This post is a little late since I was camping this past weekend. A good chunk of my time was spent sitting in a chair (or in a hammock, or on a diving platform in the water) reading some books. While camping for about 3 days, I was able to finish 3 books. Managing to read that much was an excellent starting point for my brain. I felt focused and calm while reading, and was able to ignore my phone (particularly since there’s no service where I was.) ...
The word came in this week that my company will be working from home until at least the end of the year. Although we’ve already been working from home for about 5 months now, knowing that it’s another 5 months (and that I’ll be heading back to San Diego fairly soon) changes the feeling a bit. ...
I like switching up my wallpaper every once in a while. Each device I use has a different wallpaper, and I normally just get it in my head that it’s time for a change. I decided to go a little further than before when I discovered the NASA APOD Gnome Extension. This downloads NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, and sets it as your wallpaper. It’s a neat utility. There are several others which allow you to use different sources, or which pull from Wikimedia commons, and I’ll likely play around with those. What I like about this APOD extension is that it also gives the description that accompanies the picture. ...
A while ago, one of the water bottle sleeves in my backpack started to tear. In addition, the nature of my traveling life began to change. I was taking weekend trips to San Francisco, and the occasional long-term trip back to Minnesota (such as I am on now.) Now that I’m armed with a little bit of birthday money, particularly a gift card to REI, I’m on the hunt for a new backpack. ...
This is just to record two old games that my family very much enjoys. Both are a wonderful mix of strategy and the luck inherent to board and card games. The rules are reasonably basic, and the boards can be beautiful. They are Cribbage and Backgammon. Cribbage is mainly a card game where you play to 121 points, but traditionally you play on a board with holes and pegs to track said points. It can be played with 2, 3, or 4 players (with two variations in the 3-player version) and is a wonderful game to teach someone starting at a young age. It teaches quick decision making, basic addition, and is just a casual, fun game to play at any point. ...
I was just tutoring someone in their Calculus 2 course, and we did a problem on geometric series. When I was a student, I remember memorizing several facts about geometric series without really grokking the algebraic details of why the formulas you come up with are so nice. Since it is fresh in my mind, I figured I’d go through the standard approach. ...
I’ve been thinking about the Fourth of July. During the past couple of years, I’ve become less confident that there’s any agreement what precisely it is meant to celebrate. In theory it’s a celebration of our self-proclaimed anniversary of independence from British rule. Excellent. Yet it more closely resembles a general celebration of whatever America means to each particular celebrant. ...
With no sports yet available in the United States, I’ve fallen back in love with the Marble League, a genuinely interesting, engaging, and exciting set of “athletic” events for – you guessed it – marbles. ...
I’ve created a new project called mrmp3 that encodes MP3 chapters. The repository is here: https://github.com/rich1126/mrmp3. ...
Through a wonderful little game called TeXnique, I became aware of the online typesetting system KaTeX. Unlike MathJax, which is immensely finicky, slow, and has limited support for proper LaTeX, the KaTeX system supports scaling of rendered images, automatically detects the text color of my site and adapts as necessary, and has a fuller implementation of LaTeX commands.