The personal website of Mary Knize. Web development, art, and tinkering with fun projects.
I don't love how this painting turned out, but I enjoyed every moment of creating it. (I did the best I could on the photography with a tripod, my phone, and my office lights.) I absolutely adore how the background turned out, and I'm sure I'll use some of those techniques in the future (texturing with paper, diluted paint splatter). However, I don't love how the really experimental parts turned…
Today I officially hit a 100 day streak of learning Japanese on Duolingo. I'm proud of the accomplishment, but at the same time, not feeling incredibly motivated to continue. While I plan to keep going, I've identified some pain points that I need to address going forward. The gamification is too much I'm fine with keeping up a streak, but Duolingo layers on levels of gamification. Right now, I'm…
Lately, I've had a lot of projects going on. I have some ongoing projects at work as well as multiple projects I'm working on in my free time (my 3D OSM map , investigating animated gif accessibility , learning Japanese , etc.) I'm always looking for good ways to organize my work notes. Here's a few new tactics I've been using for work and personal projects. Google Keep I used Google Keep years…
Good Night Oppy was an impulse watch, and totally worth it. Currently, it's available to stream on Prime Video. A documentary, Good Night Oppy follows the lifetimes of the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers and their respective crews. Originally scheduled for 90-day missions, both rovers outlived their missions many times over. The film begins by explaining the reason for a geological mission to…
Five-ish things that I loved this week. I made a Chill Space-Roving Robo-Goldfish / Transforming Junk into Cosmic Wonders (video) The attention to detail on this sculpture is stunning . Digital walled gardens (blog post) I really enjoyed this short post about walled gardens vs. digital gardens. It compares traversing through personal blogs to wandering through open, welcoming gardens. A few days…
Tonight, I made carnitas for the first time. I also made corn tortillas for the first time. Beginner's luck, I'm sure, but they came out great. For the carnitas, I used the recipe for crispy slow cooker carnitas from Gimme Some Oven. I made a few changes to the recipe. I used a cup of pineapple juice and pineapple chunks instead of beer or chicken stock, and I also added some leftover chipotles in…
Have you ever heard the term "design engineer"? Up until recently, I didn't realize that there was a niche being carved out in the last five years for people who specialize in bridging the realms of development and design. Discovering design engineering Last month, Jim Nielsen wrote an article called "The Case for Design Engineers, Pt. II" (2024) . The article gives an example of how a static…
Five-ish things that I loved this week. ‘I paint daily, no matter what’: how one woman’s coping mechanism became a global business (article) I found this article a little sad but very inspiring. It's about Margo McDaid finding success in art after overcoming tragedy. She turned to creating daily paintings to cope, and years later, her prolific painting has honed her craft and brought her success…
It wasn't until I heard about a cool, fast, new, insert-superlative-here terminal that I began thinking about how nice it would be to have the active Git branch displayed in the terminal at all times. Because this was a feature of the cool, fast, new, etc. terminal I decided to install it... and was promptly hit with a login page. Excuse me? I need an account registered on someone else's site to…
Over the weekend, I was able to work more on my Disney World wait time project that I began over at Translating OpenStreetMap data to HTML5 Canvas with Rust and WebAssembly . This project was last left in a state where I was pulling data from the Overpass API, processing it using Rust, and then using the generated coordinates to draw to an HTML5 canvas. It's a proof-of-concept that I was really…