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I ignored cooking for most of my life. My mom was a great cook, and always made us home-cooked meals for dinner, even though she had a very physically exhausting full-time job. I can’t really remember if she tried to teach me; I think she was always in such a hurry, she probably didn’t want me hanging around the kitchen and getting in the way. It wasn’t until I was living on my…
MPV is a really cool open source/libre media player that works with just about any kind of file. It’s based on the famous FFmpeg library used to decode pretty much all known video and audio formats. One of my favorite features of MPV is the ability for it to play any arbitrary YouTube video if you compile with yt-dlp support enabled. Normally mpv is invoked via the command line. For example,…
After nearly 13 years at the company, last Friday, April 18th, was my last day at Apple. I have decided to leave with no concrete plan in mind, but with the intention of pursuing some kind of venture on my own. I am so grateful for everything that I learned at the company, and for the innumerable opportunities that I was given there. After some time, I really started to take for granted just how…
This article from NPR about Millennials and Public Transportation was quite eye-opening. “According to a University of Michigan study, the number of people under 30 with driver’s licenses has been steadily declining.” This article, among many others found when searching the web, cites the cost and hassle of car ownership, traffic, ubiquity of parking lots, and public…
The lyrics to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”: Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer Had a very shiny nose And if you ever saw it You might even say it glows And all of the other reindeer Used to laugh and call him names They never let poor Rudolph Join in any reindeer games Then one foggy Christmas Eve Santa came to say: “Rudolph, with your nose so bright Won’t you guide my…
You are living in a computer simulation. Nick Bostrom wrote about this in 2001, shortly after The Matrix came out. I highly recommend reading his paper called Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?, which put forth a great logical analysis of why we are (probably) living in a computer simulation. This henceforth became known in philosophy (and Internet culture) as The Simulation Argument. In…
In an effort to try and avoid having a smartphone next to my bed (and, of course, for the fun of making things), I decided to build my own smart alarm clock out of a Raspberry Pi. One of the amazing things about the Raspberry Pi Compute Module is that there is a limitless number of cool and wacky things you can plug them in to. You can get the official I/O board, the all-in-one PC, a handheld…
I’ve decided to move my site from Jekyll to Hugo. I apologize to any RSS readers who just got spammed by all of my old posts. I tried to keep the dates/URLs as stable as possible! My old website was built very much the way I used to do things when I was a teenager in the 2000’s. A “LAMP stack” (although no “P” (PHP), just static pages this time), maintained by…
As I get older, I am starting to realize more and more the importance of belief. I’ve found this word means different things to different people. To some, it means a belief in God or Gods. To others, it means a belief in humanity, and the goodness of others. Some people think belief is a bug rather than a feature, something that clouds judgment and prevents one from using pure logic to…
It goes without saying that the increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem. Average temperatures are expected to increase across the globe by a modest amount, potentially leading to climate destabilization. More imminently, there are phenomena currently being observed today that are causing actual problems for humans. The Greenhouse Effect causes dry places to become drier,…
In my last post about DIY smart appliances, I wrote about thermostats. Chipotherm has been running for over a year now at the arcade, and it’s still working great! Armed with enthusiasm for my DIY smart thermostat, and having just moved into a new house that came with a Ring doorbell, I thought I might try building my own DIY doorbell to replace it. My motivations for this project were…
“The Blockchain” has become a real buzzword in computing these days, but often without a coherent justification. I think it’s because there are a lot of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who are trying to remain really tuned in to the “next big thing” in technology. I personally cringe every time I hear business people talking about “the blockchain”,…
Star Trek is a world renowned television series and media franchise that’s been running for over fifty years. It has one of the largest, most widespread and most passionate fan bases of any obsession in the world. Certainly one of the largest for a television show, with dedicated websites, forums, communities, fan fiction, and even entire conventions. Consuming the entire corpora of Star…
Around last year, we started encountering a frequent problem at XION. The winters can get somewhat chilly in San Francisco, and thanks to “Karl The Fog”, it can be pretty chilly during the summer as well. Fortunately, we have a heater installed at the arcade, but it suffers from a lot of the same problems Internet-connected thermostats promised to solve. Notably, the ability to start…
Last month I attended my eleventh annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. I’ve been going to CES every year since my first year of college, in 2009. In fact, it was the first reason I ever left my home state! The show is free to attend, but only for “industry affiliates”. Fortunately, the requirement for being an “industry affiliate” is pretty loose,…
I am deeply obsessed with hacker culture. In my movie watching preferences, this obsession manifests as a deep affinity for hacker movies. Some of my favorite movies of all time are directly influenced by hacker culture such as The Matrix (1999) or Hackers (1995). In the 1990’s and early 2000’s, there seemed to be a great trend in Hollywood of depicting hacker characters, even in…
Moments before the protagonists from the movie Hackers work together to overload the Gibson–after rollerblading through New York City via an undisturbed route of compromised traffic signals–each one of them rolls into a phone booth in Grand Central Station and boots up their laptop. During this scene, the camera pans across the laptop screens of each respective hacker as their computer…