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§ The soil in my yard is something like 80% clay, 20% large rocks. The process of creating my hügelkultur left me with plenty of each.
The rocks were easy. I was able to add them to the dry stacked walls that define my garden beds.
The clay is the hard part. In the past I’ve collected it, along with all of my other unamended soil, in an unceremonious pile in a back corner of my yard.
I’ve always been interested in learning how to extract and purify the clay for pottery making, though, which is exactly what I tried this week.
It wasn’t as difficult as I anticipated it would be and the result was a large ball of clay that was, to my eyes, nearly indistinguishable from professional earthenware.
The plan now is to process the clay into bricks then use those bricks to make a small kiln.
§ I took Friday off to look at wedding venues. We have a date or, at least, an array of possible dates orbiting mid July of next year.
§ I didn’t know it was possible for blossom end rot to manifest inside of tomatoes. Like, the outside looks totally fine and then, once sliced, you’ll notice that the seeds are covered in a black goo.
I noticed this happening with my San Marzano tomatoes. After throwing out at least a dozen fruits with obvious exterior end rot, I finally picked a few nice looking ripe fruits but then only noticed the gross center after slicing them.
This is mostly annoying because I originally intended to can these tomatoes whole which I now won’t feel confident doing until I can resolve this issue.
§ I’ve been playing the New York Times Mini Crossword. Full-sized crosswords have always felt like too large of a commitment. Their bite-sized counterparts fill a nice sub-ten-minute niche right next to Connections.
§ I’ve been evaluating Lego’s new(ish) Spike robotics platform. I am inherently suspicious of proprietary systems like these although, after a couple of hours fiddling, I am beginning to warm up to this set. There is enough modularity and flexibility built in that I don’t feel pigeon-holed into particular pre-defined projects.
§ Links
- 54 years later, the world is finally ready for Turn-on
- A very long piano
- Oscilloscope Music
- The uncoloring book
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§ Fresh peaches might be the best fruit. The key is to pick them ripe which makes shipping them next to impossible. This means you will need to find them locally. Now is the time to find for your local orchard. I promise it will be worth it.
§ I harvested all of the garlic that I planted in early May. I now realize that spring was the wrong time of year to plant garlic but, nevertheless, I am happy with my eight small, though well developed, bulbs.
§ I’ve embarked on a huge deep dive on modular architecture this week starting with Lego bricks and culminating in a prototype that aims to answer the question: “Can you build a house using enormous, wooden, Technic-style, 2x4s?”
§ Cabel Sasser wrote a fascinating post about the challenges that arise when designing public artworks.
This has been one of the most unexpectedly interesting facets of my job designing exhibits for an interactive museum.
some designers are amazing at imagining things, but not as amazing at imagining them surrounded by the universe. […]
It almost seems like there’s a real job here for the right type of person. “Real World Engineer”? Unfortunately, the closest thing most companies currently have is “lawyer”.
The challenge—and the fun—comes from the reality that the public will always interact with your work the way they want to. Your job is to guide their experience through thoughtful design, without the luxury of direct instruction.
§ Infinity Pool was wild. With Alexander Skarsgård, Mia Goth, and Brandon Cronenberg you just know you’re in for quite a trip.
Brandon Cronenberg’s previous film, Possessor, had similarly striking visuals but ultimately didn’t stick with me as much as I expect this film will.
§ One of our quails was attacked despite being in a coop that we reinforced with two layers of 1/2” hardware cloth. It was all very upsetting. For now we’ve moved them into the greenhouse. While it isn’t ideal, in terms of heat, as far as I can tell it is basically avian Fort Knox.
§ Links
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§ Our first red cherry tomatoes have ripened. They are a few weeks behind our crop from last year but no less delicious. We’re still waiting on the yellow and black cherries.
I also ate my first home grown summer squash of the season. The plant has been uncharacteristically prolific but, for whatever reason, many of its smaller fruits are suffering from blossom end rot. I tried supplementing with calcium and we will see if that helps.
§ OpenAI took its AI detection tool offline due to low accuracy. This isn’t surprising—I’ve seen a number of stories about professors rejecting student essays after they were inaccurately flagged as being AI written.
I suspect OpenAI primarily developed its AI detection capabilities for internal use, to avoid “model collapse” by filtering today’s AI generated content out of future training runs. When used this way, an overzealous classifier is totally fine. Sure, you might filter out some genuine content but that isn’t a huge deal. When the same classifier is used as the sole means to judge the authenticity of student work, however, false positives start to become a lot more impactful.
§ We got a new stove! It is a lot like our old stove except, in this one, the oven actually functions properly. The burners supposedly have a higher BTU rating too but that hasn’t had any noticeable impact, in practice.
§ I started digging a hügelkultur which I have been mistakingly calling a hinterkaifeck.
You might recall that I have been spending the summer sawing down a lot of tree branches and overgrown bushes.
The volume of branches this has produced has been challenging. Sure, making a wattle fence has been great fun but that only uses so much wood. I’ve started to annoy my city’s garbage collection service with the bags upon bags of sticks and leaves I’ve been attempting to throw out each week.
So, hey, maybe a hügelkultur would be perfect. You just bury some wood in the ground, plant things on top, and, as the wood breaks down, it feeds the growing plants above with a continuous supply of carbon.
§ Links
§ Recipes
I tried making cheese with raw—scratch that, “pet”—milk that I purchased from a local Amish grocer.
I spent a while trying to decide between a queso fresco and a farmer’s cheese before I realized that they are essentially the same thing. Mozzarella felt a bit too ambitious as an entry point.
The whole process was not as difficult as I expected. Warm up the milk, add acid, wait, scoop out the curds, drain. That is really it.
I also made ricotta with the leftover whey. I still have so much more whey left to use, though. I’ve read that you can use it in place of water in bread doughs. It is also supposed to have some unique qualities when used to soak beans. Some people make whey lemonade.
This whole experience, while fun, makes me disinclined to ever want a dairy cow. At more than seven gallons of milk per day, I would need to get way more into dairy before that ever became anything more than burdensome.
A goat on the other hand…
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§ Each of our pepper varieties—jalapeño, cayenne, poblano, banana, and Hungarian—are all growing fruit.
Thanks to some early pruning help from the local deer population, two of our cherry tomato plants are still a manageable size. The San Marzano, however, is as vigorous as ever.
I don’t even know what to say about the blackberry. It has already totally outgrown the patch I planted it in last year. I am both proud and overwhelmed.
Our purple passionflower, which I had thought hadn’t survived the winter, has come back with a vengeance. There are shoots popping up as far as four feet away from the original plant. Researching more now, I see that it is considered invasive in some areas.
Humid weather earlier in the week gave way to a violent, cathartic, storm Thursday night complete with thunder, lightning, and hail. Relentless sheets of rain flattened our young, top heavy plants.
By the next evening, just about everything was able to perk itself back up. The only casualty was a large, fruit bearing stem of one of the cherry tomato plants.
§ I rode an e-bike for the first time. As an exercise device it was, of course, less effective than a traditional bicycle. As a means of transportation, however, it might be unbeatable.
The experience considerably expanded what I can see as a viable car-free commute. Unfortunately, my current commute would be upwards of an hour each way. Even on an e-bike that is not exactly viable.
§ After some struggle, I’ve finally made a breakthrough on my capacitive touch wall mural music sampler project. The turning point came when I decided to stop using MIDI altogether and instead use the Touch Board as a basic USB keyboard.
This was all made possible by finally finding an application I had been searching for this whole time—a simple, keyboard focused, sampler app.
The next step for the project is to start prototyping its physical design.
§ I’ve been playing Connections, the latest Wordle-esque puzzle game from the New York Times. The goal is to categorize a four-by-four grid of words into four separate groups based on their commonalities. Sometimes the solutions are straightforward—flute, clarinet, harp, oboe, all musical instruments—but often there are a few words included that make things a little more ambiguous. Each game takes less than five minutes to complete and it isn’t ever difficult enough to be frustrating but never so easy that it feels mindless—a tricky balance to strike for a game of this kind.
§ The Queen’s Gambit was captivating and further evidence for my theory that limited-run series’ are always better than their indefinite counterparts.
§ Links
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§ My makrut lime plant has started growing a handful of tiny little fruits for the first time. I originally bought the plant for its aromatic leaves that are frequently used in Thai cooking. In my decidedly non-tropical climate I never expected to actually get any fruit. Exciting!
§ The Exploratorium Cookbook is such an unbelievable resource for building interactive educational experiences. Given my field of work, I am both shocked and a bit disappointed that I hadn’t heard of it until now.
A crucial detail is that the book doesn’t prescribe regimented, step-by-step projects. Instead, it sticks to cataloging broad concepts and suggests ways one might go about presenting them.
The way the book is structured as a series of numbered “recipes” reminds of the sequential architectural and cultural “patterns” from A Pattern Language. I wonder if they both could be used in tandem…
§ I have been working with MIDI this week, prototyping different approaches towards creating a capacitive touch wall mural that acts as a musical sequencer / drum machine.
It has been frustrating to learn that microcontrollers with great capacitive sensing capabilities, like the ESP32, are unable to send MIDI messages over USB. As I wait for a purpose built device to arrive, I’ve been using an old Circuit Playground Express which, frankly, doesn’t work particularly well for this use-case.
If you ever find yourself in a similar position, using MIDI in uncommon ways, I can’t recommend the application Midi View highly enough. It displays all of the information sent by connected MIDI devices in a straightforward, no-nonsense interface.
§ After resisting for a while, thinking it was just another quirky comedy, I started watching Beef. It’s much better than I expected! It helps that the episodes are short enough that the drama isn’t too heavy and the comedy isn’t too cloying.
Honestly, it may have been the title cards that first grabbed my attention. It turns out, the wild, maximalist, Egon Schiele-esque imagery was painted by David Choe, one of the show’s lead actors.
§ Does CVS employ cashiers nowadays? Surely they must, if only to approve alcohol sales, but I am not sure I can recall the last time I saw one. They have leaned heavily—more so than any other store I’ve visited—into self-checkout kiosks. The truth is that the future will almost certainly look less like Amazon’s fully autonomous corner stores and more like this.
§ Links
- Wild Heart Homestead
- Post-photography
- PlayHTML
- Virtual theremin
- Johnny Cash sings “Barbie Girl”
- The codex community corpus
§ Recipes
- Ginger-teriyaki beef kebabs
- I still unintentionally overcook my beef but I am gradually getting better. This recipe was delicious, especially with fried rice. I make it twice this week.
- Lemon butter feta chicken pasta
- This was one of my favorite meals in quite a while. Cream + chicken broth + lemon juice are a great trio.
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§ I touched a floppy drive for the first time ever.
A lot of my new job, at the moment, involves contending with a huge library of interactive Adobe Flash programs.
As with floppy drives, I had never worked with Flash before although its legacy has always loomed large in the Creative Coding circles I frequent.
There is something beautiful about it: an accessible way to create programs that are self-contained, cross-platform, multimedia, and interactive.
I still really need to find a good, modern debugger, though.
§ Going from working in a single-story building to somewhere with four floors has had a dramatic impact on my “flights climbed” Health metric.
§ Apple’s marketing stunt worked, I watched Silo.
Some details of the environment were great—I really liked the computer interface design—overall, however, the artificiality of the set was a bit of a turn off.
I kept finding myself imagining what the actors were experiencing as they were filming each scene. How big was the set? How immersive? Was it just an enormous wall of LCD screens? Watching the later seasons of Game of Thrones was a similar experience.
Despite finding the design slightly off-putting, the story itself was original. I found myself genuinely surprised by the ending of season one and am sufficiently interested to see where the writers take the show from here.
§ By and large, the new season of Black Mirror feels silly. It also doesn’t seem particularly concerned with technology—you know, the reason it was named “Black Mirror” in the first place. An interesting choice.
§ The day after Meta launched Threads, their Twitter competitor, I finally got an invite to Bluesky.
Frankly, I am not sure I see a future for Bluesky once Threads enables support for ActivityPub, the underlying protocol behind Mastodon (and this blog). Effectively everyone already has an Instagram account which means they now automatically have a Threads account too. If you don’t have an Instagram account you can join any Mastodon instances and will still be able to communicate with anyone on Threads.
Bluesky, in comparison, will look insular—even after it leaves its long invite-only phase.
§ Caroline and I took down a large, ungainly juniper bush in our front yard. This gave us two things: a bunch of wood that is naturally rot-resistant and room to start growing a patch of watermelons. In the past, we haven’t had much luck growing pumpkins, America’s second favorite oversized cucurbit. We are hoping for better luck with watermelons and their shorter growing time.
§ Our quail all managed to break loose from their enclosure in the middle of a rain storm.
Frankly, I am not entirely sure how long they were loose for. It wasn’t until I spotted Tumbleweed’s unmistakable dusty orange plumage as she was looking for shelter under a backyard tree canopy that I realized what had happened.
Take a moment to picture me, frantic and soaking wet, chasing five small birds around my tiny, unfenced, yard, attempting to catch them with a cheap Amazon.com butterfly net.
Miraculously, I was able to round them all up and return them back to safely of their enclosure.
§ Links
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§ It has been a bit of a hectic week.
I started my new job which has been great but, you know, it’s a new job with new routines, procedures, and coworkers. I have a new Outlook account. I configured all of the shared calendars. I know where the mail room is.
All of this means the garden has begun falling prey to nature’s entropy.
I think we will all pull through.
§ Fluctuating with outdoor temperatures, my car gets anywhere between 30 and 45 miles of pure electric driving before switching over to its gasoline engine.
My new job is closer to home and the parking garage has EV chargers. The last time I filled my gas tank was June 25th. Barring any unexpected road trips, my goal is to make it last to Thanksgiving. Stay tuned.
§ Season two of The Bear feels less electric than the first season.
The first season was chaotic, stressful, and claustrophobic. Watching it was, at once, both exhausting and energizing—like the feeling in the air walking home from a late night concert.
Season two has space, tenderness, non diegetic music… It no longer feels cramped, shoulder-to-shoulder, to the tight confines of a hot kitchen. We follow characters as they leave Chicago and experience the wider world. Although the story is driven by an impending deadline, it feels like we do more waiting than rushing.
The Bear continues to be a special show to me, but, now, I think it is more about Chicago nostalgia than unique story telling.
§ Links
§ Recipes
- Rosemary sea salt caramels
- Cooking is art, baking is magic, candy making is an unforgiving science. Timing is critical and temperature variations of less than 5 °F can be the difference between soft, chewy caramels and a non newtonian amorphous gloop. My candies fell somewhere in the middle. I need a better thermometer.
- Authentic(?) chili con carne
- Birria tacos are an essential companion here
- Rosemary sea salt caramels
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§ I will be starting my new job next week. There is no denying I will miss these past few weeks of vacation but, at the same time, I can’t wait to see what comes next.
On a related note, I am not planning to post daily articles until I get settled into my new routine. I will, of course, continue publishing weeknotes each Sunday.
§ I saw Ari Aster’s new movie Beau Is Afraid.
Wow, now that is a movie!
Is it the best film I’ve ever seen? No, but it’s inventive and strange, deeply discomforting and hilarious.
I wasn’t blown away by Ari Aster’s two previous films, Hereditary and Midsommar. They felt like well-executed examples of generic horror movie tropes.
Beau Is Afraid is an entirely new idea. It is Ari, like the titular Beau, leaving his comfort zone.
§ More movies —
After finding Synecdoche, New York way too depressing, I watched Wes Anderson’s two animated films: Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs, looking for a change of tone.
Previously, my primary association with animation was movies and television directed at children. Without consciously intending to, I consequently viewed it as a less serious medium.
I failed to appreciate that animation gives artists an enormous amount of control and the freedom to create exactly what they imagine, unbounded by the typical constraints of reality. When you give this technology to a filmmaker as precise and detail oriented as Wes Anderson, the results are spectacular.
§ My san marzano tomato plant, which I am growing for the first time this year, has a distinctly different growth pattern than any other tomato variety I’ve seen before. It is super dense and bushy with very few suckers. Comparatively, my cherry tomatoes are almost lanky and sparse.
Spider mites have been an absolute garden menace this year. I’m not sure what prompted their sudden invasion.
§ Old honeysuckle blossoms are great for cyanotype printing.
§ Links
§ Recipes
- Caldo verde
- A new favorite. It’s very similar to kapusniak, another beloved rustic potato soup, but lighter and simpler overall.
- I made a few alterations: I used a mix of both leek and onion and added some lemon juice at the end. I also couldn’t find the special Portuguese sausage the recipe called for so I substituted it with chorizo. I’ll be on the lookout for proper linguiça moving forward.
- Cajun gumbo
- I definitely burned the roux. I realized it early on but, for whatever reason, decided to just keep going. Big mistake. I ended up letting it simmer on the stove all afternoon—like five hours—and that helped reduce the bitterness. It still had a distinctly burned flavor, though. I’ll try making this again another time. If I hadn’t burned it at the beginning I think it would have been amazing.
- Caldo verde
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§ I harvested our first sugar snap peas and strawberries of the season. There isn’t much, this early in the season, but eating something you’ve grown yourself is always a great feeling.
§ While sawing down tree branches a few weeks ago I set aside a couple of the larger branches, intending to use them to make a cat tree.
I finally got started building it this week!
I chose one of the branches, stripped off all of its bark, and wrapped the base in a thick green jute. The cats have already taken some interest in it.
Unfortunately, the whole thing is attached to a 16” round base plate that is, I’ve come to find out, nowhere near sturdy enough. It looks like I’ll need to learn how to pour concrete to make it new base for it all.
§ I saw two movies, Blackberry and Tetris, which feels like two different takes on the same general premise: ”Follow a scrappy upstart technology company as they risk everything to bring their vision to life.”
There was something endearingly quirky about Tetris that I found really fun. Instead of using chapters, the film was broken out into “levels” with funky pixel art animations preceding each one. In comparison, Blackberry was conventional—a modest retelling of an interesting story rather than an interesting retelling of a modest story.
§ …Speaking of blackberries
The blackberry bush I planted last year is doing amazingly well. I never expected it to come back this spring with such a vengeance. It is already at least eight feet tall and is covered in dozens of tiny white blossoms.
It is doing so well, in fact, that I decided to buy another raspberry bush after loosing two of them to a mysterious disease last summer. Fingers crossed it fairs better this year.
§ I would love to play an alternative “roguelike” version of The Depths in Tears of the Kingdom.
§ Links
- I mentioned iOS 17’s new on-device 3D scanning capabilities last week. Simon Støvring just published a new app for testing this out. Give it a download if you have the iOS beta installed.
- Using ”hackits” to teach computer science
- On canalization, an interesting thought technology
§ Recipes
- Gluten free pierogis
- Amazing. One of the easiest gluten free doughs to work with.
- Sauteed morel mushrooms
- Ever since unexpectedly getting way into mushrooms this spring, I have been looking forward to trying morels for the first time. Well, I was so excited when I finally found a bag of freshly picked morels at my usual grocery store. After finally getting the opportunity to try them it was, overall, a rather upsetting experience. Take a look at the third paragraph under the “cleaning morels” heading above if you are curious to know why—gross!
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§ I can see fruit beginning to develop on our blackberry, strawberry, and snap pea plants. I can’t wait for the rest of the garden to fill out—I planted two more tomato seedlings and six different types of peppers.
We also picked an almost burdensome amount of lettuce. Just as I was starting to ready myself for a week of enormous salads, Caroline had the ingenious idea of using them in our long-neglected juicer. That quickly lightened our load.
§ Speaking of my inability to stick to reading one thing at a time, I started reading The New House by David Leo Rice after seeing James Reeves’ passionate recommendation.
Frustratingly, I can’t find a digital copy of the book anywhere so not only am I jumping around too much, in this case I don’t even get to use the reMarkable tablet to help.
§ I tried to savor the new season of I Think You Should Leave and still finished it in less than a week. My favorite sketch was The Driving Crooner.
Overall, I feel like this season was maybe slightly worse than the previous two. I still highly recommend watching it, though.
§ I thought this might be the first year that I would skip the iOS beta. I made it two days before installing iOS 17 on my phone. Playing around with the updated autocorrection engine has been interesting but, overall, there is really not much to see.
§ Since its introduction at WWDC last year, I haven’t seen much mention of Apple‘s RoomPlan API. Try it out if you want a taste of the technology behind the upcoming Vision Pro headset. You can watch your iPhone construct an accurately scaled 3D model of a room—in real time—with each architectural element and furniture item segmented and tagged. It is shockingly impressive.
§ Links
- Tiny awards
- Gruber’s Vision Pro experience
- iOS 17 comes with support for on-device 3D scanning
§ Recipes
We had a lot of quail eggs we needed to use so Caroline and I made a big batch of lemon curd with the yolks and angel food cake with the egg whites. The lemon curd had a bit of a grainy texture. I am not sure if that is due to the recipe or a just a consequence of not having a proper double boiler. Regardless, it tasted great, especially as a part of lemon curd ricotta pancakes.
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§ School is out. Classes are now completely finished for the year.
I just have a few meetings and some loose ends to tie up this week. After that, I have set aside a couple of weeks to enjoy the summer before my new job starts up.
§ Now that Succession has concluded, I can easily say that this final season was their best. I can’t recall that being the case with any of my other favorite shows.
Fingers crossed for a Better Call Saul-style spin-off series starring Greg or Connor.
§ I have been sawing down some stray tree branches in the backyard to give the plants access to a bit more sunlight.
Using all of the extra pliable branches I have been attempting to construct a small wattle fence. The process couldn’t be more straightforward but it is still a lot of work.
§ The video game developer Hideo Kojima is rumored to be working with Apple on a game for their upcoming XR headset.
Although I don’t think of myself as a particularly avid video game player, this is actually the news that has made me the most excited about the headset so far.
A few years ago I purchased a PlayStation 4 just to play Kojima’s previous game: Death Stranding—it isn’t impossible something similar will end up happening again here.
§ Links
§ Recipes
- Jaeyook Kimchi Bokum
- While not technically related, there is a sense in which this feel like a better version of Phat Bai Horapha which I linked to a little while back.
- I’ve seen alternative recipes for this where cabbage and carrots are included. I am definitely going to try adding those next time.
- Jaeyook Kimchi Bokum
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§ This was our last full week of school. There are only two more days of classes next week and then that’s it.
This might be a good time to mention that I will be starting a new job at the end of June. It is a new position at my city’s science museum that touches on a little bit of everything: some programming work, new interactive exhibit design, even some curriculum development and teaching. I am excited!
§ I have spent this entire fourth quarter of the school year teaching my third and fourth grade students using the Circuit Playground microcontrollers.
I started simple: light up the onboard LEDs. Then I added a new tiny building bock each lesson: buttons, switches, RGB color codes, how each of the built-in sensors work…
Throughout the quarter, I had three big projects.
First: Take the knowledge you have of all of the Circuit Playground’s sensors and devise a method to detect when someone picks up the circuit board.
The students came up with so many creative solutions. Some used the accelerometer, others used the photoresistor, a few even used the capacitive touch pads that surround the board. Most students realized that using a combination of multiple sensors works best.
Everyone had lots of fun testing each other’s projects. I got to take on the role of “the mastermind Circuit Playground thief”. It was great.
The second big project was to recreate the classic arcade game Cyclone, step by step. The students loved creating their own gameplay variants.
Finally, all of this is culminated in a big end of the year project that I am especially excited about.
Each student thought of a research question—Is the lunch room louder on Mondays or Fridays? Which group gets more exercise at recess—those playing soccer or football?—then they used the Circuit Playground boards to collect relevant data. After collecting their data, they analyzed it to see whether or not their hypothesis was correct.
Overall, I have immensely enjoyed teaching with these boards.
§ One week later, I still really like the reMarkable tablet. You can really only do two things—read and draw—so it is hard to get distracted while using it. I have been reading much more than I typically would.
It is actually easier to get new articles and books on the device than I anticipated. For the most part this is great, but it doesn’t do much to encourage me to stick with reading one thing at a time. Consequently, I have been jumping around a lot, reading a bit of everything.
§ I got beta access to Google’s new generative AI search features. The UI feels a bit busy and confusing, particularly on mobile, but the overall functionality is actually better than I expected.
Unfortunately, it only works in Chrome and the Google iOS app right now. I can’t wait for it to come to Safari.
§ I am getting dangerously close to becoming a mushroom forager. I’ve got the books.
§ Links
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§ My birthday was on Tuesday!
§ I finally caved and bought myself a reMarkable 2 tablet. Some initial thoughts after a few days of use:
I have previously used the iPad with an Apple Pencil which is still undeniably the best touchscreen experience available today. It is also unmistakably digital. I spent a lot of upfront time fruitlessly configuring it to limit outside distractions. It became an attractive nuisance more than a tool.
The reMarkable, on the other hand, feels like “magic paper.”
Most of the time, it is just like writing in a notebook. But then you remember you can undo a mistake or duplicate and move a shape—it is paper+. It is by no means perfect—there are still things like accidental input that immediately break the illusion—but it is good. Most importantly, it isn’t fiddly. There are no apps to install, no settings to tweak. You can read, write, and sketch. That is it.
Unless there are particularly meaningful iPadOS updates come WWDC, I plan to sell my iPad Pro.
§ Six years after Breath of the Wild, its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, was finally released last week.
The first game was easily my favorite Nintendo Switch game so I have been nervously anticipating this follow-up for quite a while.
Honestly, I would be happy even if Tears of the Kingdom were simply an updated version of BOTW with an expanded map. Tears is so much more than that, though. The new construction mechanic, alone, opens up so many new opportunities for play and experimentation.
The new map is enormous, too. It takes all of the familiar locations from the previous game and expands them both underground with a giant network of caves and through the air with a series of sky islands—“skylands.”
Here is the bottom line: BOTW is a game that is worth purchasing a Switch for. I can say the same thing about Tears, without hesitation.
§ I didn’t realize scallions were just the greens from normal onion plants that you pull from the ground early. Well, the Spanish onion bulbs that I planted a few weeks ago are now providing me with an effectively unlimited supply of them.
§ I’ve caught a cold. But at least, with Zelda and the reMarkable, there have been much worse times to be stuck at home for a little bit.
§ Links
- Draw + Play
- Yellowtail in P5.js
- Sandspiel
- Mohit Bhoite’s tiny robots
- The official ChatGPT iOS app is now available although I still prefer Short Circuit
- FastGPT from Kagi
§ Recipes
- I made baked ziti for the first time in quite a while. It is good fresh out of the oven but it is the king of leftovers. It might be twice as good the next day.
- In some sickness induced delirium I started really craving buttery dinner rolls. I found a gluten free recipe that was quick to make and turned out amazingly well.
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§ Now that we’ve finally had some nice weather, I have been able to measure that, on sunny days, the greenhouse is consistently 15-20 °F warmer than the average outdoor temperature.
The next step is to work on insulation since, right now, all of that extra warmth dissipates almost immediately once the sun sets.
§ I’ve started reading—or, more accurately, listening to—Corey Doctrow’s new book Red Team Blues. Aside from a vague self-righteousness from the protagonist that rubs me the wrong way, I have found the book unbelievably fun so far.
In the past, dry audiobook recordings have made it hard for me to absorb content as fully as I would if I were reading. Wil Wheaton’s energetic and unorthodox performance here was just what I needed. I can’t wait to finish it.
§ I finally got access to the ChatGPT Code Interpreter plugin which gives ChatGPT the ability to execute the code it writes. It is all extremely impressive.
In one of my first tests, ChatGPT initially wrote buggy code that resulted in a runtime error and it was able to detect the error, fix the bug, and re-execute the program all without any intervention on my part.
§ We had ten more yards of compost delivered on Monday, after going through five less than a month ago.
There is something meditative about filling a wheelbarrow by the shovelful while you watch the pile steadily shrink. It is a great way to get a little bit of exercise and a lot of sunlight. Caroline and I spent our afternoons doing just that, dispersing more than half of it throughout the garden beds before the weekend.
§ Speaking of the weekend… Caroline and I visited Fallingwater on Saturday! The guided tour was certainly worth it but the best part was freely wandering the grounds afterwards. There is a reason the house was built in that location; it is gorgeous.
§ Oh, and I got engaged!
§ Links
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§ Rabbit rabbit. Happy May.
§ I drove a pickup truck for the first time.
I needed to rent one from the local big box store to bring home 4x8' polycarbonate panels for the greenhouse’s roof. The surprisingly good visibility made the drive a much less anxiety inducing expirence compared to similarly sized cargo vans I have driven in the past. The downside was that I kept forgetting how long the vehicle really is—this is where a backup camera would have helped tremendously.
I managed to install the new roof right before the start of an endlessly rainy week. This was good for testing the roof, I suppose, but bad for getting any other garden work accomplished.
§ Caroline and I are planning a weekend trip to Confluence, Pennsylvania for my birthday later this month. The plan is to visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house and the Ohiopyle State Park. Exciting!
§ Caroline brought home a bunch of porcelain tiles she made. We are trying to figure out a fun way to incorporate them into the greenhouse.
§ Links
- Synthetic Summer
- An adoorable game
- News Minimalist
§ Recipes
I finally got the opportunity to use a bunch of the—extremely prolific—chives from the garden in a mushroom risotto this week. Would it have been better to make this recipe when I was growing my own mushrooms? Absolutely. Why didn’t I? Who knows!
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§ Caroline and I went to the local nature reserve for the first time in a few weeks—it is suddenly all so green! We placed a few wild grape vine branches in the creek to soften. The hope is that they will still be there next time we visit and they will be flexible enough to use for basket weaving.
§ We spent Saturday at the Geauga County Maple Festival. On the way home, we got some milk from a small dairy farm and eggs from a farmer down the street who has found himself in Ohio by way of San Francisco.
§ I saw a wild turkey in a neighbor’s front yard. I didn’t know we had those here.
§ Barbarian is one of the most creative horror movies I have seen recently. Sure, the villain is a bit hokey but the filmmaking, storytelling, and atmosphere more than makes up for it.
I would love to see a House of Leaves movie by the same director.
§ Caroline made a giant, 36x12 inch, stained glass window for the greenhouse. I finished the last big wall and made a door.
The whole thing is nearly complete. The last big task is to finish filling in the wall surrounding the new window. Other than that, I would like to replace the roof with a better sheet of polycarbonate and add more gravel to the floor.
§ Links
- Buckeye chicken
- The Whole Code Catalog — a catalog of “futuristic computational interfaces"
- Karl Nawrot’s fonts
- Also: Radim Peško‘s fonts
- Also: A font for knitting
- Bending Wood: what you need to know
§ Recipes
- Al pastor tacos using pork from the local group share. I used Kenji’s marinade and Mike’s cooking technique. I couldn’t find achiote, despite checking three different grocery stores. It was still good without it!
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§ It was snowing on Tuesday and then 80 °F on Thursday. That just doesn’t feel like something that should even be possible.
§ We got three new female coturnix quails. They were mailed to us at about one month old, nearly their fully grown size. I was initially nervous about the idea of getting live birds shipped to me like this but I guess it’s pretty common, according to my local post office. They were all totally fine upon arrival and quickly adjusted to their new home.
§ I’ve discovered that my neighborhood has two bubble tea shops that recently opened within three miles of each other on the same street. I am certainly not complaining, but I would not have pegged my largely Eastern European retiree suburb as such a hot boba market.
§ Links
- Niche museums
- A list of programming playgrounds
- I especially like Wokwi for Arduino
- Also: Vercel’s new LLM playground
- Ruffle is a Flash Player emulator written in Rust
- Hue.tools is the best color utility I’ve found yet—it’s one thousand times better than Colorhexa and other similar sites
§ Recipes
The Chicago restaurant I miss most has got to be The Bad Apple. I finally broke down over the weekend and tried to recreate their Even Cowgirls Get The Blues burger. I used Kenji’s burger technique and then added blue cheese, arugula, caramelized onions, and hot pepper bacon jam.
It would certainly be better for my health if this meal didn’t turn out well but nope—there is no denying how good this was. I’m going to have to make it again ASAP.
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§ This week was a nice sneak preview of summer. Every day was in the mid-to-high-70s and sunny. Most days Caroline and I would be outside from the time we got home from work until sunset. We got a lot of yard work done—weeding, edging, expanding the garden beds. We went through five yards of compost in two days.
§ The seeds I planted a couple of weeks ago have all sprouted—first the tomatoes and tomatillos, then peas and basil. Finally, a few days later, all of the peppers popped up.
I also started some summer squash and groundcherry seeds. I am especially excited about the later after eating them for the first time last summer.
§ Until now, you have only known Winter Blog. Summer Blog will have much more gardening. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
§ Succession episode three!
I don’t think there is anything I can say that wouldn’t be a massive spoiler but… wow—watch it.
§ Links
- Animated children’s drawings
- AgentGPT is a browser-based implementation of Auto-GPT
- A full-body keyboard
- Floor 796
- LQML is a programming language for LLM prompting
§ Recipes
- We made pizza in the Ooni more times than I care to admit.
- Earlier this week, I purchased a small kaffir lime plant which prompted me to make Kenji López-Alt’s beef with basil recipe again. Adding the lime leaves made a bigger difference than I would have expected!
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§ Happy Easter
This was my first week back at work after a blissfully long spring break. It was honestly nice to see my students again—do I wish I had another week off, though? Absolutely.
§ I harvested and ate the oyster mushrooms I planted last week—they grew so much faster than I expected them to!
§ For the second time in just over a year, our washing machine suddenly decided to stop working. Home appliance shopping is always a pleasure.
§ Throughout the process of building my greenhouse, I keep going back to the daydream of owning some giant tract of land where I can build and experiment without concern for permits and zoning and neighbors. The freedom and space to create was one of the biggest motivators for me as I was moving back here from Chicago; it feels good to finally take advantage of that and I look forward to doing more.
I still want to visit Ryan Trecartin’s rural amusement park.
§ Links
- Prompt reducer
- Meta’s Segment Anything model
- The HTML Review
§ Recipes
- Spring orecchiette pasta with burrata
- Really good but quite difficult to make well with brittle gluten free pasta. I’ll certainly try again another time with a different brand of pasta.
- Moroccan chicken bowl
- Mushroom pesto pasta
- This is how I ended up using most of the aforementioned mushrooms. It was good, but perhaps it was not the best way to showcase them—the pesto was pretty overpowering.
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§ I got a bunch of seeds planted and set up under grow lights in the basement.
Here is what I am starting with: cherry tomatoes, Cherokee purple tomatoes, purple & green tomatillos, shishito peppers, jalapeño peppers, Thai chili peppers, snap peas, and Thai basil.
I am also starting some herbs and salad greens directly in the cold frame outside.
Finally, I am trying to grow oyster mushrooms for the first time. Stay tuned for how that turns out.
§ Despite deconstructing and moving the entire greenhouse to another location in my yard, I was able to finish the framing, the roof, and a couple of the walls. It has been really exciting watching this project finally come together. All that is left is to finish the walls and the doorway.
§ I have been rewatching Succession in preparation for season 4 and I found I am enjoying it much more this time around. Maybe give it another try if you are in the same boat.
§ Links
- Matt Webb’s rhyming AI clock
- Vocode is a library for ChatGPT voice chat
- The reverse Turing test
- Stable Diffusion infinite zoom
- Browser Agent and Run Wild
- Play Codenames with GPT
- How Aristotle Created the Computer
§ Recipes
- Baked feta pasta
- I am excited to make this recipe again in the summer once my garden begins overwhelming me with cherry tomatoes
- Miso glazed salmon
- Not a fan of this recipe. It could have easily been something I did wrong, though.
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§ Spring break update: one week down, one to go.
After almost a year of slow, puttering progress, I have finally made significant headway on my greenhouse project. The foundation in place, the primary window bay is complete, and the framing for two of the walls is finished. By the end of next week, my goal is to finish the remaining framing and the roof.
§ The team behind Rewind.ai (remember “lifestreams?”) has announced a new product called ChatGPT For Me. It is almost exactly what I would like to see Siri evolve into. Here is the issue: this announcement has made it clear to me that I wouldn’t trust any third-party company with such a privacy sensitive feature. Needless to say, I didn’t sign up for their waitlist. Nonetheless, I hope Apple is watching them closely and will eventually either Sherlock or acquire them.
§ Links
- Lilian Weng’s prompt engineering guide
- Chat LLaMA
§ Recipes
- Fish tacos
- Extremely good. Honestly, much better than the fried fish I made last week.
- Chicken adobo
- I didn’t anticipate how sticky the sauce would be which made everything a big chore to clean afterwards. It was really delicious, though.
- Chicken tikka masala
- This turned out to be much heavier and more filling than my other tikka masala recipe. They almost don’t share any ingredients in common, though, so I don’t know how fair it is to try to compare them.
- Roasted potatoes
- I had been meaning to make this for a while. It was quite good — was it worth all of the extra effort, though? Probably not.
- Lemon garlic pasta
- I had this alongside a very similar oyster mushroom dish. The mushrooms were great, the pasta was fine.
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§ Spring break! With a full two weeks off, I should put together a list of things I would like to work on during this time. Let’s see…
- General spring cleaning
- Get seeds started in peat pots
- Make some progress on the greenhouse build
Hmm… that is not too bad, actually. I will check back in on how it went in a couple of weeks.
Speaking of spring break, after a super mild Winter, we finally got some snow this week… ugh.
§ To help wrap my mind around the possibilities enabled by GPT-4’s multimodality, I got a copy of the graphic novel Unflattening by Nick Sousanis. I have not had a chance to read much of it yet but what I have read so far has been interesting. I hope to have more time to dive into it next week. Watch this space.
§ A guilty pleasure of mine has alway been watching “wilderness survival” television shows. Alone is the best example of this genre that I have seen in a long time.
The general premise is this: ten participants are dropped off alone (get it?) somewhere in the Canadian wilderness. They are only allowed to bring a few basic items — a tarp, fire starter, hand saw, etc. Whoever is able to stay out for the longest amount of time wins $500,000.
What makes the show good is that isn’t overly dramatized. It is more like a personal diary of each participant’s day-to-day experience as they build a shelter, forage for food, and explore the environment around them.
§ My Google Home pronounced the opera Gianni Schicchi like it was “Jonny Squishy.”
§ Links
- An open source web interface for the ChatGPT API
- Harry Whittier Frees
- Emergent abilities of large language models
- “An amusing toy, nothing more”
- Alpaca.cpp
- Jeff Kaufman on bushels
§ Recipes
- Rosemary beer battered fish & chips
- Delicious but quite a bit of work. It reminded me how infrequently I cook fish, though. I hope to incorporate some more fishy dishes into my usual repertoire now.
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§ Week ten! This upcoming week will be the last one before a nice, two week long, spring break.
I narrowly avoided catching Norovirus despite seeing a catastrophic number of cases at my school. Now we just need to see if I can make it all the way through this next week unscathed.
§ I started teaching my fifth grade classes with the Circuit Playgrounds. It is easy to forget how exciting some of the “basic” elements are when they are new to you. For now, at least, most of my students are endlessly fascinated by lighting up the RGB LEDs into animated sequences.
I have also been having a lot of fun working on a hand-drawn activity booklet for the Playgrounds. It is certainly still an early draft but feel free to check it out!
§ GPT-4 might be announced next week? The linked article alleges the defining new feature will be multimodality — the ability to generate images and videos in addition to text. Very exciting, if true.
My prediction is that GPT-4 will launch as a “ChatGPT Pro” exclusive feature. It would explain why the pro plan is so much more expensive than “gpt-3.5-turbo” API access despite them both currently interfacing with the same underlying model.
§ Kagi announced some updates relevant to what I wrote about them last week:
- They are raising their prices beginning March 15th. The new unlimited plan will be $25/month, up from $10.
- Their generative AI features will launch next week as well, with the ability to summarize a list of search results, summarize a single page, or “chat” about a page. These summarization features might just be a frontend for the OpenAI API, though.
I am still excited to try the new features but I am very unlikely to renew my subscription at the new prices.
§ I finished The Last of Us Part II. The game does have an ending after all. I tried replaying it but quickly stalled out. I guess that is the downside to such a story-heavy game.
§ Links
- A reverse Turing test
- Microsoft’s Visual ChatGPT (arXiv)
- Abusing Snap Circuits
- A LLaMA fork optimized for Apple Silicon
§ Recipes
- Pav Bhaji
- I will admit I was nervous about this one—boiling and mashing isn’t typically my preferred way to prepare vegetables. This turned out great, though, and will definitely become a regular part of my rotation
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§ I have been testing out the Kagi search engine this week, using it exclusively instead of Google. A few thoughts:
- It is expensive at $10/month. It will have to become either significantly better or significantly differentiated from Google for me to continue paying for much longer.
- Despite what I said above, the results are surprisingly good. On par or slightly better that equivalent Google results. I was expecting it to fall down on local results but no, those were totally fine too.
- I did not realize how frequently I use search engines until I started paying attention. Around 50 searches, give or take a handful, on a typical day.
- Kagi has fewer built-in widgets than Google and the ones it does have are less polished. One of the few times I went to Google was to convert milliliters to fluid ounces. It is great to be able to do these simple conversions in an interactive widget instead of a janky, ad-covered webpage.
The most exciting aspect of Kagi, to me, is that it is being actively developed, in the open, and taking direct feedback from its customers. And they are trying new things! Of particular interest to me are their upcoming AI webpage summarizer and AI search features. It will be interesting to see where Kagi is this time next year.
§ Speaking of search engines, I finally got access to Bing Chat.
- It is really nice to have a decent mobile interface for AI chat.
- It is slow, much slower than ChatGPT, but if that is the price to pay for its real-time web retrieval capabilities then it is worth it. In practice, built-in web search with citations is a more important feature than I anticipated. It goes a long way to give me confidence that answers aren’t hallucinated.
- The automatic response suggestion bubbles are occasionally convenient but also oddly unsettling. It is almost as if I am just a conduit for the AI to talk to itself.
- I was close to saying that Bing Chat is, more or less, a better version ChatGPT but that isn’t quite right. There are certain tasks, like editing and revising an email, where Bing Chat responded with generic email drafting tips while ChatGPT accomplished the actual task at hand.
- Remember that “milliliters to fluid ounces” conversion I tried on Kagi? Well, later on I realized that Bing Chat might be a better interface for these types of queries than any conventional search engine, and indeed, it totally worked and was the most convenient method overall.
§ The Last of Us Part II is a long video game. There have been three or four different occasions where I thought I was certain the game was about to end only to realize it had just barely begun. It would have been a short, but totally satisfying, game if it had ended after reaching the TV station in Seattle, there has been at least ten hours of gameplay sense then. I mentioned last week that I was enjoying Part II more than Part I, that definitely has not changed. I will be sad when I finally finish it, whenever that ends up happening.
§ Links
- Dan Shiffman’s The Nature of Code book rewritten for P5.js
- AI generated knitting patterns
- The camera-shy hoodie
- Critical Topics: AI Images class syllabus
§ Recipes
We have finally reached a week where I didn’t cook any new recipes. I tried to keep things pretty simple: I put together a couple of simple pasta dishes, got some takeout, and cooked that tikka masala dish again.
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§ I started playing The Last of Us Part II and have been enjoying it much more than part I. One of my critiques of part I was that the story ultimately comes down to a variation of “help the hero protagonist save the world”. The story in part II, though, is much more real, nuanced, and heart wrenching.
Throughout my playthrough of the first game I would always find myself wishing for an “open world” Last of Us game. Part II is, unfortunately, not that but we do get a small glimpse of what that type of game might look like during an extended mission where our character is tasked with exploring downtown Seattle; it was definitely my favorite part of the game (at least, so far).
§ There are now less than 100 days left until the end of the school year. It is too early to say whether it will feel like a breezy home stretch or a never ending slog.
§ I finally finished building a cold frame for the garden. I ended up repurposing a window that I had set aside for my (long overdue) greenhouse project. Now I need to decide what to grow in it. Maybe cabbage? Lettuce?
It also occurred to me that I should be able to easily repurpose the frame in the summer to use as a small solar dehydrator or a wind-proof cyanotype exposure box. Exciting!
§ Links
- Tinkering with hyperlinks
- ChatGPT for Robotics
- ControlNet
- Related: Scribble Diffusion and a HuggingFace demo
- Toolformer
- “In this paper, we show that LMs can teach themselves to use external tools via simple APIs”
§ Recipes
- Gluten free paczki
- These were admittedly more dense than normal paczki but still surprisingly passable
- Vegetarian Tikka Masala
- I used around half a cup of both coconut milk and heavy cream. This was really good. I’ll certainly make it again soon.
- Lemony chicken with Brussels sprouts
- I added potatoes which I think was a good choice. I have still not successfully gotten crispy chicken skin with any of these oven recipes. Not sure what I am doing wrong. Everything was still pretty tasty, though.
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