People who are close to me know that I have a bit of a thing for Productivity Software of all shapes and sizes. I’m usually a categorical thinker; I rely on notes (either my own or those others put up online) to acquire specialized knowledge in a variety of subjects, which I then bring to the table at work and at home. Therefore, I’ve had an on-again-off-again affair with various note-taking apps. ...

• tiddlywiki
• productivity

Over the winter, with some prodding from a friend in the neighborhood, I decided to get into making coffee from scratch. And I decided to jump into the deep end with Moka Pot (sometimes known as a “stove-top espresso maker”). Coffee brewing with a Moka pot. Moka pots are more popular in Europe, but can be found all over the world; they’ve been around since the 1930’s. The Moka pot is a stove-top coffee pot which approximates espresso while not costing a small fortune (as opposed to espresso makers which can be pricey). ...

• coffee

Disclaimer: All opinions expressed herein are my own and don’t necessarily reflect that of my employer. Caveat: I hold these opinions and make these recommendations specifically with respect to high school students (or casual hobbyists). I have a friend in my neighborhood who teaches high school computer science. When she happened to mention that she was trying a new curriculum for one of her classes, I asked her which programming language she was planning to use in her class. ...

• programming
• education
• python
• javascript
• java

Disclaimer: All thoughts here are my own; this is not an endorsement of any products, brands, or media channels. A little bit over two years ago, I got back into photography with my purchase of the Fujifilm X100T. (You can see many of my exploits with it over in my photo gallery; most of the older photos were taken with it.) What I loved about that camera – and still enjoy about it, really – is how “connected” I feel to photography using it. ...

• photography

A while back, I started tinkering with a new flavor of Lisp (for me): Scheme, using the ChezScheme dialect. A Scheme-compliant Lisp is one which (among some other bits) implements a faily minimal set of functions/macros; simple string manipulations, data structures and compound data types, basic math and I/O, and a fairly sophisticated function definition, error handling, and hygienic macro facility (a full summary of the language spec can be found here). ...

• programming
• scheme