About:

Benjamin Esham is a software developer with interests in physics, music, and urban planning, and enjoys photography and programming.

Website:

Specializations:

Interests:

Cooking Math Classical music Particle physics Typography Urban planning Online privacy Star Trek Star Wars Epcot

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The post provides a practical tip for iOS and Mac developers on how to efficiently delete the DerivedData folder in Xcode. Instead of using the 'rm' command, which can be slow due to file enumeration, the author suggests using the...
The article discusses the author's unusual habit of turning off the shell history file and saving valuable commands in a separate file. He explains the benefits of separating working commands from failed attempts and shares a zsh ...
The article explains how to self-host the Anki sync server in a FreeBSD jail. It provides detailed instructions on creating the jail, installing the Rust toolchain, building and installing the Anki server, creating a user account,...
The text discusses the dangers of misinformation and the impact of Apple's decision to use AI to generate summaries of notifications on iPhones. It highlights the potential for false information to be spread and the erosion of tru...
The text discusses an odd gap in Swift's ability to verify that a given class conforms to a protocol. It highlights a situation where a class is claimed to conform to a protocol without implementing the required method, and how Sw...
The text discusses various interesting facts about tall buildings, including notable climbers of the Sears Tower, the cooling system of the building, the tuned mass damper in Taipei 101, and the never-built The Illinois by Frank L...
The text explains how to use jwt.io to create JWTs for requests to Apple's App Store Connect API, even though jwt.io requires both a private and public key, while Apple only provides a private key. It provides a command-line tool ...
The author discusses the ethical concerns and unreliability of AI systems, highlighting the tendency for people to overlook the flaws and inaccuracies in AI-generated content.
The text discusses the precision in the instructions on Tazo tea packaging, highlighting the difference in measurements and the lack of precision in the recipe for Glazed Lemon Loaf tea.
The text discusses the utility of direnv, which makes it easy to set and unset environment variables as you move between directories on the command line. The author explains how to configure direnv to make its output less obtrusiv...
The text discusses the TV show 'For All Mankind' and its portrayal of NASA's space exploration efforts. It contrasts the show's depiction of NASA's inspiring public engagement with the current reality of space exploration being dr...
The author discusses the use of Fibonacci numbers in software engineering, both in interviews and for planning work. They also provide an interactive visualization and a proof of a property of the Fibonacci sequence.
The text discusses the issues with using floating-point numbers to store amounts of currency, particularly in relation to the smallest amount of currency that can't be represented by a floating-point number, which is one cent. It ...
The author discusses the misunderstanding of the fgrep command and its correct usage. They also explore a thought experiment about creating an alias for grep -f.
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The text discusses the Vim text editor's ability to run scripts in various programming languages, including MzScheme, which is now called Racket. The author was curious about MzScheme and found that it was an older name for Racket...

0Unsustainable

2019-06-30

The text discusses the inevitability of the collapse of the current economic system due to perpetual growth on a finite planet and the need to plan for a new system based on equal rights to natural wealth.
The author discusses how to restore autocompleting search results in LaunchBar, after noticing that his work installations were showing autocomplete suggestions but his home installation was not. He discovered that it is possible ...

0Noon

2019-04-08

The word 'noon' comes from the Latin nona hora, meaning 'ninth hour', and was adapted into 'nones', one of the hours at which some Christians were required to pray. The term shifted into its current meaning by the 14th century, al...
The article discusses how to make extra state available while parsing JSON with the Aeson library. It explains how to add extra information to the JSON parsing process and how to handle the possibility of failure during the parsin...
The text discusses the lack of correlation between the cost of time-telling devices and their ability to adjust for daylight saving time. It provides a list of devices and their prices, along with whether they automatically adjust...