Yorkshire vs. Tokyo Live Coding Showdown - 2.5 hours of live coding from various performers.
“Expect improvised beats, melodies, and noise in a variety of genres, all executed through live coding in various systems. It’s all improvised live music, not DJing, so no one will have ever heard any of this music before, not even the performers.”
I read 12 books last year. Three were read on my Kobo e-reader and the rest were deadtree format. Six of them were fiction. Six were non-fiction. Nightly reading with the girls continues. I’m mising my weekday 1.5 hours bus commute reading sessions. It’s just too easy to fall asleep with a book across your face. :)
What’s Bred in the Bone - Robertson Davies
“A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.”
This was my only re-read of 2021. I think this is my favourite Davies novel, but I tend to think that after reading any of his books. It’s part two of his Cornish Trilogy, and shares some characters and settings from his Deptford Trilogy. Who was Franis Cornish? I’m a sucker for coming-of-age stories, but mix in art, philosophy, religion, spies!, forgery, provincial Canadiana, angles and daimons, and you know I’ll be hooked throughout.
“The art of the quoter is to know when to stop.”
Sapiens - A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”
Although I disagreed with some of the book’s claims, they are presented with such conviction that I just went along for the ride; it’s a good ride if slightly depressing. Harari’s history of humanity begins with the evolution of imagination and concludes with an exploration of human happiness. A 100,000 year story of how we (homo sapiens) outlived five other human species and (for better or worse) came to dominate the world.
“Biology enables, Culture forbids.”
Math Art: Truth, Beauty, and Equations by Stephen Ornes
A coffee table art book with artist interviews and high-level explorations of aesthetically pleasing mathematical concepts. Goes beyond the usual math art of Escher and Fractals, although both are mentioned. If you’re intrigued, the book is available from the Winnipeg Public Library.
Instead of a quote I’ve included photo from the book at the bottom of this post.
Public libraries were open throughout 2021 so took full advantage.
The best:
Lumberjanes Graphic Novels - Volumes 1 through 13 - The girls absolutely love the adventures at Miss Qiunzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet’s Camp for Hardcore Lady Types.
One top of those we read 73 story books and books 6 through 11 of Ivy + Bean by Annie Barrows.
Due to my backed up queue of podcasts I only added two showa to my Pocket Cast list, Eric Normand’s Thoughts on Functional Programming and Conversations with Tyler. I also managed to pare down my show count from 28 to 23.
Podcasts where I continue to listen to every episode:
CBC Spark, CppCast, CppChat, Game Dev Advice, Gameplay, Hanselminutes, Invisibilia, Lex Fridman, Long Now Seminars, Nice Games Club, Overdue, Philosophy Bites, Reply All, Song Exploder, The Bike Shed, The Tim Ferriss Show, This American Life
Occasional listens:
CBC Front Burner, CBC Ideas, Philosophize This!, Syntax
Some of my favourite episodes from the past year, listed alphabetically by show:
Quin by Bathsheba Grossman from the cover of Math Art: Truth, Beauty, and Equations.
I read 22 books last year. Three were read on my new e-reader, the rest were deadtree format. Fourteen of them were fiction. Eight were non-fiction. I continued to read to the girls almost every night. Normally my bus commute allows for my reading and podcast habit. In 2020 my reading shifted into bed before sleep. Podcasts shifted to running and cooking. 2020 was also the year the fam truely took over my Spotify account. The algorithms are confused.
Where 2019 was all re-reads, 2020 included one re-read, a bunch of sci-fi (as per usual), and a number of math and coding tomes.
The Book of Dust by Philip Pullman
“The pleasure of knowing secrets was doubled by telling them.”
The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss
“There was a door, but it was terribly bashful, so Auri politely pretended not to see it.”
Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies
“Universities cannot be more universal than the people who teach, and the people who learn, within their walls.”
How to Solve It by George Pólya
“Solving problems is a practical skill like, let us say, swimming. We acquire any practical skill by imitation and practice. Trying to swim, you imitate what other people do with their hands and feet to keep their heads above water and, finally, you learn to swim by practicing swimming. Trying to solve problems, you have to observe and imitate what other people do when solving problems and, finally, you learn to do problems by doing them.”
Burn Math Class by Jason Wilkes
“Forget everything you’ve been told about math. Forget all those silly formulas you’ve ever been told to memorize. Make a little room in your head with clean white walls and no math. Without leaving that room, let’s reinvent mathematics for ourselves.”
A Tour of C++ - Bjarne Stroustrup
“Think of [this book as a] short sightseeing tour of a city. […] You do not know the city after such a tour. You do not understand all you have seen and heard. To really know a city, you have to live in it, often for years. […] After the tour, the real exploration can begin.”
The library was closed for much of 2020 so our picture book consumption plummeted. We still managed 40 picture books, two Nancy Clancy chapter books, one Harry Potter, and far too many garfield comic strips. Jelani Memory’s A Kids Book About Racism gave us the words to talk through the racism the girls have no doubt already noticed in the world.
The plan for 2019 was to pare down my podcasts, but in 2020 my show count balloned from 20 to 28. To keep up, I’m no longer an every-show-completionist.
New Podcasts: Front Burner, Nice Games Club, Game Dev Advice, CBC Spark, CppCast, CppChat, Lex Fridman, Pitchfork Review, Gameplay
Podcasts that continue to be in rotation:
CBC Ideas, Commons, Greater than Code, Hanselminutes, Invisibilia, Javascript Jabber, Long Now Seminars, Overdue, Philosophize This!, Philosophy Bites, Reply All, Song Exploder, Syntax, The Bike Shed, The Public Philosopher, The Ruby Rogues, The Tim Ferriss Show, Think Again, This American Life
Machine-learning researcher does long-form interviews about the nature of intelligence, consciousness, love, and power.
Way more than three favourite episodes:
Front Burner and Spark from CBC
Front Burner is a short daily news podcast, while Spark is a weekly look at how technology, innovation and design affects our lives. I don’t listen to every episode, but Jayme Poisson and Nora Young are there when I need a news and culture explainer.
Instead of picking fav episodes, I suggest you cherry pick the topics that stand out to you.
A show where nice gamedevs talk gaming and game development. A lovely show with a thoughtful group of friends.
I’m here today to spread the gospel of the Mellotron.
Le Mellotron is people and music. A blog that became a webradio gathering and then a community of music curators and lovers. Located in a bar near Place de la Republique square in Paris, Le Mellotron beats day after day to the rhythm of the city, its people and streets. We believe in an emerging parisian musical scene, moved by its curiosity, and strengthened by its ability to capture and transform its influences. LeMellotron will be its amplifier.
I recommend binge-listening their “by year” playlists. The vibe is chill, funky, and full of soul.
The video stream gives you a glimpse of the friendships of a Parisian neighbourhood. For the full experience, it’s important to keep the video within sight while listening. :)
Love ya! Kyle
I read 20 books last year. All twenty books were deadtree format. Fourteen of them were fiction. Six were non-fiction. I continued to read to the girls almost every night. Together we read an additional 9 chapter books and oodles of picture books. I managed to drop a few shows from my podcatcher. Our family listened to 700 hours of music.
2019 was a year of re-reading favourites from my youth as well as more recent favourites. A year of nostalgia and retrospection! I enjoyed the journey and am planning on re-reading one book a year from here out.
Read in that order.
Top three re-reads and then one book that was (for the most part) new to me:
Anathem by Neal Stephenson and Dune by Frank Herbert
Anathem and Dune are my top two all-time favourite sci-fi books. They did not disappoint.
Similarities: Epic world building. The nature of reality. The mysteries of consciousness and free will. Long now thinking. Neologistic dictionaries. Appendices. Myth, mysticism and religion. Math, science and philosophy.
Difference: Although I’d never wish to visit Dune’s desert plant of Arrakis, I’d love to spend a few years living amongst the avout in a Mathic concent on Arbre.
The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies
I’m going to cheat and pick the entire Deptford Trilogy rather than just one book. I’m hooked on Davies again and will now have to re-read all his other trilogies. There are fates worse than this.
Myth, magic, psychology, history and a dash of rural Canada in the first half of the 20th century.
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
I’d read one of these short stories before, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, a must read for all AI enthusiasts / apologists. Read Online.
I also recommend listening to Levar Burton read The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, a tale of time-travel in medieval Baghdad. Listen to Part 1 and Part 2 on Stitcher, or Part 1 and Part 2 on Spotify.
Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg
With Nonviolent Communication (NVC) we learn to hear our own deeper needs and those of others. Communication as a spiritual practice involving deep listening, empathy and compassion. Observations, Feelings, Needs, Requests.
I might have to re-read this one yearly.
Honey I Wrecked the Kids by Alyson Schafer
Pairs nicely with NVC. Highly recommended for all parents. Don’t let the intro scare you off. This isn’t just a book for families experiencing major behavioural difficulties. This is a guide to family harmony based on “the three Cs”:
The Practicing Mind by Thomas M. Sterner
“Everything in life worth achieving requires practice. In fact, life itself is nothing more than one long practice session, an endless effort of refining our motions.”
We are what we do!
This was the year I started reading chapter books to the girls. We read:
Mixed in to our nightly reading were about 150 picture books and graphic novels from the library.
The non-fiction family book that stood out was Sex is a funny word : a book about bodies, feelings, and YOU by Cory Silverberg, with illustrations by Fiona Smyth. An age appropriate cartoon book about bodies, gender, and sexuality.
The plan for 2019 was to pare down my podcasts, but I only managed to drop my show count from 23 to 20. My unlistened episodes queue is currently at 17. I estimate that I’ve listened to over 410 hours of podcasts this year, the equivalent of 17 24-hour days. I also switched apps from BeyondPod to Pocket Casts. I listen to most podcasts at 1 to 1.2x speed with silent gaps removed.
Podcasts still in rotation:
CBC Ideas, Commons, Greater than Code, Hanselminutes, Invisibilia, Javascript Jabber, Long Now Seminars, Overdue, Philosophize This!, Philosophy Bites, Reply All, Song Exploder, Syntax, The Bike Shed, The Public Philosopher, The Ruby Rogues, The Tim Ferriss Show, Think Again, This American Life, Views on Vue
Commons with Arshy Mann
In 2019 Commons focused on Canadian oil and Canadian dynasties.
Fav Episodes: CRUDE #2 – Bombs, Blood & the Battle of Trickle Creek, CRUDE #5 – A Town, Annihilated, and DYNASTIES #3 – The Fords
Overdue with Andrew Cunningham and Craig Getting
Andrew and Craig take turns reading books and telling each other about them. The things they say are funny and smart. I only listen to episodes for books I’ve read.
I recommend digging through their back catalogue to find your favourite books. For example, they’ve got an episode on Dune, The Martian Chronicles, Franny and Zooey, The Old Man and the Sea, Siddhartha, and Slaughterhour Five.
The Bike Shed with Chris Toomey and Steph Viccari
Excellent podcast about software development. I’ve listened to almost every one of their 200+ episodes. 2019 was a good year. I’m digging the conversations between the current hosts Steph and Chris.
New for this year, our family music consumption. We have a paid Spotify account, with additional tunes provided by YouTube, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, old CDs in the car, and the radio.
Even though we mainly listen to multi-artist playlists, Spotify tells me our top artists were:
Top genres: Lo-fi beats, Electronica, Rock, Edm, Jazz boom bap
In all, we listened to over 42,000 minutes of music together. The equivalent of one month of 24 hour a day tunes.
I teach coding at Red River College. I’ve been at the college for almost 12.5. Although I’ve learned a lot over this time, this learning has been almost exclusivly related to teaching and web development (and outside of work, parenting and open government).
It’s time to step a bit of my comfort zone: I’m going to learn modern game development.
So, okay, it’s not too far outside my comfort zone. It’s still tech. It’s still coding. But it feels like a different world.
It’s also a return to the math and physics of my engineering days, and to coding with C++, which has changed significantly in the 15 years I’ve been away from the language. There’s metric ton of learning to do. The goal is to distill this learning down to a collection of college level game development courses.
I’ll be documenting my learning here. Join me.
(The idea of documenting “learning in public” was inspired by the work of Tania Rascia.)
Total network nerd out! I switched my internet provider from Bell MTS to TekSavvy and it was quite the ride.
Why the switch? Half the monthly cost and total control of my home network. Oh, and I love tech puzzle and the challenge of the build. ;)
In Winnipeg TekSavvy acts as a Shaw reseller, so the TC4400 takes in a cable signal from the Shaw network. The TC4400 acts as a Bridge to the internet for the Archer C9, which provides local wired and wireless routing. The DIR615 is configured as a Switch to allow for more wired connections, seven in total.
The Archer C9 also handles DHCP IP allocation for all devices with the Raspberry Pi set as the Domain Name Server. The Raspberry Pi uses the open source Pi Hole software to filter out ads at the network level, so no web or app ads get served to the devices on our network.
Here are a few of the benefits that made this switch worthwhile. Most of these benefits came from switching from the MTS provided modem/router/wifi combo unit (Arris 5168N) to the custom stack described above. The Arris unit wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t very configurable.
1) Wifi Signal Strength - My entire house and the backyard now has Wifi coverage in the -40 to -60 dB range at 2.4 and 5Ghz, which is really good. Measurements taken with the Wifi Analyzer Android App. I’m also running my 2.4 and 5Ghz wifi using the same SSID and password to allow my devices to auto-select 5Ghz when close to the router, and 2.4Ghz when further away.
2) More Wired Connections - I’ve gone from 4 ethernet ports to 7, meaning I can down run the following devices wired rather than on wifi: 2 laptops, 1 pi hole, 1 chromecast, 2 chromecast audio, 1 security alarm system. (Note: The Chromecast didn’t work at all when wired on the Arris.)
3) Pi Hole Ad Filtering - I had a Pi Hole running with the Arris setup, but it wasn’t perfect. So far the Pi Hole has blocked over %53 of all DNS requests as ads/trackers. That’s right, more than half of all domain name requests on my home network were for ads and trackers that I didn’t ask for. (Note: I still run uBlock origin on my browsers to catch the occasional ads that sneak through. Especially required for Facebook and YouTube.)
4) Download Speeds - Our internet speeds needs aren’t extreme. At mosts we’re pulling down 2 to 3 simultaneous audio/video streams. As such I stuck with the same speed band of 25Mbs. With MTS, speed tests over the years showed that we were rarely getting the promised 25Mbs download rate. So far with Teksavvy we’re consitently getting significantly faster than 25Mbs across all devices.Testing was done via Google and SpeedTest.net.
5) Monthy Cost - I’m now saving 50 bucks a month on my internet. More on this in the next section.
Total cost to switch: $295 (New Modem and Router)
Monthly Savings: $54 ($97/month MTS - $43/month Teksavvy)
Time to pay off switch: 5.5 months
Savings per year after that: $650
All that said, if you call MTS to cancel they’ll eventually offer you a deal. They offered to upgrade me to their Fibe 100 plan while dropping my bill to $45/month for two years (afterwhich it would be $119/month). It’d already purchased the cable modem from Teksavvy and was looking forward to my custom network, so I declined.
Also, it possible to switch to TekSavvy with a much simpler network stack by purchasing the Technicolor DPC3848V Modem/Router/Wifi combo unit. You’ll get fewer wired connections, no ad blocking, and I can’t speak to the WiFi coverage, but it should still be a solid setup.
The new network stack before I tucked it away.
I read 20 books last year. All twenty books were deadtree format. Fourteen of them were fiction. Six were non-fiction. I continued to read to the girls almost every night. Podcasts still loom large in terms of time invested.
There’s a chart below showing books read by year since 2011.
Read in that order.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
“I have dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind. And this is one: I’m going to tell it - but take care not to smile at any part of it.”
This book came highly recommend by Sam. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t an exploration of tyranny, love, and inter-generational trama on the heath.
From Sam:
“This is a wild ride: raw and violent and exceedingly modern. In Wuthering Heights there’s no hiding how terrible most of the people in it are. At the same time, the novel seems to be precisely about how conditions of violence, cruelty, racism, and intolerance reproduce themselves from generation to generation.”
At the end I was hoping for a Nelly spin-off.
Seven Surrenders and The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer
“If God made Man and Man made this, it is still a Self-portrait. And if, as some say, God made Man in His Image, and His Image then made this, it is a portrait’s portrait. And if Nature is the face of God, another Portrait, and Man is the spawn of Nature, it becomes a portrait’s portrait’s portrait. The Nature we see on Earth too is a microcosm, one might say a portrait of the Cosmos, and the Cosmos a portrait of the Laws of Nature, portraits spawning portraits like the spiral chambers of a nautilus repeating the face of God. Such a Creator seems desperate to show Himself to someone. And yet He hides Himself.”
Part two and three of the Terra Ignota Series. Philosophical and political sci-fi of the best kind.
Is there a place for miracle in a scientific society?
Is an Imperfect Sovereign better than a mounting Will to Battle?
What exactly is it that holds society together?
Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg
“Nonviolent Communication holds that most conflicts arise from coercive or manipulative language that aims to induce fear, guilt, and shame. These "violent” modes of communication divert the attention of the participants away from clarifying their needs, their feelings, their perceptions, and their requests, thus perpetuating the conflict.“ -Wikipedia Entry on NVC
Becoming Leonardo by Mike Langford
"What accounts for Leonardo is an act of self-discovery, and the tenacity to make it, over and over. […] Learning to read was incredibly difficult, writing “correctly” even more so. Everything seemed wrong to him, backward somehow, and he couldn’t figure out why. He felt so stupid. And then, somehow the idea was inserted into his confused little brain, “Do it your own way, even if it is different. You are not stupid! Find how it works for you.”
Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat. Illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton.
“Play to each element’s strengths: use Salt to enhance, Fat to carry, and Acid to balance flavor.”
A cookbook for those who wish to cook without cookbooks.
For podcasts, 2019 will be the year of the pare down. I seem to have collected 23 podcasts in the podcatcher and I can’t keep up. My unlistened episodes queue is at 27 and growing.
Podcasts added this year:
Podcasts still in rotation:
CBC Ideas, Commons, Greater than Code, Hanselminutes, Invisibilia, LeVar Burton Reads, Long Now Seminars, Overdue, Philosophize This!, Philosophy Bites, Reply All, Song Exploder, The Bike Shed, The Public Philosopher, The Ruby Rogues, The Tim Ferriss Show, Think Again & This American Life.
I enjoyed these podcasts the most in 2018.
Ideas with Paul Kennedy (CBC)
Still a favourite. So many great episodes to pick from.
Fav Episodes:
Flash Forward
Possible and not so possible futures. Speculative radio plays and science journalism.
Fav Episodes:
The Public Philosopher
I was introduced to philosopher Michael Sandel in 2012 through his online course on Justice at Harvard. Since then I’ve been following his BBC Radio series of public debates.
Fav Debates:
The Blue Whale. Natural History Museum. London.
On Wednesday I spent the day at the Google Cloud Civic Tech Hackathon. It was fun day of teamwork, fancy food, data and technology. There was even an improv comedy workshop with some of the members of Outside Joke.
The Google Cloud Relay took place in 8 cities across Canada. The challenge was to build a web application to paint a picture of your city and how it is changing, evolving and adapting.
My team focused on the City of Winnipeg property locations and assessment value open dataset.
Below are two of the maps of Winnipeg we created. The first shows property values inspired by the work of Eugene Chen and Darkhorse Analytics. The second shows density of single detached homes.
Property values of single detached homes in Winnipeg centered on where I grew up (Lord Roberts / Riverview).
Dark blue is sub-$225K. Dark red is $420K+.
Density of single detached homes in Winnipeg.
Green is less dense. Red is more dense.
9 years, 4 months, 19 days ago I posted my first image to Meow Reader, a Tumblr dedicated to images of cats reading and cats learning how to read.
A few weeks back I mentioned the (then abadoned) site to my department chair and he (jokingly?) suggested I use Machine Learning to automate the discovery of new Meow Reader images.
Challenge Accepted.
A few Ruby scripts later (plus some research into the Clarifai API) and I’ve got a shiny new collection of reading cats, dogs, rabbits, sloths… you named it! I’ve documented the process below, but you can also skip straight to the images.
Finding reading animals, a play in five acts:
book, book bindings, book series, education, literature, newspaper, research, technologyThe Clarifai API could also be used in Act 5 to filter the images even further to limit the reading animals to be cats only. View the full source code here. There’s a separate script for each step.
Oh, and I also created a new version of the Meow Reader Android app using Vue.js and Cordova.
Please install it and leave me a glowing 5 star review. (/◔◡ ◔)/