Month: February 2024

Smartphone screens are about to become speakers

smartphone-screens-are-about-to-become-speakers

Today’s mobile-device speakers and haptic generators have several problems. The first is with the components themselves. The speakers in your smartphone and the system that gives your finger feedback when you touch a virtual button may be relatively small, but they are still big enough to limit how thin our mobile devices can get. These […]

Nextdoor’s Heisensubscribe (and Other Dark Patterns)

nextdoor’s-heisensubscribe-(and-other-dark-patterns)

Nextdoor’s Heisensubscribe (And Other Dark Patterns) TL;DR: Nextdoor’s notification settings are hostile. This is not an isolated incident. “See What You Missed” Send emails that demonstrate immediate and obvious value. My email client renders HTML and CSS – show me what I missed. Of course it’s easier to send a static link to a notification […]

My Visit to Deep Springs College (2009)

The first time I visited Las Vegas was in 1988. The city was far different back then, with an old Western vibe–not at all like the modern strip with all of the new casinos and so forth. Las Vegas, in the late 1980s, was more tired and run down; it was by no means the […]

systemd by Example (2021)

November 23, 2021 Part 1: Minimization Series overview This article is part of the series systemd by example. The following articles are available. Introduction This is the first article in a series where I try to understand systemd by creating small containerized examples. systemd always has been a bit of a mystery to me. I […]

Kalman Filter Explained Simply

kalman-filter-explained-simply

Most tutorials for the Kalman Filter are difficult to understand because they require advanced math skills to understand how the Kalman Filter is derived. If you have tried to read Rudolf E Kalman’s 1960 Kalman Filter paper, you know how confusing this concept can be. But do you need to understand how to derive the […]

Shell scripting with Elixir

shell-scripting-with-elixir

When simple bash scripts start to become unwieldy, you may consider reaching out for something “higher” level, like Perl, Ruby or Python. I’m reaching out for Elixir. Maybe the startup times are not perfect for every use case, but Elixir is extremely versatile. It’s easy to add dependencies, debug, iterate and even write tests, all […]