BlogDB

Evaluating Human Factors Beyond Lines of Code

Software systems researchers want to make human-centered claims, but don't have the proper tools to do so. That's how we ended up with the ubiquitous lines-of-code comparison found in evaluation se...

Initial thoughts on The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

I finally started reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I've tried to start this book many times before, but I always stopped in the first chapter or so because I felt that the author was bein...

Your keystroke biometrics are everywhere

Real time collaboration software and text boxes that rapidly save drafts to the cloud essentially log your fingerprintable typing behavior. The industry refers to this information as “keystroke dyn...

Power to the power users

How the creative uses of data structures by power users are transforming and inspiring new features in my product

App Defaults - 2024

It’s that time of the year again: here’s my extended “frozen /uses page” for late 2024. Whenever multiple applications are listed, p marks private use, w marks software that I (have to) use at work...

Handling tarballs in Python

Need to work with tar files in Python? Here's how to create and extract compressed tarballs effortlessly.

Data Loading - Daft

I know I’ve been praising polars a lot lately, and I’m still in love. polars will be my continued go-to library for Data Analysis of Tabular data, and when building ETL (data pipelines) in 99% of t...

Importing a frontend Javascript library without a build system

I like writing Javascript without a build system and for the millionth time yesterday I ran into a problem where I needed to figure out how to import a Javascript library in my code without using a...

Native dual-range input

I just released @stanko/dual-range-input - a native dual-range input. Here is how it looks with the default styles: The "native" part is somewhat open for discussion. I call it native because the l...

A reading list for Japan

I visited Japan in Autumn 2024. As is tradition, I enriched my visit with as much reading about Japan as I could get my eyes on. Below is a list of the more interesting things I have read. Japanese...

Open Graph images: Format compatibility across platforms

A comparison of image format support for Open Graph preview cards across different social media and messaging platforms.

Announcing Labrync

Announcing Labrync (like labrynth + ncurses) Source and download here -> Labrync Labrync is a passive or active little console toy. I wanted to play with a few maze exploration algorithms (you can ...

Chatbots Decoded: Exploring AI (Review)

Chatbots Decoded: Exploring AI is a new exhibit from the Computer History Museum (CHM) opening November 20th, 2024. In development for more than a year, the exhibit covers both the history of chatb...

Starting afresh

It’s nice to set up your digital workspace again sometimes, from scratch. One that isn’t your main computer so as to not interfere with ongoing work. You are freed from the shackles of backward com...

Lessons from my First Exit

In April of this year, I sold TinyPilot, the bootstrapped hardware company I founded and ran for four years. I wrote a post in May that told the story of the sale, but I’d like to share more about ...

FauxRPC and Protovalidate

CSS fix to prevent orphan icons dropping to a new line

When an HTML element becomes too narrow, its content starts to wrap into multiple lines. This is intended behavior and works well in many cases. However, for short text, it doesn't look great when ...

Perfect Image Processing with Hugo

With the correct image processing you can still get a 100 score from PageSpeed Insights despite an image heavy article. This is an evaluation of my Speedgoat race report in July. I use Hugo to buil...

A new webring for the weird and wonderful personal web

Following up on my recent post about colophons (“meta” pages), I’ve decided to create a webring to gather more personal websites through opt-ins. I chewed over the initial idea for the former blog ...

Leveraging logprobs to build better generative AI systems

Autofilling form fields has become an increasingly common and practical application of generative AI. With just a bit of context and a well-crafted prompt, AI can produce reliable results for vario...