"Buried Treasure and Map Files" video is now free!

I was showing someone a map file; they were kind of amazed at all this information. I’m glad I got to be there for the realization. And to help them through the first wall of impenetrable hex.

When I was invited to do a talk at the Embedded Online Conference 2020, I wanted to talk about something deeply technical, something people could potentially use in their jobs today.

Putting those two events in the same week meant I knew what I was going to present. And once I got started making a D&D style map to represent memory map files, well, it was hard to stop the giggling.

I’m very pleased that the video presentation is available to the public: embedded.fm/blog/MapFiles

Snails, Paper, and Programming: A Computational Approach to Mollusc Morphology in Origami

I gave a presentation about my love of curved crease origami, math, and snails to a Harvey Mudd College mini-conference. I only had ten minutes to speak so it was… a little fast. The video is below.

The slides (available on github) show I had a few extras that got cut. I made a version of the origami snail generating Python script that can run in a browser (also available on github. Turbinator.py).



Embedded.fm TShirts!

 For a limited time, we are offering tshirts! The design is wild and awesome, honoring some of our favorite show titles.

Short-sleeved are here. You can also get long-sleeved tshirts. This is the back.

Imagine if all the show titles got together to have a party to build a Rube Goldberg machine.

Imagine if all the show titles got together to have a party to build a Rube Goldberg machine.


The front of the shirt is pretty cool too!

If the robot/radio head is a variable cap and the Embedded is a diode… It’s a radio circuit!

If the robot/radio head is a variable cap and the Embedded is a diode… It’s a radio circuit!

As for the titles on the back, we have a list of show titles, all up to date and everything.

Giving Feedback

I often think my way is the best because it is the most obvious (to me). When I review someone else’s code, I forget that the way it is implemented is the most obvious way to the developer. We can talk about why it is different from what is obvious to me, but I should expect to often be wrong because the programmer has put more thought and effort into solving the problems. My feedback should reflect that I may be wrong because my perspective is different. Put this way, it is much easier for me to be less blunt, less definitive in my correctness.

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Love Notes to Newton

Not that long ago, tech pundits would run articles like “The biggest technology flops in history” and “Apple’s Worst Products and Biggest Failures”. These lists would always contain Apple’s Newton handheld computer. Was it a failure? I don’t think so, but you can decide for yourself.


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