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A very cool stop-motion short of a knitted human body built up from the inside out.

Hank Green’s Artemis II Photo Timeline with synced NASA audio is also very cool. (And his video about creating it.)

YESSSSSSSS – Windows 11 Insider Experimental Preview Build 26300.8493: “You can now change the position of taskbar on your screen. In Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > Taskbar Behaviors, you can select the side of the screen you want your taskbar on: bottom, top, left, or right.” The inability to put my taskbar on the left side of my display was by far the worst part of upgrading to Windows 11.

Trademark drama recently around Notepad++. It’s the text editor of choice for one of my classes, so I was interested in the flurry of news stories I saw about there finally being a macOS version. But the official Notepad++ site was posting that this was not an official or endorsed version. Things now seem to be resolved with the macOS version now being made available as Nextpad++ and greater clarity on the site about their independence from Notepad++.

Browser fingerprinting at Taken might be illustrative in a variety of our courses…

Game fun:

• Cursor Camp over at neal.fun: just a little pointer arrow having fun at the beach with their pointer arrow friends
• RNGdle: generate a random number, collect achievements
• I do not know enough Javascript to fully solve the JS Crossword

I finished off a shawl that I started on a long trip back in March: the Sunday Morning Shawl. I made mine in a sock weight yarn, so I did many more repeats than the pattern called for, but it also worked great as a travel project because the sock yarn means carrying only a few materials (I think the total shawl comes in at about 300g) and after the first couple repeats I had the pattern entirely memorized. The biggest downside was the insane number of bobble stitches I ended up having to do at the end, but it was worth it for how nice the edging looks. The end result is nice and light. I’ll keep it in my office as part of my collection of layers to ward off the excessive AC/lack of heat in some of the classrooms, but it’s also light enough as a summer wrap. It turned out a bit wider than I hoped, but I can wrap the ends around my waist for more of a “shrug” look, which is nice. Overall, I’m really happy with it!

Another merged report of March and April, because I spent much of March and a chunk of April traveling….

Fun and games:

• How many animals can you list in a minute (with time added for successful animal additions. I got to 109….️‍
• Outsmart the computer in this simple five-round betting game
• Wikipedia Gacha

Spring is the time to watch the Utrecht Fish Doorbell again!

Images used to illustrate words on Wikipedia in every language. Reload to get a different random word (or enter one of your own).

Extrapolated Futures Archive: Mapping real-world scenarios to the science fiction stories that explored them first

Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity: “In design reviews, instead of “have we thought about scale?”, try “what’s the simplest version we could ship, and what specific signals would tell us we need something more complex?” That one question changes the game: it makes simplicity the default and puts the burden of proof on complexity, not the other way around!”

Game Devs Reveal All Their Ugly Placeholder Assets Made Without AI, recommended for the examples and the clarity the devs have that about the merits of placeholders that are clearly draft content. We see students often spend way too much time on visual assets in the early prototyping stages.

It’s always nice seeing what my alums are up to, so I particularly enjoyed reading through a former student’s breakdown of a recent DMV text scam, including a bit of AI usage to help with de-obfuscation.

Some games journalists I’ve encountered in various places over the years have a new website Jank that already has some cool stuff on it, including a seven-part series where they interview game developers who have designed climbing games from within the game Peak.

I shared this Penny Arcade reacting to writing-assisted AI with several colleagues in English.

I suspect a lot of people encountered Hunter’s Atlantic article Stop Meeting Students Where They Are when it came out in early February, but I happened to encounter it right after reading Guzdial’s post on Defining Learner-Centered Design of Computing Education which made for a good pairing. The supporter at the bottom vs. supporter at the top description and idea that supporter at the bottom is more student centered (as compared to standards centered) is interesting. But, the problem of “motivating in the middle” (which Guzdial does touch on) is a challenge I’m thinking about a lot. Sometimes, that gets mixed up with students gaining clarity about what they really want as learners, as compared to what their family, high school, media, etc. have been telling them they should want. When is it okay to help a student recognize they want to be scaling a different wall than the one I’m prepared to help them up….

“PrintingFilms.com is a collection of vintage films that showcase the technologies and processes of printing, journalism, and typography.” Some are old silent films with narration cards, such as the “Hand Composition at R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co.” training film. I enjoyed the intro cards justifying why they would use film as a medium to provide training.

I anticipate Introducing Our Lord and Savior, The College’s New Strategic Initiative becoming a perennial classic for academics on par with It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers.

I often ask myself to think about designing systems to allow effective coexistence with AI. The HBR article AI Doesn’t Reduce Work – It Intensifies It closes with reflections on how to design organizational systems overall (not just technical systems) – what they call an “AI Practice” – to encourage long-term productivity while using AI.

Other writing on AI this past month that caught my attention:

• How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt – I don’t see why this issue of cognitive debt wouldn’t apply to non-code projects managed by AI as well
• The AI hater’s guide to code with LLMs (The Overview) and An AI haters guide to code with LLMs (The How-to) are a snapshot of the current state
• Simon Willison’s Writing about Agentic Engineering Patterns introducing his collection of “chapters” about agentic programming design patterns
• Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

In August 1983, you could take out a punny half-page advertisement for your C compiler that will prevent you from “retreating to assembler”….

I’m trying to invent a reason that I ought to print out and use the Neatnik Calendar, a single page calendar for the whole year. If I were teaching our JavaScript course I’d consider sharing the NeatoCal tool that creates one-page calendars (inspired by Neatnik Calendar) with a variety of configuration flags available.

I’ve been hearing from some alums recently about the things they’re finding they’re spending most of their time on – and the fact that it isn’t programming. A lot of what they say is echoed by this engineer’s reflections on their time at Google.

I’m not a manga reader, but this bookshelf adapter is a very nice piece of design.

Game Poems Issue #1

In AI news, Gas Town got a lot of attention in January (Yegge’s welcome post here  – at the very least it’s an interesting exploration of pushing agentic AI forward with a variety of roles, hierarchies, agent memory, orchestration, etc.). This article is a nice effort at identifying some lessons/themes learned from Gas Town over the past month. It closes with some interesting conversation about how much developers should ever look at, or touch, code. For the time being, this sounds right: “Framing this debate as an either/or – either you look at code or don’t, either you edit code by hand or you exclusively direct agents, either you’re the anti-AI-purist or the agentic-maxxer – is unhelpful. Because nothing is a strict binary. The right distance isn’t about what kind of person you are or what you believe about AI capabilities in the current moment. How far away you step from the syntax shifts based on what you’re building, who you’re building with, and what happens when things go wrong.”

Then at the end of the month Moltbook blew up, because now that we’ve killed Stack Overflow, the bots need to make their own. Unsurprisingly, Simon Willison has thoughts. The security community is rightly losing their minds and the bots agree.

Two good books that I read in January:

• The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz: When this came up in my Libby queue I remembered nothing about it beyond assuming it was a novel about literature. I think it increased my enjoyment that I didn’t remember the specific genre or reviews I had read of it. It opens appearing to be a novel about academia, but that quickly passes, and it’s much more about the process of writing. Very plot twisty.
• Culpability by Bruce Holsinger: Family drama plus AI ethics, heavy on the trolley problem. Though ultimately the book is much more about keeping secrets, of different kinds, for different reasons.

It took me a while to realize that this month’s featured add from Byte (still on August 1983) features what’s practically a kiddy-pool sized glass of champagne:

Upload a photo of your own laptop or browse through what others have uploaded at stickertop.art. The major designs appear to be minimalist, tesselated, and chaotic overlap. You can also play the game of seeing who else has the same stickers as you. I’m impressed not to have seen any asset tags on display.

I’m going to be playing 45×45 into the new year – basically an insanely scaled up Connections.

Our interfaces have lost their senses argues that our technology interfaces are flattening our experience of the world, illustrated with yarn-craft dioramas. Much of the argument goes back to the tension between removing effort and friction and creating deep cognitive engagement. I’m not sure the author’s proposal achieves the full vision they allude to, seeming to mostly stick to talking and typing at your computer. I expected a haptic component, based on the early focus on embodied interactions. And it still doesn’t seem to offer the flexibility/customizability of form of a desk drawer full of office supplies that make less of an assumption about how I will eventually use them or what task they’re even intended for. Of course, it’s just one experiment as part of a call for more experimentation. The driving assist interfaces in cars seem like the place we are most working on how to include things like tangible artifacts and ambient signals in our interfaces, and I’m reminded of the pushback against moving everything onto a touchscreen and the return, in some cars, to knobs and dials for some functions as well.

We had this exact Mastermind box growing up and yes, yes, yes: The Mastermind Box Cover: What the Hell Were They Thinking?

My big crafty project of the month was putting together a traditional Western Pennsylvania cookie table for a friend’s wedding reception. I decided to raid the family supply of tea sets and linens and put together a tea party themed display – while I know some people lean into the Christmas theme this time of year, I wanted this to clearly say “wedding cookies” not “Christmas cookies”. Lots of friends pitched in and I was really happy with how the vision came together, including the delicate teacups filled with biscotti. I also got to try out a few new cookie recipes including Lemon Thumbprints (which included my first time making lemon curd), Lemon Lavender Shortbread, and Raspberry Coconut Macaroons.

Messenger: Beautiful little browser game where you travel a tiny world delivering messages and packages. Fully playable in a short sitting.

Bringing this pair of stories to my security class this week as a fun palette cleanser before final exams: Cryptographers Held an Election. They Can’t Decrypt the Results. and Magician forgets password to his own hand after RFID chip implant. Life lessons that key management is hard.

Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models is also fun (and summarized by Schneier)

“The sight of a person dressed as Batman led to a nearly doubled rate of people giving up their seat to a pregnant woman. Over the course of 138 subway rides, researchers found that people who saw “Batman” standing near the pregnant woman were far more altruistic than those who did not.” (Psychology Today)

This video quizzing Harrison Ford on which of his lines from movies he could remember, out of context, was charming and reminds you how many movies he’s been in.

Didn’t run across this pumpkin basque cheesecake recipe until after Thanksgiving; feel free to invite me to an event where this would be a suitable contribution to the meal….

I don’t remember the frob, from fromco, from back when it was in production but I love this collection of disks, cabling, and chips for developing Atari cartridges using your Apple II.

Late September/early October brought a combination of work travel and midterm grading so we’re just rolling a couple of months of miscellanea together here rather than getting anxious about a self-imposed structure. So a bit of a longer miscellanea post than usual!

I liked House of Mirth decently well so I clicked through on the article It’s Okay to Hate The House Of Mirth and then the opening grabbed me with something interesting way beyond what one things of House of Mirth: “What kind of reader does this book want me to be? When you start with this question, you’re taking a first step toward getting something meaningful out of whatever you read.” Ultimately the article is about how you read something you dislike or resist and still engage with the text without having to find a way to “like” it. I’m unsure if this exact article would fit into a freshman seminar or similar course, but I can see this question being useful in many contexts.

I may have linked to The Day Shift Became Enter in the past, but it is a good read about how historical technology affects current technology. It also made me think about the ever-decreasing number of us writing for the web who have typed using a manual carriage return.

Maybe I’ll just have a monthly link to a new article about how great RSS is and why we should get back into RSS. I wonder if buzz around Really Simple Licensing will give RSS a boost as well.

Simple infinite scroller DOOMscroll riffing on the “DOOM” and “feed scrolling” associations of the word “doomscroll”. You can read about the developer’s experience making the game using AI and a vibe coding approach. It seems like a lot of the challenge was getting the sprites and visuals right.

Also enjoying The Collector from the two day Ludum Dare competition. It wasn’t obvious to me until it happened accidentally MANY rounds in that you collect the orbs by bringing them back to the center of the room

The HushCrasher taxonomy of video game production scope is a nice little analysis and proposes eliminating the idea of an “indie” game in favor of categories focused on measures of the amount of development work and resulting product in the game.

I started playing I’m Not a Robot pretty sure I wasn’t a robot but now I’m stuck at Level 18 and who knows….

Instead, try playing one of the 233 falling block games from Falling Block Jam 2025.

A three part series on Rebooting the Blogosphere looking at the impact social media has had on blogs and blogging practice. As I’ve been blogging more actively (“more” being a relative term) and minimizing my use of social media, it’s got me thinking about what it means to have followers or a network, how much that does or does not matter, and the ways social media has exploded the number of readers it feels like you have to have for on-line engagement to be worthwhile. I’ve been working on adjusting my viewpoint that if I write some stuff that is a useful record for me and a half dozen people enjoy or find useful, maybe that’s fine. The asynchronous nature of blog reading and writing is more appealing to me than social media conversations that demand daily engagement to keep up.

Classic NATO security posters are pretty weird. Sure this is classic:

But what is going on with these two? Why are we socializing with a parade of pantsless folks? Are the cats a security threat or simply judging our adherence to security procedures? Baffling!

And as always wrapping up with my Byte scan of the month, a frenetic pitch for how Cybernetics Inc’s flavor of COBOL will help you defeat your hostile office equipment.

This is the first I’ve come across the Tiny Awards recognizing “the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web”. Voting for 2025 will be over by the time I post this so we can check in who the winner is. The 2024 winner One Minute Park is a collection of 60 second videos of parks from around the world (they’re still accepting submissions for more parks). It’s much more appealing and relaxing to get sucked into than the similar-in-words-only experience of getting stuck in an endless stream of videos on social media.

Daily web game of the month: Clues by Sam. Just a little daily logic puzzle where you have to deduce which people in a grid are criminals or innocent based on statements like “The only criminal in row 4 is Logan’s neighbor.” or “There is only one innocent between Eric and Susan.” I like that the game knows what facts you can and can’t logically conclude yet from the available statements and won’t let you make guesses. (Or, you can try to guess, but rather than telling you if you’re right or wrong, it calls you out on guessing without giving you any info.)

Michael Chabon’s substack article about his attempt to get hired to write a Fantastic Four movie was interesting in its own right AND made me realize Michael Chabon has a substack I should be reading AND made me go look what Michael Chabon novels are out there I haven’t read yet.

I’ll still be scanning pages that interest me out of my old physical copies of Byte magazine, but if you’re actually interested in their content you can scroll through this searchable visualization of every page of the publication. The interface includes the ability to directly link to a specific page or to generate PDFs or PNGs of pages of interest. For example, the image below is viewable in context here.

My favorite book (well, novella, but I’m counting it) that I read this past month was Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz. It’s described as a “cozy, near-future” story about robots opening a noodle shop, and it really is surprisingly cozy, given the semi-dystopian hurdles the robots are up against.

Best new recipe I tried this month, for a friend’s potluck housewarming, was smitten kitchen’s french onion baked lentils and farro. Definitely take the time to carmelize your onions all the way down, and I’d recommend a light hand with the liquid to start until you have a sense of how absorbent your lentils and grains are.

I really enjoy this ad for computer-printable forms. Why are Einstein and Gutenberg both so grumpy? Wouldn’t a company offering faster ways to print many documents want to be associated with Gutenberg? What’s the weird rug under the computer? Can you really just call up your “local banker” and ask them for these forms?