Category: Uncategorized

People Need To Stop Using All Caps In Email Subject Lines

Okay, this is more of a rant than anything else. Recently, I have received more than one email to my personal email account where the entirety of the email’s subject line was in all caps.

This is annoying. And needs to stop. NOW.

Why? Well, it is simply much easier for the human eye to read text when it is properly capitalized (either in Title Case or Sentence Case) then when it is printed in all capital letters. And while, yes, I will write programming code in all caps, program source code is a completely different animal (and normally the audience of that source code is a very specific audience).

So, if you don’t want me to almost immediately ignore your email, please, write the subject in either Title or Sentence Case, and NOT in all caps.

Split Text Into Fixed-Width Lines With Perl

I’ve written a Perl script which will split text into fixed-width strings of text. If there are any issues with this script, please let me know.

The documentation for the script is as follows:

DESCRIPTION
  splitlines.pl - Simple Perl script to take incoming arbitrary text
  and  output it in fixed-width lines, each at a user-specified length.

SYNOPSIS
  splitlines.pl [-f|--file <File to Read Input From>]
                [-l|-s|--length|--size <Size for Each String>]
                [<Size for Each String>]

OPTIONS
  -f, --file <File to Read Input From>
    Specifies the file to read input text from. The file at the 
    specified  path must be readable by the current user running this 
    script in order  for this script to be able to parse its input into 
    separate fixed-width  lines.

  -l, --length, -s, --size <Size for Each String>
    Specifies the number of characters that should be in each outputted
     line.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
  This script supports the use of the following environment variables:

SPLITLINES_LINE_SIZE
  Specifies the number of characters that should be in each outputted
  line, similar to -l or -s (or their long forms).

INPUTTING STRING SIZE
  If the size for each string is not explicitly specified by a
   command-line option or command-line argument, the script will prompt 
  the  user to input it during the operation of splitting the arbitrary 
  text.

AUTHOR
  Jeffrey Meyer <jeffrey@thejeffrey.net>, 2016-2017

splitlines.tgz (1.1KB)

Roll Back To The Classic Google+ UI

As those who use Google+ at all may have recently seen, Google recently updated Google+’s user interface (UI) to a design that complies with their Material Design guidelines.

Unfortunately, that meant some features didn’t stay inside of Google+. Recently, I myself have found it very difficult, if not impossible, to create a post that is only visible to a particular person on Google+.

While this method won’t permanently rollback Google+ to the classic interface (as navigating back to Google+ in any other browser window or tab will bring up the new Material Design UI), it will rollback that particular Google+ session to the classic interface.

To do this:

  1. On the menu on the left-hand side, click Settings.
  2. In the General section, you will see an entry for seetings that you cannot find, with a link to view the classic Google+ interface.
  3. Click the link to go to the classic interface. It will then reload the Settings window, but in the classic interface.
  4. At this point, to go back to your Google+ feed but to maintain the interface, do NOT click the Google+ logo in the top left corner! That will go back to the Material Design UI! To get back to your feed and maintain the classic interface, click “Home” in the left-hand menu.
  5. And voila! Google+, in the classic interface! For now, at least.

Google+ Settings

Figure 1: The Google+ Settings page

As with all Google products and services, there is no way to predict how long this workaround will exist for. But for now, this is at least one way to get back to all the functionality that you need in Google+.

My First Blog Post

Hello there! My name is Jeffrey, and welcome to my blog and it’s first post. It’s kind of late here, so I’ll keep this one brief.

While I’ve yet to set any official theme for topics here, I’ll likely end up rambling about my interests: tech, gaming, and anything else that’s of interest (for good or for bad reasons) at any particular time. And while this post is likely going to be on the short side, expect posts to be fairly lengthy. I say this as I’ve always had the “problem” of writing “too much”. Of course, that’s a perfect “problem” to have on hand for a blog.

Of course, since this is my first blog, I won’t be surprised if there’s a few technical bumps along the way. If there are any problems, don’t hesitate to let me know about them — I’ll fix them as soon as I can.

Thanks for reading this, and here’s to many more posts in the future!