Author Archives: filosofo

“filosofo” is the nom de guerre of Austin Matzko.

Quick and Easy Shopping at Stop & Shop

I’m a little bit suspicious of the “U-Scan” trend at grocery stores, as it seems like a ploy to get customers like me to do—unpaid—the job of cashiers. So you might think that there would be even more reason to object to the new “easySHOP” system that just appeared at my local Stop & Shop. […]

New WordPress Plugin: Remember Attachment Link Preferences

I wrote this plugin to deal with a common complaint from my clients: when uploading pictures in WordPress and sending them to the editor, one has to repeatedly re-select how the image should appear. In the case of the screenshot below, I checked “Show: Full size” and “Link to: Page.” This can get tedious if […]

Boston Turkeys

The Boston Globe has noticed the increasing number of turkeys in the Brookline area. As I mentioned a while back, I’ve seen them a number of times in Brighton and in Newton. Surprisingly, the Globe article says that the Brookline police department sometimes gets a dozen complaints about the birds every day. They are an […]

Filosofo’s WordPress Gravatar Plugin

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, recently acquired Gravatar. In case you don’t know, gravatars—or “globally recognized avatars”—are images that you can associate with an email address, so a picture of your choice can appear alongside your comments on many others’ blogs. Gravatar already provides a simple WordPress plugin, but it suffers from a common plugin […]

Internet Explorer 7 Float Bug

Today while developing a WordPress theme for a client, I ran into a vexing Internet Explorer 7 bug. Anyone who’s done any website design is familiar with Internet Explorer 6 (or earlier) wreaking havoc with standards-compliant work that looks good in, say, Firefox. But thankfully IE 7 has for the most part been a big […]

A Stellar Open-Source Application

Last night my wife and I could see a bright planet shining above the trees, which is unusual for being in Boston. We didn’t know what it was, but I knew how to find out after just having read about Stellarium.