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Ben Szymanski
  • Software Developer
  • East Haddam, CT
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Blog Archive

  1. Early Rock Music Guide (Part 1)

    This is the first of a series of posts that I’m going to put together to chronical some of my most favorite retro-rock-n-roll tracks. I love all of this super-old music, even though it alienates me from probably 98% of my peers and their preference for booty-droppin, trite electro-pop and rap music....

  2. My First Open Source Project: Classic Finder

    I created a clone/re-creation of the Classic Mac OS Finder in modern Cocoa and Objective-C. I attempted to make it as pixel perfect and to-scale as possible by referencing screenshots I found around on the web and a tangerine iBook running Mac OS 9. This Finder clone is functional. It will really (p...

  3. Shifting the Argument

    I need to talk about this: The best laptop ever madeThe argument needing to be made is not that the 2015 MacBook Pro was some kind of pinnacle of a laptop - I was in 2015, and it wasn't. The 2015 MacBook Pro was just a speedbump, and a ho-hum one at that.Today, in 2017, people are raising com...

  4. WebForms vs MVC

    A few months ago, I got a text message from a friend mulling over whether to proceed with working on and learning ASP.NET WebForms, or to go straight to ASP.NET MVC. I wrote my response out in the Notes app, copy/pasted and sent.After flipping through old notes and clearing them out, I found it a...

  5. Getting Started with Grav: Archives Plugin

    As more of a general CMS than a blogging CMS, Grav ships without any built-in way to display a list of archives of blog articles. While you could hand-roll this functionality yourself, creating all of the mechanisms and architecture and presentation, there is a plugin written to do most of this for...

  6. Going Grav

    I'd like to say that it's been a long, hard road to finally get the layout and functionality of my blog site updated, but it actually hasn't.If you've been here before, and you're here now, you've undoubtedly noticed that this site is now completely different than how it used to look and function...

  7. Multi-Index Search in Umbraco Using Examine

    Guide on using Examine multi-indexers and searchers in Umbraco.

  8. Chrome and Web Animations

    tl;dr; Don't name a function "animate()" and expect it to work right in Chrome. API naming collision!

  9. Swift Sigh

    Complaining about Swift.

  10. Shorthand in SVG, Core Graphics

    Thinking through the challenges of how SVG commands map to CoreGraphics APIs.

  11. Setting up ASP.NET/Mono on Mac OS

    A guide on how to install and configure ASP.NET / Mono on macOS.

  12. Setting up ASP.NET/Mono on Mac OS Server

    A guide on how to install and configure ASP.NET / Mono on macOS Server.

  13. Novell

    Linking to a slightly humorous promo video made by Novell, poking fun at the "old" Microsoft.

  14. NSAttributedString and Swift 2.0

    Drawing text using NSAttributedString in Swift 2.

  15. Reminiscing About Old UI's

    Comparing the user interface appearnance of Mac OS X 10.3 / Panther, against OS X 10.10 / Yosemite.

  16. The Terminal Startup

    Using Terminal.app profiles to get up and going a bit quicker.