I grew up playing Scrabble -- my grandma was cuthroat. I've played occasionally through the years, and more recently I've been playing Scrabble Go, the official, licensed Scrabble app, with friends. It's fine, but it's full of ads (unless you pay them), it has annoying side games (gems? why am I earning gems?), and I …

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I've been cooking a recipe recently of my own creation that I really like, and there isn't much similar on the internet, so I'm sharing the recipe here. It's a combination of two great things -- hot-smoking fish with wood chips in a stovetop smoker, and the fermented flavors of Hunanese cuisine. Smoked fish and duck …

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A thing that I do when I cook is to re-write the recipes I’m using (whether they’re from a cookbook or my own invention) onto a piece of paper in a very specific way. I think the approach I use is handy, so I’m describing it here in case you’d like to use it. (Or in case you need more evidence about how weird I am.) …

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This is my first new post on harlan.harris.name for a while. The occasion is a change of scenery. For about 10 years, my primary blog has been on WordPress, more recently supplemented by Medium. But WordPress and Medium are limited for technical writing, and the trend among data people recently has been to publish …

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I, Harlan D. Harris, hereby commit to the neveragain.tech pledge. Please stand with me and hold me to it. It starts: We, the undersigned, are employees of tech organizations and companies based in the United States. We are engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing …

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This is an updated version of an article first published on Medium on Oct. 24, 2015. I love my smartwatch, way more than I thought I would when I bought it, over a year ago. It’s a Moto 360, which is still better looking than the Apple watch, I think. Why do I love it? It’s not the health monitoring. I turned that junk …

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{{% x user="HarlanH" id="508680143867768832" %}}

Let me unpack that a bit…

Hugh and Crye t-shirt

Recently, Hugh & Crye, a DC-based clothing firm for men, with a novel take on sizing, recently did a Kickstarter campaign for their new line of fitted t-shirts. What the hell? H&C has been around for about 5 …

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A topographic map of Washington in 1791 by Don Alexander Hawkins. I live on the top edge of the map, on one of those hills. I’m a generally happy user of DC’s Capital Bikeshare system – just renewed my annual membership today in fact. But I don’t use it as much as I’d like to, for one critical reason. I live on top of …

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And, we’re back! After being off-line for several weeks, this site is now live again! I can’t imagine you missed it. Here’s what happened. Let’s start at the beginning. In 2003, ICANN added .name to the list of top-level domains (like .com, .edu, etc.). The idea is that individuals would use it for personal sites and …

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My newish cooking club had a dinner yesterday with the theme American Beer. I was tasked with dessert, and came up with this recipe for Pretzel Whoopie Pies. They turned out extremely well, so I thought I’d share the recipe here. Sources: About.com Southern Food (basic whoopie pie recipe) Southern Living (Stout …

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