Jeff Kaufman's Writing
In 2015 I made a little webapp that would use the NextBus API to show predictions for the MBTA: A few years later they moved from NextBus to their own API, and it stopped working. Back in those days programming required effort, and since there were other apps that did almost what I wanted it wasn't worth it for me to update it. But now that we have genies (for better or worse ) I had Claude…
A few days ago I took the kids to Canobie Lake amusement park. It's the closest one to Boston, and while it's not a serious roller coaster park I don't actually like roller coasters (and the kids aren't pushing for them yet). We went on a Wednesday, and going midweek was a good use of a vacation day: the lines are so much shorter. I've done this a few times before, but this was my first time…
When you have a lot of browser tabs open it can be very hard to tell them apart, especially if they're from the same site: Since monitors are wide and websites are tall, we should very clearly put tabs on the side in a vertical stack. I was a heavy user of these in Firefox, and when I switched to Chrome I used their experimental --enable-vertical-tabs flag. When they removed it I wrote a post…
White noise machines are widely used for sound masking, increasing privacy in offices and helping people sleep. The classic approach is a fan in a box, though in the past ten years people have mostly switched over to electronic ones. But a fan is really a great approach; you just need to put it to better use: have the fan clean the air. Instead of spinning a fan in free air to make noise, you can…
Leading up to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival the organizers asked Dudley Laufman to put together a band. He got together some folks he'd been playing for, and this was the start of the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra. They quickly became one of the leading bands of the contra dance revival, and in 1972 released a self-titled album (F-72-FW-3). I found a picture of the liner notes: I couldn't…
Someone submitted my musical multitasking post to Hacker News, where Rochus Keller saw it and left some fascinating comments . He's developed a method of foot drumming, using midi organ pedals: youtube Here's another one: youtube Additional, audio-only, examples: 1 , 2 . I find this fascinating. The physical feel of organ pedals is very different from the kick drum pedals I play , much more…
Dudley Laufman passed away last week at the age of 95 . He's best known for his extensive contribution to the 1970s contra dance revival, and especially for fostering live music. Twenty years ago [1] I attended one of the "Wind in the Timothy" dances that he and his partner Jacqueline would host at their house in NH on fifth Saturdays, and it was clear he really enjoyed what he was doing. As part…
Our kids like listening to music on their tablets, and we decided it's worth it to pay some money so they can make playlists and don't need to listen to ads. A family account makes sense if you're more than one person, and we ended up with Amazon somewhat randomly. I've been poking around: the personalization features are pretty terrible, and they have a major artist conflation problem. When you…
I like to play multiple instruments at once, and really enjoy how this lets me create a fuller musical picture. Sometimes this looks like mandolin + foot drums + bass whistle: youtube Or guitar + foot bass + singing: youtube Or piano + foot drums + talkbox: youtube People often hear what I'm doing with Kingfisher and ask how it works, but when I show them they say they couldn't do it because…
I've been reading a lot of older writing, trying to understand how and why contra dance ended up with a strong and near-exclusive live music tradition when many other dance forms switched over to recorded music. One of the more interesting ones I came across is a series of three letters (1985, 1988, 1992) from Enid Cocke, President of the Lloyd Shaw Foundation , tracing the evolution in her…
I've lately ended up calling a bunch of parties and I've been happy with calling mostly longways whole-set dances. These are ones that are shaped like a contra dance in terms of having two lines facing each other, each person across from their partner, but your role doesn't matter and you're not grouped into hands-fours ("minor sets"). I want to be able to teach it in a single fast-paced…
In 1992 Tony Parkes , one of the best-known New England contra dance callers, wrote a book: Contra Dance Calling: a Basic Text . In 2010 he published an updated second edition. I found used copies of each and read through them, interested in both what he thought, and what he thought to change. I read the whole 1992 first edition, then skimmed the 2010 second edition with the older one open at the…
EDIT 2026-07-08: Gizmohub, despite the announcements, did not stop working on the 7th. Instead, a Verizon tech called me, and told me that they were not going to take Gizmohub down until they'd resolved these issues. They also walked me through getting set up, including getting me the 2FA code that was not coming through. Apparently delivery of 2FA codes to Google Fi has been an issue for them.…
Choux pastry (the kind used in eclairs and creampuffs) is very picky, and depends heavily on the chemical properties of eggs. Five years ago I played around with trying to make it eggless with aquafaba and xanthan gum. It didn't work, but now that we have vegan egg white protein , can we do this for real? Nope. I gave it several tries over vacation, and wasn't able to get it to puff properly.…
I keep my recipies on my website , and like most of my website it grew over time instead of being designed. A couple years ago I added some progressive enhancement that puts checkboxes on the ingredients , and today I added a rescaler: Here's tripling it: This is another project, like adding transposition to my solstice songbook , where I wouldn't have put in the time if I couldn't delegate to an…
Our family is on vacation in North Carolina for a week, spending some time at a pool, and they're playing a (weirdly short) loop of music. Listening to She's In Love With The Boy for the fourth time I was thinking about how it's an example of a common pattern in country music: a repeating motif, recolored by the verses. In this case it's a father saying a boy isn't good enough for his daughter…
I've been thinking more about disaster preparedness recently , and an important piece of that is food . And for many foods, before you can eat them you need to cook them. For example, a large fraction of the calories in our house are dry rice and pasta. These have ungelatinized starch, where the nutrition is bound up very tightly in starch granules. We mostly can't digest these as-is, but heat and…
A contra dance organizer in another city wrote to me a while ago because they were stuck: the dance was in a few days and they didn't have anyone to run sound. They were asking if they could use some of my recorded music for the dance. Here's a lightly edited and linkified copy of what I sent them: This is a tricky situation, and I'm sorry you've ended up here. This is probably not what you want…
Daniel Drucker pointed me at a fun bug in Google's calculator: the parsec is wrong when you do math on it. As the earth travels around the sun, closer stars appear to shift back and forth against the distant background stars. The closer the star is the bigger this effect is. Think of how when you switch which eye you're looking through you notice near things shifting relative to farther ones. For…
If someone tells me a cake is vegan plant-based , I'm going to downgrade my expected enjoyment: I've had a lot of bad vegan baked goods. Some bakers are vegan for health reasons, and minimize all the other things that make food worth eating, but even a fully hedonistic vegan baker is at a serious disadvantage. But much less now that there are precision-fermented egg whites ! I made an eggless cake…
A couple years ago I put together a Secular Solstice Songbook , a compilation of all the songs we've sung at Boston Solstice . Anna Tchetchetkine and I led a session of group singing at LessOnline , following up from an informal one the year before, and I noticed several annoying things with its chord handling: Despite being digital, it didn't support transposition. Some songs didn't repeat the…
DIY testing of air cleaning is practical, and thoughtful experimental design can substitute for high-quality sensors including for evaluating air purifier setups that give >100,000x particle reductions. I've done a lot of DIY testing over the years ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ). The goal is generally to understand how well something removes particles from the air. A professional particle counter (…
I was in SF this weekend for LessOnline . It's nominally a blogging conference, but in practice it's more of a Rationalist meetup. I was there in my personal capacity, though I did end up having a lot of conversations about biosecurity and may have accidentally done some fundraising. Lots of good parts, but my favorite was calling and playing for a contra dance: youtube This was similar to the…
Five years ago I read a post on the EA Forum arguing that "election campaign contributions might be a way in which you can have a substantial impact as a small donor". It struck me as weird but plausible: a combination that you see a lot of on the Forum. A few months later I read another post, a case for Carrick Flynn in particular. It made a lot of sense, but while I don't remember my specific…
I'm leading a non-profit team building a pathogen-agnostic early-warning system . As AI systems become increasingly capable substitutes for expert human biologist expertise, the risk that someone could engineer a pathogen to spread widely before detection is going up. We've made great progress and we're now running the world's largest metagenomic biosurveillance network , but there's still a huge…
Running an air purifier on a battery could be really useful in an emergency that combined a biological or nuclear threat with a power outage. Getting one that can run on 12V DC and attaching it to a LiFePO4 battery is about $188 (plus $164 for the purifier) for something that will give you 141 CFM for over a week. I've been thinking about DIY biohardening, primarily to reduce risks from…
Most rooftop solar installs don't provide power when the grid is down. The primary goal is to avoid sending power out to the grid where it could injure people working to restore power, but more recently it's been expanded to avoid energized lines extending out from the panel where they could injure a firefighter on the roof. When we installed solar in 2018 we selected an inverter which offers an…
When Lily was about two she told me she wanted a song about "no". This was ten years ago, and I don't remember why she wanted this, but I made something up: This is a song about no. This is a song about no. This is a song about no, no, no. This is a song about no. The song goes... No no no no no no no no no. The song goes... No no no no no no no no no. The song goes... No no no no no no no no no,…
My older two kids (12y, 10y) like contra dancing, but but have been increasingly unhappy with the available opportunities: a family dance is "too boring", and BIDA is "not enough kids my age". What they wanted was a regular dance, but just kids. So we had one! Ghiblified for privacy We invited people ages 9-13: I really wanted to keep the age range narrow so the kids got the feeling of dancing…
I like my far-UVC Aerolamp a lot, but haven't been using it much: each time I wanted to get it out I needed to put it up on a tall stand, and ensure it wasn't going to get knocked over. This evening I attached it to the wall, which is great: It's very light and uses a 1/4" photo mount, so I used these simple cheap tiltable ones . The goal is to get it as high as possible for safety, and angled…