Alfred Hitchcock’s "Rear Window:" See How Air Conditioning Changed Our World

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Alfred Hitchcock’s "Rear Window:" See How Air Conditioning Changed Our World

We seldom appreciate the transformative impact of technology if, for us, “it’s always been there.”  And while we think of technology as smart phones, wifi, computers, etc., technology is anything that transforms inputs into outputs.  Sewers and sewage treatment plants, for example, are technologies that eradicated Cholera by eliminating street drains that overflowed with human waste.  Google the “big stink” or the “great stink” to see just how miserable London was in the 1850s before sewers.  Here’s a start.

Air conditioning (A/C) is another taken-for-granted technology because for many of you, “it’s always been there.”  Of course, it hasn’t.  And like sewers and sewage treatment, A/C has dramatically changed how we live our lives. 

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How to Edit a Blog Footer on SquareSpace

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Yes, I AM a nerd.  SquareSpace is the web hosting/development platform via which ThatChuckWilliams.com comes to life.  Gives you tingles, I can tell.

Why SquareSpace and not the ubiquitous WordPress?  Well, as a nerd, I’m willing to dive down a rabbit hole to do something, but there are limits.  And, with soooo many options and packages and add-ons, the WordPress rabbit hole was too much for me.   

The advantage of SquareSpace is 26 templates, each of which can be customized endlessly, built in blogging, galleries, commerce, etc.  If you know a little bit about web design - I do - you can be up and running within a couple of hours (if you’re willing to stay with a standard template), and a couple of days if you’re willing to customize those templates using SS’s fantastic block designs.  

But, if you’re a bit of a geek, you soon find some things that you’d like to change, but can’t. Hence, CSS, cascading style sheets. I know HTML, but didn’t know CSS. So if you want to tweak your SquareSpace web site, you need to learn some CSS ...

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Podcasts: Or Why I’m Divorcing Satellite Radio and You Should, Too→

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I'm an inveterate problem-solver when it comes to technology.  So when I switched to the Mac 3 years ago after 3 decades in the PC world, Google was my best friend.  Problem 1: The “Command” key, the equivalent of Window’s “Control” key is next to the space bar (ugh), rather than the far left of the bottom row (as Bill Gates intended - Microsoft actually saved Apple - so a little credit here for BG).  I just could not unlearn 3 decades of reaching for the “Control” key, so I Googled and learned how to swap those keys.  Three years in, that’s still how I do it (but I’m a bit more sophisticated these days, thanks to Karabiner.  Problem 2: I lived out of Windows Explorer ...

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