The Way of All Flesh
A mauled robin expired in my hands as I looked for a quiet place to leave it, safe from crows and cats. I’m sure I cut a fine figure stumbling around my yard at dawn with a bird. I have…
Time Sink
Visualising data with trees is fun, and in rare cases, useful. It is difficult to get customers to approve spending time on what to many is an esoteric field. They need to be shown concrete examples, preferably with case studies…
First they came for the morons…
I don’t have much to add about the recent revelations of NSA collection activities, or the news media’s feeble attempts to investigate further. However I would like to draw your attention to what may be the stupidest thing written about…
ASCII Art: A Cure for Amnesia?
We have all had the experience of walking into a room and forgetting why we went in the first place. Recent work from door scientists suggests memory takes context into account, dumping short-term items when the setting changes, like when…
Ammo Box Panniers
I bought a new bike and was stunned at how much bike panniers cost. Some waterproof ones I liked were over $200, which is galling given they are just a kid’s backpack with some hooks. So, nuts to that. Instead,…
Simple 555 Project
I have put together a simple 555 project using the toner transfer method. My aim was to blink two LEDs out of phase, with no particular timing in mind beyond something that might look good on robot costume at Halloween. The…
Handmade Notebooks
Here are two notebooks I made last year. They turned out to be surprisingly durable. The discoloration on the blue one is from living several months at the bottom of a bag. They are coveted with paper backed silk, which a…
The Upside of Planned Obsolescence
I have experienced many disgusting things in my time, but nothing could have prepared me for what lay under the keys of my IBM Model M keyboard. I try to keep it clean, but alas, there comes a time when…
Technical Resolutions for 2013
I hereby resolve to get off my lazy ass and complete the following in 2013: Learn to use a mocking framework for unit testing. Write JIRA plugin to present nice graphs of service monitoring data (uptime, service changes, etc.) Automate…