Side tabs are the thing I missed most after switching to Chrome (originally for speed and stability, but now that those are table stakes, for security) and I was really sad when they removed the experimental vertical option ~15y ago. Excited to see that they've added it for real!

Vertical Tabs in Chrome

When you have a lot of browser tabs open it can be very hard to tell them apart, especially if they're from the same site: Since monitors are wide and websites are tall, we should very clearly pu...

jefftk.com

Really impressive foot drumming technique: youtu.be/u4RSlO9nS50?...

Foot drumming on pedal board, close-up

YouTube video by Rochus Keller

youtu.be

Air purifiers are great, but they make a noise. Which means in most cases where you'd use a white noise machine an air purifier is better.

Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines

White noise machines are widely used for sound masking, increasing privacy in offices and helping people sleep. The classic approach is a fan in a box, though in the past ten years people have mostly...

jefftk.com

Liner notes from the 1972 Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra album. www.jefftk.com/p/canterbury...

Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra Liner Notes

Leading up to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival the organizers asked Dudley Laufman to put together a band. He got together some folks he'd been playing for, and this was the start of the Canterbury Coun...

jefftk.com

Someone submitted my musical multitasking post to Hacker News, where Rochus Keller saw it and left some fascinating comments. He's developed a method of foot drumming, using midi organ pedals: www.jefftk.com/p/organ-peda...

Organ Pedals for Drumming

Someone submitted my musical multitasking post to Hacker News, where Rochus Keller saw it and left some fascinating comments. He's developed a method of foot drumming, using midi organ pedals: you...

jefftk.com

Notes on reading Dudley and Jacqueline Laufman's barn dance book. I'm especially interested in the presentation of the question of live vs recorded music for contra dancing (Dudley was a famous partisan of live), especially when combined with a selling a book of recorded music to dance to.

Reading Dudley and Jacqueline's Barn Dance Book

Dudley Laufman passed away last week at the age of 95. He's best known for his extensive contribution to the 1970s contra dance revival, and especially for fostering live music. Twenty years ago [1] ...

jefftk.com

59min from getting on the red line shuttle bus at Kendall to get off at Davis. Not counting the wait for the shuttle. Definitely should have taken the green line today.

Amazon music's concept of "Artist" is terrible: of the nine bands I tested seven of them conflated multiple artists into a single ID. Their recommendation system is also terrible, and I wonder if this is part of why. (We've since unsubscribed, for unrelated reasons.)

Amazon Music's Artist Conflation

Our kids like listening to music on their tablets, and we decided it's worth it to pay some money so they can make playlists and don't need to listen to ads. A family account makes sense if you're mor...

jefftk.com

The core of musical multitasking that you have much more physical ability than conscious attention to coordinate it with, so you need to get aspects of your playing out of your conscious mind. I practice by playing and reading a book: this forces my body to learn to draw minimally on my attention.

Learning Musical Multitasking

I like to play multiple instruments at once, and really enjoy how this lets me create a fuller musical picture. Sometimes this looks like mandolin + foot drums + bass whistle: youtube Or guitar ...

jefftk.com

Looking through writing from 1985-1992 as a dance community grappled with the question of live vs recorded music, and noticing how the features the author disliked about the newly revived live music tradition on initial exposure were prerequisite for the later thriving tradition.

Embracing Amateurs to Get Experts

I've been reading a lot of older writing, trying to understand how and why contra dance ended up with a strong and near-exclusive live music tradition when many other dance forms switched over to reco...

jefftk.com

Kingfisher (Cecilia Vacanti and I) will be playing ArtBeat this Saturday in Davis Square, 3-4pm on the Elm Street stage. Harris Lapiroff will be calling dances for all!

I've been calling some parties and I've been happy with mostly longways whole-set dances. But if I build every dance out of the same small number of building blocks you run into "haven't we done this one before"? Asking around for ones with unique "hooks" turned up two I'm excited to start calling.

Easy Whole Set Dances With a Hook

I've lately ended up calling a bunch of parties and I've been happy with calling mostly longways whole-set dances. These are ones that are shaped like a contra dance in terms of having two lines faci...

jefftk.com

In 1992 Tony Parkes, one of the best-known New England contra dance callers, wrote a book: Contra Dance Calling: a Basic Text. In 2010 he published an updated second edition. I found used copies of each and read through them, interested in both what he thought, and what he thought to change.

Notes on Tony Parkes' "Contra Dance Calling"

In 1992 Tony Parkes, one of the best-known New England contra dance callers, wrote a book: Contra Dance Calling: a Basic Text. In 2010 he published an updated second edition. I found used copies of e...

jefftk.com

We have Verizon Gizmo watches so we can text with our kids. @verizonofficial.bsky.social has botched the transition from their "Gizmohub" to their "Family" app, and on Monday we'll loose access. I've talked with reps multiple times, they promised me a response within 48hr, and I've heard nothing.

Verizon is About to Break our Watches

Two years ago I bought a pair of Gizmo watches for my kids ( review). There's a companion app for texting and configuration ("Gizmohub"), and Verizon is moving everyone over to a new one ("Verizon Fam...

jefftk.com

I tried making eggless choux pastry with precision-fermented egg whites, but it didn't work. I think the problem is that it's ovalbumin (the most common egg protein) but I need some ovotransferrin so I get a shell that will trap steam. Models recomment potato protein or methylcellulose. Thoughts?

More Failed Eggless Choux

draft post Choux pastry (the kind used in eclairs and creampuffs) is very picky, and depends heavily on the chemical properties of eggs. Five years ago I played around with trying to make it eggless...

jefftk.com

My recipes can now be scaled. Another small bit of usability I wouldn't have gotten around to if I couldn't delegate to an LLM.

Recipe Rescaler

I keep my recipies on my website, and like most of my website it grew over time instead of being designed. A couple years ago I added some progressive enhancement that puts checkboxes on the ingredie...

jefftk.com

Spending some time at the pool, they're playing a (weirdly short) loop of music. Listening to She's In Love With The Boy for the fourth time I was thinking about how it's an example of a common pattern in country music: a repeating motif, recolored by the verses.

Chorus-Reinterpretation Country Songs

Our family is on vacation in North Carolina for a week, spending some time at a pool, and they're playing a (weirdly short) loop of music. Listening to She's In Love With The Boy for the fourth time ...

jefftk.com

A large fraction of the calories in our house are dry pasta. These have ungelatinized starch, which normally needs heat and water to become bioavailable. I spent a while reading about whether the gut can adapt, and looking at ways to jury-rig solar panels, before realizing a solar cooker is plenty.

Gelatenizing Starch in an Emergency

draft post I've been thinking more about disaster preparedness recently, and an important piece of that is food. And for many foods, before you can eat them you need to cook them. For example, a lar...

jefftk.com

Someone asked if they could use some of my recorded music for a contra dance because their sound person had fallen through. I told them I wouldn't hold a dance with recorded music, and offered some stopgap suggestions (acoustic-only, crash-course, reschedule). www.jefftk.com/p/live-music...

Live Music Without a Sound Person

A contra dance organizer in another city wrote to me a while ago because they were stuck: the dance was in a few days and they didn't have anyone to run sound. They were asking if they could use some ...

jefftk.com

Google has the wrong value of the parsec, but only when you do math on it. Looks like a degrees/radians mistake. www.jefftk.com/p/google-can...

Google Can't Math Parsecs

Daniel Drucker pointed me at a fun bug in Google's calculator: the parsec is wrong when you do math on it. As the earth travels around the sun, closer stars appear to shift back and forth against the...

jefftk.com

If someone tells me a cake is vegan, I'm going to downgrade my expected enjoyment. Even a fully hedonistic vegan baker is at a serious disadvantage. But now there are precision-fermented egg whites! I made an cake last weekend that was indistinguishable from the summer cakes we'd eat growing up.

Unchickenous Apricot Berry Cake

If someone tells me a cake is vegan plant-based, I'm going to downgrade my expected enjoyment: I've had a lot of bad vegan baked goods. Some bakers are vegan for health reasons, and minimize all the ...

jefftk.com

A couple years ago I put together a Secular Solstice Songbook, a compilation of all the songs we've sung at Boston Solstice. Anna and I led a session of group singing at LessOnline, and I've now had Claude fix a bunch of things I didn't like about how it handled chords. (Now with transposition!)

Solsong Chord Updates

A couple years ago I put together a Secular Solstice Songbook, a compilation of all the songs we've sung at Boston Solstice. Anna Tchetchetkine and I led a session of group singing at LessOnline, fol...

jefftk.com

DIY testing of air cleaning is practical, and thoughtful experimental design can substitute for high-quality sensors including for evaluating air purifier setups that give >100,000x particle reductions.

High Dynamic Range DIY Air Testing

DIY testing of air cleaning is practical, and thoughtful experimental design can substitute for high-quality sensors including for evaluating air purifier setups that give >100,000x particle reduct...

jefftk.com

I put together a contra dance at the Rationalist blogging conference, LessOnline. It was great: www.jefftk.com/p/contra-dan...

Contra Dance at LessOnline

I was in SF this weekend for LessOnline. It's nominally a blogging conference, but in practice it's more of a Rationalist meetup. I was there in my personal capacity, though I did end up having a lot...

jefftk.com

I've come around to thinking I should make political donations my primary method of giving. Most charitable dollars legally can't go to candidates, and lowish per-person hard-dollar limits. This means my money is unusually well-suited to help fill what I see as one of the highest priority gaps.

I'm leading a non-profit team building a pathogen-agnostic early-warning system. We're running the world's largest metagenomic biosurveillance network and we're looking for people who know how to build and scale processing systems and infra. No bio background needed!

SecureBio Detection is Hiring Software Engineers

I'm leading a non-profit team building a pathogen-agnostic early-warning system. As AI systems become increasingly capable substitutes for expert human biologist expertise, the risk that someone coul...

jefftk.com

Running an air purifier on a battery could be really useful in an emergency that combined a biological or nuclear threat with a power outage. Getting one that can run on 12V DC and attaching it to a LiFePO4 battery is about $188 for something that will give you 141 CFM for over a week.

Running An Air Purifier on Batteries

I've been thinking about DIY biohardening, to reduce risks from environment-to-human threats, and a lot of what's out there assumes the power grid stays up. This doesn't seem like a good assumption: ...

jefftk.com

When we installed solar in 2018 we selected an inverter which offers an outlet that provides best-effort power during grid outages when the sun is shining. It's been a while so I tested to see whether it could charge my portable power stations on a sunny day. It did!

Testing Best-Effort Solar

Most rooftop solar installs don't provide power when the grid is down. The primary goal is to avoid sending power out to the grid where it could injure people working to restore power, but more recent...

jefftk.com

When Lily was about two she told me she wanted a song about "no". This was ten years ago, and I don't remember why she wanted this, but I made something up: www.jefftk.com/p/a-song-abo...

A Song About No

When Lily was about two she told me she wanted a song about "no". This was ten years ago, and I don't remember why she wanted this, but I made something up: This is a song about no. This is a song...

jefftk.com

My older two kids (12y, 10y) like contra dancing, but have been increasingly unhappy with the available opportunities: a family dance is "too boring", and BIDA is "not enough kids my age". What they wanted was a regular dance, but just kids. So we had one!

Tween Contra Dance

My older two kids (12y, 10y) like contra dancing, but but have been increasingly unhappy with the available opportunities: a family dance is "too boring", and BIDA is "not enough kids my age". What th...

jefftk.com