Posts

Crash diet: finding spare bytes with request logs

2024-12-08

A recent Hacker News post caused a surge in traffic to my website, pushing me over my free-tier Firebase bandwidth limit1. This surprised me because the submission wasn't that popular - a measly ~40 upvotes. I've had traffic surges from HN before with no issue. Time to do some optimization!...

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Square Zero: hide silly messages in decorative borders

2024-12-04

I decided to include an Easter Egg in our New Years greeting this year1. If you managed to decipher it, you'd be treated to a retro mini-game based on the card. Can you spot it? If your eye was drawn to the border of the card, congrats. The white and black blocks encode a binary message. The bits run from the top left -> top right -> bottom right -> bottom left. Let me save you some pain...

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My "Year In Sport", v2

2024-02-10

Strava continues to hold my statistics hostage, so we're back again with another edition of my My Year In Sport (possibly the final edition). For reference, the first edition lives here, but we'll be pulling in the pertinent bits from last year as we go along. Don't worry, you don't need to have seen the first one to get this one....

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Writing every month

2023-12-27

Last year, Strava decided to make their end of year recap thing pay-to-play. This led me to writing my own script to pull the same kinds of reports together. and write about my accomplishments1. It just so happened that I posted that on January 31st, planting the seed of an idea: what if I could write a little something every month? I'd long wanted to write more regularly; maybe this is what I needed. February rolled around and I wrote a second post...

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Phocus

2023-11-29

If you're anything like me, the idea of teeing off your smartphone into the fucking sea is an exciting, nearly erotic proposition. I have fantasized about "Office Space"-ing this little demon rectangle so frequently and viscerally that I find myself clenching my fists and curling my toes even as I'm typing this out....

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How I became a vegetarian

2023-10-29

Eight years ago, Ricky Gervais convinced me to become a vegetarian. Not him personally, but something he said. At the time, he was tweeting about a dog meat festival, calling the practice cruel and unethical....

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Getting hitched on the cheap in Pittsburgh

2023-09-30

A few weeks ago, Libby and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. It's a little hard to believe its been five years already. At the time, we had just finished paying off a lot of student loan debt...

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The Activities Building in Riverview Park

2023-08-31

Five years ago, Libby and I got hitched in the Activities Building in Riverview Park. We rented it through the City of Pittsburgh Facilities Rental website. There wasn't a lot of information out there about the Activities Building, so I wanted to share the dimensions and some photos for anyone considering using this space....

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Can a 3D printed keyboard last three years?

2023-07-17

A few years ago, I set out to build my own keyboard. It was a project that taught me a lot about myself - my focus, my tenacity, my interests, my design sensibilities, and so on. The keyboard I built is called the Dactyl, and it combines basically every keyboard trend you can imagine - scalloped keys, split layout, ortholinear layout, etc. etc. ...

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How to get paid to learn anything

2023-06-30

One piece of advice I dole out regularly: "Trojan horse the thing you want to learn into whatever it is you've been asked to do." (THTTYWTLIWIIYBATD for short) I wanted to elaborate on that advice a bit today....

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How to register a Kei truck in Pennsylvania

2023-05-30

Kei trucks are a special designation of Japanese car that have very small engines (660cc) and dimensions (~10m^3). Tell 'em, Wikipedia. Whoever coined the idea of "creative constraints" should take a gander at Kei trucks; there's definitely an upper bound:...

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The Pittsburgh Dirty Dozen

2023-04-30

The Dirty Dozen is a Pittsburgh tradition stretching back forty years. In 1983, local legend (and 2x RAAM winner) Danny Chew set out with his brother Tom and some friends to ride some of the steepest hills the city has to offer....

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Running these streets

2023-03-10

Dr. Tom Murphy VII is a tediumcore performance artist based in Pittburgh with a YouTube channel. His formula is as elegant as it is effective - take a topic, pluck out an interesting nugget of truth, apply the commutative property, unrelentingly follow that reasoning straight into a wall. E.g. "x86 instructions can be one byte, and ASCII characters are ALSO one byte, so ...

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The unreasonable effectiveness of Google Apps Script

2023-02-28

Over the course of my career, I've found one tool in my toolkit more useful than any other. It's a service called Google Apps Script, a somewhat obscure suite of functionality provided by Google that allows you do, well, almost anything....

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My "Year In Sport"

2023-01-31

This year, Strava has paywalled the yearly recap "Year in Sport" recap they send their users. This is a real bummer because Last years recap inspired me to try and exercise every day in 2022 and I don't want to pay for Strava Premium....

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The captain's chair

2022-02-20

In the never-ending quest for perfect ergonomics, I hacked together wrist rests to attach to my computer chair and set my keyboard on. The end result looks a bit like the captain's chair in Star Trek....

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Riding a bike in Pittsburgh

2021-04-02

I get asked about biking in Pittsburgh a lot, so I wrote this post to point folks to who are looking to get started. Getting a Bike I recommend buying a cheap bike before investing in a nicer ride; you may find cycling isn't for you and it'd be a shame to deprive both your bank account and a sweet ride from full usage....

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Escaping Debt Mountain

2021-04-02

Disclaimer: I'm not a financial professional. If you've been given advice contrary to mine, take it. My advice might be bad for you. We're not filthy rich or anything. In 2010, student loan debt exceeded credit card debt in the United States...

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Cycling

2021-03-27

The wheel shrieked and I bucked over the handlebars, elbows-first into the concrete. With a groan, I peeled myself off the road, blossoming red patches on each arm stinging as street grime swept into road rash....

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Codepen in a URL

2021-02-22

OR: Data URLs are neat Data URLs are cool - embed things directly, cut out a round-trip for images etc, all very nice things. You've probably seen them tucked in a stylesheet somewhere, e.g.: .foo { background-image(url("data:...")) } ...

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Moving to a static site

2019-10-28

I made the first version of this site sometime in 2013; since then its lived a few short lives, first as a sort of portfolio, then a (neglected) blog, and now as a revived-but-soon-to-be-neglected blog....

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An unofficial Allegheny County real estate API

2015-11-02

NOTE: I get emails about this once in awhile; the whole dataset appears to be available here and this code is unmaintained and YMMV! Allegheny County makes available a searchable database of public records on parcels in the area. It's a handy resource for homebuyers interested in knowing a little more about the history of a home they're purchasing, or to do some comparison shopping when preparing to buy a home....

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