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History of HTTPS Usage
"What should I use HTTPS for?" is a question whose answer has changed over the years. Here's an attempt to piece the history together. The web started off as just HTTP. This allowed for an enormous...
View ArticleThoughts on Existential Risk
I recently talked to someone who wanted to know what I thought about existential risk (x-risk). The idea is, how do we keep humanity from being destroyed, or otherwise failing to meet its potential?...
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Touring As a Contra Band
Several people have asked me lately how you go about playing a tour as a contra dance band, so I thought I'd write something up. I've helped book three tours with the Free Raisins, in 2012, 2013, and...
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Bedroom Sizes
The Unit of Caring has been writinga lotrecently about how there should be fewer restrictions on how we use our land and houses, and especially talking about bedroom sizing. Both from the perspective...
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Multiples of the Minimum Wage
Colombia has had high inflation for decades, averaging ~14% yearly since the 1950s. Talking to our au pair, who's from Medellin, one way Colombians have adapted to this is by tying many things to the...
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More Expressive Footboard Thoughts
Currently I don't use my footboard for quick touches or for light touches because I haven't been able to get either of these to trigger with the consistency I need. I have the velocity sensitivity...
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Acoustic Leslie Instruments
With a Leslie speaker the pitch of an instrument is moved up and down by the doppler effect. I was thinking about ways to do this with an acoustic instrument, but most instruments wouldn't be...
View ArticleChord Shape as Input
When I'm playing mandolin, sometimes it would be nice to have a bass player. Nothing fancy, something like hitting every downbeat and playing the same chords as I am. What's interesting is I'm already...
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More Musician Gender
Rebecca Bosworth-Clemens recently wrote some about the gendered booking dynamics she's seen, where at the dance weekends and festivals she's played at there tend to be many more male musicians than...
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Contra Dance Weekend Musician Gender
A few days ago I looked at the gender composition of BIDA dances and saw that about 41% of the people playing for our dances were women. I wanted to see how things were different at the dance weekend...
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Immersion Blender Safety
The immersion blender is one of my favorite cooking implements, but it's also pretty dangerous. In a regular blender or a food processor the blades only spin when safely enclosed in plastic, which...
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Sound Isolation for Ceilings?
Our house was converted from a single-family to a two-family in the 1970s, and the layout isn't ideal. Here's our first floor: And here's our second floor: One of the first floor bedrooms is under the...
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Measuring Sound Transmission Through Floors
I've been thinking about how sound moves through floors and ceilings, and trying to figure out what to do about a bedroom in our house that gets more noise than we'd like. I wanted a way to compare...
View ArticleWeight Strategies
Content note: discussion of weight loss. This sort of discussion is very hard to target: ideas that are helpful for one person can be harmful for another. Some people need to be supported in resisting...
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Built-in Shelves
This weekend Julia and I made a set of built-in shelves for our living room: Our Ikea shelves were big enough that we couldn't put anything else against that wall, but they didn't use the whole space...
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Rise Again
We had a singing party recently, following a pattern that feels familiar and standard to me though I don't know how universal it really is. Potluck dinner, followed by people picking songs out of Rise...
View ArticleRecording your own CD
I recently had some friends ask me for advice about recording a short CD ("EP") of their contra dance band. They're thinking of doing the recording themselves and then either mixing it themselves or...
View ArticleTrying out AMP
I'm going to be working with AMP some at work, so to get more familiar with it I decided to try making an AMP version of my site. Switching everything over would be a bunch of work, so I decided to...
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Assessing Heating Improvements
We've made four main heating improvements since we bought our house three years ago: 2015-09: Replacing two old low efficiency gas boilers with a single condensing boiler.2015-12: Fiberglass batts in...
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Blind-Tasting the Impossible Burger
The Impossible Burger is supposed to be pretty good: I've seen people in the animal-focused part of the EA movement saying that it's as good as a beef burger and the real challenge now is outreach. I...
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