I was building some flatpack furniture the other day (my life is so glamorous) when I came across an interesting example of how not to write technical documentation. Drill a hole in part A and insert part B once you have ensured part C has been aligned after its connection to A. Most people can handle reading a whole sentence to figure out what's going on. But, after a tiring day of building, it is somewhat annoying having to juggle instructions into actions. Most readers will assume…
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I'm going to be slightly contrarian and say that I like Discord. It's great to be able to get real-time help on a problem. And it is fun to see, again in real-time, what other people are working on and struggling with. In truth, Discord is no harder to sign up to than Slack, Matrix, Gitter, IRC, or whatever. And of course Open Source projects will follow the maxim of "go where your audience are". There's no point posting everything to MySpace when everyone's already on Facebook. Do I care…
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I was trying to install a new open source project and was having a hell of a time. Nothing seemed to be working despite me following the tutorial to the letter. I was getting the most bizarre error messages and was on the verge of quitting to become a goat farmer, when I threw one last dice... I read the tutorial. Previously I'd been copying and pasting the instructions as I went. One step said "Make sure the bauxite configuration command is set to true" but the code provided said ./configure …
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How many characters can a Tweet contain? It used to be 140, back in the good old days. Now it's 280. Unless you're Japanese. Let me explain… I run OpenBenches - a site which collects memorial benches. When a user adds a bench, the inscription is automatically Tweeted. If the inscription is longer than 280 characters, it is truncated. The PHP code to truncate text to a specific length is pretty simple: $tweet_inscription = mb_substr($inscription, 0, 280); I use Multibyte String o…
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What is "Implicit Knowledge"? Essentially it's stuff that everyone knows, but no one has written down. Usually it's something that people have worked out through their own experiences. This sort of knowledge is common in life - but is fatal in computing and design. Take the following tweet I received. Mark Hawkins @Mawkins Replying to @edent …
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