Innbundet

To me, a classic JRPG is pure mechanism, a kind of puzzle. Was there some way of getting the fun out of building such a mechanism—of solving that puzzle—, wrapping it with the minimal amount of functionality, the simplest thing that could possibly pass as a video game?

Between the '70s and the '90s a lot of the action happened in newsletters and magazines like The Whole Earth Catalog, Byte, or Dr. Dobb's. An anthology of articles from those magazines would tell a compelling history of personal computing: that's a book I'd like to read.

Borges y Bioy caminando por las calles empedradas de la noche porteña o sobre el pasto de una estancia bonaerense, entre chicharras y olor a bosta; Bioy y Borges tirándose con argumentos como tenistas —swinging story plots at each other like tennis players— abordando historias como problemas a resolver, con rigurosidad de relojeros o fabricantes de rompecabezas o escritores de novelas policiales, coqueteando con el...

The fact that we can’t remove essential complexity with a software redesign doesn’t mean that there’s nothing we can do about it. What if the problem definition wasn’t outside of our purview? What if we could get the world to conform to the software, and not just the other way around?

A Kindle integration was a natural extension to my feed reader. I had to learn a couple of things to get it working, so it seemed interesting to document the implementation process.

A couple of days ago I enjoyed reading James's list of things to do on your website and, as he suggests by the end, I thought of a few more to add to the list. These are things I've either already done here or thought about doing but decided not to, or plan to eventually do:

Para nosotros, la casona era nada más un edificio en un rincón de la quinta, medio oculto por los árboles. Como pasábamos casi todo el tiempo en el quincho o en la pileta, o jugando a la pelota en el parque, no le prestábamos mucha atención a la casa pero seguro ahí vivían los dueños, o habían vivido.

Hubo un Borges antes y otro después de Norah Lange, uno antes y otro después del accidente de 1938, uno antes y otro después de la ceguera. Además de esos, célebres, hubo un Borges marginal, colaborador de la revista El Hogar, el Borges de los Textos cautivos.

The problem with organizing content chronologically is that it makes everything ephemeral by default. Even if at a slower pace than social media, blogging still submits us to the clock. Just as we need discovery and curation to navigate through information overflow, we need archiving and anthologizing to stay aware of what came before.

Este año me propuse reconquistar el ocio; me compré una computadora; volví a jugar.

There’s a kind of zen flow that programmers unblock when they experience their software daily as an end user. There’s no better catalyst for ideas and experimentation, no better prioritization driver than having to face the bugs, annoyances, and limitations of an application first-hand.

Code is read more than written, code is run more than read. I think this line of thought can be extended beyond code-writing, and used as a rule of thumb to identify problems and make decisions.