I’ve read several novels in Amazon Kindle format (on an actual Kindle device, the PC client, or an iPad), and the experience is pretty good. But having now finished reading a technical book that way, I think there is plenty of room for improvement.

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By the time Christmas comes around, our house is usually awash with boxes from Amazon. It gets a bit tricky at that point, because I’m never sure if the box is something I ordered to give to my family, or something someone else sent me as a gift. In the former case, I’ll want to wrap it and put it under the tree. In the latter, a lot of times my wife will wrap it on behalf of the giver so it can still be a surprise Christmas morning. The problem is telling them apart.

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I got this flyer from Sprint. I wonder if they wrote that “protecting more than ever before” with a straight face or what.

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I was a bit of a masochist this year. I actually did my federal taxes twice, trying to figure out if there is a cheaper alternative to using TurboTax. But TurboTax, in spite of costing more, ended up being the cheaper option by a long shot.
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I’ve used both Evernote and Microsoft OneNote for several years. While there are lots of extensive comparisons of the applications around, I think the difference between them comes down to just a few broad issues.
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After years of building this site with my own custom software, I’ve decided to switch to WordPress.

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A few years ago I was reading some books about biological evolution. At some point, probably reading something by Richard Dawkins, I was thinking about randomness and its ability to produce apparently non-random things. All you need is a little pressure that selects one random thing over another. So I wrote a little program that demonstrates the idea by transforming a black box into a picture through entirely random steps. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been working on a context menu handler shell extension in C# lately. There are a few samples that people have produced on the web (for example, The Code Project, pek.com, and TheServerSide.net). I’ve found a better way of implementing IShellExtInit.Initialize than in the examples I’ve seen.

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