Recently updated blogs

[warning - a bit of long post] Well, here we are! The end of 2023! It seems like only yesterday that we were starting to hear some whispers about this thing called "ChatGPT," but it was in fact about a year ago, and as you know we moved pretty quickly through that hype cycle. Don't worry, this entire YIR (year in review) won't be about ChatGPT 😂. As I was …

Annual year in review: 2023 edition.

Back in 2014, I was invited to join the AGU Blogosphere to post about geoscience education and educational technology (see my very first post, Join the Trek to explore Geoscience Education). Over time, as my career interests and experiences expanded, my posts included science communication and the creative arts. I shared conference summaries, field experiences, best practices on inclusive pedagogy, and more. I’ve posted 428 blog entries, with this being …

We're almost out of 2023!This year has been the 30th Anniversary of Risus: The Anything RPG, the 20th Anniversary of The Risus Companion, and the 10th Anniversary of Risus 2nd Edition.As I write this, we're at the end of December, and I feel like I should raise a glass to Risus before the year is done. I've kept quiet so far because I think it would be unseemly, nowadays, for …

"What I often find as I make my way through the year in books is that I am prone to zig-zagging between different styles and genres. I couldn’t imagine reading the same type of book all year, even if I adored that particular type."

How to serve protomaps tiles with NodeJS.

While working on a changelog-generation script for my vsvg project, I wanted to display the list of contributors as circular avatars, just like GitHub does in multiple places. After a few Google searches and some failed attempts, I identified a couple of key tricks. The first is about obtaining the avatar image for a given GitHub account. Although the URL is hard to predict, adding .png to the account page …

I really enjoyed attending and speaking at LeadDev Berlin in 2023. Here are just a few of the things that I took away from the conference. When to make quick decisions I learned the most from Nicky Thompson’s excellent talk, “Making work (and life) less stressful by making better decisions”. This was jam packed with information to help us understand how our brains work (both for and against us) when …

Notes for season 5, episode 13, “return 0“ 08:26 Even with HR removed, it’s apparently not hard to find a bunch of cops at the precinct that would execute fellow officers for “a nice fat bonus”. 11:27 The music playing as Finch waits on the room is “Bunsen Burner” which previously appeared on the soundtrack of Ex Machina (2014). 14:02 “The suspense is killing me… in addition to the gunshot …

SteamOS 3 (“Holo”) is the Arch-based Linux distribution built for the Steam Deck, Valve Software’s portable PC gaming device. It’s a very interesting Linux distribution even when you only focus on how it updates itself: updates are performed atomically by downloading a new read-only root filesystem to an inactive partition, then rebooting into that partition. But consumers can also run steamos-devmode to unlock the root filesystem, put the pacman database …

I’m fortunate to have the week between Christmas and New Year’s off work, and that affords me the opportunity to spend some quality time out in the garage, working on various projects. I knocked together a little cart for a new drill press using leftover wood from the workbench project. I was also able to build in some extra storage, which is always welcome in the workshop. My other big …

I don’t remember how I came across it, but this is one of the most exciting papers I’ve read recently. The authors train a neural network that tries to identify the next in a sequence of MNIST samples, presented in digit order. The interesting part is that when they include a proxy for energy usage in the loss function (i.e. train it to be more energy-efficient), the resulting network seems …

Why do so many guitar players resist learning the notes on the fretboard? This is my most complex set of animations so far, built in service of the simplest topic I’ve covered to date: how to learn the notes of the fretboard efficiently, and working on recall speed as a key enabler for improvisation.

Come for the tacos; stay for the birria One of the great things about tacos is that there’s nowhere to hide. When using a small maize tortilla, there’s very little room to hide slapdash sauces and miserable-quality protein. If you attempt to do so in anglocapitalist fashion by overloading with guacamole, refried beans and other frippery as if it were some of kind of burrito, then such a house of …