If I spend more than a few days in a new town, I start to poke around for a breakfast diner. It's a sort of greasy time bubble where everyone sets aside their differences to gorge on eggs and coffee. Eggs, coffee, bacon, pancakes. Notes...

I finished Fermat's Enigma recently and was surprised how much I enjoyed a book about math. I've always seen myself as a liberal arts guy, but in the last couple years I've been reading a lot of computer history books that each have some...

I was lucky enough to grow up in a house with a backyard and a pool. To the side of the pool is a guesthouse with white stucco walls and a multicolored tile roof. In my earliest memories, the guesthouse had a bed where aunts and nannies...

Two's Complement is a way to represent positive and negative numbers in binary. It's useful because we want a way to represent each number's inverse within a limited number of bits. The sign bitPutting aside two's complement, the "naive"...

On my way back from a trip last month, I stopped in Baltimore to catch a Conan show. I've been getting into doom metal lately and Conan is a lot of fun. When asked for their favorite Conan album, one redditor responded: "the one with the...

One of my favorite things about small projects is the way their constraints can inspire unexpected solutions. You might expect a simple design to limit the room for creativity, but in my experience the opposite is often true. With this...