Archive
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2023-05
24, TOTP: It's not Google Authenticator : On data portability, how those six-digit two-factor authentication codes work, and why we should stop advertising them as ‘Google Authenticator.’
2023-01
14, Rawwwwwr, let's talk about Wavosaur : In which I talk about a straightforward donationware waveform editor, Wavosaur.
2022-12
29, Some things I have been meaning to write about but haven't : In which I briefly talk about the Steam Deck, a Brother label maker, reWASD, and an old Sony speaker.
2022-09
03, Revisiting the travel chess computer : In which I talk about the reasons that dedicated chess computers existed, the reasons they only exist as niche items anymore, and my experiences with a 1994 pegboard chess computer.
2022-07
21, A doughnut in my ear: the Sony Linkbuds : Having been listening to music on the Sony Linkbuds nearly exclusively for the past couple of weeks, I dive deep into my feelings about them.
2022-06
20, The low end of the high end : On the market segment that defines my daily driver Walkman, the Sony WM-DD11
2022-03
23, Commercial music media, a tier list : Ranking all of the physical media that I’ve bought commercial music recordings on.
2022-02
02, On Wordle and Fragmentation : The Gray Lady bought the word puzzle and now it’s dead to me.
2022-01
16, 2020 & 2021 Media retrospective : Some music, video games, and movies that I enjoyed that were released in the past two years.
2021-12
08, A dismal sea of color : On the demise of custom monochromatic displays like VFDs.
2021-10
31, Experiencing Tetris Effect : I’m absolutely in love with Tetris Effect .
2021-09
16, A few of my favorite: Woodcased pencils (with erasers) : In which I talk about a handful of pencils that I like, and the reasons that I like them.
2021-08
08, On Heathcliff and hackish image manipulation : In which I talk about both the ethics and technical details of my Twitter account which posts a mashup of a random Heathcliff panel and a random Heathcliff caption.
2021-04
22, Sony's resin tubes : Ostensibly a review of the Sony LSPX-S2.
2021-03
08, You need a Torx T10 driver to disassemble the 8BitDo Arcade Stick : Notes on customizing the 8BitDo Arcade Stick.
2021-02
26, The voice of a wizard hacking away : I was posed with an interesting challenge for a zine about wizards!
2021-01
13, Artwork of the Channel F (external) : Links to a piece by Kate Willaert diving deep into the artwork of the Fairchild Channel F.
07, Two slim keyboards : Nerdy keyboard talk. More specifically, I compare the Keychron K3 with Keychron Slim Optical switches and the Morgrie RKB6801 with Kailh choc switches.
2020-12
29, Digirule 2U : On a ruler-sized binary single-board computer that harkens back to the dev boards of yore.
2020-11
25, Medium/Message: Music and Medium : On pieces of music that exploited their release media in novel and/or unique ways.
09, Rediscovering Compact Cassettes : Well, it’s 2020 and I’m listening to cassettes again.
2020-10
04, Super Mario Bros. 35 : On Nintendo’s wild new battle royale implementation of Super Mario Bros.
2020-09
30, Replacing a fan
21, Don't turn off the lights : On a spoopy little visual-novel-esque game that managed to invigorate and inspire me.
2020-08
11, I bought another four-function calculator : On a modern recreation of a classic Casio game/calculator.
2020-07
30, Learning opsec with Nermal : In 2016, Paws Inc. made some comic books about cybersecurity. And in 2020, here I am briefly discussing one of them.
11, Monster Care Squad : This game rules, and the creators are doing incredible shit. Check it out.
2020-06
16, All of the Windows Explorers, together at last (external) : Link to a post by Gravis chronicling every version of Windows Explorer from Windows 1 onward.
09, Hollow hearts : This post is about like buttons, not potatoes.
04, Dismantle each and every police force. (external) : Link goes to the donation page for Black Visions Collective. Donate if you can.
03, Experiencing the Casio S100 : For whatever reason, I acquired Casio’s bizarre $300 showpiece of a basic calculator.
2020-05
24, The 1st Dictionary With Attitude : Remember that time Jim Davis teamed up with Merriam-Webster to make ‘Garfield’s Favorite Dictionary?’
19, Yet another baffling UX decision from Adobe : Adobe inexplicably changed a keyboard shortcut in Acrobat, breaking years of muscle memory. I hate this company.
05, A test of three zippers : Trying out three archive/unarchive applications for Windows.
03, Geometry Expressions
02, Quarantine food: 7DAYS Croissants : In which I eat some foods while in isolation and… well… write about them.
2020-04
22, Backward compatibility in operating systems : On the respective values in the differing approaches between Apple and Microsoft regarding backward compatibility.
05, Open Mic Aid (external)
2020-03
16, Solving puzzles using Sentient Lang : In which I briefly explain a puzzle that I opted to cheat at, and how I cheated using a fascinating language, Sentient.
09, Caltrops : An initial set of thoughts on a simplistic d4-based TTRPG mechanism.
2020-02
26, Unicode bloats and emoji kitchens : On the perception of Unicode becoming bloated, and Google’s emoji-masher-upper of a keyboard.
06, On Animal Crossing and native UX
2020-01
27, On the Kensington Expert Wireless (and other pointing devices)
23, The new mobile Tetris is a travesty : A new company is in charge of Tetris on mobile platforms, and they have entirely botched the job.
17, Tetris Microcard vs. Tetris Micro Arcade : On two handheld Tetris games — one quite good, the other quite poor.
07, 2019, a personal video game retrospective : On the video games that I loved that were released in the garbage year of 2019.
2019-12
26, On computers, particularly the HP Spectre x360 : Likes and dislikes of my new computer.
11, (Finally) playing Pokémon : I played a Pokémon for the first time!
06, Cats, dogs, and birbs (according to my phone) : Some things that my phone thinks are cats, some things that my phone thinks are dogs, some things that my phone thinks are birds. Also an illustration of a bird.
04, On the dot org situation (external) : Read what the EFF has to say about the sale of the .org top-level domain.
2019-11
21, Garfield Kart: Furious Racing is out, but whatever : In which I review Garfield GO for some reason.
2019-10
30, IDBiG: Implicitly-Dimensioned Binary Grid
24, Keyboards, old and new : On the subtle differences between the QWERTYs of the typewriter eras and the QWERTY of today.
22, Objects : A wee TTRPG, or a shell of an idea of one, about the things in your room finding one another.
14, I am writing about the goose game : My favorite little details from my time as a horrible goose.
2019-09
26, Hey go check out Disposable Heroes on Kickstarter (external) : My pals at Sandy Pug Games have a really cool PbtA game on Kickstarter right now, maybe go look at it!
12, An accidental PDF bomb : On a weird, infinitely-nested pair of tags in a PDF file.
2019-08
30, Solo: Islands of the Heart : On an odd little introspective puzzle game.
26, Font changes, hopefully no major issues : I’m hosting the fonts I use on this site now. That’s about all this post says.
22, The poetics of TTRPGs : On TTRPG design that fills me with a certain sense of poetry.
2019-07
23, WTPDF: Role Mapping : A brief explanation of role maps in tagged PDFs and why you should care.
2019-06
25, Changing and updating the brhfl dot com template
07, Acrobat: The disparity of tagging methods : On the various quirks with the various methods of tagging PDFs in Adobe Acrobat.
2019-05
31, (Retro) Single-board computers : In which I get soppy over the most hackish of old microcomputers, and discover a modern analogue.
23, MINOL and the languages of the early micros : On MINOL, a very small BASIC-inspired language written by a high-school junior in the ‘70s.
17, Time again for anger : Fuck everything, here are some reproductive rights groups to donate to.
06, VTL-2: golfing and preservation : On a minimalist programming language from the mid-1970s, and whether or not we even care.
2019-04
23, The unsettling meows of a Garf : A bunch of weird thoughts about a weird game about an orange cat.
17, VT100 Line Drawing : On using VT100 control codes to print line drawing characters in dc
.
09, Allocations : On partitioning and formatting a thing.
2019-03
26, Baba is Turing Complete (external) : External link to Matthew Rodriguez’s demonstration of Turing completeness in the video game, Baba is You .
10, The avocado with legs : On Avo , a peculiar little adventure from Playdeo.
01, On Twine (and my first Twine project) : On Twine and making my first weird little Twine experiment, yum yum you are a bread .
2019-02
15, Tetris 99 : Early thoughts on Arika’s new battle royale Tetris for the Nintendo Switch.
11, Build your own dial-up ISP in 2019 (external) : External link to an explanation of how to set up a dial-up ISP in one’s home.
10, Curtailing Amazon purchases : On my personal recent issues with Amazon customer support, and how core aspects of the experience seem to be decreasingly consumer-centric.
2019-01
30, RIP, Wii Shop Channel : On a sad day for the Nintendo Wii
04, Be gone, 2018 : A bunch of stuff I liked that came out in 2018.
2018-12
23, 365 Numbers : In which I potentially learn about numbers on the daily.
10, Site updates, supporting open source software, &c. : Various bits about the goings-on of my blog, as well as a handful of open source projects that help keep the thing running (and how to support them).
06, "I don't know what to say" (external) : External link to a github issue thread regarding an interesting bit of malicious code.
03, Portal, Commodore 64 style : Brief thoughts about Jamie Fuller’s Commodore 64 adaptation of Portal .
2018-11
11, The VCSthetic : On the chip behind the typical aesthetic of Atari 2600 games.
2018-10
26, A few of my favorite: Tetrises (Tetrii? Tetrodes?) : On the versions of Tetris that I routinely pull out.
23, Get angry again (Unicode edition) : In which I discuss the erosion of civil liberties but also UTF-8, I guess.
16, Honey walnut, please : A bagel-fueled ramble on the difference between emoji glyphs and the Unicode Standard.
08, JPEG Comments : On an early ‘90s attempt at DRM via commenting image data out of JPEGs.
2018-09
25, Americana : On an upcoming tabletop RPG, and the experiential details that make it stand out to me.
18, Solo play: Cardventures: Stowaway 52 : On a choosable narrative presented via cards instead of book.
01, Sea Duel : On Sea Duel , a rather complex ‘programming’ game for the Milton Bradley Microvision.
2018-08
29, Oh-so-many colors : In which I struggle with colorful things.
22, Time itself (external) : Article on SWLing Post about our government shuttering the nation’s time-synchronizing radio transmitters.
19, 256 pixels : On successfully rebuilding a functional Milton Bradley Microvision, and playing several games in their 256-pixel glory.
16, Accessibility myths: The misguided war on merged cells : On why ‘don’t merge cells’ is bad accessibility advice.
06, Lava lamps as HRNGs (external) : Interesting article on Wired about Cloudflare’s use of lava lamps as hardware random number generators.
03, Amplitude Modulation : On the absurdity of proprietary digital streams taking over AM radio.
2018-07
30, DuckDuckGo : On the plausibility of using DuckDuckGo (a search engine that isn’t Google) as a primary search engine.
25, HTTPS and categories : I turned on HTTPS and fixed some categories. This is honestly a pretty boring post.
16, What pros? : On my lack of understanding regarding the professional markets Apple is targeting.
11, Another World : Reminiscing about a game in which you die, die, and die some more.
03, Part Time UFO : On HAL Laboratory’s adorable first entry into mobile gaming.
01, Kakoune : In which I experiment with a modal text editor that stands out by merely not being vim.
2018-06
25, Solo play: Coffee Roaster : On Coffee Roaster ; an excellent bag-building game for one.
05, Revisiting my Linux box : On bringing my Linux laptop back up to speed.
2018-05
30, Accessibility myths: The deceitful panacea of alt text : On the pitfalls of immediately jumping to ‘alt text!’ as an accessible data presentation solution.
16, decolletage.vim : On my new vim color scheme, which looks a lot like this blog.
11, Examining 'my .vimrc' : On checking out the .vimrc files of others.
02, Reversing Markdown : In which I muse over the pains of converting from (something) to Markdown.
01, Accessibility myths: The delusion of accessibility checkers : In which I gripe over how positively broken so-called accessibility checkers are.
2018-04
27, A few of my favorite: Slide rules : In which I discuss a number of impractical mathematical devices.
24, netrw and invalid certificates : On getting past invalid certificates with netrw.
18, Nancy (ca. 2018) : The comic strip Nancy is good again!
12, NPR's 150 greatest albums made by women (external) : NPR released an inspiring list of the 150 best albums made by women. Not without its flaws, but great nonetheless.
06, FOSTA-SESTA
02, Mirror : In which I gush upon Mirror , a genuinely wonderful tabletop RPG.
2018-03
28, Trying Twitterific : In which I largely condemn Twitter and briefly praise Twitterrific.
08, Distant megaphones : On the sounds of the District.
06, An interesting memcached/UDP amplification attack (external) : External link to a Cloudflare blog post about an interesting amplification DDOS attack using memcached as the vector.
2018-02
20, Weird Amazon/CreateSpace fraud (external) : Krebs on Security article about a very peculiar scam involving CreateSpace
08, Dotfile highlights: .vimrc : Some of the (hopefully) more interesting aspects of my .vimrc
dotfile.
02, Personal Log : On reducing the friction of keeping a personal log in vim.
2018-01
26, The death of Miitomo : Mourning the loss of a very important virtual dollhouse.
20, Firefox mobile : On the mobile version of Firefox, and how it compares to Chrome.
18, Boing Boing is being sued over a hyperlink (external) : In which a frivolous lawsuit is brought against the parent company of Boing Boing.
06, Interpreting 69lang (a ;# dialect) in dc : On transliterating a pointless language in order to build a pointless interpreter in dc
.
2017-12
28, "You're scaring us" (external) : On some very poor decision-making at Mozilla.
26, As Queen, I keep dying : On Reigns: Her Majesty , an absolutely brilliant sequel.
08, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp : My mixed bag of thoughts on Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp .
06, Firefox Quantum : On a long-time-coming version of Firefox that isn’t pure misery.
05, SVG d6 : On using classes to hide/show pips of a six-sided die in an SVG.
2017-11
25, Antiquine : Notes on a weird quine-like programming challenge.
18, Firefox fixes (et cetera) : In which I discuss a handful of frustrating touch-ups to brhfl.com to accommodate both Firefox and, weirdly, iOS.
13, QR codes from box-drawing characters : In which I waste a wee bit of time demonstrating that box-drawing characters can be used to render QR codes.
08, A billion points: an SVG bomb : On overloading web browsers with a ~2kB SVG file.
05, The internet sucks (external) : The internet is a cesspool and we are all suffering for it.
2017-10
20, SVGs : On preparing SVGs for this here website.
17, Aztec diamonds: Shifted like tangrams : On having puzzled my way to the solution to the Aztec diamond problem.
16, Aztec diamonds: Testing the reversed Aztec numbers : In which I confirm the first 50 billion or so numbers from A046092 can be reversed to reveal the dimensions of the square they would grid.
12, Aztec diamonds: How I came to learn of them : Of grids and Aztec diamonds
07, Golfing in Eukleides
05, Fight our administration's hate, now. (external)
2017-09
15, Tetris has been implemented in Conway's Game of Life (external)
11, Sinclair Scientific Programmable : On a quirky old ‘programmable’ calculator.
2017-08
24, A few of my favorite: Pink pencils : In which I briefly review (or something) six pink mechanical pencils.
17, Bubble sort in dc : On writing a bubble sorter in dc
08, Sieve of Eratosthenes
03, Post updates : A few notes on some older posts, as well as general blog musings
2017-07
29, Eukleides : On Eukleides, a geometric drawing language and interpreter
26, A call to donate to Lambda Legal (external) : In which I beg people to donate to NPOs fighting for queer folks (again)
24, Nth-order Fibonacci sequence in dc : On calculating arbitrary-order Fibonacci sequences in dc
22, Bitcoin Explained (with Emoji) (external)
19, Nearest Fibonacci number in dc
17, Scaling visualized data using common multiples : On a scaling problem in visualized information.
10, Anchors, away! : On ‘anchor’ as legacy web terminology.
09, How not to write about trans folks : In which I get too depressed over a poorly written article about Wendy Carlos
02, The Classic Sound of the Moog Ladder Filter (external) : Linky-link to a wonderful little tribute to the Moog ladder filter.
2017-06
28, Field recording with the Tascam GT-R1 : On using a handheld guitar recorder with contact microphones.
22, Inline audio player : On my little inline audio player for posts.
21, Compromised : On having my money snatched from me.
16, Americium-241 as a hardware random number generator (external)
06, Brief thoughts on the iMac Pro : Mulling over the octodecacore iMac.
01, Discoveries : On what we’ve discovered.
2017-05
12, A chessboard for pebbling : A little playable version of a math puzzle spotted on Numberphile.
12, Speech synthesis : On the increasing unnecessary use of flawed speech synthesizers.
10, Arbitrary precision : On always forgetting about arbitrary precision in dc.
2017-04
23, Separating cd and pushd : On the differences between cd and pushd, and the follies of conflating the two.
20, Tagging in Acrobat from the keyboard : Tips for navigating the seemingly unnavigable tags panel in Acrobat.
18, Extracting JPEGs from PDFs : On extracting JPEGs from PDFs on the command line
11, Fireworks, and its bloated PNGs : On why one should be very, very careful exporting PNGs from Fireworks.
10, Binaries and hex editors : On what possible reason hex editors have for existing.
10, Playlist for a new turntable : Ten tracks to christen a new turntable
07, Breaking Binaries (external) : Great article on intersectionality in classical composition competitions, essentially.
05, Template updates : Just a few notes on some template polish.
04, Semaphore and sips redux : On chained commands in parallel/semaphore.
02, Darwin image conversion via sips : On a Darwin-specific image conversion binary.
2017-03
29, Of lynx and curl : On using lynx and curl in tandem to pull lists of links.
10, Game-in-a-post: Rolling Market : A playable version of my solo dice game, ‘Rolling Market’.
07, Rolling Market introduction & rules : Rules to a little solo dice game I’ve been working on for a while.
2017-02
26, Lenovo Yoga Book : On a weird laptoppish, tabletish, non-keyboardish device.
21, Game-in-a-post: Sid Sackson's Solitaire dice : A quick little in-post implementation of a great solo dice game.
09, Solo play: One Deck Dungeon : On One Deck Dungeon, a fantastic dungeon-crawl card/dice game for one or two.
07, Solo play: Deep Space D-6 : On Deep Space D-6, an anxiety-inducing worker placement game for one
07, Solo play: Friday : On Friday, a solo card game about saving Robinson Crusoe.
02, Solo play: Onirim : On Onirim, a wonderful solitaire… dream-crawler?
2017-01
30, Solo play: Intro and Dungeon Roll : The first in a series of brief write-ups re: solo board and card games.
12, Brains: Japanese Garden : Quick thoughts on a Reiner Knizia puzzle
10, This is not crazy : On the casual deprecating usage of language describing mental illness.
05, Position Descriptions : On incomprehensible technical job descriptions.
03, The Lazy He : On condescending justifications for maleness as a default.
2016-12
26, Yamzod : On a new dice-chucking concept
16, Super Mario Run : Initial musings on Mario’s first mobile foray
02, Karuba: Solo : On variant rules for solo Karuba play
2016-11
24, Karuba : On the potential for correspondence play of the game Karuba.
15, Many organizations need support now; Trans Lifeline is one (external) : Just my suggestion out of a thousand of suggestions of organizations that need donations right now.
03, Automatic excitement: video as default : On video as a default medium, and the death of Vine
2016-10
27, Musical numbers (external) : The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences creates music from… well… integer sequences!
26, No escape : On the MacBook Pro’s missing escape key, and what ‘pro’ means.
21, Game-in-a-post: Dim Corridor : A puzzling little diversion, playable in the post.
20, "Everything we assumed about how people use the dictionary was wrong." (external) : A Merriam-Webster lexicographer discusses the dictionary’s Twitter presence
11, Pizza dreams : In which I discuss dreaming about pizza repeatedly.
11, Making multiple directories with mkdir -p : Quick little tip for creating a handful of directories all at once
03, Game-in-a-post: Yz (or, on post-specific JS/CSS requirements in Hugo) : A single hand of a five-die diversion.
01, Finding the greatest Yahtzee score : On calculating the best Yahtzee score, given a roll.
2016-09
29, Fractran (external) : Great article on coding in a bizarre language built of fractions.
20, wo: 9-byte modulo : On small word sizes vs. full instruction sets.
14, Telephoto : On what makes a telephoto lens a telephoto lens.
13, wo: Registers : Initial thoughts on registers in wo.
10, Swiftpoint GT : On a peripheral I wanted to love.
08, Pi from pi (external) : In which Rhett Allain uses the (seeming) randomness of pi to approximate pi.
06, wo: Stacks : Thoughts on stacks in wo, and what to do with them
05, wo: Implementing the interpreter : Thoughts about how to make a wo interpreter work.
2016-08
31, wo: A truth machine in wo3 : On wo instructions 2 & 3, and a single-byte implementation of a truth machine.
30, wo: Numbers : On numbers in wo, big and small.
29, wo: Word size : On adjusting word size in a wo program.
26, wo: Introduction : Introducing ‘wo’, an as-of-yet theoretical code golf language utilizing variable word sizes
25, Your Brand New Linux Install (A letter to my future self) : A letter to my future self who is about to begin a minimal Ubuntu install
22, Of mice and meh : On my struggle to find the perfect mouse.
13, Alphasmart Neo2 : On a keyboard with a screen, and not much else.
10, Collatz sequences in dc : Rendering out a fun mathematical phenomenon in dc.
09, dc as a code golf language : In which I question the viability of dc for code golf by golfing ‘99 Bottles of Beer’
07, A night of Pokémon Go : Reflections on a night of catching Pokémon
2016-07
30, Licensing : On the liberal licensing of this site’s content.
2012-01
25, dc : A primer on dc, the POSIX arbitrary-precision calculator
2010-08
07, dvtm and the mouse : On buggy mouse behavior in dvtm.
2010-07
24, SCorCh, Part Two : Continued thoughts on Simple Correspondence Chess
20, SCorCh - Simple Correspondence Chess : On ‘Simple Correspondence Chess’, a conceptual experiment
2010-06
19, Smartenter : On smartenter and fish
13, Job Control : On job control in fish (the friendly interactive shell)
12, Multitasking vs. Simultasking : On a couple of imagined multitasking paradigms
2010-05
12, ep : On using eLinks as a pager
06, dc Syntax for Vim : On writing a vim syntax file for a rather ugly language.
2010-02
10, On multitasking : On multitasking
2009-11
09, Back to my MacVim : On MacVim, which I have largely outgrown since 2009