Profile avatar
max-webster.bsky.social
Tech writer in California. Opinions all mine, not my employer's.
228 posts 50 followers 59 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
Posts 16 Comments 34

SF Bay Area residents, whether you felt this evening’s #earthquake or not, please complete the “Did you feel it?” survey earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/...

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

TIL: there's a name for the wild-looking stratigraphic layers of rock that you see along the "gorge" sections of Rennie's River in Newfoundland: "flysch". (Must try that in Scrabble some time.) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flysch

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Shot (from #Snowflake Summit 2025)

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

As someone who was told this urban legend from earliest times, there's a lot I could say about this.

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

TIL: the $BASH_REMATCH array variable in bash lets you do the Pythonic operation: match a regex using ( ) groups, then retrieve the value of group 1, group 2, ... As Python evolves more towards numeric analysis, I'm using bash more and more for string processing use cases. medium.com/@linuxadminh...

submitted 30 days ago • 0 comments

Potatoes trending as fuel for athletes? About time! wapo.st/4dihulG

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

When I was growing up in eastern Canada, some people had a strong affinity for New York, others for Boston. I always wondered what the factors were. (More English ancestry = Boston, Irish = New York?) My granddad worked construction on the Empire State Building, which puts me in the New York camp.

submitted 34 days ago • 0 comments

TIL: Peter Weller got his PhD in Italian renaissance art history. Not that long ago either. That's in character for Buckaroo Banzai, not so much for RoboCop. escholarship.org/uc/item/0dm8...

submitted 38 days ago • 0 comments

Am I the only one who, given an address or a neighborhood in Manhattan, visualizes it in terms of what Peter Parker did or who Spider-Man fought there?

submitted 40 days ago • 0 comments

TIL: in vi, q/ to bring up a menu of recent searches that you can cursor through, edit, and run again. vi, always a new surprise waiting somewhere.

submitted 41 days ago • 1 comment

This is a new image from #JWST. The bright points with spikes are stars in the Milky Way. Everything else is a galaxy. Everything. Else. Is. A. Galaxy.

submitted 42 days ago • 631 comments

I check the little screen, I check the big screen, I check the watch screen, I check the tablet screen. I check the screen that reminds me of the good times, I check the screen that reminds me of the better times.

submitted 43 days ago • 172 comments

Holy shit I just found out that “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing,” by Leo Sayer, is basically a Steely Dan song. Drums: Steve Gadd and Jeff Porcaro Bass: Chuck Rainey Guitar: Larry Carlton - youtu.be/ex96q32A6UU

submitted 42 days ago • 11 comments

terminal escape codes wizardzines.com/comics/escap...

submitted 42 days ago • 6 comments

TIL: I usually use normal! in vi/vim to simulate sending keystrokes for movement etc. I didn't see a way to do the equivalent of Ctrl-R followed by a register letter, to insert the contents of a register. Solution: the feedkeys() function: let @a="hello" call feedkeys("i\<c-r>a\<esc>")

submitted 44 days ago • 1 comment

47 years ago today, the same day Steve Martin debuted King Tut, the Blues Brothers made their first official appearance.

submitted 49 days ago • 38 comments