The last hackathon I attended was quite a while ago. It was at MIT, which was fun, and I think the theme was bookish. I really enjoyed myself. My coding skills at the time were enough to contribute, but not so much that my team was really counting on me. I met some interesting people… Continue reading NASA hackathon
Neovim as a word processor
I recently posted about using Lua to configure my neovim setup. This has been altogether a big improvement. One thing that is easier is having separate .lua configuration files for each file type that I work with in vim. At first, this seemed useful for minor quality-of-life improvements, like setting differing default tabs for Python… Continue reading Neovim as a word processor
Committing to reading one academic article per day
This post is a bit of a departure from the library technology stuff I usually post about, but I feel that it is very much core academic librarianship, so probably relevant to some people here. I was listening to this interview with Eleanor Colla, where she talks (among many other things) about committing to reading… Continue reading Committing to reading one academic article per day
Lua
I’ve liked the idea of the Lua programming language since reading about it in Coding Places: Software Practice in a South American City. After reading that book, I put some effort into learning a bit of Lua syntax, but never really followed up beyond that. It seemed potentially useful but I didn’t really have the… Continue reading Lua
Further into Quasar
In my last post on Quasar, I was just getting started with the framework, basically taking components from the docs and trying them out for myself. Now I’m getting a bit further into it: I’m getting different components wired up to interact with each other. This is, of course, what Vue excels at, so I’m… Continue reading Further into Quasar
Firefox on a Chromebook
Google has caused a controversy these past few days by disabling uBlock Origin in the latest version of Chrome. uBlock is the most widely regarded browser-based ad blocker. “Disabling” may be the wrong word, as uBlock seems to still be partially functional. I won’t go into the details, because there’s plenty of more knowledgeable discussion… Continue reading Firefox on a Chromebook
On sometimes needing to explicitly copy Python dicts
I recently ran into a Python problem that stumped me for a bit. I was looping through a list of dicts and modifying the dicts slightly, then appending them to a new list. But it wasn’t behaving like I thought it would. Despite my loop being extremely simple and easy to step through mentally, my… Continue reading On sometimes needing to explicitly copy Python dicts
Linkblog
I’ve created a new linkblog on Mastodon, which is to be a feed of interesting things I’ve found on the web. There’s not much there yet, as I only started it, uh, an hour ago; so please be patient. But the point is that I come across tons of interesting stuff in my RSS reader,… Continue reading Linkblog
Summer, again
Summer is upon us at the Kingsborough Library! The fiscal year has ended, commencement is over, and things have quieted down in the library. I had been really busy with revisions for some papers, but those are wrapping up now too. Time to think about some summer coding projects: Implement Mind AR in our library… Continue reading Summer, again
#blogjune
This year, like in past years, a handful of librarians are doing #blogjune, which is a challenge to blog every day for the month of June. I think it is a wonderful initiative. Each year it is an opportunity for me to add some great new feeds to my RSS reader. It helps reestablish a… Continue reading #blogjune

