Links

Image Dithering: Eleven Algorithms and Source Code 🌐

Approachable introduction to a useful image processing technique; the concept of error diffusion seems like it could be applied elsewhere too

Recycle Cardboard into Anything with 3D Printing! 📺

Tutorial for converting used paper products into essentially a lightweight variety of engineered wood using 3D printed presses

Chuck Jones - The Evolution of an Artist 📺

Video essay describing the process and artistic philosophy of Chuck Jones, a prominent director of Looney Tunes and other cartoons in the mid-20th century

The Planets Today : A live view of the solar system 🔧

Map of the solar system; provides a more helpful perspective for amateur astronomy than only consulting tables of rise and set times

The Sector: the calculator of the 1500s 📺

History of a simple and ancient measuring tool based on clever proportions; predecessor to the slide rule

The Shell Hater’s Handbook 📺

A defense of the Unix shell as a useful language and tool, rather than an arcane jumble of hostile syntax; definitely learned some stuff from this talk, including the fact that in most shells, you can type CTRL+X, CTRL+E to move the current command buffer into your $EDITOR to make changes; this is helpful for transitioning commands to programs

SpamChannel - Spoofing Emails From 2M+ Domains & Virtually Becoming Satan 📺

Talk from DEF CON 31 about a vulnerability in MailChannels, a popular transactional email service; brought up a collection of bad memories from when I used to run my own email server; email security is a mess, and I’m often surprised that it works at all

KiCanvas 🔧

Solves a problem I’ve run into before but didn’t think would have such a lovely solution; sometimes I find a repo with a KiCad project, and I want to examine the schematic or PCB; to do that I’d normally have to clone the repo and open it, but that’s a lot of extra steps for just casual browsing, and I usually skip it; this tool takes a GitHub URL and displays the schematics and PCBs in the browser; quick and easy

Then Next Comes 📺

Speedrun to the end of history

Programming with Math | The Lambda Calculus 📺

Delightfully slow introduction to the topic; I appreciate the long pauses for thinking

IMG_0416 🌐

Turns out you can type IMG_XXXX into YouTube and open a portal to the early 2010s; I tried this for a bit but quickly felt like I was being a creep, although I can’t explain why

HyperPhysics Concepts 📚

Old-school knowledge graph for physics with useful calculator widgets distributed throughout; helped me many a time in undergrad and still turns up in my search results from time to time; I should really index this locally so I don’t lose it when it eventually goes down

Voice of America Coverage Analysis Program (VOACAP) 🔧

Have you ever wanted to use software to estimate radio propagation so you can deliver propaganda to international audiences efficiently? Well, now you can

geohack 🔧

Type in any lat/lon and generate links to tons of mapping services at that location; surprisingly fun to put in a random place and see what comes out

MMAcevedo 🖌️

A Wikipedia page that fell through a time portal and ended up on our ancient internet

Implementing Neural Networks on the “10-cent” RISC-V MCU without Multiplier 🌐

Title mostly covers it; impressive example of doing more with less by applying a good understanding of the problem; also see the follow-up post that’s even more ambitious

Wavelets: a mathematical microscope 📺

Introduction to a clever technique that extracts some frequency information from a signal while preserving some of its information in the time domain; found this while researching for a future project; curious how it compares to the short-time Fourier transform

minimodem — general-purpose software audio FSK modem 💻

Unix-style tool that sends/receives beeps and boops that carry data; be sure to check the demo videos linked on that page

BuiltWith Technology Lookup 🔧

Answers questions like “what web stack is GSG using? … ah, looks like Apache, LetsEncrypt, and Hugo”; also lets you download lists of websites that use particular technologies (!); this is fun to poke at and seems useful for pentesting or gathering stats; I don’t think there’s anything here that you couldn’t figure out yourself with other tools, but it’s in a convenient package

“Low-Resource” Text Classification: A Parameter-Free Classification Method with Compressors 📃

1. Run gzip on some inputs A and B separately
2. Run gzip again on the concatenation AB
3. Compare the lengths of all three outputs to determine how similar A and B are

If A and B are similar, then concatenating and then compressing them should result in an output length that’s similar to those of A and B individually; this has been applied to MNIST with decent results

Loudness control in pianists as exemplified in keystroke force measurements on different touches 📃

I referred to this paper a lot while designing and building the solenoids for my self-playing piano project; I appreciate the attention the authors show to an area that some might overlook