While listening to a book, I noticed a strange series of syllables that I simply could not comprehend. I took the phone from my pocket, stared at the text, and replayed it. Turns out the word “environments” is mispronounced as enviRONments, with an odd stress pattern and an “i” sound kinda like the “ea” in “ear.” I got curious about repro steps so I wrote “environment” and “environments” in a note and played it with VoiceOver....

For the past few months, I’ve been using iOS VoiceOver and Speak Screen as a sighted user to avoid carsickness while reading during bus commutes. I wanted to use my transit time to read articles and make progress on books, so this was my way of dealing with the motion sickness. I’m also an auditory learner, so hearing the content is generally appealing to me. I’ve enjoyed using both of these features so much, that I now use them habitually while walking around, doing chores, etc....

While on vacation, I read Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit and found that it was full of advice that could easily be applied to many creative endeavors, from building kickboxing combos to journaling to writing code. Here are some highlights from my reading, grouped by themes: Forward momentum: Any approach that renews your self-confidence and keeps you moving forward is worth cultivating and repeating. In every situation, at the beginning or end of the workday, you have a choice....

Recently, I was playing around with the split command-line tool on Mac OS X, and I decided to chop a 4000-line file into 4000 separate single-line files. However, when I attempted to run split -l1, I ran into a funny error: split: too many files Curious to see if any splitting had occurred, I ran ls and sure enough, a huge list of filenames appeared, such as: xaa xab ... xzy xzz Now I could see why you’d run out of unique filenames - there are only 26 letters in the alphabet and these filenames were only three letters long....