What makes a humanoid?
The Humanoid Alignment Chart
James Darpinian Blog
James Darpinian Blog
Latest posts
Four incorrect beliefs you may hold about iMessage
Apple has been touting iMessage as "end-to-end encrypted" for many years. "The first widely available messaging app to provide end-to-end encryption by default". Users understandably trust Apple to get this right, and believe that their messages are secure even from Apple. However, that trust is misplaced. Most beliefs users hold about iMessage end-to-end encryption are false.
28 Humanoid Robot Demos
The world of humanoid robots is exploding, and new demos are coming out seemingly every day. I'm keeping a list updated with every current humanoid effort that has at least a public demo video. You'll see dozens of projects at all scales, from one guy in his garage, to growing startups, to multinational conglomerates. Even if you follow the field pretty closely, I guarantee there will be at least…
I'm sorry, but omnidirectional treadmills can't work and here's why
Another omnidirectional treadmill has been making the rounds this week. This one from Disney looks very cool, with a creative mechanism for moving the feet around that has a lot of advantages.
How "See A Satellite Tonight" Works
See A Satellite Tonight is my most successful side project so far, with 5 million users since launch in 2019. It's been entirely a solo project, and I've used it as a proving ground for a bunch of tech that I wanted to learn. It took dozens of APIs and services to put together the experience I wanted: The front page of See A Satellite Tonight
Integer math in JavaScript
You may know that all numbers in JavaScript are 64 bit double-precision floating point values. This is sometimes convenient and it works pretty well as a default for novice programmers, who are often confused by integer math, and rightfully so when 1 / 2 = 0. Unfortunately, it makes things slow. Doubles take a lot of memory and floating point math is slower than integer math on CPUs. It's also…
Mounting Valve Index Base Stations (without holes in walls)
Shower curtain tension rods are way better than tripods. They are cheap, strong, available everywhere, and designed to look nice permanently installed in a home. They work perfectly installed vertically floor-to-ceiling and take up only one square inch of floor space. Get a cheap camera mount and you're good to go. They also work for non-permanent installation of other small items like baby…
Scraping my own Hacker News comments
I've left a lot of comments on Hacker News since 2009, when I moved over from Slashdot. HN Search is great for finding old comments, but it can't see comment scores, which are private to the author of the comment. I thought it would be interesting to find my highest-voted comments, so I had to scrape my comments from HN myself. Here's how I did it:
Redirecting a Blogger blog
I just moved some posts here from an old Blogger blog that I made many years ago. Now that all my posts are here I wanted to redirect the whole old blog to this new one. Blogger doesn't have a built-in way to do it, but it can be done! Here's how:
How to test for Safari on Windows
"Safari on Windows?", you say. "That's impossible! Safari doesn't run on Windows." And you're right! I mean it used to, but Apple stopped supporting Windows way back in 2012. Which is a bummer for web developers who want to test Safari compatibility.
Why Your Input Latency is Bad, and How to Fix It
You may have noticed that when you drag something on your screen, it will often lag behind your mouse or finger, as if attached by a rubber band. This is input latency: a delay in the computer's response to your actions.
Techniques to Reduce Latency in Your Apps
This is part 2 of a series on input latency. Check the first post for background information about input latency.
Input Latency: Platform-specific Considerations
This is part 3 of a series on input latency. Check the first post for background information about input latency, and part 2 for general techniques for reducing input latency in applications.
Tensorflow tidbit: What's up with :0 in the names of my variables?
tl;dr replace t.name with t.op.name to get rid of the :0
Tensorflow tidbit: incompatible with expected float_ref
'x' was passed float from 'y:0' incompatible with expected float_ref
Homebrew Oculus Rift Eye Tracker
Eye tracking camera installed on Oculus Rift DK1
Pebble vs. Qualcomm Toq: Smartwatch showdown
There are a lot of new smartwatch contenders out there this holiday season. I've had my Pebble since February, and wearing it all year has given me a good idea of what's important in a smartwatch and what's not. The most heavily promoted smartwatch, Samsung's Galaxy Gear, has a fatal flaw the Qualcomm Toq (pronounced "tock", apparently). It has a fancy new non-LCD screen technology and a lot of…