at Facebook. Imagine how well they would then be able to target their advertising, based on their access to both your Facebook profile and your private WhatsApp messages!

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