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. I certainly haven’t tried them all, but I’ve tried a few, and had trouble sticking with them. And I’m here today to talk about my latest experiment, which is TiddlyWiki. ...

• 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). They come in a variety of sizes; and size does matter when it comes to Moka pot. Moka pots are sold in increments of “cup” sizes, where each “cup” corresponds with a single-shot of Moka “espresso”; exactly that much “espresso” must be brewed every time for consistent (or even decent) results. ...

• 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. She said that she hadn’t quite decided yet, but was leaning towards JavaScript, because it’s ubiquitous and (importantly!) runs well on her school’s Chromebook machines. Upon hearing that she was favoring JavaScript, I ran my mouth and recommend that she instead consider Python. Based on my professional experience with both JavaScript and Python, I feel comfortable stating that JavaScript has quite a few pitfalls in terms of learning, and has a non-trivial path to writing high-quality code. I also feel comfortable stating that Python has a number of educational virtues, and has a fairly strong path for students to learn to write high-quality code. ...

• 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. It has no extraneous bells or whistles, and puts the photographer in charge of the photographic trinity (aperture, shutter speed, ISO). It feels like an extension of the photographer. ...

• 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). I chose Chez Scheme because of its fascinating heritage as an industrial-strengh production-ready Scheme dialect, and because it seemed more traditional (being fully self-hosted); but that’s a conversation for another post. ...

• programming
• scheme