A Small Model for Big Articulators: Sign Language Detection With a Tiny Machine Learning Model
I'm putting up this page for LREC attendees to download the paper I'm presenting at sign-lang@LREC 2026.
Frederick's Perch
The website and portfolio of Frederick Chan, Software Engineer and Technomancer from the Emerald City
Latest posts
Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain
In the US, you can get a domain name like `somename.city.state.us` for free. If your town has its own domain, you can get nameservers from Amazon Lightsail, send the *Interim .US Domain Template* to the delegated manager for your locality, then point DNS entries at your webhost.
Linguistics explainer: direct-inverse morphosyntactic alignment
Direct-inverse alignment is where transitive verb's agent and object NPs are not marked, and instead which NP is the agent is determined by where they fall on a hierarchy. This article explains what that means and how that works.
Running a conpidgin: A Pidgin Island Quest Retrospective
Learning from the successes and failures of previous SCC pidgin games, the we devised a new set of rules for PidginCraft to help players stay engaged: giving them goals, having synchronous sessions, enforcing world boundaries, and removing starter languages.
Non-legendary Pokémon with no evolutions or alternate forms
I calculated a list of them using the SQL database that drives PokéAPI. There is only one such Pokémon from Gen 1.
How to use SIGILS: a way to pipe items in modded Minecraft using ComputerCraft
SIGILS allows you to pipe items in modded Minecraft factories using ComputerCraft computers and manage them in the browser. It's faster than traditional item pipes and easier to manage complex factories with it thanks to its intuitive click-and-drag interface.
How to play Grow
Grow is an abstract strategy board game I invented that's played on a 15x15 Go board and multicolored stones. It is intended for 3-4 players, but playable with 2+. It is inspired by Go and Tron.
HamNoSys symbol name → HamNoSys Web Component
I wrote a quick little Web Component for rendering HamNoSys symbol names into their corresponding HamNoSys characters that you can put on any web page.
The Story of the Triumph Emoji
The 😤 `Face with Steam From Nose` emoji was originally called the `Face with Look of Triumph` because the face has a different meaning in Japan.
Mathematikka: WolframAlpha in Minecraft
I put WolframAlpha in Minecraft by writing Mathematikka, a Bukkit plugin that queries Mathematica via J/Link to get WolframAlpha results.
The Traveling Minecraft Player Problem
You can scan a Minecraft world for diamonds and use GRASS's `v.net.salesman` to plot an efficient route to get all of them.
Vein Mining with ComputerCraft Part 2 (Veins as Graphs)
We can model Minecraft ore veins as graph data structures in ComputerCraft to create a program for veinmining. The graph method maximizes runtime efficiency at the cost of a bigger program.
Vein Mining with ComputerCraft Part 1 (Veins as Trees)
We can model Minecraft ore veins as tree data structures in ComputerCraft to create a program for veinmining. The tree method minimizes the program size at the cost of efficiency compared to the graph method.