Gymnopédies
I’ve arranged Erik Satie’s most famous piano compositions for the mandolin.
Vijith Assar
Latest posts
Infinite Sadness
The title track from the single greatest accomplishment by the Smashing Pumpkins is a tiny piano ballad that was nominated for a Grammy when it was first released, but now nobody seems to remember it, so I arranged it for solo mandolin.
Evil Billionaire Attack
Over at Wired, I propose that the chaos unfolding in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter qualifies as a new kind of security risk in which the intrusion mechanism is simply massive amounts of money. In the field of information security, there’s a kind of vulnerability known as the evil maid attack whereby […]
iPhone 12
My first gadget review! I previewed the specs of the new iPhone 12 for Wired. The iPhone 12 comes with a new ProMotion OLED display, which Apple is calling the “Super Retina XDR” screen. It’s the biggest visual upgrade since the original Retina screens a decade ago, and it’s crafted out of a new material […]
Let’s go time traveling
Things should have been different before, but maybe they can still be fixed now? If you have files from the past which need to be converted or altered in ways that would require writing a new inode to your local storage disk, ordinarily you’d lose the original timestamps, and the new versions would instead end […]
Pingkiller
A new Chrome extension which stops the HTML “ping” attribute from tracking your browsing activity.
Processing Fellowship recap
As my fellowship with the Processing Foundation wound down, I wrote a bit about the process of deriving the guiding principles of p5.js far enough to write useful documentation for it — a dissection manual, if you will. more
CNN election coverage
Lately I have been on CNN’s election night coverage, in particular interactive data visualizations for the Senate and the House.
The Internet Is Lying To You
Error 301: This post has moved permanently. Just kidding! Ha ha! But I did write about the problems with aggressive link redirecting for New York Magazine. This is both dangerous and ridiculous. Pages load more slowly, and the extra useless links are much more likely to break, and it’s impossible to know where you’re actually […]
ACLU
I’ve been doing some work for the ACLU lately, and Fast Company profiled the team in an article that I still cannot believe is titled The ACLU is building a tech dream team. Your move, Trump.
Meltdown, Spectre, and everything else
For Wired, a meandering essay that uses the Meltdown and Spectre exploits to point out problems with how we think about the future: Anything that seeks to reshape the infrastructure built by our past selves should deserve our most aggressive scrutiny, regulation, and suspicion. If backtracking overeager technology is already proving so catastrophic for the […]
Processing Foundation Fellowship
The Processing Foundation runs a fellowship for people interested in interactive art, and I am part of the 2018 class. I’ll be working on the documentation for p5.js, helping to clean up the developer-facing architecture and design logic so it’s easier to contribute.
AMP for Email
Google recently unveiled a set of proposed upgrades to email. For New York Magazine’s tech section, I wrote about where it went wrong – most notably, that it should not be possible to “unveil” upgrades to a standardized communication platform in the first place. The biggest flaw is simply that it can’t reasonably be called version […]
Net Neutrality
New York magazine’s tech blog Select All let me go wayyyy overboard explaining why internet application protocols like http:// and ftp:// intrinsically fight for net neutrality even with the FCC does not. Networks are made of computers, and computers take instruction. They do as they are told reliably until they break, and for decades now, […]
Easier Literate Programming
The tools I’ve been building for literate programming, such as lit and the Markdown import plugin for Rollup, are powerful and can help you fit literate programming into a serious application build process. But what if you don’t want to bother with a build process? Here’s a quick-and-dirty alternative for JavaScript on the web: lit-web.js. […]
Better Literate Programming
First, several big updates recently to the original version of lit, my agnostic tool for literate programming. It can now preserve correct line numbers for debugging, which is the killer feature I’ve been trying to figure out; this is the only reason I haven’t written all my source code in this format for the past […]
Object Iteration
New on GitHub and npm: I rebuilt the ES5 array methods from JavaScript and made them work with objects/hashmaps.
Augmentad Reality
A new project with Rich Harris and Aliza Aufrichtig: Augmentad Reality is a custom hardware heads-up display which overlays ads on whatever you were looking at anyway. This is a real device which actually works, built and coded within about six hours at the Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon and subsequently […]
Tweet Strings
My new piece for Motherboard unpacks the recent changes to Twitter’s character limits. In short, the big news is not that the tweets are growing longer, it’s that they are now being treated as data structures, not text strings. Twitter has always performed text analysis of the tweet content to detect elements and extract them […]
Web Safe
Web Safe 2k16 is a strange, beautiful project in which writers sift through their memories of the early internet using a specific color as a prompt. I wrote about blue.