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I got a watermelon yesterday. It looked appealing, as they always do. It is the largest of the fruits commonly encountered at the grocery store. It is also the largest fruit encountered in Pikmin 3 . Brittany says of it: “It’s huge, super juicy, and filled with tons of seeds to take…
This was also sent out as a newsletter. If you’d like to get project updates like this as email, you can subscribe . It feels weird to say, but I am taking an Arts Entrepreneurship class. I’m skeptical about some of the applicability to me. (They keep bringing up the example of a web series creator porting their character to various platforms and mediums, for example.) And som…
This was also sent out as a newsletter. If you’d like to get project updates like this as email, you can subscribe . New album , complete with the original box art by Katt ! <img src="unpopular%20game%2…
🚨 The RSS feed is moving! 🚨 It will now be at https://feeds.jimkang.com/weblog/feed.xml . The old feed at https://jimkang.com/weblog/feed.xml will redirect to the new feed for about a week, but after that, Cloudflare will be in front of that old feed, and it may block your reader. Hopefully, the RSS readers will notice the 301 (permanent redirect) response and update their subscri…
Katt showed us how to make linocuts this February vacation week! Linocuts are a kind of block printing. They’re derived from woodcuts, in which you engrave an image into wood, coat it in ink, then press it to paper to print the image. Linocuts use linoleum instead of wood. I assumed that linocuts would be slightly easier to make than woodcuts, but not by much, beca…
I often talk about important bill pay web sites that are shoddily built and have some problem that prevents you from actually paying your bill, unless you go into devtools and mess with stuff. I don’t think talking about that changes anything. Much like that,, I don’t think that detailing a bad healthcare system experience will change anything. Yet somehow, I feel it should be talked about. Having…
Yesterday at judo, I tore or strained some intercostal muscles (the muscles that go between your ribs). I was trying to hold on to kesa gatame during a drill, and crunched down and tensed in a way that moved one of my ribs. I felt a pop and a lot of pain, then had trouble using muscles connected to the intercostals without pain. img { …
This was also sent out as a newsletter. If you’d like to get project updates like this as email, you can subscribe . I’ve finished a piece of programmatic music that I started in 2022. It’s the The Sound of Ocean Heat Energy ! You can listen to (and watch) it here: https://jimkang.com/ocean-heat-en…
Bryan Byun passed away recently. His cause of death was an aggressive cancer. His birthday was today, December 31. I think he would have been about 55 or 56. I had first met Bryan online in the early ‘00s — and not via a chat room or social media, which didn’t exist back then. I met him via weblog posts and comments on those blog posts. I would not meet him in person until the late ‘00s. Here in…
I work on the web and usually have access to CSS color, which lets you specify colors in the HSL (hue, saturation, lightness) space . That makes it easy to shift a color to make it redder by nudging the H value toward 0 or to send it closer to purple by moving it toward 360. Recently, I needed to shift hue in <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Games/Techniques/3D_on_the_web/G…
I learned via this report that the essays in the MCAS are being graded with AI, and that it has graded at least 1,400 essays incorrectly. And that is only the grading that was obviously wrong and discoverable. There are likely more undiscovered critical mistakes. It is unsettling that my kid’s essays and other kids’ essay are being evaluated by models that have no real understanding of…
This was also sent out as a newsletter. If you’d like to get project updates like this as email, you can subscribe . Oyez oyez! I am here, and this is a newsletter. I was out putting up flyers this morning and ended up drenched in sweat. It wasn’t even some kind of all-day Black Flag guerilla wheatpaste operation. I only got up ten flyers, then stopped to go to a meeting.<…
It’s a new month, so it’s time for me to once again be shocked that it’s a new month! I was going to say it was a month of mostly just incremental progress, but now that I think about it: We went on two trips. We went to our most distant and tougest judo tournament yet (to be clear, my kid competed, not me) We ran birthday party, and it seemed to be fun. Middle school started and seems to be fine,…
This was also sent out as a newsletter. If you’d like to get project updates like this as email, you can subscribe . Oyez! Half of our week was extremely hot here in the Northeast United States. So, I went to the pool twice, which is a lot for me. There, I happened to unlock the mystery of the people that seem to just go to the pool to sit by it: They actually do</em…
I was just thinking, oh, yeah, the triangle wave is one of the basic waves, so the equation for it is probably fairly obvious with a mod somewhere in it. So, I tried to work it out in notebook and couldn’t get it. I did not know how to make the “V” repeat. So, I looked it up, and it is indeed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tria…
This was also sent out as a newsletter. If you’d like to get project updates like this as email, you can subscribe . Oyez! It’s me, Jim ( https://jimkang.com/) . I last emailed you about two years ago when TinyLetter, the newsletter service I used, shut down. But I’ve finally gotten around to writing my own bare bones mailing list ser…
A few weeks ago, I found myself having to do a thing over and over again in my browser. It was cumbersome. And so, it was time for me to reduce this pain by making 1 a browser extension. However, the last browser extension I wrote was in 2013 2 . (It was a <…
Anton Podviaznikov, a Recurse Center alum, is matching donations to Ukraine . So, if you donate $100, he’ll donate $100. And maybe just as useful, he (a Ukrainian) has guidance on which organizations are effective ones to donate to. Having lost the US to because Trump has some strange desire to be admired by Putin, they’re going to need all the help they can get to survive an incredibly blatant…
Since November of 2023, I’ve been doing morning warm-ups. In the last six months, I’ve done them almost every morning. If you can do them, I think they’re helpful, especially if you’re over 40. Even though they’re most helpful for older people, I got the idea by watching my kid’s judo class. (Incidentally, if you want to try judo as a kid or adult, Tohuku is a great cl…
I finished a new song. It’s about the formation of a planet. …
Last Friday, I found myself a liturgical space while listening to a news podcast. button { font-size: 36px; font-weight: bold; cursor: pointer; padding-top: 0.3em; padding-bottom: 0.3em; padding-left: 0.5em; padding-right: 0.5em; border-radius: 0.5em; border-width: 0; background-color: hsl(210, 40%, 50%); color: white; } .control-label { font-size: 0.75em; } .opties-box { display: flex; gap: 1em;…
We finished Season 1 of Girls’ High Mystery Class , which was fun. The mysteries were well-designed (though, I don’t think I actually solved any of them), and it was good times to watch the characters interacting. (The players play versions of themselves as if they were mystery-solving high school students.) There was one small meta-mystery I did solve just now, though. The show is Kor…
Sadly , Now More Than Ever, every single Bandcamp Friday is possibly the last one, a last chance to conveniently maximize how much money you get to artists when you buy music. So, today, here is what I picked up. The Number Fi…
The other day, I was in an <svg> , trying to make the end of a line into a triangle, like that of a pencil. I eventually realized that the most elegant way to do it was with a marker definition like this: <svg width="100%" height="50"> <title>Line with triangular point diagram</title> <defs> <marker id="pencil-p…
I’m listening to Gorguts’s Obscura . I often don’t listen to it because I can’t listen to it while doing other things, but I am on a plane now, not doing other things. A lot has been said about this album because it is a landmark progressive metal album. And yet now I feel like saying even more about it and about how we perceive music. img { width: 90%; } </style…
This was also sent out as a newsletter . If you’d like to get project updates like this as email, you can subscribe . Here is a new EP for you! https://jimkang.bandcamp.com/album/sleep-funnels <iframe style="borde…
I signed up to the Stacking the Bricks newsletter. They tell you how to build a business in a way you too can do . They have one central idea : Visit forums of professionals known to pay for things, see what they want, and make that. I think this idea is valid . They also bold every third paragraph and write in short sentences. This style makes me feel like I’m reading: SMID…
At the last three jobs I’ve been at, I’ve hit some form of this issue: I am writing a web app. I am running locally on localhost while developing it. It needs to make an http request to a server on another origin (a “cross-origin” request, if you will). That server, at least at that moment, does not provide headers in its http responses that say “it is OK to make requests to me from localhost.”…
This is a roundup of miscellaneous things that I’ve found out about (or have rediscovered). I put the findings that translate well to speech on my podcast, Small Findings . The rest (which are often technical findings), I put here. Well, I forgot about doing this, so it’s been <a href="http://localhost:8080/weblog/articles/miscellaneous-fin…
This was also sent out as a newsletter . If you’d like to get project updates like this as email, you can subscribe . Everyone’s talking about how large language models are going to take internet misinformation to a new level in the near future! That’s true. But there’s no need to wait for all of that web scrapi…
This was also sent out as a newsletter . If you’d like to get project updates like this as email, you can subscribe . Hey, everyone! New EP here: https://jimkang.bandcamp.com/album/lets-have-fun-why-not (An EP is a possibly archaic term that mean…
As a public service, I’m explicitly stating that linearRampToValueAtTime does not work on an AudioBufferSourceNode’s playbackRate , as of February 24, 2023, on Firefox. It does work on Chrome. I’ve included a simple demo here. #message-field { font-weight: bold…
I was reading The Mindfulness Prescription for ADHD (which, a couple of chapters in, seems OK), and it mentions meditation classes. Presumably, the schools that run these classes position them as positive or at least non-evil. So, I allowed my attention to travel to this question: If I started a school of evil meditation, would it be a better business than a meditation school without a specific…
This was also sent out as a newsletter . If you’d like to get project updates like this as email, you can subscribe . Hey, everybody. I’ve been doing contract work. I’ve been transporting my kid to various places. I’ve been learning about audio digital signal processing in fits and starts. But! I’ve also done several smal…
This weekend, we were riffing about soup sleeves at lunch. (Soup sleeves are sleeves that you’ve accidentally dunked in your soup. It came up because Katt used the term to warn the guy about a potential sleeve-in-food situation.) I remarked that Soup Sleeves would be a good name for a restaurant. The guy (who is seven) urged me to open that rest…
This is a roundup of miscellaneous things that I’ve found out about (or have rediscovered). I take notes on findings regularly, and I put the findings that translate well to speech on my podcast, Small Findings . The rest (which are often technical findings), I put here. They’re not always written up for maximum comprehension as a blog post, but if any…
This was also sent out as a newsletter . If you’d like to get project updates like this as email, you can subscribe . Did you want to know how a vocoder works? (You know, that thing Newcleus used to put the robot voice in their songs.) Assuming you said yes, you’re in luck! I have a step-by-step walkthrough that explains how the ori…
This edition is brought to you by the start of my stint at the Recurse Center ! One of my goals for my time at the Recurse Center is to learn more about signal processing, and I started by finding out how modulation works. This is a roundup of miscellaneous things that I’ve found out about (or have rediscovered). I take notes on findings regularly, and I put the findings that translate well to…
This was also sent out as a newsletter . If you’d like to get project updates like this as email, you can subscribe . I have made a nearly two-hour long album. That sounds really long, I know. But consider this: it is a piece of music that represents events that happen 10,000 years to 10 10 10 56 years in the future. It is at least shorter than what it…
This was also sent out as a newsletter . If you’d like to get project updates like this as email, you can subscribe . I know—we all know—that it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya. So long. Over a year. So, now I’m rappin’ at ya. In that time, I: Relearned to type on a weird keyboard to avo…
It is important to me to create Small Findings episodes that have information that I myself would want to hear. At the same time, for the sake of sustainability, it is also important to keep it cheap in terms of time and effort . That is to say, if it’s too much work, I can’t justify doing it. Therefore, I cast aside concerns about slick audio and perfect phrasing and vocal performance. Here are…
There’s one finding about a handy D3 method, and the rest are about quirks, including one that affected getting this weblog, in this edition of Miscellaneous Findings. This is a roundup of miscellaneous things that I’ve found out about (or have rediscovered). I take notes on findings regularly, and I put the findings that translate well to speech on my podcast, Sm…
This time, in Miscellaneous Findings, we’ve got some command line things, plus a huge Raspberry Pi setup dump, with some related stuff about hard drives and filesystems mixed in. This is a roundup of miscellaneous things that I’ve found out about (or have rediscovered). I take notes on findings regularly, and I put the findings that translate well to speech on my podcast, <a…
I really liked this video essay I saw, and I have some thoughts about it. The Decay of Cinema: Susan Sontag, Martin Scorsese & Their Lamentations on the Decline of Cinema Explored in a New Video Essay This past March, Scorsese published an essay in Harper‘s called …
People have been writing software for quite a long time, so natually, there are some amazing, rock-solid old tools out there, like make and rsync . This extends to diagramming software. For years, I’ve used Graphviz (created “before 19…
Here’s a script that’s handy for unzipping stuff you download from Bandcamp. Bandcamp gives you zip files that contain no directory structure. So, the files just unzip to whatever directory you’re in. I have found that to get messy, and I now like an artist-dir/album-dir structure, like I’m in the year 2000. Here’s a script I wrote to unzip Bandcamp zip files into such a structure. It uses the…
Last Wednesday, I played Dungeons and Dragons with my six-year-old kid. It went surprisingly well! Here’s the D&D module I wrote for Wednesday’s game: Pom Pom Dungeon It was designed for a single, six-year-old player who’s never played a role-playing game and likes physicas objects. Maybe it could work for someone outside of that description? It’…
For this round of Miscellaneous Findings, we have things related to the internet, mostly the doings of servers. This is a roundup of miscellaneous things that I’ve found out about (or have rediscovered). I take notes on findings regularly, and I put the findings that translate well to speech on my podcast, Small Findings . The rest (which a…
For this round of Miscellaneous Findings, we have a few web dev odds and ends. This is a roundup of miscellaneous things that I’ve found out about (or have rediscovered). I take notes on findings regularly, and I put the findings that translate well to speech on my podcast, Small Findings . The rest (which are often technical findings), I p…
I finished reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. It’s a book that’s in high school curriculums (my partner Katt read it in high school), but I just heard about it on a non-profit’s staff page (that I can’t find anymore), oddly. There’s a personal story in it, as well as a systems story in it. The personal story is a well-worn one. Okonkwo is a man in an Igbo tribe in what is now Nigeria. His…