Recently updated blogs

Since I conveniently missed my “decade of gainful employment as a web developer” post last year, I’ll make it up with a “oh wow, this blog is a decade old” post. There’s not much to say, considering my output was sorely lacking over the past 3 years. BUT, I still dutifully renewed my domain name over the past ten years, and kept the dependencies on the site up-to-date, with an …

If you truly love something, let he, she, they or it know. Now, in this instance, I am talking about silent film, and it is the season for wearing your heart on your sleeve, so here’s an opportunity to do just that. Coincidentally, if you are the sort of person who has considered giving up … Continue reading Your silent cinema Valentine →

I've recently built a Remote Control for the Hy-Gain AR-500X Antenna Rotator which works nicely but requires me to look up the desired heading for a specific station in Cloudlog, go to the remote control web application, determine the best memory channel and then click it to move the rotator. Determined to streamline this process, I embarked on a journey to automate antenna control with the help of Cloudlog and …

It made headlines around the world: The young man was doing pull-ups at the top of a skyscraper and let go. “Let go” might not be the right word: it implies intention. “Fell,” however, implies total accident. His arms gave out. He’d reached his limit. I don’t know, because I watched the video until that moment neared, and then couldn’t go on. It was snuff, I thought. To witness that …

A recipe for making carob bars that are not chocolate but resemble it somewhat

I've developed a useful rule to reject all social media, coupons, and wearables. A few weeks ago, I broke my rule. In January, I spent $400 on a 2-year WHOOP subscription after diving into Bryan Johnson. (For the uninitiated, I think of him as an alternative, inward-facing version of Elon Musk—Paypal fortune origins, then some interesting bets afterwards. I highly recommend this podcast interview and the sequel.)Whoop is a bracelet …

How do you follow up on a widely acclaimed album? Simple, get Aaron Dessner from The National, renowned for his collaborations with artists like Taylor Swift, Ben Howard, and Sharon Van Etten, to produce your next album. That’s what Brighton-based artist Bess Atwell did as she prepares to follow up her 2021 LP ‘Already, Always’ with her next full-length album, ‘Light Sleeper.’ It’s preceded by her latest single ‘Release Myself’ …

In the Netherlands, water management is stubbornly technocratic, driven more by metrics than people. As climate change upends calculations, can planners find new modes of ecological repair? Read on Places Journal

Enough of this. Enough. Equivocal or vague principles, as a rule, will make your life an uninspired, undirected, and meaningless act. This is taken from Alphabetical Diaries, a remarkable book I am reading by Sheila Heti, composed of many thousands of sentences drawn from her decades of diaries and presented in alphabetical order. It starts like this: A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want …

I am driving home at night hands gripping the wheel empty tarmac surrounding me fertiliser stinging my nostrils The engine shaking all the space between my scattered atoms as white lines converge scattered atoms of steel shake in engine vibrations fertiliser drifts from nearby fields the empty tarmac sighs someone else’s hands grip a steering wheel as a car drives on, into darkness.

In a recent preprint, Siddharth Bhandari and Abhishek Khetan have improved the decades old upper bound on the trifference problem by using a clever combinatorial argument involving extremal graph theory. As discussed in my previous posts a trifferent code of length is a subset of with the property that for any three distinct elements of , there exists a coordinate position at which these codewords have distinct values, that is, …

I often wonder: when did we stop? When did we stop caring, when did we stop being human? When did we stop seeing in the other a human being? I have always had those questions in my head, maybe because I grew up with this heavy guilt of coming from a country that killed six […]

The J-Find Visa enables recent graduates to engage in activities such as job hunting, business startup, and other income-generating endeavors within Japan — opportunities that were previously inaccessible to do so. I was one of the first recipients of this visa, which provided me with the legal foundation to reside in Japan for the initial year, allowing me to make pivotal connections, lay the groundwork for starting a business, open …

Compliments of u/ceech8, who "uploaded a PDF of [Stahl's Essential Psychopharmacology] chapter 3 and asked [chatgpt4] to make an outline of key concepts" and then "make a helpful diagram summarizing those concepts for a graduate level audience", then posted the result to r/psychiatry: comments

Plein Air is certainly the best cafe in Hyde Park. (Arguably Build Coffee is fine as well, but they are only open about 5 hours a week.) But it is also true to say that Plein Air is (at best) … Continue reading →