I got my first computer when I was 8. It was made out of this beige-white plastic and ran a (possibly bootlegged) copy of Windows ME1. Since our house had recently gotten DSL installed, the internet could be on 24 hours a day without tying up the phone line. But I didn’t care about that. I was perfectly content browsing through each of the menus in Control Panel and rearranging the files in My Documents. As long as I was in front of a computer screen, I felt like I was in my element and everything was going to be alright. Computers have come a long way. Today, you can rent jiggabytes of data storage for literally pennies per month (and yet iPhone users still constantly run out of space to save photos). For most people living in advanced capitalist societies,… more →

Did I intentionally use 3 different smart quotes in the title? You bet I did! But did it require a few trips to fileformat.info and some Python to figure out what the proper octal escape sequences are? As a matter of fact, yes. Yes it did. And if you’re wondering, they’re \342\200\231, \342\200\234, and \342\200\2351. The last time I rewrote RogerHub.com was in November of 2010, more than 6 years ago. Before that, I was using this PHP/MySQL blogging software that I wrote myself. RogerHub ran on cheap shared hosting that cost $44 USD per year. I moved the site to WordPress because I was tired of writing basic features (RSS feeds, caching, comments, etc.) myself. The whole migration process took about a week. That includes translating my blog theme to WordPress, exporting all my articles2, and setting up WordPress via… more →