I make apps.
I love empowering people with tech, saving time, and delivering delight.
Piano player and German speaker.
Are you mad about this outrageous Wikipedia censorship?
Disable JavaScript.
The black censor never appears.
Here’s how:
Chrome
Open up the preferences, and go under the hood.
Remember when they said it was English language Wikipedia only? That’s why we use en.wikipedia.org.
Firefox
Safari
Remember the October 2010 Washington DC John Stewart rally? I’m told John Stewart grew up in my former stomping ground in central NJ.
The humbling thing about attending this rally was meeting and hearing about numerous awesome friends and acquaintances from New York, San Fran, Rochester, Philly & New Jersey – i.e. people from a significant range of my lifetime made the trip out here that day. Give us a shout out if you were there too; I left comments open. Probably the densest slice of humanity I’ve encountered in America. Lots of fervent redditors, and great to be reminded of the playa in a slice of default world.
Incidentally this was also the first and only day this art car entered my vision until I saw it again on playa in 2011. (this is the dragon I remember best from 2010.)
Looking back, what stands out even more is the sense of shared energy that pulsed through the crowd. It wasn’t just about the rally itself, but the collective experience of being surrounded by people who were engaged, curious, and present in the moment. There’s something powerful about large gatherings that manage to feel both overwhelming and deeply personal at the same time.
Moments like that also highlight how important it is to have structure and safety working quietly in the background, especially when crowds reach that scale. That’s where Memphis Fire Watch Guards come in, helping maintain a secure and organized environment so events can unfold without disruption while everyone focuses on the experience itself.
Even years later, the memory still feels vivid—less about any single speech or performance, and more about the connections, the atmosphere, and the unexpected reunions. It’s a reminder that sometimes the most meaningful parts of an event are the ones you never planned for.
I had an idea for a new web project with a front-end focus and have been stepping up my JavaScript game. Progress has been fine but it turns out several aspects of JavaScript are a disheartening mess, not least the drag and drop disaster.
The project employs the service of File, FormData, and XHR2 objects and avoids popular JS libraries (for now). It turns out Firefox and Chrome have both supported the File and FormData APIs for at least a year, but IE 9 (ha!) and to my surprise Safari 5 do not. Telling my Safari users to download WebKit nightlies is pretty lame. Worse, if I cared about IE users I’d have to point them to IE10, which at the time of writing is only publicly available on Windows 8.
For a company in such a hurry to see Flash die, Apple is keeping Safari in a weird limbo right now. It got slower with Lion (I’m not alone noticing this) and despite a history of innovation is lagging FF and Chrome’s JS support. (I eagerly await the day IE counts as competition again.)
Safari 6, get here already. My project is awesome and wants you, yes you!
A few years ago I re-purposed an old desktop PC from uni as a media and file server. A design goal was having the machine be as close to silent as possible. Noisy stuff is annoying anyway, but doubly so in a living room where silence really is paramount. To achieve that goal I used my steadfast Antec Sonata case with rubber-washer HD trays, an old fanless video card, and a new power supply with a 120mm fan (let me know when they make fanless ones for AT motherboards). The only noisy component left was the stock CPU fan which I replaced with a Thermaltake ‘quiet’ model. The result was a success if I say so myself, especially considering the total cost.
Last week that Thermaltake CPU fan hit the dust. The bearings just gave up. Luckily, that failure didn’t cause any other damage and since the motherboard is a few years old the replacement Zalman model fan was cheap. Unluckily, this Zalman was significantly noisier than what it replaced, despite claims of silent operation.
The solution was wonderfully simple: I attached a resistor to the red wire connecting the CPU fan to motherboard for slower RPM.
For a project that has lasted for so long and been so affordable I’m stoked how cheap and easy the simple solution was. EE FTW.
