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Notes on the Ivory Coast
I spent about ten days in the Ivory Coast, mostly in Abidjan, but also Yamoussoukro, Man, and Grand Bassam. (Note – The Ivory Coast is so French in culture and temperament that it insists on offici…
Elizabeth line testing ways of banishing its "ghosts in the walls"
The appearance of shadowy ghosts has plagued some of the Elizabeth line's central London stations, and now TfL is trying to banish them.
What I've learned about flow fields so far
Noise functions and the tiniest bit of trigonometry can take you a long way towards making art.
Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often
Sending helpful & engaging pushes, filtering annoying pushes, and finding the frequency sweet spot.
Running 9front on an emulated SGI Indy via MAME
I recently found that MAME supports running the SGI Indy while looking for ways to test some modifications I was making to the mips code in 9front. After a fair bit of elbow grease cinap and I (but mostly cinap) were able to get the old 9front indy kernel booting and running within mame. I thought I might as well…
We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't
[programmers frantically pulling cables out of the wall]AI: "Nuclear power. Double teachers' salaries. Build more houses. Distribute food more fairly. TRAINS—"— qntmyrrh (@qntm) November 24, 2023 I remember growing up with that same old adage of how you could be the next scientist to invent a cure for cancer, or a…
$450 for a School Bag?
Every year, around March, a curious social custom occurs in Japanese families. Parents of kids entering elementary school visit the grandparents and gingerly tread the topic of buying the kids a very expensive item: a randoseru. And gingerly they must tread. The randoseru, a Japanese school bag, costs a whopping
Displaying Content as a Graph
Most web content is displayed as a strict hierarchy, tree-based or otherwise. What if it wasn't?An exploration into the advantages of graph-based content design, the numerous pitfalls, and a few case studies along the way.
2024's public domain is a banger
They stole something from you. For decades, they stole it. That thing they stole? Your entire culture. For all of human history, works created in living memory entered the public domain every year. 40 years ago, that stopped.
Writing a TrueType font renderer
Text is the medium of digital interaction, and text rendering has an outsized impact on the overall fit and finish of any system. It therefore pains me that axle has for years relied on a low-resolution 8x8 bitmap font. Let’s fix it! Take a look at the characters composing this sentence. Note the curves, the negative…
A* tricks for videogame path finding
A* Tricks for Videogame Path Finding, A* (A-star) Search Algorithm
Procrastination is connected to perfectionism
Procrastination is a common issue , which occurs when people unnecessarily postpone decisions or actions, generally despite knowing that doing so is likely to cause them issues .
The fresh start effect
I spent nearly five years working at the nutrition startup Lifesum in Stockholm, where we built a mobile app for tracking your diet and exercise.
Orange Site Hit
I know I'm not alone in having a relationship with the orange site that is... weird. I generally dislike the culture there, it's almost impossible to read any of the comments without being frustrated about the industry I work in or am adjacent to and some of the people who inhabit it; but as a link aggregator of stuff…
Fixing annoying blue standby lights
A simple and free fix for those annoying over bright blue standby lights on home electronics (TV, Stereo, Set top box, etc.)
Git Things
A grab bag of less frequently talked about git adjacent points.
Using a Markov chain to generate readable nonsense with 20 lines of Python
Describes a simple Markov chain algorithm to generate reasonable-sounding but utterly nonsensical text, and presents some example outputs as well as a Python implementation.
Nim on a Real-Time Operating System: Apache NuttX RTOS and Ox64 BL808 SBC
Let's blink an LED on Pine64 Ox64 BL808 64-bit RISC-V Single-Board Computer... With Nim Programming Language and Apache NuttX Real-Time Operating System
Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023
2023 was the breakthrough year for Large Language Models (LLMs). I think it’s OK to call these AI—they’re the latest and (currently) most interesting development in the academic field of …
Threads.net is the new app.net but with ads and interoperable
Meta's Threads.net sure looks a lot like App.net. Is Meta due for a pivot? The legislation the company supports suggests yes.
Interesting double-poly latches inside AMD's vintage LANCE Ethernet chip
I've studied a lot of chips from the 1970s and 1980s, so I usually know what to expect. But an Ethernet chip from 1982 had something new: a ...
Ambient Co-Presence
Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web
Email addresses are not good 'permanent' identifiers for accounts
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Bun, JavaScript, and TCO
Bun is a JavaScript runtime that just released version 1.0! Now you have three choices for running JavaScript outside of the browser: Node, Deno, and Bun. One of Bun's selling points is speed! It makes some interesting decisions to achieve this.
7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel 12th/13th gen
Maybe a poem will help remember complicated power-saving settings for SSDs. Here goes. "ALPM for SATA, not N-V-M-e. The latter needs ASPM, and A-P-S-T"....