Technology

A pickle I’ve avoided for a couple of years has finally been unjarred.1 Two years ago, I was issued a company-owned laptop that was precisely the same make and model—down to the color—as my personal computer. I was loathe to use two computers and felt uncomfortable doing my extracurricular tasks on the work device, so I continued exclusively using my personal laptop as I’ve done since I started there. To comply with various data privacy laws and ensure the company can provide tech support, it was recently made clear to me that work had to be done on the work laptop. I now have to maintain feature parity between two computers, bring them both with me while traveling, and generally be inconvenienced by this change. ...

I love puzzles. I was lucky enough to coauthor a puzzle book at my job, and I’ve been fascinated by any logical, engaging game I can find. I’m no expert, but I am an enthusiast. Over the last several months, I’ve nailed down a set of puzzles that bookend each day, getting my mind working in the morning and letting me wind down in the evening. ...

You may have seen any number of scatter plots on the internet that show data comparisons among players or teams in a given league. These are part of my daily experience on the /r/baseball community, and I finally decided to scratch my statistical presentation itch by making my own. This post isn’t to cover what statistics to compare, just the process I’ve settled on for now to turn a table of comparisons into precisely-designed charts suitable for sharing on the internet. ...

Until my older sister got a Nintendo DS, the only gaming devices we had were those cheap handheld ones that had a single game on it—Sudoku, a baseball simulator—and the similarly-cheap Plug and Play TV game consoles that typically comprised a joystick, a button or two, and composite video cables. They required batteries. They were slow. I loved them. ...

If you grew up around the plain-text internet and pre-smartphone texting, you may be aware of the distinction between emoticons and emojis. The latter are separate unicode characters that are increasingly-detailed artistic renderings of various faces and items, like a Ferris wheel: 🎡. The former are clever constructions of non-emoji characters, which provide some intangible level of whimsy and cleverness that never fails to delight.1 Consider this shrug: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Or someone flipping a table in frustration: (ノ ゜Д゜)ノ ︵ ┻━┻ ...

Last week I was talking with Erin on our way to a coffee shop, and I had a sudden memory of a movie where a mouse needed to scurry about to find medicine to save a young boy who had quite a dastardly fever. Naturally I thought it was a Stuart Little movie, somewhere along the series, but that didn’t feel quite right. Luckily, the subreddit /r/TipOfMyTongue had me covered, when someone asked about this exact movie two years ago. It’s called The Mouse and the Motorcycle, and has a runtime of only 42 minutes. I haven’t rewatched it quite yet, but I was delighted to find the answer. ...

I’ve bounced between browsers over the years. Chrome or Chromium were my default for many years while I ran Linux, with a few small dalliances with Chrome-powered alternatives like Brave. I tried Safari when I switched to a MacBook and used it for months. I then hopped on the Arc Browser bandwagon, which introduced me to features that I now consider essential. That experience wouldn’t last forever. ...

A short article that mirrors my thinking rather well. In particular: Each little metacognitive act of constructing a sentence, though, reflects valuable thinking. Knowing how to use conjunctions, for instance — the ifs, buts and therefores — is an important exercise in logical reasoning. How much should we outsource that to AI? Too much, and the writing experience may feel like a fill-in-the-blank exercise like MadLibs.

I came across the javascript terminal app Playball. It’s fun and slick, and I’m enjoying using it. It gives you a way to view MLB Gameday data from the terminal, and it’s beautifully done. When you first run the app after installing it via npm, you are greeted with the day’s schedule, and the box scores of any games. Keyboard navigation hints are shown at the bottom of the window at all times, so you can easily look at scores from previous days, or check out the schedule in the future. You can jump back to the current day at any point. Navigating any screen can be done with either the arrow keys or vim keybindings. ...

In my weekly perusal of education newsletters, I came across a Time magazine article about new attempts to bring AI and machine learning to monitoring student behavior on school devices. While the article focuses on student mental health—suicide prevention in particular—I looked into the companies mentioned therein and discovered that the scope of monitoring efforts is broad and deep. It is a fascinating and discomforting topic, with each company working on a different aspect of student safety with rhetoric to match. ...