Personalized Policing of Slack for Diversity and Inclusion

I work at a tech company that has great Diversity & Inclusion intentions, but — like many tech companies — faces occasional internal challenges. An idea that came up recently, sparked by a tweet, was to configure Slackbot, the friendly neighborhood Slack autoresponder, to gently poke at people if they used words that are problematic … Continue reading Personalized Policing of Slack for Diversity and Inclusion

Unconscious sexism in the workplace

At work, we have a whiteboard in the kitchen. Previously, it was used for kitchen requests. Are we running low on something? Write it on the whiteboard. More recently, those sorts of requests seem to be automatically taken care of by little cobblers’ elves that inventory the kitchen stocks and automatically order supplies. The whiteboard, … Continue reading Unconscious sexism in the workplace

My work, on display at NAB

It’s not unusual for a product or service that I played some small part in designing and building to appear at an industry trade show, whether that’s CES or NAB or whathaveyou. But this year, a device in which I was a lot more integral in the hands-on design and manufacture appeared. I not only designed a … Continue reading My work, on display at NAB

Digital Note-Taking

I’ve been using a couple of different systems for note-taking over the past several years. Last month, I had meant to point a friend/coworker to a blog post describing my setup. (Hi, Dunx!) He had been using Evernote which, to put it mildly, pooped its pants, deleting much of his content. [Spoiler: he managed to … Continue reading Digital Note-Taking

On 3D Printing Lego Robot Accessories

This past week, the engineering department of my company (Elemental Technologies — we’re hiring engineers, by the way) had our annual off-site. This year we did something a little different and had a Lego competition. The previous week, we were given time with the Lego Mindstorms kits to get familiar with the components and programming language. The … Continue reading On 3D Printing Lego Robot Accessories

ssh for Programmers

Overview Way back when, just after the dot-com-bomb, I found myself working for a media company named Metapa. We made mp3s and 30 second preview clips from boxes of CDs that tech-clueless record companies snail-mailed us. Metapa was staffed with a ton of Unix-heads and I received a great schooling in the ways of the … Continue reading ssh for Programmers

Windows Natural Scrolling and Synergy

Windows Natural Scrolling and Synergy A little over a year ago, I wrote about setting up “natural scolling” on Windows. I tried it for a week or so and never quite got used to it. One of the biggest setbacks was the software I use to connect my Windows and Linux boxes together as one … Continue reading Windows Natural Scrolling and Synergy