Recently updated blogs

WIP: Remains a work-in-progress for the year 2024. K My daughters are fascinated by strange things. Of course, the younger one is influenced by what her sister does. Five years ago, the elder one asked me to get Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn. I started reading it, and left it. This year, I decided to finish reading the stories. Kwaidan (怪談) is a 1904 ghost …

Chen Hongshou 陳洪綬, 1599–1652 Great Ford on the Yellow River So, if the class makes1 I will be doing Late Imperial China in Spring. I was going to do a few weeks of basic stuff, do some Sanyan Stories, set up their research projects, and at the end do the Glory of The Qing and have them read Soulstealers. This is a pretty social and cultural and economic class, and …

[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 …