I was talking to a friend about pencils a few weeks ago. I noticed she had a Blackwing 602 and asked her about it. She told me she never got along with mechanical pencils. The leads break too easily and the erasers don’t last—once they’re worn and need to be adjusted outward, they tend to slide back into their...

Scientific American published a clock puzzle a couple of weeks ago that I finally got around to looking at today. It wasn’t hard, but I’m less interested in the solution than in a very small discrepancy I found. Finding discrepancies was a big part of my job, so it was nice to see that I still can.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned in a footnote that I have a script that takes a URL on the clipboard and makes a Markdown reference-style link in BBEdit. Actually, I have several link-making scripts for BBEdit. I’ve written about some of them already (including very long ago), but never about all of them. Buckle up.