I’d like to take a popular class for 3d printing at the library, but I can’t get a spot. The ideal LLM assistant could check for class availability and sign me up, without me monitoring the page constantly. Unfortunately we are not there yet. Increasingly complicated attempts to sign up MLK Labs in DC offers apparently highly desirable 3d printing classes. These are posted 30 days out - but have been booked solid for the past few weeks. ...

If you sort a list of Texas counties by county name, the counties will not be in order by county number. Texas Center for Healthcare Statistics Every county in the United States has a FIPS code. These standards codes are usful for mapping and joining additional datasets. Texas state agencies do not bother with these FIPS codes. Instead, each state agency publishes data using their own county codes. The county codes of one state agency may not match other agencies’ county codes. I recently spent a few hours extremely confused by this, because I used the formula published by the Texas Department of State Health Services on data published by the Texas Health and Human Services, resulting in incorrect data. ...

The Trump Administration has a famously loose approach to data visualizations. If the data doesn’t match up with what you want, grab a marker and draw over the visualization until it does. Source: New York Times article showing hand-drawn modifications to official NOAA weather map The USDA released an announcement, USDA Invests Up To $1 Billion to Combat Avian Flu and Reduce Egg Prices, with two charts that made some questionable decisions worth discussing. ...

This is the obligatory moved blog from one framework to a different framework article. Wordpress.com asked me for $78 for a two year subscription. However, I dislike the mobile app and the text editing experience online. I also had difficulties editing any part of the website with the in-browser tools. Originally, I signed up because I wanted my focus to be on writing, rather than on coding, a blog. Simply purchasing the Wordpress plan let me test whether or not I wanted to keep up with writing posts at all. It did that, but I didn’t find that WordPress provided much additional value. ...

Close to 2 years ago, I had an idea for a mobile application that allowed users to store, submit, and manage tax reimbursements in foreign countries. For 2 years ago, I on and off worked on this idea and had a functioning version on my phone - and for nearly all that time, I never felt like the application was ready to release to potential users - and it doesn’t look like I’ll ever get it there. ...

The National Review in July published a short opinion piece in July ‘24 entitled How Congress Can Fix Food Stamps. Sam Adolphsen, the author, argues that the cost of SNAP benefits is too high. He comments that “about 17.6 million food-stamp recipients are able-bodied adults, and about two-thirds don’t work,” which leads him to list a series of Republican-led, state-level policies that require SNAP recipients to participate in job training or employment programs. These policy decisions, Adolphsen argues throughout the article, are “common-sense”, “wildly popular among voters”, “turning a handout into the hand up that [SNAP benefits were] always supposed to be,” and are “protecting taxpayers while promoting work over welfare”. ...

I re-deployed 8 Red Squares, a site that allows you to play through the 8 Queens Puzzle on different sized boards. Future enhancements I’d like to add are Timer (for each segment), and total running time until the users solves n=8. Better mobile support (board size 9 and 10 don’t handle small screens well). Foundational solutions checklist, e.g., if a user wants to find all possible arrangements (excluding symmetries and rotations). ...

I recently bought the Kensington Slimblade Trackball to replace the Logitech MX Master mouse that I have been using for the last year. This is the first time that I’ve used a trackball. A couple of thoughts worth noting that are either omitted from or in conflict with other reviews: The device is too large for me. It takes up almost an entire mousepad, and it is wide enough to force frequent movement between the trackball and the keyboard (I use a Glove80). I blame this partially on the desk, as it requires a roll-out keyboard holder that was not made to accommodate the split keyboard and the trackball. But for a trackball with “Slim” in the name, I expected it to be smaller. ...

What follows are a few takeaways from a recent app launch, where I had some successes and some things I had to fix. I also maintain dashboards for a wide set of clients on a different project that will be overhauled soon, and would like to apply these learnings during the redesign. The three guiding business questions for initial design are: How are we getting users? What our users are finding value in when using the application? ...

Site is accessible here, and the accompanying GitHub repository can be accessed through that site as well. It is based on a Google Alerts RSS feed, built every ~6 hours with Jekyll and GitHub Actions. Monthly commentary will be included on that site in the future. Immediate next steps are to add in more news aggregators as sources, to try and get articles that are missed. I would like to integrate Google Scholar as well, but it does not appear they offer an RSS feed or any simple method. Article display filtering is currently done on a keyword basis, which has been working fine, but would like to move to a classifier model. ...