Author: David Faden
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Iowa county seats
I got the coordinates of the county seats using the utility I previously wrote to get California county seats: The generated CSV is now available here: https://github.com/fadend/county_seat_coords/blob/main/county_seat_coords/generated/ia_usa_county_seats.csv. One complication that it doesn’t handle: Lee County has *two* county seats. A little copying pasting from the R code from the other post produced a pretty okay…
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Save as “single file” via AppleScript is live in Chrome!
Back in December 2024, I got to submit a change to Chrome/Chromium adding support for saving as MHTML via AppleScript: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/6107133/1 — Adding support for MHTML in Chrome’s Apple Script “save” action. Just now, I noticed that it’s live: It’s a little thing, but I’m excited. Woohoo!
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California geophytes
On Reddit, bobtheturd said, “Calscape doesn’t do a good job filtering for geophytes, so wondering which are your favorites. I’m in the Bay Area, so more specifically interested in those.” (The post got some interesting replies.) Calscape describes itself like this: “Calscape is California’s hub for California native plants and native plant gardening, created for…
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Defining a method outside of a Python class
I’m having some fun reading the source code for Whisper: https://github.com/openai/whisper. One thing I learned from it that delighted (horrified?) me: you can use a function defined outside of a class to provide the implementation for a method. (E.g., used in their Whisper class.) That’s fun. I don’t have a use case in mind yet…
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Pittosporum tobira
Our neighbor’s Japanese cheesewood (Pittosporum tobira) is blooming, and it smells great, like sweet citrus. I’ve been wanting to learn a little more about the plants around me so I think I’ll start with this one. Some photos: According to Kew’s Plants of the World Online, it’s native to Japan, Korea, Nansei-shoto, Taiwan, and Vietnam.…
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From redwoods to chaparral
A paragraph that caught my attention in John Young’s book Ghost Towns of the Santa Cruz Mountains: Thirty lumber mills operated for seventy years on the eastern slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains above Los Gatos, changing the landscape from a verdant parkland of giant redwoods to dense, chaparral-covered slopes with rocky gullies carved by…
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Stripping NULLs recursively from an R list
Is there a nicer way to do this in R? I have a list where some elements are themselves lists (of lists of lists, etc.) I want to ignore entries with NULL as well as entries that are empty after stripping NULLs.
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Itadakimasu
We were in Japan between February 9th and 20th, first visiting some people dear to us in Ibusuki (指宿市), then exploring Kyoto (京都) on our own. (A somewhat random selection of photos. I might follow up with a more organized set later.) This is my second time visiting Japan. The first was for a pretty…
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California County Seats
I had some fun today getting the location of each county seat in California. You can see the code here if you’re curious: https://github.com/fadend/county_seat_coords. The data are pulled from Wikipedia’s List of counties in California. I plotted them going through the tutorial here: https://eriqande.github.io/rep-res-eeb-2017/map-making-in-R.html. (Very nice!) Here’s my ugly R code for doing that, shamelessly…
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Kagi puts greg.app at top for [yerba buena cat safety] also
Seeing A Three Month Review of Kagi Search on Hacker News got me curious about Kagi again. My first search, following up on a previous post looking at Google’s results for the same, was [yerba buena cat safety]. I was a little disappointed to see this: You can take a look at the Reddit post…