Last month, I climbed Cerro Zapaleri, the 5648 m tall summit of which forms the tripoint of the borders of Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia.1 Its location is quite remote, ~105 km from San Pedro de Atacama, Chile and >40 km from the nearest...

As a follow-up to my previous entries for the Ashley Book of Knots and Space-Filling Curves, I decided to enter a submission into this year’s Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries’ (virtual) Edible Book Festival contest for Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry...

Recently, I came across a blog post about converting parts of a JavaScript library into WebAssembly. The part that interested me the most was a section about efficiently embedding the WebAssembly binary into the JavaScript code such that the library...

Last year, I published a blog post on figure caption color indicators. The positive feedback I received on it from a number of individuals prompted me to revisit the subject. At the time, I did not have a good way...

Although slowly improving, typography on the web pages is considerably lower quality than that of high-quality print / PDF typography, such as that produced by LaTeX or Adobe InDesign. In particular, line breaks and hyphenation need considerable improvement. While CSS...

Sometime last year, the Shop & Shop and Giant (of Landover) grocery store chains began introducing redesigned packaging for their store brand products. The two chains share a parent company and share branding, so the labels only use the shared...

Since my last update on the Color Cycle Survey, there have been no drastic changes, but responses have continued to trickle in. There are now ~13.7k total responses, with ~6k responses each for the six color and eight color components....

Earlier this year, I became aware of a feature in GitHub-flavored Markdown that displays a colored square inline when HTML color codes are surrounded by backticks, e.g., #1f77b4. Although I only recently became aware of this feature, it dates back...

Earlier this month, the Turbo rainbow colormap was released and publicized on the Google AI Blog. This colormap attempts to mitigate the banding issues in the existing Jet rainbow colormap, while retaining the advantages of its high contrast; note that...

Pannellum 2.5 has now been released. As with Pannellum 2.4, this was a rather incremental release. The most noteworthy change is that equirectangular panoramas will now be automatically split into two textures if too big for a given device, which...

Last month, I presented a preliminary analysis of ranking color sets using responses collected in the Color Cycle Survey. Now, I extend this analysis to look at color ordering within a given color set. For this analysis, the same artificial...

Since I launched my color cycle survey in December, it has collected ~9.7k responses across ~800 user sessions. Although the responses are not as numerous as I’d like, there’s currently enough data for preliminary analysis. The data are split between...

Three years ago, I entered an Ashley Book of Knots Cake into the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries’ third annual Edible Book Festival. For this year’s contest, I figured I could apply my 3D-printed Hilbert curve microwave absorber research to...

When readily available containers do not come in the desired form factor, 3D-printing can be quite useful. In this case, I wanted a tea bag holder that fit on a small ledge, allowed the tea bag labels to be read,...

A previous post about randomly generating color sets with a minimum perceptual distance addresses the technical aspects of generating sets of colors that are visually distinct for those with normal color vision as well as for those with color vision...

Earlier this year, I released a color cycle picker that enforces a minimum perceptual distance between colors, including color vision deficiency simulations, with the goal of creating a better color cycle to replace the “category 10” color palette used by...

Fused filament fabrication (FFF) 3D printers are good for many things,1 but production of sharp points is not among those strengths. Thus, the traditional structure of millimeter wave absorbers—a periodic array of square pyramids—is poorly suited for production via FFF...

I recently returned from a couple months working in Chile. While there, I finally made it out to see the El Tatio geyser field, which is the third largest geyser field in the world. The geysers are around an 80 km,...

The Scanreference photogrammetry system includes 149 magnetic coded targets and PDFs for printing 192 more targets. However, while measuring something that isn’t ferromagnetic, the magnetic targets aren’t particularly helpful, and the 192 printable coded targets aren’t always enough. Unfortunately, AICON...

The “category10” color palette, originally developed by Tableau, was adopted as the default color cycle for Matplotlib 2.0 and is also used by default by D3.js and Vega, along with other software packages. While more aesthetically pleasing than the old...

Yesterday, I released Pannellum 2.4.0. It doesn’t contain any major new features, although it does finally include translation support, which was an often requested feature. Also included are numerous minor improvements, a few new API functions, and quite a few...

Amazon recently released the Echo Button, a Bluetooth Low Energy device designed for use with Echo devices (which I don’t own). Although it uses Bluetooth instead of Wi-Fi, I thought it might be a better device to repurpose than the...

As part of a Halloween costume (I was a “bright idea”), I designed a light bulb PCB, which was mostly just an excuse to try out PCBmodE. It consists of seven addressable RGB LEDs, an ATtiny85 microcontroller, an ambient light...

While recently in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, I drove out towards Argentina to look at the national flamingo reserve, which consists of a number of salt lakes (with flamingos). There are also other interesting geologic formations including rocks sticking...

After viewing the total solar eclipse last month, I visited Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the way back from Tennessee, as well as the Cherohala Skyway, parts of the Blue Ridge Parkway, and Mount Mitchell. Here are some photos...