Conventions are important, even when it seems like it doesn’t matter one way or the other. Just look at all the people who complain about the nerve of Steve Jobs to place the close-window button on the left. There’s no reason why the left side is better than the right side. Convention, however, says that […]

All I wanted was for a legend tag to fill up its box horizontally, much like an h1 or div does by default. Apparently, legend tags are special and don’t follow the same rules as other tags in WebKit, and what I wanted to do was simply impossible. Since I wasn’t the one to choose […]

Update: I now have an improved C version of this program: usbscale. I got suckered into one of those hard-to-cancel Stamps.com trials. The upside is that they give you a $10 USB 5 lb. scale to use with their software. The downside is that they want you to only use it with their software, and […]

“I” is a subject pronoun.  “Me” is an object pronoun.  ‘K? So… I hit the car. The car hit me. Right?  “I” goes before a verb, and “me” goes after a verb. But… if somebody asks who ate the cake, you would be tempted to say, “It was me.”  Nope.  Wrong.  Fail. As any grammar nazi […]

CAD file formats are a mess. I’m trying to get a part made in Autodesk Inventor into Mastercam. IGES is borked. Half the surfaces don’t come in. SAT has a version mismatch or something, and it refuses to import. I don’t have a license for STEP import, apparently, and STL (even if it isn’t NURBS) […]