Category: Tech

  • Fraction north of Fresno

    I had a Google Sheet with data like the following: City Count Los Angeles 10000 San Diego 9000 San Jose 1000 Tiburon 10 Palo Alto 5 I wanted to understand what fraction of the count was in cities lying north of Fresno — “Northern California”. My first thought was to look up latitude using a…

  • ArcGIS map linking

    Something I’ve found frustrating with a few different instances of ArcGIS-based maps is the lack of an easy ability to share or link to a particular location. E.g., one of the water districts shares this map: https://valleywater.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=39632100ff6d48dcab9405ee080b142b. After some fruitless searching in regular search, Gemini helped get me on the right track in response to…

  • Playing with iNaturalist taxonomy data in MariaDB

    You can download the iNaturalist taxonomy data (updated monthly) from https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/developers under “iNaturalist Taxonomy DarwinCore Archive” (https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/inaturalist-taxonomy.dwca.zip). After unzipping, you’ll find “taxa.csv”. Here’s one way of importing this into MariaDB (and I guess MySQL too). I know that the schema for my table isn’t optimal. (I would love to hear suggestions on how to improve…

  • Get rid of Reels

    I suppose the real answer is to be more disciplined about using Facebook at all, but I’m disgusted with myself for wasting time on Reals when I do get drawn in. Is there a nicer and less fragile way to identify the block and get rid of it? Not sure if any of the CSS…

  • Choosing a newsletter service

    I’m planning to use this blog for quick thoughts, then less frequently send out a newsletter with more fully digested ideas plus other things that didn’t fit. I’ve looked at a few alternatives: I also thought about some of the others mentioned in Best Newsletter Platforms for 2024: Comparing 13 ESPs. For example, Michael Betancourt…