The AR Tsunami
In a recent episode of his excellent podcast Cautionary Tales, entitled “Frankenstein vs. the Volcano“, Tim Harford looks at the impact of the explosion of Mt. Tambora (which was far more powerful than...
View ArticleTyping in AR/VR
The first objection I typically get to my prediction that AR is the next big technology wave that will make existing personal computers obsolete is "what about text entry?"
View ArticleWeb3 Adventures: Distributed Storage with Filecoin
My latest foray into Web3 is a result of a Udemy course I decided to do on Web3 which centers on Ethereum. Thing is, Ethereum isn’t a good model for storage, so I paused and went looking at how web3...
View Articlexinjs turns 0.1.0
If you can’t beat em, join em? I wrote b8rjs after leaving Facebook during the hiatus between that and my next job. It was an attempt to distill everything I knew about front-end development into a...
View ArticleBuilding Custom Elements
Custom Elements, a.k.a. web-components, are (in my opinion) the way reusable, composable components ought to work, but the process of implementing them has not received as much love and attention as...
View ArticleSymbol vs. WeakMap
JavaScript has added a bunch of new stuff over the last several years whose purpose wasn’t immediately obvious to me, and Symbol was definitely one of those things. The basic idea is actually clearly...
View ArticleA Better Galaxy Demo
For a long time I’ve had a pretty cute Galaxy Generator (on this site) that randomly generates a galaxy and displays it using bound SVG elements. It’s pretty cool and in modern browsers on modern...
View ArticlereMarkable 2—Long Term Review
I was a huge fan of the Newton MP2000, which I bought as a replacement for a Newton MP120 I dropped and broke. The MP120 was essentially the MP100 with vastly improved handwriting recognition, but...
View Articlenew Function considered harmful, or when is a closure not a closure?
I had an extended chat recently with friend and former colleague on the subject of safely rendering outside HTML with javascript in it on a server (basically for purposes of screen capture) and how to...
View Articlebun
For the last few months I’ve been using a new would-be node.js replacement called bun. (Yes, it’s hard to google because bun is not a unique word.) As of writing, bun has just turned v0.5.0. It’s not...
View ArticleShining Girls
Warning: spoilers. Like most of my reviews, this is anything but timely. I just finished Shining Girls, an Apple TV+ show I would never have watched had it not gotten a strong recommendation from my...
View ArticleAir Crash Investigation: When Usability Failures Kill People
I don’t know how to fly a plane, although like any gamer I’ve played with flight simulators, so I speak from a position of profound ignorance. I do know from speaking to people who are pilots that the...
View ArticleReview: Tracers in the Dark
One of my favorite new podcasts is Story of the Week by Joel Stein, which is a good humored interview of whoever wrote Joel Stein’s favorite piece of long form journalism that week (well, presumably...
View ArticleDefault Folder X
tldr; if you use a Mac as more than a glorified Chromebook, buy Default Folder X. As I was tediously navigating folders in an “Open…” dialog today, it struck me that I was doing something stupid and...
View ArticleThe ShadowDOM is Optional
You wouldn’t know it to read about custom-elements (a.k.a. web-components) but while the shadowDOM is undoubtedly useful, it is also optional. This is lucky because the shadowDOM adds a lot of overhead...
View ArticleWhy has 3d printing progressed so slowly?
3d "sintered metal" printed weasel from 2013 propped up on a pencil (for scale) and next to a plastic SLA print I made in 2021.
View ArticleA Few Front-End Tricks
Over the years I’ve picked up some tricks that never seem to get old and I thought I’d share some of them. Centering (CSS) It’s still stupidly hard to center things inside other things in HTML. (Even...
View ArticleStrange New Logic
Spoilers ahead… I was a huge fan of Star Trek from the first time I saw it. In early 1970s Australia, the only SF we got regularly was Dr. Who (which I also loved) and sporadic episodes of Star Trek...
View ArticleMy Graphics Toolkit (2023)
For quite a while I would blog about my quest for replacements for Adobe Creative Suite. I’m long past that and have no interest in using such bloated software. At the same time, there’s a core set of...
View ArticleHow to solve your current Firebase Admin SDK Issues
Note: the title of this blog post refers to a piece of paper that fell out of the box when I first installed Master of Magic, an MS-DOS fantasy game derived from Master of Orion. Both games were...
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