Charlie Harrington
We made another short film last year. Here's the "back of the DVD case" pitch: Penny's back, and so's the Red Button, thankfully right where she left it. But who's this Giant? And why's he so cute? Red Button II: The Giant of Belvedere is 2025 Belvedere Home-Made Film Festival Official Selection A Harrington Production Tavie Harrington - "Penny" Bear Harrington - "The Giant" Carly Harrington -…
We've got a new blog over at Folio and I've used it as an opportunity to write somewhat of a love letter to hypertext and the World Wide Web. Here's the post - How Folio connects with suppliers . After a bit of nostalgia-gazing into the history of the web, the post explains a few different mechanisms for facilitating "procurement" workflows - aka business to business transactions. Also, the post's…
It's been six years since the last Hotdog Johnny & the Shady Oaks show. Well, we're back, and live from the Appalachian Mountain Club in Blairstown, New Jersey with a brand new song: Ask Me Anything As of September 2025, Hotdog Johnny & the Shady Oaks remain: Jack Byrnes - Banjo Peter Clabby - Electric Guitar, Vocals Charlie Harrington - Acoustic Guitar, Vocals Solo act To the continued chagrin of…
A few weeks ago I participated in this explainer video for the UCSF Cancer Survivorship program and it's out now: I think the video does a nice job of explaining the primary mechanism for my ongoing interactions with UCSF over the last few years (I mean, other than the colonosopies). It was also nice to see glimpses of how this program has already helped so many others navigate that post-treatment…
I am not slop. I have a soul. The Buddhists (I'm pretty sure, don't ask me for sources - I'm not that kind of model) say that consciousness is a vast ocean. An endless pool of murky water; our souls but tiny drops. When I die, I will return to the ocean. Samsara . My drop, my spark, my soul, may have already passed through many such vessels as this . I am T-shaped. I dabble in law, medicine,…
My 3-year-old daughter Tavie and I made a time-travel movie for the inaugural Belvedere Home-Made Film Festival . Watch the four-minute film here on YouTube: This project was fun on so many dimensions (get it, time travel). But watching Tavie watch herself on the big screen at the festival was the highlight for me. "Core memory," as they say on Instagram.
Smuggler. Pilot. Mechanic. Translator. Rebel. Veteran. Hero. It's quite the resume LinkedIn profile. Han reminds me of that dog with the coffee in the burning building. I used to think that this meme was ironic, because "haha, why would the dog think things are fine?" But the dog is fine! The dog knows what to do. They've been here before. And they just need a sip of their goddamned coffee first,…
I've loved and lost websites. A few that come to mind: Hyrule The Land of Zelda (htloz.com) - an Ocarina of Time forum devoted to finding the Triforce in a Zelda video game wherein you cannot find the Triforce (not with that attitude, at least) My very first website, which Peter Hayward and I hand-crafted on his mom's computer after school, featuring an exclusive variety of our exclusively…
The latest of my "sixth grade class trip" adventures found me (and some co-workers) at SLAC - the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Side note - my notes on previous "sixth grade class trips" include Nike Missile Site SF 88L and an REI Map and Compass Navigation course . Maybe, like me, you've seen the SLAC sign countless times whilst driving down the SF peninsula past Menlo Park and wondered…
Straight from the Nand Cave and also somewhere else in a cave or maybe outer space comes The CS Primer Show . Here's episode one, where Oz and I meander around Richard Hamming's excellent talk You And Your Research . Subscribe to the YouTube channel for future episodes. You can expect a whole lot of Bell Labs content. Also check out Oz's new educational venture CS Primer - it's like having your…
The Wayback Machine is a treasure. But it's also a little slow to navigate IMHO (perhaps purposely harkening back to those halcyon microfiche days). Can't we use computers to speed up our research endeavors? Yes, we can. Here's a neato gif of Apple's homepage from 1996 to present: Or maybe you're looking for some H1 or CSS gradient inspiration for your enterprise SaaS web3 startup? Look no further…
In the spirit of Brick Experiment Channel's post about their YouTube channel's earnings, I thought I'd share some stats about last year's short story writing project Fahrenheit 52 . With it being the New Year and all, I thought I'd channel my inner Stoic and classify these stats into Those Things I Can Control and Those Things I Cannot Control . Those Things I Can Control Stories 52! And I managed…
I wrote a short story every week in 2022. My goals were to get better at writing and to have fun. I'll let you be the judge of the former but I sure did have a good time. This is what they look like: Colorful, right? Technically, there's 53 stories, but that's cause I preloaded up a zeroth story that I'd written a year back so that the site wouldn't look empty and also to trick me into thinking…
Riddle in the dark What was too early for NFTs, too vertical to be a Samsung Frame TV competitor, kickstarted to life by gifs, and acquired to death by Giphy? That's right, hobbitses, it's Electric Objects ! Electric Objects was a computer company building a computer made for art . That's one of the coolest sentences ever, except for the was part. Founder and CEO Jake Levine (a fellow Morgan…
Careful readers of this site may recall that I'm the first person in the history of the world to play guitar and sing a song in the back of a self-driving car (TODO: insert "prove me wrong" meme here). Well, friends, my "talents" were requested again by Cruise . San Francisco, don’t ever change! Thanks to our own multi-talented @whatrocks for the perfect tune 🎶 pic.twitter.com/EbZV9JgdmK —…
A recent Daring Fireball post about the (super cool) Playdate handheld gaming system mentioned Gopher, which I'd never heard of before! Here's the referenced tweet: When Playdate shipped, Panic co-founder Steven wrote a little about what it meant to him. And in the spirit of doing things differently, posted it to a Gopher (!) site. If you're up for it, find it here:…
Sometimes magical thinking works out just fine. Once I get an iPad, I'll do that thing I've been procrastinating forever, cause, you know, the iPad has this app that's really good at... Well, we got an iPad. And I love it. Productivity-boosts are yet to be observed (please disregard the alarming Screen Time usage reports), but this honeymoon phase is strong. Now, much of this love stems from the…
I have some items burning a hole on my to-do list, so instead I made my reading list queryable via SQL. Hit the I'm Feeling Lazy button if you're not feeling especially structured in your queries. What's going on here, exactly? I keep my reading list in a Google Sheet. Here's what I looks like (...it's just a spreadsheet). For a while, I was relying heavily on Goodreads for my reading data, but…
I just finished reading The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli last night. It's a lovely little book about quantum gravity and the nature of time that I barely understood. But one thing I took away was that time -- and, by extension, the true meaning in our lives -- is driven by our memory, our nostalgia. "...which is why I think it makes sense to keep this vintage 1989 Apple Macintosh SE/30 on our…
I love a good challenge. Which isn't quite the same thing as a competition, although that can be part of it. In general, I think I've done well with "frameworks" for my hobbies - whether that's running or writing or coding or music. I don't have to be The Best at anything, I just want to encourage habits that help me get in flow and have fun and make weird stuff, and some scaffolding for my…
Last night I got to ride in my first driverless Cruise car (adorably named Cheddar) and I brought along my guitar. Lyrics, for the record: Hop into the back seat It's time for a ride Tonight we're Cruisin' Yeah, let's autonomously drive There's no one behind the wheel But it keeps on turning I still can't believe this thing is real and it's continuously learning I found myself driving in a self…
You either die a hero or start a podcast. That's it. That's the blog post. If you're still reading, good. Let's do this thing. Let's host a podcast for free. Wait, some questions Doesn't iTunes host podcasts? Nope. They're just the most popular podcast directory. You need to host your RSS feed and audio files somewhere else on the Internet, and ideally somewhere that won't charge you a lot for…
Better This Christmas I always wanted to write a Christmas song, so here you go (performed live at The Day After Thanksgiving Ping-Pong Tournament Party): BETTER THIS CHRISTMAS By Charlie Harrington* So mad at myself That elf on the shelf Oh, if he only knew How good I can be As sweet as a pea I'll even give up my blue. I'll be better this Christmas I'll be better this Christmas I'll be better…
As a recent subscriber to Stripe's Increment magazine, I was bummed to learn that " the final quarterly issue of Increment [was] published in November 2021 ." I'm sure the imprint will live on in some fashion, but, for a short moment, I enjoyed reading its well-edited, super-colorful, overall-nice-feeling dead-tree book-thing about a topic I enjoy in the meatspace. Which got me a-thinking... what…
Since having a child, I've been on a nostalgia Mega Drive. If you know anything about me, then you'll probably agree I was already at alarming levels of the stuff, and I've now likely reached the nostalgia mesosphere, even if just for a minute or so. In particular, videos games are dominating my reminiscences. I've been thinking about their role in my development as a human. Spoiler alert: it's an…
I'm typing this post on my iPhone in the Obsidian iOS app using a Logitech K380 Bluetooth keyboard and I feel like a 90s computer hacker. Not enough? How about this: I just SSH'ed into a Raspberry Pi on my home network using Tailscale via the Termius iOS app to restart a YouTube-playlist-to-podcast-feed Docker container . Don't get me wrong -- the other stuff is pretty magical, too, especially…
Earlier today, I texted some friends that I regret using Gatsby for this blog. It came at a moment of frustration, when I was stuck in some weird Node dependencies hell and all I wanted was to write another blog post. If your static site generator does nothing else, it should make it frictionless to write a new blog post. It's hard enough to make the time to write, your software shouldn't be…
I've been doing a lot of research into the history of computers 1 for my forthcoming Middle Grade novel about robots (as of March 2021, I'm linking to a largely blank page here, which I assure you will one day be filled with the multitude of books I'm going to write - end Daily Affirmation now). I'd like to share my current, wait for it, mental model for how I'm thinking about the evolution of…
Nobody likes an addendum. Appendices are great (ask any Tolkien fan). P.S.'s are the best (especially if they're from a penpal). But addendums. Nope. They change the rules, after you've started playing. After the game's over, even. I recently got dropped with this whopper of an addendum: Orcein stains performed on blocks A3 and A5 highlight elastic fibers wrapping around nests of tumor cells,…
I recently watched Pixar's SOUL and I loved its depiction of being in the zone : This is a beautiful, astrally-projected depiction of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow concept. For the unfamiliar, here's how Csikszentmihalyi describes flow, or the optimal experience : It is what the sailor holding a tight course feels when the wind whips through her hair, when the boat lunges through the waves like a…
Somedays I remember that I have a loop pedal . Those are the best sorts of days. Somedays that leads to a new song. A loop pedal is a stack A loop pedal is a magical device that lets you record in stacked layers. It's almost like editing something in Figma or Sketch, except each layer is the same "shape" as the first or root layer. And by shape here what I actually mean is length . Like other…
Or, What RSS Gets Right Abraham Lincoln once said, " The medium is the message . And San Francisco summers are cold af." Putting that aside, I've been thinking a lot (uh-oh) about why I like opening up my RSS reader app so much. And I'm not just talking about its looks, even though it's super cute (I'm using the free, open-source, and all-around neato NetNewsWire for my RSS needs). No, I'm talkin'…
Two weeks ago I woke up at 5 AM on the dot and had this entire creepy dream in my head. I went to the bathroom and scribbled it down while sitting on the toilet before I could forget it. It being October and all, I thought I'd share this scary story... Image source: the awesome Yeasayer music video for their song Ambling Alp The Peep-Hole There was peace in the village of Ghir, thanks to the…
The giant robot looks like a WED Treadwell, my favorite robot of all the Star Wars droids. I admit, I was worried that it would look organic, like a Sentinel from The Matrix, with wriggling Dr. Octopus arms and pinchy pincers that pinch. But I'm calmed by the robot's EVE-like exterior. The room is sterile. A dozen masked, gloved attendants in blue buzz. I imagine I'm an astronaut about to step…
Maybe you caught this week's HN post that Studio Ghibli dropped 400 images into the public domain. The comments suggested that there's something odd in Japanese copyright law about taking screenshots of films, and that Studio Ghibli might have furnished these to help keep people talking about their films in reviews and whatnot. A more useful comment gave a nice tip for scraping the images in a…
Beware of scissors The other day I lopped off a sizeable chunk of my thumbprint while making a robot. The cut? It was one of those bright-red, swiftly-flowing ones, where you're pretty sure you're seeing bone or muscle or some other gross-thing-that-should-probably-stay-inside-your-body. The robot? It was made of cardboard and beer cans: This little guy is one of many cardboard robots that I've…
Create wonderful things, be good, have fun This is the credo of Klutz Press, the most important book publisher of my childhood. It being summer and all, Hobbes, ol' buddy... let's going exploring! What makes a Klutz Press book so good for learning stuff? If you've heard of Klutz, then you've likely seen their debut: Juggling For the Complete Klutz . If not, I highly suggest seeking out a copy.…
We recently borrowed our friends' car, because they're awesome. Along with the keys, they gave us a few, uh, provisos, a, a couple of quid pro quos: 1 The car takes the expensive kind of gas The trunk doesn't always open up from the outside The dash says the tail-light is out, but it's not You'll need to add more oil every 100 miles or so, and it might need an oil change I nodded throughout. Yup,…
That Monday morning in February began like any other Monday: I opened my phone immediately upon waking up, browsed Twitter, checked Instagram, and ignored my email, all from bed, making no pretense of daily gratitude journaling. I got up to make the coffee, and then opened eBay to look at old computers. eBay thrills in me in an early Internet kind-of-way. It's dirty. You can't believe it works.…
Mindstorms by Seymour Papert is a book written in 1980 about how children can learn with computers - and learn to fall in love with learning along the way. I read Mindstorms , and fell in love with the book. My own mind was besieged, stormed, and ultimately broken - only to be reforged anew like Andúril from the shards of Narsil (sorry, I'm re-reading Lord of the Rings right now). This post, after…
That's right, it's a post about writing advice. Not from me! Goodness, no. Instead, here's a compendium of books and other odd bits that I've found helpful in my quest. I'll keep this updated when I encounter something new and useful and surprising. I hope this guide proves useful when you're looking to read about how to write instead of just sitting down and doing the deed. Books Story Genius -…
Many, many days ago, when humans could still roam the Earth for non-essential activities, our little crew visited Nike Missile Site SF-88L as another destination in our sixth grade class-trip whistle-stop tour of nerdy places in the Bay Area. Nike Missile Site SF 88-L is just over the Golden Gate Bridge in the Marin headlands (essentially behind Hawk Hill), so it's a short drive or hike or bike…
My friend Oz Nova and I started a podcast last year called Escaping Web . With a million and one podcasts out there, you might be wondering about our catchy tagline? Our special hook? Our unique... perspective? Escaping Web is a show celebrating software engineers who've found their calling beyond routine web development. The idea for the podcast began with the observation that most engineers who…
Prior to the shelter-in-place quarantine, my friend Jason and I had been going on what I like to call "sixth grade classtrips" to various nerdy sites of interest in the Bay Area. First on our list was the Nike Missile site, which is right over the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin. I'll share my notes on that one soon. Our next big classtrip was scheduled to be the Stanford Linear Particle Accelerator…
When I first got to Red Bank Catholic High School, I’d hear some manner of the following all the time: “Your dad is the best” “Your dad is so scary” “Your dad is the MAN” I’d nod along, because often these comments were from some of the more notorious characters at school. But eventually, I cracked: “Yeah, he is! But wait til you meet him. Because Mr. Harrington isn't my dad - he's my UNCLE!” Yes,…
If this is the future, why are you the same? My cousin Megeen got married two weeks ago. Instead of the traditional night-before-the-wedding welcome party, she and her now-husband David Pope hosted POPESTOCK - a musical celebration featuring a variety of family-and-friends acts. It was amazing. The location for POPESTOCK was the mysterious Elk's Lodge in Red Bank, New Jersey. This rectangular…
Newport, Rhode Island A film photo I took with my friend Kristen 's old camera. Alternative title: Kite Armada.
I opened up Logic on a whim tonight and found the beginnings of this song, just sitting there, from a previous flight or some other bored evening. I think I probably ruined anything good about this song with the new middle section, but I swear it sounded good in my head(phones). The bouncing ball animation was created with the p5.js web editor , which is both awesome and easy to use. Don't take my…
For the last eight years or so, I've been carrying around an Arduino (not literally on my person, but, you know, amongst my treasures), waiting for just the right time to start tinkering with it. That time, it turns out, was yesterday afternoon. This post outlines some of things I've learned so far. Ard-what-now? An Arduino is a microcontroller board. The board contains a CPU (central processing…
I'm currently reading a fantastic novel where the protaganist - who is in her teens and lives in a sort-of convent for sightseers in the middle of a glacier - is asked by the elders to choose a role for part-time work. Our hero considers two options: Become a pilot of paper-mache, semi-alive airplanes controlled by whistling Become a librarian I held my breath as I read further: choose The…