Recent content on Hayden Schiff
Originally published in my OpenHistoricalMap diary I found something interesting while working on mapping historical streets in my hometown of Cincinnati. Take a look at Alexander St on J.H. Colton & Co.'s 1855 map , the oldest map I'm aware of that includes the street: Here's how S. Augustus Mitchell depicted Alexander St on his 1860 map : And just for good measure, here it is in Mendenhall 1867…
Recently, I wanted to make a bar chart in Google Sheets from a dataset with hundreds of rows. When I used the built-in Chart functionality, it wasn't able to fit all of the bar labels on screen at once. I made the chart its own sheet (so it'd be as big as possible) and set the labels to use the smallest possible font, but it was still only showing half the labels. I needed to see all the labels,…
I alternate between working at home and in the office a lot, and I like to keep my coworkers informed about where I am. Earlier this year, Slack added statuses , which allows you to show an emoji next to your name to indicate what you're up to. I immediately took to this feature and always tried to set "Working remotely" or "In the office" each morning, but I'm very forgetful, and would often…
I'm heading to my first Defcon on Wednesday, and naturally, I'm a little bit anxious about prepping my devices so as to not get pwned. The advice I've seen for this varies wildly -- some people go all out and use a separate phone and laptop for the convention, while others simply turn off wi-fi and Bluetooth. I'm thinking the best strategy for me is somewhere in the middle -- make sure I'm locked…
If you've been living under a rock for the past few years, you might not know there's this cool site called Humble Bundle that sells games and ebooks in very affordable pay-what-you-want bundles. They donate some of the profits to charity, and they have some really cool offerings -- definitely worth checking out if you've never seen it before. I've been a patron of Humble Bundle for quite a few…
Holy crap man. Okay so there's this dude, Domenick Nati ( @KingOfContacts ), and he's a publicist/agent for celebrities — he has clients like the rapper DMX. For a while, Nati had a Wikipedia article. I somehow stumbled upon it in mid-March, and noticed it seemed to be kinda promotional and also didn’t sufficiently prove that he was a notable person according to Wikipedia’s guidelines, so I…
Everyone hates ads, but content can't survive without revenue. AdBlock is increasingly cutting into profit margins of websites that rely on advertising, and the problem doesn't look to be going away. These websites are desperately looking to innovate in how their bring in revenue. Individual site subscriptions # A few sites have tried launching their own ad-free services; for example, WIRED is…
The names of the clerk, the county, and the state are all fake for anonymity. I also left out email signatures (except in her first email, because "Sincerely," doesn't make sense without it). Everything else is completely unmodified. FROM: Hayden Schiff TO: Jane Doe DATE: Thursday, 5:46 PM Hello, I'd like to purchase the Foobar County voter registration list. I'd like records for all parties, all…
Hey there, I'm Hayden. I'm an open knowledge enthusiast and software developer from Cincinnati, Ohio. If you're looking for my work experience, you can find my resume here . Contact # If you want to get in touch, the best way to contact me is probably via email: hayden@schiff.io You can find all of my social media and whatnot over here: hylx.cc
A browser port of the classic TI calculator game, made with PuzzleScript
A macOS script for automatically logging into the captive portal on my old workplace's wi-fi
CoeBot is an open-source auto-moderation chatbot for the livestreaming website Twitch.tv, used in over 4,000 channels at its peak. It assists livestreamers by providing commands, automatic responses, external service integrations, and much more for their chat room. I built the bot's original website, which allowed the bot's complex configuration to be easily viewed and edited.
A plugin for Bukkit (Minecraft servers) that can assign random nicknames from a list (the default list consists of about two hundred "bro names", i.e. Edgar Allan Broe, Stephen Brolbert, etc).
A bootstrapper for SKCraft Launcher that makes the powerful Minecraft modpack launcher more accessible to server owners.
The website for Cyber@UC, a student-run cybersecurity organization at the University of Cincinnati. Built from scratch using Jekyll (a simple static site generator) to enable and encourage club members to hack on it.
A browser script for downloading DRM-free copies of your Dark Horse digital comics
A script for automatically deploying a website on cPanel whenever new code is pushed to GitHub
A simple word-based password generator
A repository of country and state flags in a standard format for easy use in other programming projects
Here's a high-level summary of all the API endpoints I know about for Humble Bundle's API, used by their Android app. You can read more about this API (and about how I found these endpoints) in my blog post . Getting a captcha # To login or request an SMS code (via the /processlogin endpoint), you need to first solve a captcha. To do this, first visit this page in a web browser. Open the…
A replacement for the email notifications on livestreaming service Twitch.tv which sends a Yo whenever any channel a user follows goes live. Made using Node.js at DandyHacks 2015 (University of Rochester's annual hackathon).
A simple file organization app I built for my English professor dad to help him organize hundreds/thousands of letters written by John Updike for an upcoming book.
OpenHistoricalMap is a project that seeks to create the world's most out-of-date map: it chronicles historical data to allow you to slide the timeline to any point in history. I've been working on documenting the history of Cincinnati, using old maps, images, and other sources to chronicle hundreds of buildings, streets, and other features. To enable this work, I've georectified hundreds of old…
OpenStreetMap is a free and open world map that anyone can use and edit. I've worked on adding fine details to the Cincinnati area, such as house numbers, points of interest, and 3D building data. I've also put a lot of work into adding land use and land cover (such as forests) throughout southern Ohio, particularly in Clermont, Ross, Highland, and Pike counties.
Reverse-engineered documentation of Patreon's API
In high school, I worked on the school plays as a stage manager. We were managing our rehearsal schedule using an online calendar system provided by the school, but it was clunky, inflexible, and often didn't work. I also noticed that it took a lot of work for each actor to figure out which rehearsals they were called for. I built phpStageManager, an easy-to-use calendar web app which allowed…
SportsArchive is a website I created to archive old documents and headshots related to professional sports. As a big fan of FC Cincinnati, I noticed that old Major League Soccer documents from just a few years ago would often be impossible to find, and I wanted to help prevent the loss of history. I planned out and designed the website, then coded it from scratch using Symfony and PHP. I also…
A HexChat plugin for making Twitch IRC more intelligent
Wikidata is a free knowledge base that catalogs structured data about all things that have a Wikipedia article, and many more things that don't. My focuses have been on our data for sports and computer hardware. I've had over 50 property proposals approved by the community, improving our ability to model the world. I've made over 250,000 edits, including over 120,000 new item creations. I've also…
My interest in Wikipedia led me to contribute to Wikimedia Commons, an open repository of free media files. Photographs I shot are used over 600 times on English Wikipedia and over 3,000 times across all Wikimedia projects. I've also put a lot of work into organizing and curating the collection, seeking out freely-licensed media and obtaining public domain images by using obscure parts of…
I made my first edit to Wikipedia in 2006, and have been fairly active since 2009. My contributions include >25,000 edits on English Wikipedia (and >400,000 across all Wikimedia projects). I wrote the article Game of Change , which has been recognized as a Good Article.
Winston's World is a 2D platformer video game that you can play in your web browser. I was part of a team of four that built the game for the DMC 1000 course (Foundations of Digital Media) at UC in fall of 2019. As the only coder on the team, I did all the programming, building the game from the ground up in JavaScript using the Phaser engine. I also wrote a comprehensive wiki for my teammates to…
This project is no longer maintained and may not work on the current nytimes.com website. xwTweaks is a browser extension that implements quality-of-life improvements for New York Times crosswords and puzzles on nytimes.com.