After successfully booting MS-DOS inside an emulator on my M1-powered MacBook Pro, I decided to try out another ancient operating system: MacOS 9.
In this post, I explore what it takes to get it running and what it’s like to browse today’s World Wide Web using a 20-year-old operating system.
Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re feeling a bit fed up with the state of the world and are yearning for the good old days of the 1990s when, because you were a kid, you were oblivious to much of whatever might have been wrong with the world at that point in time.
Now, suppose the epitome of 90s-era technology for you is taking a trip to your dad’s office in the big city, where his corporate computer was just better enough than the crummy one at home that you could reliably use it to play a really cool new game—namely, SimCity 2000. And finally, suppose you’d like to fulfill your craving for nostalgia by playing that game, which was designed for MS-DOS (an OS created in the 80s) on your brand new MacBook Pro (which was released in 2021).
Well, there’s a problem. Actually, a few problems (not the least of which is that I have too much time on my hands).
My very first blog post when I set up this website in July of 2019 was about buying a brand…
For some reason, Schoology’s “Assessment” tool cannot tell you how many students picked an individual incorrect answer choice on a multiple choice question.
(This is particularly annoying because Schoology’s similar but older “Test/Quiz” tool CAN give you this information!)
Even though Schoology can’t summarize the results for you, the information is all there. We just need a way to process it.
In this tutorial, I walk readers through a method involving JavaScript that can be used to scrape the answer data from a Schoology page and retrieve the missing information.
Suppose you’ve asked someone for some information. You were hoping for a nice, neat table, but what they’ve sent you back is, well, messy. Maybe the columns aren’t broken up the way you expected. Or maybe you don’t even have any columns, and it’s just several rows of information pasted into an email.
If you need to sort your data, run a mail merge, or do anything useful with this information, you’re going to have to clean it up first. Fortunately, Excel has a tool for just this type of problem: Text to Columns.
Let’s take a look at how to use that tool along with the Find/Replace feature to organize a stubborn set of data.
Because we’re nerds, my fiancée and I like to keep track of our score every time we play Spirit Island, a fun but complicated cooperative strategy game. Calculating the score requires looking up a difficulty rating in a table, a fair bit of counting, and some math.
While none of that is especially hard to do, the process could go a bit quicker if most of the work (aside from the counting) could be done automatically.
As it turns out, this is a great job for Apple’s Shortcuts app!
After the pandemic canceled our Winter Break travel plans for the second year in a row, this meant that my fiancée and I would have a lot more time on our hands than expected.
That, combined with some exceptionally dry knuckles, was just the excuse I needed to try my hand at a new electronics project. My goal was to answer the following question: How dry, actually, was the air in our apartment?
While I have had a definite fondness for (and occasional obsession with) computer programming since at least 6th grade, I’ve mostly gravitated more recently towards web development.
So for my final project of the summer, I decided to give actual app development one more chance by exploring the world of Swift and SwiftUI, two of Apple’s latest programming technologies.
The goal: build a watch app to help me track how much time is left in class!
Someone on Facebook was giving away a “late 2009” iMac with a busted graphics card. Getting that thing back into working condition sounded like a great way to kick off summer vacation!
Room 225 had never been a photography classroom, but something about a 28-year-old “memorandum” on darkroom chemicals seemed to capture the essence of that long-lost learning space.