In the last few years AI image generation has gone from something very rudimentary and nigh-on unusable for commercial purposes to the go-to option for small businesses' signs and menus from SF to Rome—this sucks. Somehow, as the models have gotten better, they've left something behind. I find myself thinking more...

My blog used to use Crimson Pro as the main body font, something that threads the needle of being serif-y enough for the Possession-esque posts, but not too out of place for the technical macOS Messages debugging ones. You should consider customizing anything you use, and the font is no exception. Let's tweak it!

There's a place in Skyrim, right outside the capital city, Solitude, where if you cast Magelight at the top of a mountain, you get tons of XP in Alteration — enough to level you from 15 to 25 in just one cast. But why?

I recently reverse-engineered the formula behind the pickpocket success rate in Skyrim. One of the Pickpocket perks in the game is called "Keymaster", which makes pickpocketing keys "almost always works", and which which I described as "maybe the most worthless perk in the game". Now that we have the formula, we can...

I was writing up my main post reverse-engineering Skyrim pickpocketing and found myself going a little too deep into how Non-Player Characters gain skills. Once again the wiki had the wrong formula, which was making it hard to answer my question: who has the lowest and highest pickpocketing skill?

I was recently the willful accomplice victim of a successful plot to pull me back into Skyrim. I put hundreds of hours into the game back in high school but had mostly escaped — until my friend texted me when I was sick. While playing through it seemed like the pickpocketing chance was bugged. Follow me down the...

Back in college I wrote The Mathematics Behind "Ride the Bus", detailing the mathematics behind expected drinking while playing a game of luck skill where someone deals a card off the top of a shuffled deck one at a time, and you have to answer four questions about the next card: get one wrong, and you go back to...

Nothing's more of a first world problem than the WiFi not working on your plane. Hell, it can even be a bit of a boon if you use your productivity right. But you're annoyed, you're stuck in a tin can miraculous invention, you've already come to grips with the fact that Starlink wasn't turned on for your flight yet,...

While I'm not lactose intolerant I have a lot of friends who are, and so as a generous host I like to keep Lactaid on hand. I noticed that the letters for the Tic Tac logo could be moved around to make Lactaid, so I figured rather than keep them in the normal packaging I could make a custom box!

I try not to be on my iPhone (hence my guides for automatically making it grayscale and not knowing your Screen Time code). The main tool for keeping tabs on this is Apple's Screen Time feature which, while limited in granularity, is better than nothing—until it's wrong. Recently Screen Time started showing large,...

As part of my previous post reverse engineering the Denon XML API I talked about my love for the Golf sound effects in Nintendo Switch Sports, complete with a way to build an ambient soundscape. But where did I get those sound files? There are in-game ambience recordings on YouTube but the sounds are all muddled...

My home audio system goes through a Denon AVR-X1700H as the primary receiver. My house has three pairs of ceiling speakers: one in the living room, one in the dining room, and one in the kitchen. When listening to music I want them all streaming from the same Spotify source, but if I'm playing video games I...