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What I’ve been reading (October 2020)
Finishing 66 hours of listening to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, plus Maggie O’Farrell and Charlie Kaufman
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What I’ve been reading (September 2020)
Learning the Tuchman maneuver with Barbara Tuchman, explaining away comedy with Malcolm Turvey and catching up with Bov Bjerg
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Lockdown Hack #5: Personal YouTube Charts
(About Lockdown Hacks) Where In the Chrome webstore Plus: Source code on GitHub Stack Chrome extension, jQuery, unofficial YouTube APIs Notes This is a YouTube feature I’ve been wanting for a while: I know there are videos, especially music videos, that I return to over and over again, and I would like to see which
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(Failed) Lockdown Hack #4: Prontissimo
(About Lockdown Hacks) Stack Amazon Product Advertising API, Ruby on Rails, Vue.js Notes Not burying the lede here, I failed to achieve what I set out to do with this one. (The screenshot above only reflects how far I got in terms of the frontend – yes, I spent 30 minutes designing a logo, what
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Lockdown Hack #3: Whence
(About Lockdown Hacks) Where https://nikhaldimann.com/whence What A game of guessing random locations on Earth based only on satellite views Stack Google Maps JS API, Vue.js Notes Perhaps obviously, the popular game GeoGuessr inspired this hack, where you move around Street View to guess your location. It’s fun enough that they managed to spin it into
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Lockdown Hack #2: Towards proving that social distancing works
(About Lockdown Hacks) How effective is social distancing at combating the spread of COVID-19? I explained in my previous post how I was inspired to look at correlating mobility data with COVID-19 growth to begin to answer that question. How much people move around is a decent proxy for how strictly social distancing rules are
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Lockdown Hack interlude: Correlating mobility stats & pandemic growth
I crunched some data related to the COVID-19 pandemic, following an impulse after I came across two separate news items: Descartes Labs released a new set of mobility stats, based on mobile phone data aggregated at the US county level (full disclosure: I used to work for Descartes Labs). On Twitter I saw a pre-print
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Lockdown Hack #1: Hugster
Where https://nikhaldimann.com/hugster What Get gentle reminders by text to reach out to friends while social distancing. Stack Ruby on Rails, Vue.js, BootstrapVue, Twilio Timeline It took me about 3 days to arrive at the feature complete version as it is now. At that point it looked like this though: All the interactivity was in place
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Lockdown Hacks
The COVID-19 pandemic began to seriously affect life in London just a couple of weeks after I had moved here and started a new job. I had deliberately chosen an employer with a business model rooted in physical space – in real estate – since I had tired a bit of businesses that are, let’s
Salt Mines
Tales of Electronic Drudgery
Salt Mines 