Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Building a Cosmic Coffee Table

Now that I finally have a couch (and am living in an apartment big enough to comfortably fit one, unlike when I was in grad school), I decided I also needed a coffee table. Instead of just buying one, I … Continue reading

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Pre-calculated Line Breaks for HTML / CSS

Although slowly improving, typography on the web pages is considerably lower quality than that of high-quality print / PDF typography, such as that produced by LaTeX or Adobe InDesign. In particular, line breaks and hyphenation need considerable improvement. While CSS … Continue reading

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A Case Study in Product Label Regressions

Sometime last year, the Shop & Shop and Giant (of Landover) grocery store chains began introducing redesigned packaging for their store brand products. The two chains share a parent company and share branding, so the labels only use the shared … Continue reading

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Discernibility of (Rainbow) Colormaps

Earlier this month, the Turbo rainbow colormap was released and publicized on the Google AI Blog. This colormap attempts to mitigate the banding issues in the existing Jet rainbow colormap, while retaining the advantages of its high contrast; note that … Continue reading

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Light Bulb PCB

As part of a Halloween costume (I was a “bright idea”), I designed a light bulb PCB, which was mostly just an excuse to try out PCBmodE. It consists of seven addressable RGB LEDs, an ATtiny85 microcontroller, an ambient light … Continue reading

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