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** Sticker party, November **
Some random thoughts including how the band Imagine Dragons is kinda like Metal for kids; distributing apps, even without involving Apple at all, is deeply annoying on macOS; Pokemon ZA is fun, but I think that I’m a turn-based girlie at heart; my partner has been playing a lot of Tears of the Kingdom lately, it has been a lot of fun for me to watch, and hair-pullingly frustrating for our nearly 10 year old who has strong opinions about the correct order of operations in that game; I wrote, but am cu … ⌘ Read more
** Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits **
A friend recently asked how to get started watching Gundam, and as I tripped all over myself, equal parts excitement and not wanting to sound like a lunatic, I fumbled around for a good answer.
What I landed at was inelegant and I eventually panicked and found a watch list online. BUT! BUT! What is a blog for if not do overs!? Also, what follows has literally no i … ⌘ Read more
** Timber **
Timber, I’m not gonna lie, I kinda hated you. At the same time I am surprised to find how gutted I am now … ⌘ Read more
** Delta chatting **
I’m trying out delta chat. If that’s your jam, feel free to say“hi.” ⌘ Read more
** Autumnal week notes **
Someone I grew up with happened to go to the same college as me, and now we happen to live in the same relatively small city. We’ve been totally casual but pretty consistent mainstays of each others’ lives for going on 20 years at this point. She’s also one of the few people that I run into who knows that I can’t actually see well enough to reliably tell people apart from any further away than like 4 or 5 feet, and I always feel really appreciative whenever she waves that she also always says“hi” and who … ⌘ Read more
** …but I can do that with regex? **
The other day a co-worker showed me a project that seemed genuinely useful, but I didn’t love some bits of how complicated and resource intensive its architecture were, so, I made my own version of it! Check out diff heatmap.
Your browser does not support the video tag. You are rad as hell.
As an aside, I put this one on github which I don’t generally choose to use for personal projects, but I’d love to see folks contribute rules to this projec … ⌘ Read more
** Fall foliage, music, games, and text editors **
Turning to fall. While playing a little squash this morning one of the pros that hangs out at the courts asked if he could give me and one of my kids some tips. He then proceeded to spend 40 mins or so with us. It was honestly rad. Totally changed how I approach playing squash in that little time. I’m excited to play more this winter.
I’m also excited for the new The Last Dinner Party album to come out in a f … ⌘ Read more
** Wobbly updates or a sort of week notes **
Hello RSS goblins.
It’s unseasonably warm here, and well, I suppose everywhere. That’s…frightening, but before I let that weigh to heavily on this post I must move on.
It’s been a gorgeous weekend. We took the kids to the beach Friday after dinner, expecting to play on the sand and scramble up the rocks, but they actually each went swimming. They had a blast. The car is filled with sand, and I hope that last little hurrah of summer hangs around for a bit.
We also went putt putt golfi … ⌘ Read more
** Video games goods **
Here are 3 mostly unedited paragraphs from a blog post that fizzled out and I decided not to finish…but then I posted it on mastodon and it seemed to resonate with folks, so, here it is as an RSS exclusive plus some other thoughts, too!
I have a weird relationship with video games. I love video games, but I hardly ever really play them. As a kid I wasn’t allowed to play them at home, and didn’t have much facility to play them. I’d get sneaky bits of game time with my cousin in the back of the car o … ⌘ Read more
** JavaScript Notebook **
Kartik recently reminded me of my own project playground that I do use from time to time, but that I’ve always been a little frustrated with.
That reminder paired with that frustration lead me to revisit something similar that I’d started a while ago, but hadn’t finished. Notebook is kinda my take on Jupyter Notebooks minus a ton of features and capabilities.
Here is … ⌘ Read more
** Read the Book **
There’s a whole lot going on, and I’ve been feeling myself develop bad habits concerning doom scrolling. I can’t reconfigure my life to not have a phone, so, instead, I made a thing to replace those things that invite me to doomy scroll. Meet Read the Book.
Read the book is a relatively simple website where you can read a book. The books are presented in short chunks so you’re never faced with a big scrolling wall of text. It has support for dark mode and light mode, and you can u … ⌘ Read more
** Franconia Notch **
We went to the Franconia Notch, which is on objectively funny thing to name a region. It was beautiful and the weather was wildly clear. Even on top of Mount Washington, the highest peak in the entire north eastern United States, it was sunny and calm. We could see all the way back to Maine…supposedly…it all looks kinda like green lumpy blurs to me.
While there I started to read two books, Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang and The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami.
_Kata … ⌘ Read more
** Standing only **
I tried to sit at my standing desk today for the first time in an eternity. My ability to focus on any task immediately went from pretty fucking solid to“oooh, what if stare into the middle distance?” so I guess I’ll be continuing to exclusively stand at my desk for the next 10 years. ⌘ Read more
** Strata **
A Counterfeit - a Plated Person -
I would not be -
Whatever strata of Iniquity
My Nature underlie -
Truth is good Health - and Safety, and the Sky.
How meagre, what an Exile - is a Lie,
And Vocal - when we die -
– Emily Dickinson
I made another game! This one pretty much has one single verb:“move.” The game, like most games I make, is a roguelike that relies heavily on probabilities and rng (random number generation).
Each level is … ⌘ Read more
** A week notes to round out the summer **
I haven’t posted anything remotely resembling week notes since the middle of June! Since then many things have happened including, but not limited to: a trip to Minnesota to visit Isaac, a couple trips to New Hampshire for work, a family trip to Mount Desert Island to revisit our old stomping grounds, a whole heap of bicycle riding, I finished a couple great books, played some games, made some games, and wrote what is probably an unhealthy a … ⌘ Read more
** Answering some questions about Baba Yaga **
My previous post found its way to Hacker News; I don’t have an account there, but a commenter asked a few questions that I thought I could answer in a follow up post.
Baba Yaga uses call-by-value evaluation, not call-by-need (aka“lazy”).
From the interpreter,
”`hljs javascript
function visitFunctionCall(node) {
const callee = visit(node.callee);
// Arguments ar … ⌘ Read more”`
** To the surprise of literally no one, I’m working on implementing a programming language all my own **
Inspired by conversation at a recent Future of Coding event, I decided I’d write up a little something about the programming language I’ve been working on (for what feels like forever) before I’ve gotten it to a totally shareable state. I have a working interpreter that I’m pretty pleased with, but I don’t yet have an interact … ⌘ Read more
** Make awk rawk **
A friend online recently replied to something I wrote about awk by saying:
[…] it’s a danged shame [awk] didn’t continue to evolve the way Ruby, Python, PHP have evolved over the decades.
I had exactly this thought while working on my slightly unhinged“lets see if I can implement a basic scheme using awk by writing an assembler and VM in awk,” skwak. Which eventually lead me to start noodling on how to layer in some modern niceties into awk, without breaking awk’s portability.
… ⌘ Read more
** Om nom nom LLMs, in which I respond to Simon Willison’s analogy **
I am hesitant to wade into the tumultuous waters that are the discourse around generative AI and LLMs, but this morning I came across a thing that so thoroughly melted my brain I feel uncontrollably compelled to respond.
This morning, at evidently 4:10 AM (no mention of timezone), Simon Willison shared the following blog post, quoted here in full:
Quitting programming as … ⌘ Read more
** Of fairies, compost, and computers **
Lately I’ve buried myself in reading fiction. Stand outs from among the crowd are, of course, Middlemarch but also a lot of sort of scholarly fairy fiction; works that follow the scholastic adventures of studious professorial types in vaugely magical settings. Namely Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries’, Heather Fawcett and The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow.
I’ve also been working on a handful of personal utility programs. I … ⌘ Read more
** My measurer **
My dad is an electrical engineer and physicist. Measuring things is a core part of his professional life, and something he seems to spend a lot of time doing around the house. This is all to say my dad is relatively expert in the ways of measuring things so I think it’s hilarious that he calls absolutely anything he is using to measure anything else“my measurer.” Measuring tape, oscilloscope, scale, volt meter, bubble level, table spoons, whatever. They’re all“my measurer.” ⌘ Read more
** growing good **
“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
George Eliot, Middlemarch ⌘ Read more
** More stink **
I read A Court of Throne and Roses this weekend. Not my usual fare but what the heck it was there so I read it. I found it to be an unremarkable, relatively conservative romantasy.
What stood out to me, though, is that everyone is so stinky. The main character is always describing how folks smell, smelling them before they round a corner and stuff. Even if they don’t like smell bad, this setting seems overwhelming perfumed. ⌘ Read more
** Stinky **
This morning I set up our new composter. This entailed shoveling a lot of compost from the old one into the new so that it can actually finish cooking. Shoveling 4 years worth of mostly kitchen scrap compost is a very very stinky endeavor. Despite wearing gloves I don’t know if my hands will ever not smell again. ⌘ Read more
** Admitting that they’re really never weekly notes **
While everyone is up to their eyeballs in puzzles playing Blue Prince I’ve been playing some Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword on the Gameboy Advanced. I’ve also set up the playdate to mirror at my computer and have been having fun exploring the games in season 2! Mostly just Dig! Dig! Dino!, so far.
I decided to learn OCaml a few weeks ago. I’ve been writing a rogue clone in it. I am enjoying is and the entire ML fami … ⌘ Read more
** My not so pragmatic guide to running background services on macOS **
I self host a lot of stuff — these days, mostly weird little utility scripts and toys that run in the background, but also some web apps like plex, calibre, and a suite of irc things. For a long time I ran such things on a VPS, but being incredibly cheap, and hardly ever leaving my house for realsies, during the height of the pandemic I brought everything on to an aged mac mini I keep on a shelf behind some books.
I tr … ⌘ Read more
** Crinkly chip bags **
I usually read pretty fast. I’ve been intentionally reading Middlemarch slowly. Chapter by chapter. This forced restraint makes reading Middlemarch feel sort of religious in pace and intention.
I fell back down the type theory hole, and have once again thought to myself“what about Haskell?” and“what about algebraic data types?” These thoughts are questionable and my motivations dubious, but here I am again imagining tiny type carrying backpacks strapped to little guys — bees, beetles, and other crawlies.
My part … ⌘ Read more
** Dad shrapnel **
In a flash I think I“get” liveliness in relation to programming. It’s talked so much about in the context of programming systems and languages — as being something they do or do not intrinsically have or support…but what if it’s actually about the process of doing the thing, and not inherent to the thing you do it with. A noun-gerund kinda dichotomy.
Left with dad shrapnel, 5 minutes here, 20 there, 120 on the horizon, with which to poke at projects what if the key to collaboration is liveliness? Sporadic, low … ⌘ Read more
** Collaboration is a scary word **
I like programming partially because it’s a practice I can, with appropriate to unhealthy application of effort, usually accomplish something at least proximal to my intention.
This isn’t true for visual art, nor music. Lately I’ve been feeling like the little games and toys I wanna make are sorta hampered by my total inability to make stuff I find aesthetically appealing…so…I’ve been thinking about collaboration. Which is a scary word because, you know, other people and all, but I figured I’d … ⌘ Read more
** Something something something, week notes **
I’ve finished my little exploratory jaunt through the writings of Sally Rooney this week. I’ve left aside one of her novels for some other time, Beautiful World, Where Are You. Some authors have clear habits, or“projects.” Rooney strikes me as such an author. Naming either seems a bit trickier, though. Something something something, what do normative friendships between people entail, something something something how is morality constructed by other peoples’ percep … ⌘ Read more
** In reply to: Common Cyborg | Jillian Weise | Granta **
In reply to: Common Cyborg | Jillian Weise | Granta
They like us best with bionic arms and legs. They like us deaf with hearing aids, though they prefer cochlear implants. It would be an affront to ask the hearing to learn sign language. Instead they wish for us to lose our language, abandon our culture and consider ourselves cured. They like exoskeletons, which none of us use. They would never consider cyborg those of us with pace … ⌘ Read more
** In reply to: The rise of end times fascism | Far right (US) | The Guardian **
In reply to: The rise of end times fascism | Far right (US) | The Guardian
Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to p … ⌘ Read more
** Muddy weeknotes **
Some RSS exclusive week notes:
- I finished reading Emily St. James’ Woodworking
- I started reading Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo
- I took a break from re-watching Frieren for the third time
- I used that break to start watching The Apothecary Diaries, which isn’t at all what I assumed it was. It is more a detective show than anything else, so far, and I dig it
- I started to play Citizen Sleeper
- I cleaned so much, yet the house remains not clean
- It has stopped snowing (for now), we are now solidly in … ⌘ Read more
** leibovitz **
Folks what that haunt me (positive) on the Fediverse may have seen me sharing progress shots from this, but here I am, and I have made another camera application for the web. Leibovitz combines a lot that I learned making my other camera applications into one, hopefully less clunky package.
With leibovitz you can either take new photos, or upload any image file and apply filters to it. The UX to toggle between the two modes is … ⌘ Read more
** Late March Snow **
The forecast predicted snow, but even with that knowledge I held out hope that it wouldn’t. The shade over the window in the bedroom doesn’t close all the way. It always stops short of totally covering the window with about an inch further to go. It is too short. When I woke up this morning there was a flat grey line of light streaming into the room through the gap left by the too short shade. So, I spent some time shoveling this morning. Probably sooner than I ought to have since it’s still coming down. It’s 80ish de … ⌘ Read more
** A day off **
I didn’t go to work today. Six month ago I took the day off when I made my kids a dentist appointment. So, this morning I took them to the dentist where we played Mario Kart in the waiting room on the Nintendo the dentist keeps set up there.
After that, I dropped them each at school and picked up my dad and took him to Costco and to the Chinese takeaway place. While he gossiped with the folks at the takeaway I started Sally Rooney’s Normal People. I’m late to this book, but enjoying it right away.
After all th … ⌘ Read more
** Job posting **
I don’t write about work here. Not really as a rule, but out of habit.
It is a Saturday, and this morning at around 1 AM the federal government here in the U.S. fired my entire team, and the whole group they worked out of, 18f. This means that the team I was on is now just me. I was the only one not from 18f.
Nothing about this will increase efficiency or help anyone, at all.
If any of you beautiful RSS people are hiring senior level designers or qualitative researchers, please reach out and I can make introd … ⌘ Read more
** mkv no more **
My previous post included a video. I made that video with OBS which outputs .mkv video files.
I wanted to do my best to ensure that folks with a variety of devices and browsers would be able to watch the video if they wanted to, so, I converted it into a few different formats.
Here’s the bash script I wrote to do that. It relies on ffmpeg.
”`hljs bash
#!/bin/bash
if ! command -v ffmpeg &> /dev/null; then
echo "ffmpeg ... ⌘ [Read more](https://eli.li/mkv-no-more)```
** Skwaking Week Notes **
I’d never thought about adding playlists to my website, but then I did it and now I wanna add more. While I wait to put together another playlist, here’s the song that I’m listening to right now — Lady Lamb’s“Crane Your Neck.”
We had a few big snows, so the kids spent extra time at home and we’ve done a fair bit of sledding and shoveling. There was a bunch of frozen rain after one of the snow storms, so the snow had a crunch … ⌘ Read more
** One last run **
I can hear my kids in their room right now. They’re trying to get something that rolled under one of their beds. They’re talking about trying to get it like planning a run in Neuromancer or something.
“Okay, you can do this, just one last run!” ⌘ Read more
** In reply to: The politics of accessibility – Brian DeConinck **
In reply to: The politics of accessibility – Brian DeConinck
A devastating perfect blog post.
The core concept of digital accessibility is that everyone, including people with disabilities, should be able to access information and accomplish tasks via computer independently.
Continuing later,
This is an intensely political statement, backed by decades of protests and lobbying and litigation. … ⌘ Read more