Miscellany

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

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 … Continue reading Miscellanea, September/October 2025

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 … Continue reading Miscellanea, August 2025

Detailed photo essay of making the table for the G7 summit – nice details about the challenges with the oak veneer and the design for hidden power and data ports that can be updated as technology evolves. I am unspeakably bad at Hued. I have bad intuition for how hue and saturation change a color, and for guessing what the hint text is referring to. Turning on fine-tune mode with the crosshairs in the lower left helps a bit. This got covered all over, but here’s Soundslice’s accounting of their decision to add a feature to their software because ChatGPT … Continue reading Miscellanea, July 2025

This video made me laugh enough I watched it twice, and then a bunch of others from the series, which were also good but not as funny as How to Fix Grocery Stores from Hank Green. This made the rounds thoroughly, but this is exactly how I consumed the weather forecast for years and I would absolutely install a widget that ran this on my phone. Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Aviation is a variation on the falsehood programmers believe about names. While the names piece is great, the aviation variation is interesting because, on its surface, air travel is an … Continue reading Miscellanea, June 2025

April got away from me with the end of the semester (earlier than usual with a new academic calendar for us), so early May has been spent catching up all over the place. Looming summer means more time to read. In preparation, I browsed the new-to-me Literary Hub on grading breaks. Ask a Ninja is back! Long read The Department of Everything: Dispatches from the telephone reference desk – excellent reflections on the importance of knowing how to find information and how to frame answerable questions. An even longer read on the hidden house in the IBM ascii character set … Continue reading Miscellanea, May 2025

Going up a couple of days late, here’s some things I came across in the past month…. A new favorite comic from SMBC There is a variety of content at the ELIZA Archaeology Project site including the complete code of the text generation system with a description of the MAD language it was written in, a blog on the software archaeology process of recovering it, and a running version you can try out. The Calm Tech Certification (IEEE Spectrum article, project site, book) is a really appealing idea, both for consumers and as a tool for encouraging developers to think … Continue reading Miscellanea, January 2025