Matt's Blog

I’m looking to replace a laptop at home, and I know a few other people in the market as well, so I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled. Some of the specs are really pretty amazing. For under $750 you can get a laptop with a powerful dual-core processor, 6-8 GB of RAM, and a huge [...]

This caught my eye while going through the Costco circular. I’m going to buy gum, croissants, and orange juice, but they have this deal for $999.99: an HP desktop with quad-core Phenom (2.93 GHz), 8GB of RAM, a 1.5 TB hard drive, DVD-RW drive, 802.11b/g/n wireless, and a pair of 23″ 1920×1080 LCDs. Gamers, the [...]

After far too long of a wait, I finally made some tweaks to the main page: There are no longer links to non-existent pages across the top. They link to the bloggers. (In alphabetic order.) Posts from sites that don’t implement a comment_count parameter no longer generate illegal HTML causing random URLs to be spewed [...]

An extremely niche post, but for scanner listeners who wonder what the numeric codes given after the fire department responds somewhere, e.g., “We’ll be returning. Code this a 136,” the answers are varied: Many places seem to have their own codes. Boston uses these codes, while someone kindly scanned the codes used by Waltham here. [...]

It’s really exciting to see protests going on across the world. Not because of the unrest or the violence — that’s scary — but there’s this awe-inspiring wave of people who are starting to take a stand for freedom, security, and their rights. But — and I know this is a ridiculous leap — it [...]

Okay, so I admit to being biased here. I’m an open-source advocate, work for an open-source company developing an open-source application, and my Wikipedia edit history goes back to 2005, ranging from fixing picayune details to reverting massive vandalism to creating new articles. (I actually recall making edits long before that, but I don’t recall [...]

Sorry, the site is back up again. This time, the VPS I’m hosting the site on seems to have been rebooted while I was away on vacation, and it didn’t boot properly. In my ongoing efforts to make this place not seem so dead, I’ve added my Tumblr feed to the main page as well. [...]