TL;DR: I used MTurk and PostgreSQL to create vocab flash cards for Chinese restaurant menus, ranked from most common to least common terms. It’s an embarrassing scenario: you’re dining with friends at a Chinese restaurant when the server drops off the menus, including the non-English “secret menu”. All eyes turn to you, as the only […]

This animated cube contains the data in a 3D LUT: A Look-Up Table, as the name describes, is simply a large table of numbers. Given an input color RᵢGᵢBᵢ, you simply go to the corresponding row in the table and find your new color RⱼGⱼBⱼ. Each dot in the video is an RGB values (each […]

TL;DR: A Ricoh Theta S can be had for under $60 on eBay. Combined with pfstools, you can easily capture HDRI environment maps and merge them into OpenEXR images. The Ricoh Theta S is Ricoh’s cheapest 360-degree camera that has automatic bracketing functionality. I bought mine for about $60 on eBay second-hand. The image quality […]

The Argus C44 was not a particularly fancy camera. First sold in 1956, it was the latest and greatest (and last) in a line of Argus rangefinders. Most people who know the name Argus know it for the Argus C3, a boxy “everyman’s” camera, but consider that the very next year, Nikon released the famous […]

Right this minute, you can open up Krita and start a new document in linear ACEScg with either 16fp or 32fp encoding. And it works! You can open floating-point OpenEXR files or use the color picker to choose colors like RGB[3.5, 3.0, 1.5] where normally you would be limited to 0.0–1.0. You can paint in […]

Listening to episode #2326 of Car Talk, titled “Bill’s Chevy Maliboo-boo,” I noticed an interesting attribution for the Puzzler—it was “inspired by Jef Raskin” of Pacifica, California. The actual spelling is not given, but it seems reasonable that this is the Jef Raskin of Macintosh fame. This Car Talk episode is a re-run (or some […]

This is old thing I made that I never wrote about here: a thumbnailer for Procreate files. Procreate is a popular iPad drawing and painting app that has its own native *.procreate file format. Most people probably never have to think about this since you can’t access files directly on an iPad and PSD is […]

My Macintosh SE had the original 20MB hard drive still full of software, and although it was painfully slow (too much bloat, maybe?) I didn’t want to lose anything on it. That meant I needed to get a new hard drive that I could play around with. Since the Macintosh SE uses SCSI, I wanted […]

TL;DR: I turned off swap on my machine and it’s been fine. I haven’t been able to find clear guidance on whether I should use swap or not on my machine, and if so, how much to set. There are some arguments in favor of using swap that I’ve not been able to fully understand, […]

The below steps have worked great for me for cleaning up narration audio I’ve recorded. After running through this process, the audio should be ready to be assembled into a video, podcasts, etc. When recording: Maintain consistent distance between mouth and microphone Don’t record too loud (past maximum) or too soft (too close to noise […]