Author: AMH

Earlier this month I wrote about why it seems AI likes archivists. I sometimes feel bad about how old some books on my to-read stack are, particularly relative to their recency when I first bought them. But, of course, more books keep coming out so what can you do! I just got around to reading Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and I’m actually glad that I waited to read this until I, and many of my friends, are also academics in our 50s. As this article acknowledges, from a data science side the processes used for watermarking AI generated text are interesting … Continue reading Miscellanea, August 2026

Not a lot of links this month as I’ve been spending more time outside and more time reading books than being online. A highlight of the month was What We Can Know by Ian McEwan. Some reviews described it as speculative fiction, but I found those elements fairly minor. The general story revolves around a lost poem, shifting between a plot about literary scholars in the future searching for it and the story in our current time of the single time the poem was read to an audience at a party. The future scholars have access to the full digital lives … Continue reading Miscellanea, June 2026

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 … Continue reading Miscellanea, May 2026

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 … Continue reading Miscellanea, March/April 2026

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 … Continue reading Miscellanea, February 2026

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 … Continue reading Miscellanea, January 2026

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 … Continue reading Miscellanea, December 2025

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 … Continue reading Miscellanea, November 2025