Recent content on Scott Smitelli
“In the year 5555, your arms are hangin’ limp at your sides, your legs got nothing to do, some machine doin’ that for you.” Zager and Evans sang these words in 1969. Now, thirty-five centuries ahead of schedule, it’s never been easier to tell the world “I didn’t care about this and I don’t care about you.” More »
“In evolution, a maladaptation is a trait that is (or has become) more harmful than helpful, in contrast with an adaptation, which is more helpful than harmful.” I went to Wikipedia to look that up, not a large language model. More »
It’s a safe bet that most of us have encountered the age-old admonition to “never judge a book by its cover” at some point in our lives. There is a deep wisdom in that advice—wisdom that seems to go completely out the window as soon as a certain type of person spots a certain type of punctuation. More »
Toasted Frontega Chicken sandwich, no sliced tomatoes. There’s that feeling again, why are my teeth clenched? And a cup of Mac & Cheese. I remember getting locked out of my online loan servicing account a few years ago, that sucked. And a regular Dr Pepper. How long have my hands been shaking? More »
A human interest piece about a person who never existed, who has spent his entire adult life doing something I don’t know anything about. More »
At some companies, it is expected that certain engineers will serve as part of a formal on-call rotation. On paper, this seems like a reasonable way to ensure the reliability of the product. In practice, it is a miserable burden and you probably won’t even get paid for it. More »
Look up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s hundreds of thousands of birds! What are all these birds doing with my patio umbrella? And why do they all collectively believe that “scrappiness” is a good example of a corporate value? More »
When you’re improvising a comedy scene, the golden rule is to respond with “yes, and” to everything your partners say and do. This unwavering acceptance can produce riotous bouts of laughter. In an engineering team, it just creates unholy messes. More »
The description suggests that this is some kind of extended metaphor about work. It appears to be written in that Choose Your Own Adventure style second-person voice, yet there are no choices to be found within. Against your better judgment, you follow the link. More »
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, where none of the light switches do a damn thing. And you may ask yourself, “How do I work this?” And you may ask yourself, “Am I right, am I wrong?” Same as it ever was. More »
Join me on a brief foray into one of mankind’s most disreputable pastimes: Attempting to analyze and critique Christmas music. Today’s subject is “Deck the Halls” as performed by Mannheim Steamroller. You know, the 80s synthesizer version with that bad note in it. More »
The powered chainsaw was developed nearly a century ago. Its rise in prevalence has fundamentally changed the shape of human work in forestry and logging industries. But when was the last time you personally needed to use a chainsaw in your daily life? More »
Twenty years ago, it was not difficult to find songs that used the word “fake” somewhere in the lyrics. This is not nearly as prevalent in music today, nor was it all that common before that era. This article explores the phenomenon to try to see if there’s really something to it. More »
Everybody has their own unique way of processing and dealing with grief. There’s not really any right or wrong way to do it. Except for Google Calendar—they are absolutely doing it wrong. More »
A detailed look at a few different sources of visual distortion that commonly occur when developing a raycaster. Covers fish eye distortion, projection plane angle distortion, and outlines a technique to disentangle the rendered wall height from the screen’s aspect ratio. More »
Depending on how you interpret the numbers, you can make any country come out on top. More »
An exploration of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) message format, the interpretation of each of its data fields, and the underlying variables that time servers track to keep their clocks accurate. More »
This is the website you are currently looking at. More »
Drawing onto a <canvas> element doesn’t need as much code as online tutorials and example pages might lead you to believe. This page contains a handful of demos that show exactly what you need and almost nothing that you don’t. More »
A deep dive into hidden data encoded in the BMP files saved by the Klein Tools TI250 thermal imager. More »
The semi-complete teardown of Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure (1992). More »
A reconstruction of the source code of Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure (1992), using the original C compiler and x86 assembler from 1988. More »
A utility that removes tweets from Twitter after they reach a specified age. Because nothing good ever came from a ten-year-old tweet. More »
Windowbox is a photo-hosting website where I post pictures directly from my phone camera. More »
The configuration management code that automatically built this web server and everything running on it. More »
Scott’s dotfiles. More »
A cache object that actually deletes the least-recently-used items. More »
An absurd tale of my experience trying to reset the security questions on an Apple ID account. More »
A dynamic CMS for mostly-static content. This site was powered by Docroute from 2012 to 2024. More »
A web service that uses a proprietary and jealously-guarded algorithm to determine if a given company is “real.” More »
It will soon be stapling time. More »
Inspired by the popular (and eventually debunked ) Twitter account @horse_ebooks , The Sort of Face is my attempt at creating a Twitter bot that generates funny gibberish. More »
The Trigger and Freewheel CMS powers a webcomic of the same name that I started drawing in 2008 and have been sporadically updating since. More »
I assembled and uploaded a video showing a timelapse road trip from Pittsburgh, PA to San Mateo, CA. Here I share the tricks and pitfalls I discovered in my work. More »
A series of tests designed to try to thwart the audio portion of YouTube’s Content ID digital fingerprinting system. More »
Working in conjunction with twitstash , twanslationparty corrupts the English text in one Twitter account’s timeline and posts the result to another account. More »
twitstash is a cron script that archives a Twitter user’s timeline into a MySQL database for search, data mining, or as a foundation for twanslationparty bots. More »
Determining the speed and tempo variations in Barry Manilow’s 1974 hit “Mandy.” More »
Synthesizing Futurama’s “Angry Machine” sound effect from scratch using a noise generator and a few filters. More »
A self-made block diagram for the Behringer SL2442FX-PRO mixer. More »
In January 2008, Apple released version 7.4 of QuickTime which had the unfortunate side-effect of breaking video rendering in Adobe After Effects. This article explores a method to revert the installed version of QuickTime back to 7.3. More »
A list of some of the loudest-sounding songs in my music collection, and a plea to bring back dynamic range. More »
An analysis of strange digital compression artifacting present on certain tracks of Chef Aid: The South Park Album . More »