body { background: #f9f0f0; } article { font-family: monospace; font-size: 105%; line-height: 160%; } article h1 { font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 110%; } .figure img { max-height: 1000px; max-width: 100%; } why are computers so complicated?1 (they've gotten a lot more complicated since your typical home computer of the 1980s.2) would you do it differently if you were making a new…
body { background: #fff0df; } article { font-family: monospace; font-size: 105%; line-height: 160%; } article h1 { font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 110%; } .figure img { max-height: 1000px; max-width: 100%; } (This post was originally part of an email update to my GitHub sponsors. I'm making it public because I like it. It's a little less formal than most things on my site.) at…
Hover your mouse over this screenshot to *see into the future* At Hacker School last year (I was part of the winter 2013 batch), I spent a few days making a falling ball game/demo (source on GitHub). I've neglected to write it up and package it until now. It's pretty simple, but it's got one really cool feature that I wanted to show off: you can ~~see into the future~~.
Megaregions of the U.S. (original at America 2050) I've been working on a post about riding local transit from New York City to Boston. While writing, I've run into some really neat regional transit maps, which cover an entire metropolitan area, cluster of metropolitan areas, or region of the United States. They focus on commuter and intercity services, as opposed to metro maps covering local…
The key idea of functional reactive programming (FRP) is time-varying values, which the Elm language calls Signals. In a discrete FRP system like Elm, you can think of a Signal as a stream of individual events. Rather than using a callback function to swing at every event that shows up, we use higher-level operators to manipulate a whole stream of events at once. Signals fit modern "real-time"…
I’ve made some minor changes to Micropolis, the open-source release of the original SimCity, so that it compiles and runs on Macs (or, at least, on my 10.8 Mac). You can download my build and try it, as long as you have XQuartz. All the other ways to play this game are kind of dumb (until now, the best method for a Mac user to play was to run the Windows version).
latency "Let me tell you a little story. There was once a young man who dreamed of reducing the world to pure logic. Because he was a very clever young man, he actually managed to do it. And when he'd finished his work, he stood back and admired it. It was beautiful. A world purged of imperfection and indeterminacy. Countless acres of gleaming ice stretching to the horizon.
ScreenMatcher is a thing (utility? service? daemon? background process? TSR?1) that you install that runs in the background of your Mac and watches your screen all the time. You can teach it to detect and respond to anything that appears on your screen. Here's an example of a pattern you could tell ScreenMatcher to look for: FIXME And here are all the places it shows up on my screen:
body { font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; background: #eee; } h1 { font-family: Helvetica; } #TableOfContents ul li:first-child { display: none; } #TableOfContents a[rel=footnote] { display: none; } pre { white-space: pre-wrap; } TabFS is a browser extension that mounts your browser tabs as a filesystem on your computer. Out of the box, it supports Chrome and (to a lesser extent1) Firefox and…