Titles on Netflix
A word cloud generated from Netflix viewing data, January-June 2023
A histogram of Netflix watch time by show, January-June 2023
NaMoGenMo 2023 report
Over the month of November, I worked on a project to create code that generates a movie.
My project this year: see most exciting parts of a movie right away, and leave all those pesky slow, boring parts for the end. Bottom Line Up Front.
What parts of a movie …
Thought about Cosmopolitan C
The Cosmopolitan C project just released v3.0 of the library. It's a technical marvel - compile a single binary that runs on 6 OSes, across 2 architectures, and also on bare metal.
It occurs to me - since BIOS is supported, one could probably compile Firefox with cosmoc, and get the …
Querying a power outage database
I have been tracking power outage data using a technique I learned about from Simon Willison called git-scraping. The outages are broken down by city, a stylized version of the data looks like:
1pm seattle: 300
2pm seattle: 200 tacoma: 150
3pm tacoma: 140 # implied seattle = 0 …TIL: converting JSON using git-history
git-history is a tool created by Simon Willison, that makes it easy to work with data collected via git scraping.
It expects data in a particular format - a flat JSON array. If your data isn't already there, you can use the --convert option to run any python code to make …
APSE updates
It has been a while since I wrote about APSE here, and over the past few months I've made a number of big updates to it in version 4.
Performance
First of all, there have been major performance improvements. Users can expect much faster (i.e. lower CPU usage) processing …
TIL: API for saving webpages in the wayback machine
The Internet Archive's Wayback machine is a way to save a copy of a public webpage at a point in time. There is an API to submit URLs for them to crawl, but the documentation I found is fragmented and some is out of date. Here is what I have …
video-to-sqlite
Inspired by Simon Willison's collection of sqlite tools, I created
a library for extracting information from a video, and storing it in an sqlite database. It's
called video-to-sqlite. You can also install it
via pip install video-to-sqlite.
You can use Simon's very nifty tool Datasette to explore the resulting DB …
Remapping keys in windows
Today I learned about Powertoys,, a utility application from Microsoft.
Caps lock isn't a very useful key, but it occupies very valuable keyboard real estate, sitting on home row. Some programmers like mapping ctrl to the caps lock key. Some keyboards even have hardware settings to switch them. Personally, I …
Disabling the extensions button on Firefox toolbar
In Firefox 109, Mozilla introduced a "unified extensions button". Normally, you can fully customize your toolbar, but this button cannot be moved or removed from the toolbar via the usual "Customize Toolbar" method.
However, it can be removed with an edit to your Firefox config. To remove it, open about …
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