[trigger warning: pretentious thinkpiece]
Tonight I was speaking with a new friend and the topic of what we do with our free time came up. In the course of describing what I do with my down hours (usually, coding), I realized I had never actually verbalized my reason behind this to anyone but her until then. At first glance, it may seem odd — I code all day; why would I want to do more of it in my free time, and especially dufus projects like what I usually pick?
And no, it’s not my brain.
nope forcibly shuts down your computer down like pulling out the plug. No shut down process, no graceful halt, just a crash and burn.
Because sometimes you just gotta say, ‘nope.’
Hi all. New implant tonight. I’m zonked so not much fanfare, but it’s an xEM that lets me clone contactless access cards (like cards to get into buildings, gym, etc.).
Check out the video here (don’t need a FB account to watch).
…because I make things like this. I have no regrets.
Wait! Don’t run away! This is actually super cool. It’s a long post, but you’ll be super smart by the end ;)
Yesterday, an extremely exciting academic study from the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam described tremendously exciting leaps in anti-aging drugs, often thought to be a holy grail of biological science. These results are so cool I wanted to break them down into layman’s terms for people who aren’t necessarily interested in hardcore microbiology (if you are, the original paper can be found in Cell (paywalled; reduced but public version is here)). By the end, you’ll know enough to perfectly understand the title! I’ve taken some scientific liberties in breaking it down into easily explainable terms, but for the most part, everything here is pretty much accurate, if a bit simplified.
Tech debt: a concept in programming that reflects the extra development work that arises when code that is easy to implement in the short run is used instead of applying the best overall solution.source
Research institutions often suffer from the effects of technical debt that slow processing, lead to inflexible procedures and pipelines, and ultimately limit the potential for forward progress in high speed academic environments. This article covers three key ways that researchers can begin to tackle the issue of tech debt.
As you may or may not have heard, the CIA has recently had a major document trove released about the works of CCI in Langley. There are lots of analyses of the technical aspects (including on the leak homepage).
Politics aside, I’m mainly enjoying seeing the internals of a different developer/company/government culture — some of them are hilarious, some of them are laughably relatable (who doesn’t have notes scrawled somewhere about handling git submodules so they don’t have to hit StackOverflow), and some of them are reminders that software devs gonna software dev, no matter who signs the paycheck!
This is a little half hour project I built before bed since I was itching to code something that wasn’t horribly frustrating (thanks, Compilers class…).
This replaces text as you type with user-defined replacements _a la iOS. It’s simple but super nice if you prefer emojis or use text shortcuts (‘shrug’ becomes ¯_(ツ)/¯ on my system).
Github. Chrome Store. Fork me hard.
A groundbreaking new study linking gamma frequency photostrobing to reduction of amyloid plaque load in the brain which can cause Alzheimer’s.
I wrote a Chrome extension that strobes the screen at a custom intensity and frequency to aim to replicate gamma frequency induce amyloid plaque reduction. The extension options page allows for custom change in the flash opacity and frequency. Default is 10% opacity, 40Hz.
Download from the Chrome store or fork me on GitHub.
I finished some homework early so I took ten minutes to spin out a piece of code I actually wrote as part of a class project (COEN164 shout out; thanks to Evan Paul for the praise that spurred me into repo-fying this) into a proper open source repo.
I’ve often been frustrated with super heavy and feature-rich testing harnesses that I have to spend 20 minutes looking at before I can even write a test. **μHarness **aims to solve that with an ulta-low-frills system that serially runs functions and compares their output to an expected value; nothing fancy in the slightest went into the making of this.
