The curious history of the previous question

While parliamentary procedure is generally very similar between American and British/Commonwealth parliaments and meetings, one curious difference arises in the notion of the ‘previous question’. While such a notion exists both sides of the Atlantic, everything from the form to the function appears to be… »

Fix: Allow Kodi to power down and reboot Raspbian

The default settings for Raspbian seem to prevent Kodi from accessing the power-related functions it requires to shut down or reboot the system, causing its power menu to display only the ‘Exit’ option. This is particularly frustrating, as the default setup of Kodi is generally… »

Guide: Launching EmulationStation/RetroPie from within Kodi on Raspbian (The XBone, part 2)

So you've got your Raspberry Pi to display a glorious ‘XBone’ splash screen, but what kind of bone would it be if it couldn't play games? Kodi looks kind of like a console UI, and with RetroPie, we can launch games, but how… »

Guide: A custom splash screen on the Raspberry Pi, for Raspbian Jessie (The XBone, part 1)

There are many guides on the internet for creating a custom splash screen on Linux, but most for Raspbian are based on SysV init, and don't interface well with systemd, which is now used by Raspbian. Those that do support systemd make use of Plymouth… »

GUIDE: Convert SWFs to PDFs, preserving text as text, with gfx2gfx-pdftext

Introducing gfx2gfx-pdftext, a fork of gfx2gfx designed to convert SWF files to PDF files, while preserving text! I am not aware of any other freely-available tools that can do this.

The original gfx2gfx from SWFTools unfortunately converts text to paths. An improvement on… »

US Election 2016: What if the Electoral College was proportional?

The title says it all really. What would have happened in the 2016 American federal election if votes in the Electoral College were allocated proportionally, either within each state or nationwide? I was curious, so here's some number-crunching.