Nicholas Cloud's Blog

Kiwix is a multi-platform content browser that is designed to support offline access to large content websites, like Wikipedia or Stack Overflow, in under-developed countries. These sites have a significant amount of content, and are invaluable for researchers, professionals, or hobbyists. Offline access guarantees that the wealth of knowledge they contain is available in unpredictable circumstances, or when online access is not guaranteed, such as during power outages, long airplane trips, remo...

Today my company, Teaming has launched our application on Product Hunt.

When I evaluate new technologies and tools for my own use, I like to look for a few things.

First, which tools give me the simplest and most obvious means to accomplish my tasks and achieve my goals? Second, how easy is it for me to discover additional functionality once I’ve mastered a tool’s basics? And finally, does a tool free me by removing obstacles or hinder me by spawning more?

At Teaming, we ask ourselves these same qu...

In a previous blog post I wrote about using the find command to search a file system. I recently had need to locate a number of ebook files with different extensions in my personal library, and wanted a quick way to enumerate them all with a single script. On BSD and OSX systems, the find command processes regular expressions differently than on Linux systems, so using it wouldn’t work for me as I wanted my script to work on both OSX and Linux. Fortunately Alvin Alexander’s blog post “Using the ...

Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split is both a fun stroll through UNIX history and also a good illustration about how far-reaching decisions are sometimes made based on short-term limitations, creating long-term complexity where it otherwise might not exist. This is probably unavoidable, but nudges me toward the conclusion that all decisions ��� behind which there may be serious conviction, or the best of intentions ��� should be reviewed on some routine basis (once a generation?...

by: dialup (Nicholas Cloud), AO The Citadel, St. Charles MO

(This article originally appeared in the March 27th edition of the St. Louis F3 Accelerator. F3 is a ���national network including 3,198 free, peer-led workouts for men in 242 regions [whose] mission is to plant, grow and serve small workout groups for men for the invigoration of male community leadership.��� All opinions expressed in this article are my own.)

Doing hard things to gain small improvements over time is a core F3 principle. ...

I���ve watched a few BBC documentaries by Adam Curtis now, and I have a lot of respect for his ability to articulate ideas, and delve into history. A friend sent HyperNomalisation my way a little while ago. I watched it last night, and this is my initial impression.

Curtis starts in the mid-70s and moves up to present day, bouncing back and forth between economic changes in New York, and political changes in the Middle East. The two seem completely unrelated, until he starts to develop his thesis...

I���ve been a paying Evernote user for years; and before that, a ���free��� Evernote user for even longer. Evernote has some seriously powerful features, among which is the Evernote Web Clipper extension available on all major browsers, the excellent PDF markup features, flawless sync across devices, etc. It is solid software, backed by a solid service.

But I���ve left Evernote, likely for good.

In the wake of efforts by ���Big Tech��� companies to censor, deplatform, or control the data that belo...

This morning I finished reading Thomas Sowell���s book Black Rednecks and White Liberals.

Sowell has spent a lifetime (he���s 90 years old) studying the root causes of racial tension throughout the world, especially in the United States. Written in 2005, this book is far more relevant today ��� fifteen years later ��� than when he first wrote it. But Sowell saw the fomenting racial tensions in this country and vocally protested the policies and ideas that have continued to push us all into corner...

This morning I finished reading Thomas Sowell���s book Black Rednecks and White Liberals.

Sowell has spent a lifetime (he���s 90 years old) studying the root causes of racial tension throughout the world, especially in the United States. Written in 2005, this book is far more relevant today ��� fifteen years later ��� than when he first wrote it. But Sowell saw the fomenting racial tensions in this country and vocally protested the policies and ideas that have continued to push us all into corner...