I publicly came out as transgender last year , and more recently, changed my name. I’m now Liliane Fontenot, and I’ve been blogging on blog.liliane.io . I hope that if you followed my work here, you’ll continue following me there. Eventually, I will likely redirect the whole website to my new one, with static copies of old posts kept around for posterity, but I want to leave this…
DUNE I wanna talk about Dune, and this is my blog, so we’re gonna talk about Dune. This post will contain spoilers for the films Dune I and II . Please mind the caveat that I haven’t read the Dune books, and I’m unfamiliar with most writing, academic and otherwise, about Dune . There is a lot to say about Dune II . The film seems to invite comparison, criticism, and debate.…
Origins When I started this site back in 2014, I only had a couple of years of experience writing Python, but I wanted to try writing a real (meaning “dynamic”) site, so I went with the Flask framework. The site started as a single Python file and a few static CSS files and Jinja2 templates. When I did the conversion this weekend, it was still a single Python file, a few static CSS…
Context First let me give enough technical information to make this blog post comprehensible to newcomers, and then dive in with a little bit of history. Those already familiar with how font rendering works can skip the next section. Font rendering basics Most computer screens are made up of little square pixels. On most of these screens, each pixel is composed of three subpixels — vertical…
I’ve used LibreOffice for quick word processing tasks for years now — since before it was forked from OpenOffice in fact. However, for years I’ve drafted documents in another tool, before copying them into LibreOffice for the final export to PDF. The reason is that the font rendering in LibreOffice is infamous for how terrible it is, with a large number of issues reporting going…
Content note: this article contains a discussion of weight loss and healthy eating, and includes my before and after pictures at the end. You can view a version of this document without these pictures here . Quick summary I lost 80 pounds following a diet focused on calorie restriction and satiety by writing software to track my weight and suggest adjustments. The program is PyWeight and it is…
Goodreads is a popular site for tracking books you have read and finding new ones using your ratings. Many people have noticed that Goodreads ratings have a surprisingly small variance: it seems like most popular books have ratings around ~3.8. This suggests that a book the community assesses as fairly poor and one that it says is great will be closer in rating than the descriminatory capacity of…
Wordle is a simple online word game . It is played by similar rules to the classic game Mastermind , which is known in the United States through the version licensed to Hasbro. Wordle is played with words instead of arbitrary configurations of pegs or numbers, and there is one added twist: each of your guesses must also be a word in Wordle’s dictionary, not any arbitrary configuration of…
Code accompanying this blog post is available on Github. My partner is a research scientist working in a lab group. Every year, members of the lab are expected to go on long driving trips to collect specimens for research. This labor is shared among the members of the lab (in practice, the graduate student members of the lab). So even though one lab member’s work might only focus on a single…
I’ve been playing FEZ for the first time recently, and came across this room where some NPCs are constructing a QR code on the wall: This seemed very likely to be a puzzle. It’s almost a complete QR (most of what’s missing is the top left positioning square), and anything under the scaffolding can be reconstructed, so it stands some chance of scanning after a few fixups. I…