Recent content on The Regex King
Running a small weather station presents many opportunities to indulge in a particular fantasy of how software and data should work: for the small cost of a few sensors and a rented server, I can record weather data that has a very specific terroir…it comes from a specific and real place in Queens! I can store that data and do anything with it forever, without worrying about some provider…
I was listening to an archival radio broadcast from the late Phil Schaap about the swing jazz band man Tiny Bradshaw. In full Phil Schaap discursive mode, he briefly detoured to describe a recording that Louis Armstrong has made of “Mack the Knife” with Lotte Lenya, the singer who’d made this song famous originally in the 1930’s as part of Threepenny Opera. Mack the Knife…
I like a live event where the format is people riffing, and try to attend these when I can. It’s also remarkable that we live in an era with unprecedented access to recordings of these types of live events: I’m always seeing or being sent links to a video recording of a presentation, a panel discussion, or a video version of a podcast. Unfortunately, the practice of watching or…
Great interview with the maintainer of a region-specific OpenStreetMap style called “OpenArdenneMap”, that’s been optimized for hiking in a specific region in the world (the Ardennes) while still being usable and forkable for use elsewhere. I found this interview while researching tools I could use to make a print map of the neighborhood for my son (I ended up using QGIS).…
I’ve been working on a project that was riffed into existence by friends John, Olov, and Nora at Grand Morelos: it’s called Labor Leverage. It’s loosely based on workshops John and our coworker Stacy Cowley have run previously, where they share with other unions how to research employer finances in order to build power at the bargaining table. Big public companies are required to…
In 2016 I was inspired to run a series of DIY workshops on the command line and the Unix philosophy generally. I’d been chatting with a handful of friends about interest in learning more about the history of Unix and non-graphical interfaces. I chose the name “Unix Time” as a tribute to the time convention of the same name, and we met for several months in Red Hook, Brooklyn at…
In 2011, which in retrospect was a gentler computer era, I made a piece of software called Volume Pops Pro which installed custom sounds over the system default “pop” sound you get when you increase or decrease the volume on a Mac computer. There was a Funkmaster Flex inspired explosion sound, and an airhorn sound. It was packaged as a package installer that put the files in the…
ZeroConf is a protocol that lets computers find each other automatically on a local network. In the typical configuration, if your computer is named “Jeff’s Mac”, it’s Zeroconf that makes your computer available for networking using the hostname jeffs-mac.local. I have what I like to think is a normal number of Raspberry Pi computers around the house, doing Raspberry Pi…
The Big Boy Weather station records data forever: observations for temperature, humidity, rainfall, and wind speed, are all recorded with the original time of observation. These observations are then rolled up into an almanac view, where it’s possible to note exceptional weather events within a day, or a month, or a year. A timeless way to mark exceptional amounts of rainfall is to say…
I’ve been avoiding learning deeply about large language models. I’m not totally sure why. It’s at least in part for the same reason other people are cautious about them: they seem bad for the environment, they’re going to pollute the delicate ecosystem of freely authored HTML, scammy people are interested in them. I think I also have a more specific reason I’ve stayed…
My friend Josh and I were riffing earlier this year about what it’s like to “watch TV” now. He was about to become a parent, and so potentially was going to be watching a lot of TV (by way of unpredictable newborn sleep schedules). We were talking about the flattening experience of scrolling a horizontal carousel of movies or TV forever. Maybe you’re scrolling on one of the…
An experience I’m guaranteed to have on any given summer: it’s 90°F indoors and probably some nasty level of humidity, and I’m stewing in the living room wondering how many other people are in the exact same situation right now. I added a little feature called “same-temp” to the Big Boy Weather station that answers this. It’ll show you everywhere else (in the…
I’m convinced that there is a perfect bike route between any two points in New York City. When you ride the same way over and over, these perfect routes kind of just reveal themselves naturally. You randomly encounter and memorize which streets have the best timed signals, the fewest double parkers, the roomiest shoulders. It’s harder to find a perfect route when you’re going…
I was inspired by Laurel’s phones post, and want to describe my flip phone rig. Left to right: really old LG flip phone, hibernating Alcatel Go Flip V, active Sunbeam Orchid. It's too bad they get bigger over time! My current phone I currently use a Sunbeam Orchid, which is a flip phone running on a fork of Android called “BasicOS” that doesn’t have a browser or apps.
About a year ago, while looking up directions, I noticed that a prominent new place name had been added to the map in western Queens: I’d never heard of “Haberman” before. The name of the neighborhood that people who live here would recognize is Maspeth (which you can see up-and-to-the-right of Haberman). Is Haberman even a real neighborhood? Why did Google put this giant…
I wanted to rig up some way to automatically take a photo of every sunrise and sunset. New York City has spectacular sunsets, but I’ve always felt weird about taking photos of them because I experience an “observer effect” where I feel like the sunset doesn’t hit you as hard if you’re busy documenting it. Knowing that a camera will be capturing the sunset…
Somewhere in the dead zone after the 2016 election, adrift in a season of wanting to pour some energy into something hopeful, I read Mike Migurski’s two blog posts 1 2 about legislative redistricting and gerrymandering. These are worth reading in full, but the basic idea is that it should be possible to create a “court-friendly measure” for evaluating the partisan effects of the…
After leaving a job where it felt like I’d orphaned a rich history of chats with friends that were completely unrelated to that job, marooned somewhere in Slack’s data centers, I wanted to recalibrate how & where I spent time chatting on the internet. My primary goal was to continue chatting with my friends Tom and Thomas, coworkers at this old job, but my loftier goal was to find or…
I’ve had the itch to read an Elvis book for a while. I can’t really explain this. I’m not an Elvis fan and didn’t really know anything about him, but for whatever reason in 2018 “Elvis” felt like a blindspot I wanted to attempt to correct. I saw “Last Train to Memphis” on the shelves at my local library and checked it out. “Last Train to…
One thing I wish the weather station could be tracking, but currently isn’t, is whether or not it’s snowing. Right now, I have a rain gauge that’s a “tipping bucket”, so-called because it collects rain in a tiny bucket, which tips periodically as it fills up. The rain rate is inferred from the number of bucket tips. This setup doesn’t work when it snows: snow…
This post consecrates this “log”, where I’m trying to record everything relevant to the humble weather station I run. Please picture me reading all of these in the Picard stardate voice. 🍾🚢
One of my favorite Twitter bots, from Casey Kolderup, is called Sailor Clones. It does something deceptively simple: slowly but surely it trawls thru a secret list of terms, emitting iterations on the classic “red sky at morning / sailors' delight” rhyme. For context, here’s the original rhyme: Red sky at night, sailors' delight. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning And here…
An excerpt from Valis by Philip K. Dick: I’ve always told people that for each person there is a sentence — a series of words — which has the power to destroy him. When Fat told me about Leon Stone I realized (this came years after the first realization) that another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you’re lucky you will get the second, but you…
I’m struck by this piece of advice offered by GNUPG, a piece of software used in cryptography: We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to perform some other action (type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the disks) during the prime generation; this gives the random number generator a better chance to gain enough entropy. The idea that random keystrokes help to make a…
I’ve written a small program. The program does one thing very simply: it draws a random record from the list of businesses incorporated in New York State since 1800, and posts the name of the business, along with the date of incorporation, to a Twitter account.
I used the yes command (Linux/Unix/Mac OS X) for the first time the other day. Here’s a description of what it does: YES(1) BSD General Commands Manual YES(1) NAME yes -- be repetitively affirmative SYNOPSIS yes [expletive] DESCRIPTION yes outputs expletive, or, by default, ``y'', forever. HISTORY The yes command appeared in 4.0BSD. By way of example: 17:01 ~ $ yes y y y y y y y y y y y y…
From 20 public-spirited lawyers could change the world: …law enables individuals and institutions to send laser beams (of varying quality, depending on cost) from one point in time and space to another, saying “this is what will take place; this is what we agree has happened; this is what must happen; these are the conditions of co-operation”. Law, more than the media, allows…
As “username and password required” has become a de facto internet standard, a number of odd patterns have emerged. I like this list from a free password generator site: A strong password: has at least 15 characters; has uppercase letters; has lowercase letters; has numbers; has symbols, such as ` ! " ? $ ? % ^ & * ( ) _ - + = { [ } ] : ; @ ' ~ # | \ < , > .
Allen inadvertently participated in a panel on International Art English, the Triple Canopy analysis of the English language as represented in art press releases. I didn’t listen to the entire panel, but enjoyed Allen’s small contribution: Using the traffic example, if formal language is my work is about traffic, or this is a depiction of traffic and you describe how it’s doing that,…
The Game Genie is a “plugin” that sits between a video game cartridge and the video game’s player. Because eletrical signals pass thru the Game Genie before hitting the game console, it allows the player to “fold, spindle, and mutilate” how the game is played. Usually this meant inputting cheat codes. Some cheats mumbled at the end of a game genie commercial:…
In the distant past, my friend Josh described a category of speech which performs an action in the process of being spoken. The existence of this category has stuck with me because it endows speech with powers similar to a spell or a computer command. I wasn’t able to recall the name until finding a reference to How to Do Things With Words, a posthumous book by J. L. Austin. He defines a…
Knowing how to wield regular expressions unleashes processing powers you might not even know were available. Regular Expressions can add, remove, isolate , and generally fold, spindle, and mutilate all kinds of text and data Excerpts from Mastering Regular Expressions