Last week I emceed my friends’ wedding as a one-day marriage officiant . Here’s a condensed, plain-English outline of exactly what needs to happen for that. The couple gets a marriage license. They go here and choose “Marriage License”. Either in-person or virtual will work. The virtual flow still requires an in-person appointment anyway. The license will be valid for only 60 days, so the…
When you see a statistic such as “75% of reviewers liked this movie”, you can’t help but wonder whether there were only four reviewers. What about other, less obvious percentages? Here are the smallest possible denominators that correspond to each integer percentage value: Percentage Simplest fraction 0% 0 out of 1 1% 1 out of 51 2% 1 out of 34 3% 1 out of 26 4% 1 out of 21 5% 1 out of 17 6% 1 out…
I’m not picky and I promise that I’m always equally down for any of the options below. Please just pick your favorite, choose randomly, or suggest another restaurant! NYC I haven’t eaten out much in NYC yet. Hit me up and help me build this list! Pittsburgh Choose random 98K Hamburger Bird on the Run Blue Sky Butterjoint Cafe 33 Casbah Chipotle Choolaah Cilantro & Ajo City Kitchen Condado Duo's…
An exercise in hyperoptimizing my daily life. What’s wrong with tap to pay? Nothing, in general. It’s convenient and secure. But here’s my situation: I want to pay for most things by tapping my phone, not my credit card. Apple Pay / Google Pay removes the need to carry all my physical credit cards everywhere. I want to carry exactly one physical credit card as a backup for vendors whom I can’t…
I just spent 34 days walking the Camino de Santiago , a medieval pilgrimage route that starts in France and runs 800 km across Spain to the tomb of St. James the Apostle in Santiago de Compostela. This UNESCO-recognized tradition began 1200 years ago and is now undertaken, at least in part, by around half a million people every year. Jump to: Background · Tips · Language · Observations · Memories…
While noodling around on guitar as the year wraps up, I thought of the song Auld Lang Syne and—to my pleasant surprise—banged out a fully formed fingerstyle arrangement in one go. It wasn’t always so simple! I’ve never been interested in music theory for its own sake, I’m far from naturally gifted, and I completely relied on sheet music for many years… until eventually I got tired of hunting down…
Here’s exactly what I did to set up my own firstname@lastname.com email address in Gmail, allowing me to seamlessly use that new address with my existing Gmail account: This process takes an hour or two and costs around $10/year. Create a personal Gmail account if you don’t already have one. Optional: go to gear icon > Settings > Images and disable automatic image loading. You know how some chat…
Here’s a gratuitously detailed rundown of some of my software choices. I tend to prioritize efficiency and flexibility over aesthetics and ease of use out of the box. My dotfiles repo contains text-based config files for these apps. General: Android , Chronofile , Duolingo , Firefox , FitNotes , FreeTaxUSA , Google Fi , Google Keep , Google Tasks , Inoreader , KeePassXC , Linux , Meteogram ,…
I’ve been continuously recording my daily activities by hand since I was 17, amounting to 85,000+ activities over the span of a decade. Update See Hacker News for 100+ more comments on this post. Why?! Self-awareness. Am I getting enough sleep and exercise? Often I become engrossed in whatever I’m doing and forget about biological obligations like eating. My job is cool, but have I been making…
I want calls to ring audibly, and I want notifications to vibrate silently. Is that too much to ask for? Recent Android versions make this exceedingly reasonable configuration nearly impossible to implement. Update Android 14 finally fixed this problem by providing separate settings for ringtone volume and notification volume! Just set your notification volume to 0, set your ringtone volume to…
My Kasa HS103 smart plugs arrived today, and I felt an uncontrollable urge to control them via API. This post is a distillation of these guides for my own reference. It should work for at least the HS1xx product line. 1. Get authentication token Substitute your login details. You can use uuidgen to generate a UUID. curl -s https://wap.tplinkcloud.com -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d…
After brief forays into LilyPond and TuxGuitar (and a failed attempt at running Guitar Pro in Wine), I’ve settled on MuseScore for my guitar tabbing needs. Here are some notes on how I produce tab files like this one : Journey - Don't Stop Believin'.pdf For more advanced topics, check out MuseScore’s Tablature handbook. Creating a new file In the new score wizard, enter Title and Composer Select…
Yesterday I had the deranged pleasure of writing 1000+ lines of cross-platform Bash, which got me thinking that I could probably save myself some unnecessary googling and/or decision-making in future projects by documenting my stylistic choices and the reasons behind them. I don’t expect that these guidelines will ever be completely finished, but for now: Follow Google’s style guide and use…
I needed to connect a Linux client to an L2TP/IPsec VPN using shared secret (a.k.a. pre-shared key) authentication, but every online guide I could find was inaccurate and/or incomplete. Here’s a fully working solution at the time of writing. The initial 10-minute setup is pretty tedious, but once you’ve got it working you can throw it all into a script and never worry about it again. Update A…
Dropbox is convenient, but there are several reasons why you might want to drop it: You feel uneasy about handing sensitive personal info to strangers You find the Dropbox client too resource hungry or invasive You don’t want to pay for storage beyond the free 2 GB The most popular open source, self-hosted alternatives to Dropbox are ownCloud , Seafile , and Syncthing . I went with Syncthing…
The guitalele is a miniature guitar built like a ukulele, and it should be your next—or even first—musical instrument. For comparison with any instruments you might already play, here are my flamebaity ratings of several instruments’ qualities: Fun Versatility Portability Affordability Learnability Acoustic guitar ★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★ ★★★ ★★★ Bass guitar ★★ ★ ★★★ ★★★ ★★★★ Clarinet ★★ ★★ ★★★★ ★★ ★★★…
This page is a living document intended to save time for my future self in case the same issues ever crop up again. It’s based on my experience with running Arch on a Raspberry Pi 2 , a Lenovo Flex 4, a ThinkPad P50, a ThinkPad P51, and a GMKtec NucBox M2 Pro S. Arch is surprisingly stable if you remember the single most important post-install step: subscribe to the official news feed for breaking…
Bilingual dictionaries are some of the most valuable tools for learning natural languages like French. The idea also applies perfectly well to programming languages, and so here’s the guide I wished I had before embarking on my trip to Elixir land. Corrections from those more fluent in Elixir are welcome! The Elixir ecosystem Let’s first take a look at the software that comes with Elixir. I find…