Technology

One of the coolest resources available to everyone in the US is public archive and research services. While I was always tangentially aware of their existence (the Library of Congress being one of the main entities associated in my mind) it was never something that was clearly within reach, nor of any use. Most of research I did in high school found third-party research that were quick online searches away. In college I took a British History class, and then I was informed of the services that the university paid for which I could access. This allowed me to find old editions of British newspapers, which were very cool to go through. ...

If you’ve never used a Plug ’n Play game before, you’re missing out. They were the one piece of simple video game fun I had growing up. Beyond that, it was various Flash-based games in a browser (and since that’s my only association with Flash, I’m quite bummed it’s being killed.) And although some of my friends had consoles, and I would play occasionally, it was never something that really grabbed my attention. ...

I am not very much of an audiophile, nor do I do podcasting to make any money. As such, all of the hardware I use is hobbyist at best, and completely amateur otherwise. But, I’ll give a quick rundown of what I have. ...

As promised, I’ve recorded myself editing a podcast (published at 2X speed), which you can find in the middle of this post. Beyond that, this post will just be an overview of my editing workflow. ...

After nobody asked me to, I’ve decided to write a few posts about how I podcast. There might be an additional post where I talk about some other software I use on my computer in general, but we’ll start with podcasting because it really is the heaviest use of my computer. In this post, I’ll focus on the software I use to record. In the next post, I’ll share some of the hardware I use. And finally, I’ll explain how I edit podcasts with the aim of having a screen recording of myself editing either OHAC or Comical Start. ...

After playing around with Project Euler for a while, I determined I wanted to challenge my coding skills even more, but stay firmly planted in the mathematical realm in which I’m familiar. So, I’ve begun writing some code that can be used for certain mathematical objects. In particular, I’ve written a fraction class, a 2D vector class, and a complex number class. You can find the code on GitHub. ...

As part of my year of focus, I’ve been trying to spend more consistent chunks of time working on programming. In particular, right now I’m focusing on doubling down on my Python knowledge, and exploring some other aspects of computer science that interest me. After checking out a few books and tutorials, I’ve made my way back to a website that I found a number of years ago, which is the most intriguing to me: Project Euler. ...

As I come to the realization that a significant part of both my work and personal hobbies involve sitting at a computer, I have become increasingly wary of the stories I hear about things such as repetitive stress injuries (RSI), and what will likely be the impending damage to my eyes. In an effort to avoid, or at least delay, the former issue I have tentatively purchased an ergonomic keyboard. Specifically, the Surface Ergonomic Keyboard from Microsoft. I say tentatively because it’s not cheap. I may return it, but so far I’ve put a few thousand keystrokes on it and it’s feeling pretty good. This review is meant to get as in-depth as a keyboard review can be when written by someone who has never written a keyboard review. I’ll briefly explain my rough, but sufficient, testing procedure and what I found out. Then I’ll get into some details and comparisons I noted to other keyboards I’ve used. ...

Wordpress (both the .org and .com versions) is rolling out a new native editor. It is a “block” system, and I am entirely unsure how I feel about it. I figured I would give them the benefit of the doubt and try to write a somewhat complete post using the Wordpress.org back-end, with this new block system, and see how it goes. ...

During sophomore year of college, I embarked on a project to put a Linux operating system on my laptop. I had been interested ever since using a computer in one of the engineering labs which ran Ubuntu, one of the most mainstream, user-friendly distributions out there. I was intrigued both by the visual design, and the ease with which complex programs could be run. There was also the intrigue of feeling like a cool hacker, using a terminal and typing commands to get around a file system. I was hooked, and since then I’ve had a Linux distribution running on every computer I’ve owned over the past three years. I want to spend a good chunk of time explaining my growing passion for Linux, and why I think more people should seriously consider it as an option for the computers in their lives. This first post will focus on two of the oft-repeated phrases in the Linux community, and its main inspiration: Linux is free. ...