I have long had a habit of bookmarking interesting blogs online then never reading them again. Part of setting up my own blog was the RSS feed, and with AI now, I thought it would be quick to take a folder of the ~2k bookmarks and turn it into an RSS feed so I could actually leverage all those links. Plus, I’ve seen all those cool projects where people re-use old electronics, and I wanted to learn how to do this. ...

Our cat recently got cut on his leg; being in an area without access to a vet, we were a bit unsure on the severity of the injury or what a naturally healing cut would look like over time (and how to identify the start of any infection). I couldn’t find a good clear set of photos online. Hopefully this can alleviate some concern or save a trip to the vet. ...

Croissant Club has been live for about 3 weeks now. It is a personal review blog for croissants. Huge traffic to it, obviously. Over the past few years I have developed an appreciation for croissants, and I thought this would be a simple funny project to look back on in a few years if I keep up with it. Backfilling the data has been a bit irritating, but luckily I’ve only had this idea for a month or two. ...

The Nespresso Vertuo Next we had would when initially turned on, immediately blink orange and not stop if you pressed it, sometimes it would switch to blinking orange twice, then pausing, over and over the application would various show and error that the machine was unlocked, or ready to brew never was the mobile application useful A couple tips that I struggled with from watching videos (and I saw also in the comments): ...

Signing up for an online, at-home test from Pearson VUE also means accepting their Facial Comparison Policy.1 Pearson VUE may use facial images collected during the testing process to develop, upgrade, and improve our online proctoring application in the event that automated facial comparison processes are determined to have resulted in a matching failure. In these cases, facial images will be reviewed manually to determine the cause and the results from such a review may be used to develop, upgrade, and improve our online proctoring application. - Pearson VUE Privacy Policy ...

I needed to identify and tag duplicate news articles from a Google Alerts RSS feed which filters the news through keywords while working on topic modeling of news coverage on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program since summer 2024. I also want to in the future group these on the surfaced SNAP News site I put together for these articles. After reading it for around a year, I consider duplicates / near duplicates to be an overall rare, but noticeable phenomenon. This post quantifies that feeling, explores why it occurs, and discusses some implications for topic modeling. ...

A slow pace, to be sure, but I have been adding to a dashboard of SNAP Performance Indicators over the past year, based on the SNAP data I’ve been cleaning and compiling over the past 2 years, and built with the Observable Framework library. You can view the dashboard here. No extremely tricky visualizations, but that is because I have found that these datasets that are simple tables by state each year mask the complexity of federal and state policy around implementing SNAP benefits. The dashboards become more and more text heavy, I realize, as I absentmindedly pull in context that I believe is valuable to know alongside each chart. Additionally, the recent changes to SNAP in 2025 have complicated any forward-looking projections. ...

Recently on YouTube I searched “population apportionment” to find that many of the recommended videos across different channels looked the same and appeared to be AI-generated, heavily automated, and extremely low effort. Of the 18 Recently Uploaded videos for the search, 10 of theme were all from this same “family” of channels: 2 to 3 minute, political-themed questions with an AI-generated man or women in the thumbnail, leading to an animated PowerPoint presentation. ...

With the Flashforge Adventurer 5m, my first 3D print is the Enclosure kit project. What follows are just a quick few notes from trying to figure this all out. After exploring some of the comments around the enclosure online, I decided to follow the DIY Minimal Enclosure from @design8studio, so thank you to them. I did forget to print the updated riser panels that is now linked on that project, however, and just used the project at that link. I would recommend to use the upgrades after printing the original, but they aren’t serious enough to make me want to print anything over again. ...

If you visited a .gov website during the 2025 government shutdown, you may have noticed alert banners on the top of the page that indicate a suspension or interruption of normal operations for the agency. Some agencies vary from the standard, however, and instead use this opportunity to deliver a political message. From a cursory analysis, of the 248 shutdown banners I could find from about 1,150 agency websites, 92 were political to some extent (37%).1 ...