“defrag” is short for “defragment”. when a file is saved to a hard drive, it is physically written to the device by a needle. when you need to read the file, the needle moves along the portion of the disk that contains the data to read it. let’s say you… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: What’s “defragging”?

an operating system (OS), such as windows or macOS, handles a lot of low-level stuff. this means that developers don’t have to worry about details like “how to scroll a page” or “how to read text from a file”, because the OS handles it for you. a computer can’t do… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: why don’t windows programs work on a mac, and vice versa?

the “analogue loophole” (or the analog loophole) refers to the idea that no matter how hard you try to make sure nobody can make illegal copies of videos, music, or text, there’s always a “hole” in the protection that occurs when it’s no longer digital. digital content can be protected… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: what is the “analogue loophole”?

after downloading the image, OCRbot uses tesseract-ocr to extract the text. this is a free (as in libre and gratis) program that uses neural networks to do the job. it’s been trained on a massive dataset of text and has “learned” what letters usually look like. it knows that a… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: How does OCRbot work?

the ebooks bots (the ones i using the code i made, anyway) use something called markov chains. markov chains are a mathematical concept, and in computer science (computers are the only thing i know about), they are generally used for predictive text. when you type “how are” on your phone… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: How do mstdn-ebooks bots work?

Let’s use twitter and mastodon for our examples.Twitter is centralised, while Mastodon is not. This means that it’s possible for Twitter to disappear at any time – the CEO could (theoretically) shut it down and delete anything at a moment’s notice. The company behind twitter has complete control over everything… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: What does “decentralised” mean?