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 ...

In September 2025, the Trump administration said it will no longer release the Household Food Security Reports. The USDA also put relevant employees on indefinite leave. This post provides context to the published press release based on the USDA’s own 2025 Information Collection Request renewal for the Food Security Supplement to the Current Population Survey, hosted on Reginfo.gov.1 These redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger. Is the survey redundant? ...

At our wedding, each table was named after a country we had either visited or had some relation to, as a personal touch instead of classic table numbers. To complement this, I built a small static website deployed on GitHub pages to learn more about the country with Claude Sonnet 4 through Github Copilot. Each table had small printed cards with QR codes linking to the webpage that attendees could scan and briefly view. I generated the 17 QR Codes manually for each table through Project Nayuki’s web implementation and renamed the downloaded file to the country. Thanks to them! I figured generating the code to do so would take about the same amount of time. This said, I fortunately didn’t have to ever change the URL of each page. ...

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. ...