The best ways to organize pointless meetings

Posted on Sat 25 March 2023 in IT, meta

All good meetings are similar, but each bad meeting is shitty in its own way. I could also say that it's hard to formalize elements that make meetings ineffective, but that's not true: I have a neat list. All summarized to one point is: being lazy. Organizing a good meeting …

Dissecting explanations of Javascript Promises

Posted on Thu 09 February 2023 in IT, meta

What is a Javascript Promise? When I was documenting the Neo4j Javascript driver, I did not know. So let's find out, and in so doing tear to pieces explanations I found online. My favorite past time.

W3Docs

In JavaScript, a promise is a unique object linking the "producing code" and …

I built a Lily58 split keyboard so you don't have to

Posted on Fri 04 November 2022 in keyboards, IT

I had a long summer and decided I would do something to improve the ergonomics of my tech life. Many years ago I bought a Kinesis Advantage, but I was young and naive, and gave up after a week. This time, with all the wisdom of my late twenties, I …

Create a WP test site with lots of users and posts

Posted on Wed 05 January 2022 in programming, IT, wordpress

The following WP-CLI command will create a lot of test data into a WordPress site: 1000 new users, each with 50 posts. Each post gets a random date in the last year and a random post content of variable length filled using a lorem ipsum generator.

WP_CLI::add_command( 'test', 'create_test_data …

How to implement the 6-hour workday in a company

Posted on Sun 02 May 2021 in IT, meta

It is difficult to argue that the current, wide popular 8-hour workday in cognitive-demanding jobs is in any way efficient. It is bad both for employees and employers. Quoting the Harvard Business Review,

Many of today’s organizations sabotage flow by setting counter-productive expectations on availability, responsiveness, and meeting attendance …

Setup OpenWRT on Raspberry Pi 3 B+ to avoid data trackers

Posted on Fri 18 September 2020 in security, IT, open source

I am definitely not an expert in networking, so take all of this with some salt. Still, I found it valuable to have my home internet powered by open source software as much as possible, rather than some shitty closed black-box provided by my ISP.

There are already lots of …

A setup for remote piano lesson over Zoom

Posted on Sun 24 May 2020 in tips, IT

First create a new sink:

pactl load-module module-null-sink sink_name=zoom_input sink_properties=device.description=zoom_input

then remap into a Zoom monitor source that Zoom will allow selection of:

pactl load-module module-remap-source master=zoom_input.monitor source_name=zoom_mic source_properties=device.description="zoom_mic"

Then create as many new virtual sources as microphones you need …

The need of teaching and learning more languages

Posted on Thu 07 November 2019 in languages, meta, teaching

For a second, stop to think about how many languages you know. With languages, I do not mean verbal languages: rather, any means of expressing thoughts and feelings, or of expressing a dialogue. I am here do advocate for the learning and teaching of more than just one.

Our western …

The reasons why mathematics teaching is failing

Posted on Fri 01 November 2019 in mathematics, teaching, meta

As a mathematics PhD student, I have seen a lot of mathematics teaching. I have been lucky enough to witness some (very) good teaching, but I have also been inflicted with so much bad teaching. Sometimes, I just wondered whether the people do even realize that their teaching is horrible …