I traveled quite a bit recently and got exposed to a negative aspect of current technology: Things work well if you have a solid internet connection with no traffic limits and are plugged into a power outlet. Otherwise, things do not work well at all. This blog post describes the problems that arise and suggests solutions.

Recently, I was shopping for a presenter (a remote control for PowerPoint, Keynote, etc.) and liked the Logitech Presenter R700 (a newer European-only version of the R800) best, due to its design and its integrated display with a countdown. Alas, Macs are not officially supported for this device. Thankfully, they can be made to work together, as explained in this blog post. I also mention how my configuration file can be adapted to an R800.

Web apps have been around for a while, but the ability to install them as if they were native apps is relatively new. This blog post takes a look at what’s currently possible.

Python’s SimpleHTTPServer is the classic quick solution for serving the files in a directory via HTTP (often, you’ll access them locally, via localhost). This is useful, because there are some things that don’t work with file: URLs in web browsers.

“Curbing Online Abuse Isn’t Impossible. Here’s Where We Start” by Laura Hudson describes how online abuse was curbed in the battle-arena game League of Legends, published by Riot Games. The following insight is interesting:

Electrolysis (e10s) [^1] is a project to add a one-process-per-tab architecture (similar to Google Chrome’s) to Firefox. It was put on hold [^2] in early 2012 and is now being resumed.

If you combine the features “property value shorthand” and “destructuring”, ECMAScript 6 gives you an elegant way to handle multiple return values. This blog post explains why that is useful and how it works.

Allen Wirfs-Brock, editor of the ECMAScript 6 specification, recently mentioned on Twitter that the schedule for ECMAScript 6 has changed slightly.

Integers lead an odd life in JavaScript. In the ECMAScript specification, they only exist conceptually: All numbers are always floating point and integers are ranges of numbers without decimal fractions (for details, consult “Integers in JavaScript” in “Speaking JavaScript”). In this blog post, I explain how to check whether a value is an integer.