Secret project(opens in new tab)
One of my new motors. It's about 10mm in diameter I’ve started work on a top-secret project. I can’t really hide the fact that it’s going to be a robot, but I’m not going to say what it is, at ...
Curated river of news
Reader
Latest posts from blogs I follow
3006
entries
61
pages
Adding custom annotations to your java beans(opens in new tab)
Java annotations are syntactic meta-information that can be added to your source code. You can annotate classes, methods, variables, parameters, and even packages. The primary advantage of annotations over Javadoc tags is that they can be reflective. This means the ...
go-piglow, a lib for controlling the piglow in Golang(opens in new tab)
A Piglow glowing A few days ago I got a Piglow. It’s a fairly useless but fun addon board for the Raspberry Pi that has 18 individual user controllable LEDs arranged in Arms/Legs/Tentacles (whatever you want to call them). There ...
Sharing Your Labor of Love: PyPI Quick and Dirty(opens in new tab)
A completely incomplete guide to packaging a Python module and sharing it with the world on PyPI.
Life after Google Reader(opens in new tab)
Google killed its Reader and my beloved Reeder for Mac and iPad officially won’t get updated in time. I think to have found an adequate setup to replace both.
Writing a simple file monitor in Java using Commons IO(opens in new tab)
Even though Java 7 introduced a low-level API to watch for file system changes (see the article here), you also have the option of using the Commons IO library from the Apache Foundation, specifically the org.apache.commons.io.monitor package. The first step ...
Bash Scripting - Best Practices(opens in new tab)
A list of best practices for writing bash scripts: Use a portable shebang In computing, a shebang is the character sequence consisting of the characters number sign and exclamation mark (#!) at the beginning of a script. (source wikipedia) Use: ...
Implementing a generic Priority Queue in C(opens in new tab)
Contents Introduction The Binary Heap Why use a Heap? The code Defining the data Implementation Testing Introduction In Computer Science, a Priority Queue is an abstract data type similar to a standard Queue, but with a critical distinction: every element ...
Evaluate RPN expressions using Haskell, Scala, and python(opens in new tab)
Contents Introduction The Algorithm Implementations Scala Python Haskell Introduction One of the earlier challenges from Programming Praxis was the RPN Calculator. The goal is to create a module that evaluates Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) expressions. RPN is a mathematical notation ...
Converting infix to RPN (shunting-yard algorithm)(opens in new tab)
Introduction If you’ve ever tried to write your own calculator, you’ve probably needed a way to convert mathematical expressions written in the usual infix notation into Reverse Polish Notation (RPN). This post walks through that conversion using the classic shunting-yard ...
Generic data structures in C(opens in new tab)
Update (2026): This was the first 'real article' I ever wrote. It actually dates back to before 2010, though I didn't publish it until later. I’ve made a few tweaks here and there, but the original 'old code' remains. Please ...
Hello world!(opens in new tab)
My first blog post, in which I am writing Hello World!. #include int main() { long long h = 0x0A646C726F57206FLL; long long e = 0x6C6C6548; printf("%.4s%s", (char*)&e, (char*)&h); return 0; }
if I’m in therapy and you’re in therapy...then who's driving this societal collapse(opens in new tab)
A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden(opens in new tab)
Design engineering writing and resources(opens in new tab)
opening yourself to support(opens in new tab)
Every site needs a Links Page / Why linking matters(opens in new tab)
Graphic design ruined my life(opens in new tab)
I Deleted My Second Brain(opens in new tab)
Tech continues to be political(opens in new tab)
We Need To Rewild The Internet(opens in new tab)
A Poem That’s Like a Perfect First Date(opens in new tab)
Self-respect: its source, its power (Vogue, 1961)(opens in new tab)
Don't Use JS for That: Moving Features to CSS and HTML(opens in new tab)
The Empire of AI(opens in new tab)
Why Is CSS So Weird?(opens in new tab)
How to distort text with SVG filters(opens in new tab)
A lot of the SVG filter primitive content out there is some really rad, deep-dive type content (I’ll link some of these at the end!), so I reckoned it might be nice to do a quick write-up on some effects ...
What to say when you don't know what to say(opens in new tab)
I have this weird relationship with Incredible Amounts Of Grief where, like, I’ve literally been there — I know there’s nothing to say, and nothing will heal but time. When The Bad Thing™ happened, I felt angry so often with ...
The Algorithm Poops(opens in new tab)
I have been writing "the algorithm eats X" for the better part of a year now. It ate virtue. It ate language, love, democracy, reality, and time. Eventually it ate itself. The whole series is a catalog of appetite, and ...
The Unit(opens in new tab)
This is the second essay in what is apparently becoming a series. In Mental Health (for Humans) I presented my credentials: sick as fuck, disabled in fact, ten-plus years inside the system. That essay argued that the system's core abstractions ...
A Framework of One's Own(opens in new tab)
In October 2018 I released a web framework called Responder, and to understand why it exists you have to remember what the Python web felt like that year, because the web it was born into no longer exists. It was ...
Breaking Changes(opens in new tab)
The first DSM shipped in 1952. It was a spiral-bound thing of about 130 pages describing roughly a hundred disorders. The current release runs just under a thousand pages and describes around three hundred. Between those two artifacts sit five ...
Handwriting on the Floor(opens in new tab)
Sometimes there is handwriting on the floor. Sometimes there are printed pages on the walls, set like scripture, type where no type is. This has been true for years. It comes in waves, usually when stress is high or the ...
How I Write Now(opens in new tab)
Some of my own essays this year have made me cry. That's not remarkable; writers cry at their own work all the time, usually at how bad it is. What's remarkable is when it happens. Not while typing a sentence. ...
MentalHealthError: Ten Years Later(opens in new tab)
This week I did something I'd been putting off for a long time. I reread MentalHealthError: an exception occurred, the essay where I told the internet I had bipolar disorder. A hundred and fifty thousand people read it the first ...
RhymePad: Seeing the Sound(opens in new tab)
Rhyme is a fact about sound, not spelling. Blue rhymes with shoe and through and you, and not one of them is spelled like the others. Comb, bomb, and tomb all end in the same three letters and not one ...
Tending the Vault(opens in new tab)
There's an entry in my Obsidian daily notes from this April that I didn't think anyone would ever read, including me. It says: > Working on the vault today. Got a fancy new theme going, pretty good. Refactored the style ...
The Algorithm Eats Diagnosis(opens in new tab)
There's a genre now. You've seen it. A face fills the frame, the captions bounce along the bottom, and the voice says something like: five signs you might have ADHD. Or: things I didn't know were autism. Or the compound ...
Whatever This Is(opens in new tab)
There is a folder in my notes called System 777. It contains around two hundred files and a hundred and thirty thousand words: maps, dream logs, a glossary, a quest log, channeled writings preserved verbatim, and profiles of some forty-seven ...
PyTheory Playground(opens in new tab)
Earlier this spring I wrote a few essays about PyTheory, the music theory library I was stuck on for five years and finally unstuck. The short version: it models tones, scales, chords, and fretboards in Python the way a musician ...
This Website's Changelog(opens in new tab)
A changelog for a personal website is a strange genre. Nobody asked for release notes. There is no userbase waiting on a fix, unless you count me, and I already know what shipped. But this site is the closest thing ...
Conducting Between Roller Coasters(opens in new tab)
I almost didn't write this down, because the sentence sounds like a brag and it isn't one. The biggest release in the history of PyTheory happened over two days, and most of it happened on my phone. On vacation. With ...
Focus on Family More Than Code(opens in new tab)
A programmer in his twenties asked me what advice I would give someone like him. I said: focus on family more than code. I think it is the best advice I have. I also think I am close to the ...
Music Theory, Asterisk(opens in new tab)
There is a silent asterisk after the words music theory. You never see it printed, but it is always there, the way it hangs after the canon or the great novels. When someone says music theory they mean one specific ...
Smile and Nod(opens in new tab)
Some mornings I wake with the clear sense that I was just with someone, and I sit down to write it before it fades, and the words come out thinner than the thing. Not wrong, exactly. Just smaller. A pencil ...