Blog
-
IRL HTML Is the Place For Your Most Hand-Written Websites
Last year before HTML Energy's HTML Day in San Francisco I had the idea to iterate on some of my previous projects like Whiteboard Email, and make both an app that would do OCR on HTML, and a website to host truly “hand-written” HTML. That became IRL HTML and it was good enough to make some very simple websites! The published website and the han… Read More →
-
Unravelling an iMessage URL Parsing Mystery
I have long been a fan of frontend-only websites, usually single-page apps, that are able to persist state in sharable URLs despite not having a database or a backend. One of the more complex projects I used this technique for was my Crossword Puzzle Editor, which stores an entire puzzle, both clues and correct answers in the URL hash. However, w… Read More →
-
A Blog Post With Every HTML Element
After learning a little bit more about web accessibility last year I had been exploring some of the less common HTML elements, and making changes to this website, like wrapping the text of the posts on this blog in Read More →
-
Alphabetic Internet Time: A Time Zone for the Internet
In the Fall of 2020 I participated in a 12 week batch at the Recurse Center. While I had a lot of previous experience working remotely, both before and during the pandemic, RC was the first time where I was communicating with people in more than 1 or 2 other time zones. I now work at a fully remote company, mostly spread over the 4(ish) U.S. tim… Read More →
-
How to Set Up a Raspberry Pi as a Home Web Server
Like most of the world, I’ve been spending a lot of time at home lately. Over the winter I was experimenting with building my own web-based digital tools, like an app to track articles and books I was reading. I initially thought I would need to buy hosting space to have the app accessible, but realized I mostly needed to use it when I was at home… Read More →
-
Participating in a Remote Batch at the Recurse Center
Participating in a batch at the Recurse Center is something that I’ve thought on-and-off about doing since I found out about it (then called Hacker School) sometime between 2013 and 2015, but it just never seemed like the right time to leave my job and its subsidized health insurance until I was laid off (what turned out to be) early on in the pan… Read More →
-
Making a Real-Time NYC Subway Map with Real Weird NYC Subway Data
Earlier this week the NYC MTA released a new digital-first map. The Curbed exclusive that announced its release accurately portrays it as a strange child of both the 1972 map design by Massimo Vignelli and the current “paper” map. One feature of the new map (though it’s harder than it should be to notice at first) is real-time visualizations of ea… Read More →
-
Week 1 at Recurse Center: Two Approaches to Learning
I just finished my first week as part of the Fall 1 '20 batch at Recurse Center. I tried to split my time between being social and building skills that I want to use for future projects. The social aspect of RC is interesting because this batch is being conducted remotely. My batch at RC started exactly 5 months after my last day in an office, an… Read More →
-
How to Download an Image from a Google Doc
For some reason Google hasn’t built in a way for you to download images in Google docs! There are workarounds to get those image files like using Google Keep, or downloading your whole doc as a .zip file, but these have always felt like too many steps. And this is something that people really want… Read More →
-
I Could Never Remember How to Make a Simple S3 Upload Feature So I Wrote It Down
Whenever I start a new web project there is an ominous, literal, figurative, "cloud" lurking on the horizon: Will this project get complicated enough to need to be connected to S3 for file upload? More often than I’d like the answer is yes, and at this point I’ve re-learned how to connect a Node.js app to S3 more times than I’d like. Rather tha… Read More →
-
Building a futuristic Record Player with Glitch and Raspberry Pi
Earlier this year I wanted to explore the new async/await functionality in Javascript so I started playing around with a project on Glitch (glitch.com) that would call one API after another, then generate new API call options from each cycle. I compiled a long list of potential APIs to use, but didn’t get past chaining together an API that will re… Read More →
-
Which Wearable Arduino Should I Use For My Sewable Tech Project?
This fall Mouse launched our brand new Sewable Tech Course! The course introduces learners to circuitry and electronics without the abstraction of a breadboard. In the final two projects in the course we use a wearable Arduino to prototype a DIY activity tracker. Sew-matic for DIY Wearable Goal Tracker from Mouse Create The big question we ran… Read More →
-
How we used a chatbot to teach writing and coding!
When Mouse moved into our new office in early 2015, we were excited to have space for our high school Design League program to spread out and work on assistive technology projects like 1derphone, a motorized headphone for a DJ with limited mobility. We also quickly realized we had the chance to reach more students in more ways by hosting flexibl… Read More →