Studio
Writing
Travel
- Taiwan
- Wintermission
- Bali
- Penang
- Singapore
- The Philippines
- Vietnam
- Korea
- Georgia
- Israel
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Serbia
- London
- Scotland Roadtrip
- Part I: Aberdeen, British Royalty, and Expensive Castles
- Part II: Inverness, Loch Ness, and Booking-less
- Part III: Isle of Skye
- Part IV: Oban, Fingal’s Cave, and Car Troubles
- Part V: Glasgow Terminus
- Edinburgh
- Paris
- Lyon
- Aix-en-Provence
- Montpellier
- Slovenia
- Croatia
- Crete
- Naxos
- Athens
- Seattle in May
- Madrid
- Basque Country
- Peneda-Gerês National Park
- Douro Valley
- Córdoba
- Granada
- Nerja
- Málaga
- Seville
- Porto
- Lisbon
- Washington, D.C.
Design
- Misclicking Live Search
- Who Has Been Speaking?
- The Power of Lists
- Force Click for Layer Selection
- Fixing Mobile Page Layouts
- Don't Justify Web Text
Programming
- Building an ECS in TypeScript
- What is an ECS?
- Why build an ECS? Why TypeScript?
- A TypesScript ECS in 99 Lines of Code
- Tests
- Deeper Dive: Entities
- Deeper Dive: Components
- Dirty Component Optimization
- Aspects
- Deeper Dive: Systems
- Sparking Joy with Python
Creating & Thinking
- Cultural Wisdom
- Appropriate Quality
- Creative Reading
- Use Examples
- Deeply Knowing
- Creative Friction
- Paralysis
Health
Projects
weatherspread FallgateSoftware
food
A simple Desktop-only app for calorie counting and meal planning.
I wrote this to use it myself. You can read much more about it in my post on Calorie Counting × Meal Planning.
python-utils
My helper functions for python.
I add this tiny library as a dependency to all my projects. It contains little functions I kept writing over and over. There’s very little here—probably a positive testament to Python—but I like the idea of having a personal helper library so much I couldn’t resist including it.
git-checker
A tiny tool to find git repositories on your computer and tell you if any are dirty or unpushed.
I wrote this to use it myself. Over time, it’s also expanded to check other directories on your computer for any files that aren’t expected, and offer to delete them. These two functionalities are part of an effort to have things backed up at all times, so a hard drive failing is no big deal.
dotfiles
My helper scripts, configs, and instructions for setting up new environments.
I think dotfiles (named because they often start with a dot, like .bashrc) are a fun window into someone’s work environment. (And probably a time capsule of when they started working with unix-esque systems.) My favorite trick is to name custom scripts starting with a comma.
You might also be interested in checking out my research software.
Sketches
Blog
In Praise And Critique of Digital Gardens My Media Snapshot Sleeper Train to Sapa Blank Screen Manifesto Get the Picture Just Moving and Making Climate and Schedule Infrastructure Writing vs Blogging Rewrites and replants Hot The Distant Rumble of Change Smaller Postsµblog
Latest: Aug 29, 2023
It seems that now, it’s nearly impossible to know about niche things. Not because it’s too hard, but because it’s too easy. In other words, knowledge that used to be niche is now easily accessible. The reason is that any niche thing you know about is now covered on YouTube. So whether you know a niche thing is just whether you’ve watched a particular YouTube video. My example: I remember learning that the original Roller Coaster Tycoon was programmed in assembly by a single guy. I have held onto this as a bizarre and fascinating nugget. I was recently suggested a YouTube video explaining this fact. I am sure people felt this phenomenon about the Internet itself.* But something about the explosion of knowledge on YouTube has made rare knowledge feel less valuable. Maybe it’s because YouTube video makers are incentivized to make videos as engaging as possible. So acquiring niche knowledge used to be a function of whether you were sufficiently interested in something such that you would pass the activation energy required to look it up. People who weren’t interested in it would never know about it because they would be too bored to tolerate the process of finding the information. But since YouTube videos are entertaining, this barrier no longer exists. * Thinking more about this re: the Internet in general, it is certainly true. Going to a library and finding a book was a lot more effort than Googling something. I guess people probably felt the same about libraries. And writing.
Garage
The garage is an experiment in "working with the garage door up." These evolving notes are written for me but posted publicly here. Read more in What is the garage?
- TypeScript readonly wrapper
- Image Placeholder Test Page
- Photo Notebook
- About
- Aperture
- Crop
- Exposure
- Focus
- Mode
- Shooting Street
- Shutter Speed
- Software
- Study: Photographing Drinks, Q2
- Vs Phone
- Image Placeholder Development Page
- Code layout test page
- Image layout test page
- Image transition test page
- Reflections on Maintenance
- On WaniKani
- Sidenote test page
- Templating Languages Considered Harmful
- 3D Notebook
- About: Restructuring my 3D notes
- MagicaVoxel: Importing
- MagicaVoxel: Layer vs Outline
- MagicaVoxel: Project Objects to Ground
- MagicaVoxel: Shaders
- MagicaVoxel: Terrain
- Study: Chicken
- Study: Ocean Floor
- Study: Ryu (BoF III)
- Study: Ryu (BoF III): II
- Three.js: Cube confusion
- Topic: Colors
- Topic: Level of detail
- Topic: Lighting
- Topic: Projections
- Image lazy load test page
- Speeding up my website
- Lastpass Lockout
- Site Design Refresh 2022
- Big Header Design
- Website Redesigns
- Google's and Facebook's Software
- When Lists Don't Work
- New tech time budget
- Producing lots of work
- On Neon White
- Mo Photos Mo Problems
- Image scroll test page
- Image size test page
- WebP test page
- Small communities
- Spectators
- City maps with prettymaps
- Mandelbrot
- Shader stress test
- Pixi.js graphics stress test
- Generative voxel world editor
- Ways of looking
- Bézier basics
- Personal infrastructure graveyard
- Benefits of creating prototypes that fail
- Video game graveyard
- Website graveyard
- Critiquing Internet use
- Does k-means on an image's colors make a good palette?
- Reducing creative friction: starting a new project
- Spirit of discovery
- Simulation: Basic street
- Animating SVGs from Sketch with anime.js
- Stupid things I do constantly in Python
- Creation and virality
- Causes and conditions
- Omitting negative results precludes thinking in reverse
- Thinking in reverse
- Summer 2021 website goals
- Working blocks
- Working process
- Deciding and following
- Deeper ideas in pocket
- Notes on fragment shaders and p5.js
- Teachers are responsible for multiple perspectives
- Tension between discovery and intentional creation
- Home base feeling
- Tiny naming woes
- What is the garage?
TypeScript readonly wrapper
Summary I stumbled upon a great type to enforce object immutability at compile time if that’s all you’re worried about:...
aug
29
2023
Photo Notebook: Study: Photographing Drinks, Q2
Code layout test page
I’m inline ya dig. def main(): Setup device device = torch.device( f"cuda:{args.device}" if torch.cuda.is_available()...
Image Placeholder Test Page
Inline cityMap Static Animated "plain big" cityPic v1 (img) Full-width (Just switching to v2 but using old (“v1”)...
Image Placeholder Development Page
Is it possible to have images save space and render placeholders before they’ve loaded? Site-wide I went down the...
Photo Notebook: Vs Phone
Photo Notebook: About
Photo Notebook: Aperture
Photo Notebook: Crop
Photo Notebook: Exposure
Photo Notebook: Focus
Photo Notebook: Mode
I quickly stumbled on what I believe to be the best shooting mode: aperture priority.01 This means that you pick...
Photo Notebook: Shooting Street
There’s probably a better term for it, but by shooting street I mean getting primed to take photos more quickly while...
Photo Notebook: Shutter Speed
Photo Notebook: Software
Apple Photos Apple Photos is simultaneously a blessing and a bane. The interface for viewing and editing photos is...
Taiwan: Hualien
Taiwan: Chishang
Taiwan: Kaohsiung
Taiwan: Tainan
Taiwan: Alishan
may
17
2023
Taiwan: Taichung
Taiwan: Taipei
Wintermission
Bali
Penang
apr
24
2023
Singapore
The Philippines: El Nido
The Philippines: Bohol
The Philippines: Manila
Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh City
Vietnam: Dalat
Vietnam: Sapa
Vietnam: Hanoi
mar
29
2023
Korea: Jeju
Korea: Busan
Korea: Seoul
mar
19
2023
Software: dotfiles ↗
My helper scripts, configs, and instructions for setting up new environments.I think dotfiles (named because they often start with a dot, like .bashrc) are a fun window into someone’s work...
Image transition test page
mar
05
2023
Sidenote test page
I’d like to try putting sidenotes in the margins for large enough pages. (This page has previews of the sidenotes if...
Templating Languages Considered Harmful
I.e., frontend templating languages like Liquid and Nunjucks. Can’t set attribute on object...
mar
04
2023
Georgia
Software: git-checker ↗
A tiny tool to find git repositories on your computer and tell you if any are dirty or unpushed.I wrote this to use it myself. Over time, it’s also expanded to check other directories on your computer for any files...
Sketch: Ramen ode
feb
26
2023
3D Notebook: About: Restructuring my 3D notes
Studies. I’d like to work on focused studies. If I want to, I can post the result as a sketch, but it’s not required....
Sketch: Muji Page Please
feb
25
2023
feb
24
2023
Image lazy load test page
Attribute Investigation NB: The following numbers change as I add more text here because the images are getting pushed...
feb
23
2023
Speeding up my website
Summary: 100MB → 5MB initial load, drastically improved interactive times (roughly ~10s → ~1s). Longer summary:...
feb
22
2023
Israel
feb
21
2023
Lastpass Lockout
LastPass MFA: Too Risky If your phone is stolen, how would you log into LastPass with multi-factor auth (MFA)? Circular...
Reflections on Maintenance
Maintenance is beautiful. I’d never really considered how widespread it is, and how much it’s a sign of life, until...
On WaniKani
Good Visual design: colors, URLs API design: that extensibility is possible Quirkiness Teaching you just a couple...
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Serbia
London
Site Design Refresh 2022
Before/after screenshots in assets/garage/site-design-refresh-2022/.
Scotland Roadtrip: Part V: Glasgow Terminus
Scotland Roadtrip: Part IV: Oban, Fingal’s Cave, and Car Troubles
Scotland Roadtrip: Part III: Isle of Skye
Scotland Roadtrip: Part II: Inverness, Loch Ness, and Booking-less
Scotland Roadtrip: Part I: Aberdeen, British Royalty, and Expensive Castles
Big Header Design
Spent a bit of time working on a different header style to use for articles (on this website). WIP. Notes for myself:...
In Praise And Critique of Digital Gardens
Google's and Facebook's Software
Notes: Google: high latency, high bandwidth TF vs Pytorch Tensorboard vs Whatever FB’s was Angular vs React
When Lists Don't Work
This is one note I’d like to just turn into a normal post. Webrings https://macmenubar.com/ Why? Something about lack of...
Website Redesigns
Worklist [x] nav [x] desktop [x] color themes [x] mobile [x] footer [x] desktop [x] color themes [x] mobile [x] new h...
My Media Snapshot
Sleeper Train to Sapa
Blank Screen Manifesto
New tech time budget
Starting a new project, each new technology you use adds a time cost for figuring out how it works. You really notice...
Producing lots of work
One of the core things I believe about doing good work is that you first need to produce a lot of (probably bad) work in...
Get the Picture
Just Moving and Making
Climate and Schedule
A couple little notes so I don’t owe Max C $5 this week. Gotta feed the blog machine. Climate I’m spending more time on...
Edinburgh
Infrastructure
Writing vs Blogging
On Neon White
I never play FPSes, and I never (anymore) try to 100% games. So why I am I so hooked on Neon White, and achieving all...
Mo Photos Mo Problems
Some notes—hope to expand further—on the surprising number of additional website issues I faced when trying to include...
3D Notebook: Topic: Level of detail
What’s interesting is that voxel resolution isn’t the same thing as level of detail used. This goes both ways. There are...
Aix-en-Provence
Lyon
Montpellier
Paris
Image size test page
Due to preliminary pixel density tests in the image layout test page, I've been exporting my images assuming an @3x device pixel ratio and a moderately large screen (939 CSSpx height).
Image scroll test page
Attempting resolution of issue seen in recent photo blog posts: scrolling down, or even back up, results in Chrome...
WebP test page
A quick test to see whether folks' browsers are able to display this (somewhat) new image format called "WebP."
3D Notebook: Study: Ryu (BoF III): II
Image layout test page
I want to experiment with wider layouts, so want to have HTML/CSS formulas for breaking out of the normal content flow....
Small communities
Visiting climbing gyms that are just getting their legs under them—usually in smaller cities—is bittersweet. It’s lovely...
Spectators
Public vs Private Spaces I’m interested in the difference between public and private spaces (/ groups) (/ communities)....
weatherspread
Slovenia
Croatia
Crete
Naxos
Athens
Seattle in May
Madrid
Basque Country
Peneda-Gerês National Park
Douro Valley
Córdoba
City maps with prettymaps
This is my devlog for working with the prettymaps library to try to generate maps for cities that I visit. I ran into a...
Granada
3D Notebook: Topic: Lighting
3D Notebook: Topic: Projections
Sketch: Wood Shelf Room
Nerja
Málaga
Seville
Porto
Lisbon
Sketch: Red Wine
Washington, D.C.
Mandelbrot
Rewrites and replants
Shader stress test
Building an ECS in TypeScript: Deeper Dive: Systems
Pixi.js graphics stress test
3D Notebook: Three.js: Cube confusion
Generative voxel world editor
Building an ECS in TypeScript: Aspects
3D Notebook: Study: Ryu (BoF III)
3D Notebook: MagicaVoxel: Layer vs Outline
I think Layer doesn’t determine draw order, but Outline does. Manipulating the order with the Outline is awkward. In...
3D Notebook: MagicaVoxel: Project Objects to Ground
(The actual ground may be a terrain — i.e., not just z=0.) Have different color voxels underneath, then run drop shader...
3D Notebook: MagicaVoxel: Shaders
For me it’s not immediately obvious how to use them, sometimes even after reading about it. Brush grass - shader mode...
3D Notebook: MagicaVoxel: Terrain
Turns out Perlin noise is great, much nicer than what I can do by hand. Run shader tergen (or tergen2 for selected area...
3D Notebook: Study: Ocean Floor
Building an ECS in TypeScript: What is an ECS?
Ways of looking
A personal example catalog Unintentional Caffeine filling the brain — Optimism about current and potential endeavors...
3D Notebook: Topic: Colors
3D Notebook: MagicaVoxel: Importing
3D Notebook: Study: Chicken
Sketch: Chicken
Misclicking Live Search
Building an ECS in TypeScript: Dirty Component Optimization
Who Has Been Speaking?
Sketch: A
Figure Creation Tutorial: Making a Figure 1
The Power of Lists
Building an ECS in TypeScript: Deeper Dive: Components
Building an ECS in TypeScript: Deeper Dive: Entities
Building an ECS in TypeScript: Tests
Building an ECS in TypeScript: A TypesScript ECS in 99 Lines of Code
Building an ECS in TypeScript: Why build an ECS? Why TypeScript?
Bézier basics
Personal infrastructure graveyard
Benefits of creating prototypes that fail
This is a commonly held belief in the tech world, so I’m writing this really for myself. Creating prototypes that fail...
Video game graveyard
Website graveyard
Critiquing Internet use
It feels silly and trivial to talk about any bad aspects of the Internet. Specifically that it allows us access to huge...
Does k-means on an image's colors make a good palette?
Reducing creative friction: starting a new project
I’ve written about creative friction before. But I just realized a new source: how much effort it takes to start a new...
Spirit of discovery
The spirit of discovery is wanting to figure something out for yourself rather than look up the answer. While it feels...
Simulation: Basic street
Force Click for Layer Selection
Animating SVGs from Sketch with anime.js
Stupid things I do constantly in Python
Output a string with "{value}", run the whole thing again and make it f"{value}". Misspell a command...
Creation and virality
When I’m creating something, a nonzero portion of my thoughts are about whether it will become big and successful. This...
Cultural Wisdom
Let me take a crack at defining what I mean by cultural wisdom right at the start. Cultural wisdom Wisdom you get for...
Fixing Mobile Page Layouts
Causes and conditions
This is a mode of thinking that looks at the web/cloud/set of causes and conditions leading up to—and surrounding—an...
Omitting negative results precludes thinking in reverse
In science—or at least in machine learning—we have a culture of rewarding positive results and omitting (or...
Thinking in reverse
I read about this idea in the context of Charlie Munger’s process for drawing good maps for pilots: Think about all the...
Summer 2021 website goals
I didn't finish, but they helped a lot.
Working blocks
Working blocks are periods of focused work.01 Benefits Getting started. You can do anything for twenty-five minutes....
Working process
Over many years of independent work during the PhD, I’ve pieced together components of a process for getting work done...
Deciding and following
“The mind is a great servant but a terrible master.” – proverb One tendency I struggle with is how to balance two modes:...
Deeper ideas in pocket
I wrote about this quote in Hot, but I wanted a way to reference it later. When you’re new at something, you get excited...
Hot
It is very hot in Seattle right now. Today was the hottest day in recorded history. Tomorrow is supposed to be hotter. I...
Notes on fragment shaders and p5.js
createGraphics() makes a new <canvas> I thought I had a bug with resizeCanvas() because a bunch of extra...
Teachers are responsible for multiple perspectives
If you’re not a teacher, and you need to figure out how to do something challenging—like lose weight, reach a high depth...
Tension between discovery and intentional creation
Especially when inexperienced with a medium, it can be difficult to pick which creative ideas to pursue. If you just let...
Home base feeling
The home base feeling is when you are comfortable enough with what’s going on that the idea of embarking on a new quest...
Tiny naming woes
“There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things.” – Phil Karlton The word...
What is the garage?
The garage01 is a new experiment (starting June 2021) with “working with the garage door up.” It’s inspired by Alex’s...
The Distant Rumble of Change
Even just writing a “blog post” and calling it a “blog post” feels like a cop-out. But this is actually exactly what I...
"Every PhD Is Different"
Sketch: Cube Room
Sketch: New Damien Who Dis
Voxel Web Renderer Ft. Bar Table
Sketch: Bar Table
Sketch: Mimyc
Sketch: City Parts
Sketch: Lighting Height Study
Sketch: Material Study
Sketch: Symmetry Tools Study
Sketch: Taco
Sketch: Tiny Red Truck
Sketch: Wide Blue Truck
Sketch: Coffee Bowl
Sketch: Coffee Mug Scale Study
Sketch: Green Screen
Don't Justify Web Text
A Modest Proposal: Let’s Stop Lying To Each Other in Our Research Papers
Fragment Shader on iPhone
Sketch: Stars
Software: python-utils ↗
My helper functions for python.I add this tiny library as a dependency to all my projects. It contains little functions I kept writing over and over....
Appropriate Quality
Creative Reading
A little bit ago, I spent a weekend by a lake. We rented a cabin. I passed two days cooking and soaking in nature’s...
Smaller Posts
I’m going to try writing some smaller posts. Each time I’ve tried to write something small recently, it’s become quite...
Use Examples
Sparking Joy with Python: Conventions Are Small Magic
Sparking Joy with Python: Static Typing Is the Key to Joy
Sparking Joy with Python: Decluttering with Tools
Sparking Joy with Python: Why
Deeply Knowing
Sketch: Limes
Sketch: Follow Me
Sketch: Color World
T-Shirt: Monologue
Sketch: Primitives
Calorie Counting × Meal Planning
Software: food ↗
A simple Desktop-only app for calorie counting and meal planning.I wrote this to use it myself. You can read much more about it in my post on Calorie Counting × Meal Planning.
Sketch: Thinking
Sketch: Circles
Creative Friction
Fallgate
Procedural City Layout Generation with GANs
Ordinary least squares, ℓ² (ridge), and ℓ¹ (lasso) linear regressions
Downloading books from Project Gutenberg
Note: I wrote this in 2016, and am posting it now in 2021. Others have found it helpful. In case it’s still a bit...
Paralysis
Making Plots Pretty
