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I've been biking in Brooklyn for a few years now! It's hard for me to believe it, but I'm now one of the people other bicyclists ask questions to now. I decided to make a zine that answers the most common of those questions: Bike Brooklyn! is a zine that touches on everything I wish I knew when I started biking in Brooklyn. A lot of this information can be found in other resources, but I wanted to collect it in one place. I hope to update this zine when we get significantly more safe bike infrastructure in Brooklyn and laws change to make streets safer for bicyclists (and everyone) over time, but it's still important to note that each release will reflect a specific snapshot in time of bicycling in Brooklyn. All text and illustrations in the zine are my own. Thank you to Matt Denys, Geoffrey Thomas, Alex Morano, Saskia Haegens, Vishnu Reddy, Ben Turndorf, Thomas Nayem-Huzij, and Ryan Christman for suggestions for content and help with proofreading. This zine is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, so you can copy and distribute this zine for noncommercial purposes in unadapted form as long as you give credit to me. Check out the Bike Brooklyn! zine on the web or download pdfs to read digitally or print here!
I found inspiration for this pitcher's glaze design in the night sky. Whenever I feel lost, I know I can always look up and be under the same night sky, no matter where I am. Whenever I feel alone, I know I can always look up and feel connected to humanity, everyone else looking up at the same sky. Whenever I feel all is lost, the vast darkness in the night sky reminds me there are so many possibilities out there that I haven't even thought of yet. My studio practice is on a partial pause for an unknown amount of time right now; every piece I make is stuck in the greenware stage as I continue to save up to buy kilns and build out the glaze and kiln area. In some moments, this pause feels like a rare opportunity to take time to make more experimental and labor intensive pieces, but in other moments, I am overwhelmed by the feeling that pieces without a completion timeline on the horizon are just not worth doing. It's easy to bask in fleeting bursts of inspiration; it's harder to push through the periods where nothing feels worth doing. It's especially when the waves of anxiety about the unknown future of my studio practice and the waves of anxiety about the direction of the US government and the future of my country come at me at the same time. I try to ground myself, to keep myself from spiraling. I name things I can see, smell, hear. At night, I look to the dark sky. When I can, I reread Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark: Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes–you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It's the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone. May we all find hope in the dark and choose to act.
When I was glazing this v60-style cone, I was thinking of rising sea levels, eroding beaches, and melting ice caps. Trying to tackle large challenges like climate change is overwhelming in the best of times, and these are not the best of times. There are many things we can personally do to reduce our carbon footprints and fight climate change, but If we want to have any chance to succeed, we need to join together and organize. If you're new to organizing, connect with local groups already doing the work you're interested in, and don't forget to look for groups pushing for change outside of just the national stage. Creating more dense walkable, transit-oriented communities is one of our strongest tools for a sustainable, climate friendly future. Generally, the bulk this work in the US happens at the state and local levels. In addition to the climate benefits, it's essential work to keep communities together and fight displacement. I personally spend a lot of my spare time organizing locally around this issue to help ensure NYC and New York State stay places everyone can thrive. I focus especially on pro-housing policies and improving transportation options and reliability so climate-friendly, less car-dependent lifestyles - and New York's relative safety - can be for everyone.
Clay shrinks as it dries and even more as it's fired, so it's useful to have a way to estimate the final size of in-progress work - especially if you're making multiples or trying to fit pieces together. One way to do this is with shrinkage rulers. I figured I'd design my own shrinkage rulers and provide a way for folks to make them themselves since ceramic tool costs can add up. To make your shrinkage rulers: Download either the colorful printable shrinkage rulers or black and white printable shrinkage rulers. Print at 100% size. (These files are both 400 dpi.) Verify that the 0% shrinkage standard ruler at the top matches the size of an existing regular ruler you have. This quick calibration step will make sure nothing out of scale during printing! Cut out your rulers. Optionally, laminate or cover in packing tape to help them last longer. To use your shrinkage rulers: If you're using commercial clay, look up how much your clay is estimated to shrink. If you're using a blend of clays or custom clays, you'll have to calculate how much your clay shrinks. An easy way to do this is measure the length of a wet piece right after you form them and again after it's been through its glaze firing. You can then calculate the estimated shrinkage rate: Pick the shrinkage ruler that corresponds to your clay's shrinkage rate. If you're between shrinkage rates, you can estimate with a nearby size. Remember that shrinkage rates are estimates, and a piece's actual shrinkage depends on many variables, including how wet your clay is and how close it is to it's original composition (this can change with repeated recycling). Measure your wet piece with the shrinkage ruler! The length shown is the expected length your piece's dimension will be when fired. The fine print: Reminder that shrinkage rulers only give estimated lengths! You're welcome to print these shrinkage rulers for yourself or your business. You may use the printed shrinkage rulers privately, even in commercial applications (I hope they help your ceramic art and business!), provided you do not redistribute or resell the shrinkage rulers themselves in any form, digital or physical. Footnotes If you're working on a jar or something else that needs to fit together tightly, it's better not to rely on shrinkage rulers to get a perfect fit. In my experiences, you ideally want to make the vessel and the lid as close in time as possible and have them dry together and fire together through as many phases as possible.↩
I'm continuing my clay body reviews series with two very heavily grogged "sculpture" clays I've used. Note that I currently practice in a community studio that glaze fires to cone 6 in oxidation, so my observations reflect that. Standard 420 Sculpture: Cone 6: average shrinkage 8.0%, absorption 1.5% Light straw when fired to cone 6: more yellow/beige than most white stonewares so the color is something to consider in your final vision (or engobe in something else) So much grog that it’s best described as working with wet sand, non-derogatory I've made complicated open coil-based structures with this clay that have been formed across many studio sessions over a couple days, and they've survived without cracking! Wet clay attaches readily to leather hard and even slightly dry clay. Wrapping my works in dry cleaning bags until done and dry before bisque was enough - I was worried I'd have to make a damp box, but not with this clay! The grog is white and grey, and it comes in a variety of sizes, including some that is visually rather large. The grog really shows if you sand to smooth the surface. I typically dislike how this looks - the result ends up looking more like concrete than clay. If you use this for functional ware or anything you move around a lot, you'll certainly want to sand the bottom since the groggy surface is extra rough to protect tables and counters. Burnishing alone doesn't usually make this clay smooth. Can be thrown when very soft, but your hands will feel scratched if you're not used to it! Angled slab joins join readily, and support coils press in quickly and easily. Some members of my studio prefer to make plates with this clay because the high level of grog significantly reduces warping. I personally prefer to make plates with clays with far less grog that I dry very slowly. High palpable grog content means a weaker object, and I prefer more strength in objects that are handled frequently. Can be marbled with 798, but needs to dry slowly. Standard 420's straw color shows in the unglazed section of this planter's drip tray, and there's also some flashing from the glaze near the edges. I sanded the base of this piece so the slightly rough surface of Standard 420 wouldn't scratch tables, and you can see the contrast between the sanded bottom (outside) layer where the varied grogs are revealed and the rougher surfaces of the other layers where they are still covered by clay particles. This handbuilt planter was made of Standard 798 over multiple studio sessions. The sculptural coil structures attached readily with my regular slip and score process, and it dried evenly enough to not crack with my regular process of drying under a single plastic dry-cleaning bag. This coiled wall art piece was made out of equal parts Standard 112 and Standard 420 wedged fully together. There's still ample grog in this hybrid clay body to work the same as the Standard 798 planter's coiled structure. Standard 798 Black Sculpture: Cone 6: average shrinkage 10%, absorption 1.0% Dark brown when wet, fires to a gorgeous black at cone 6 when unglazed. Clear glazes will make this clay look brown, so you need to use a black like Coyote Black or Amaco Obsidian to preserve the black color if you want to glaze it. So much grog that it’s best described as working with wet sand, non-derogatory. The grog is white, and provides a lovely contrast when on the surface or sanded to be revealed. Like 420, you'll probably want to sand the bottom of anything you'll pick up and put down more than once. Very similar working qualities to 420 - a true joy for handbuilding! Can be marbled with 420, but needs to dry slowly.
More in programming
When you're just getting started with music, you have so many skills to learn. You have to be able to play your instrument and express yourself through it. You need to know the style you're playing, and its idioms and conventions. You may want to record your music, and need all the skills that come along with it. Music is, mostly, subjective: there's not an objective right or wrong way to do things. And that can make it really hard! Each of these skills is then couched in this subjectivity of trying to see if it's good enough. Playing someone else's music, making a cover, is great because it can make it objective. It gives you something to check against. When you're playing your own music, you're in charge of the entire thing. You didn't play a wrong note, because, well, you've just changed the piece! But when you play someone else's music, now there's an original and you can try to get as close to it as possible. Recreating it gives you a lot of practice in figuring out what someone did and how they did it. It also lets you peek into why they did it. Maybe a particular chord voicing is hard for you to play. Okay, let's simplify it and play an easier voicing. How does it sound now? How does it sound with the harder one? Play around with those differences and you start to see the why behind it all. * * * The same thing holds true for programming. One of my friends is a C++ programmer[1] and he was telling me about how he learned C++ and data structures really well early on: He reimplemented parts of the Boost library. This code makes heavy use of templates, a hard thing in C++. And it provides fundamental data structures with robust implementations and good performance[2]. What he would do is look at the library and pick a slice of it to implement. He'd look at what the API for it is, how it was implemented, what it was doing under the hood. Then he'd go ahead and try to do it himself, without any copy-pasting and without real-time copying from the other screen. Sometimes, he'd run into things which didn't make sense. Why is this a doubly-linked list here, when it seems a singly-linked list would do just fine? And in those moments, if you can't find a reason? You get to go down that path, make it the singly-linked version, and then find out later: oh, ohhh. Ohhhh, they did that for a reason. It lets you run into some of the hard problems, grapple with them, and understand why the original was written how it was. You get to study with some really strong programmers, by proxy via their codebase. Their code is your tutor and your guide for understanding how to write similar things in the future. * * * There's a lot of judgment out there about doing original works. This kind of judgment of covers and of reimplementing things that already exist, just to learn. So many people have internalized this, and I've heard countless times "I want to make a new project, but everything I think of, someone else has already done!" And to that, I say: do it anyway[3]. If someone else has done it, that's great. That means that you had an idea so good that someone else thought it was a good idea, too. And that means that, because someone else has done it, you have a reference now. You can compare notes, and you can see how they did it, and you can learn. I'm a recovering C++ programmer myself, and had some unpleasant experiences associated with the language. This friend is a game developer, and his industry is one where C++ makes a lot of sense to use because of the built-up code around it. ↩ He said they're not perfect, but that they're really good and solid and you know a lot of people thought for a long time about how to do them. You get to follow in their footsteps and benefit from all that hard thinking time. ↩ But: you must always give credit when you are using someone else's work. If you're reimplementing someone else's library, or covering someone's song, don't claim it's your own original invention. ↩
A key feature of Bazel is its ability to produce fast, reliable builds by caching the output of actions.
AltTab solves a simple problem really well: it brings Windows-style Alt + Tab window switching to Mac OS. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. I think Windows way of Alt - tabbing windows is better than Mac’s. It’s a must for someone like me, who switches between using Windows and Mac OS. That small difference drove me mad when using Mac so super thankful someone wrote an app that fixes it. It’s free and open source so no excuse to not to use it.
One of my side quests at work is to get a simple feedback loop going where we can create knowledge bases that comment on Notion documents. I was curious if I could hook this together following these requirements: No custom code hosting Prompt is editable within Notion rather than requiring understanding of Zapier Should be be fairly quickly Ultimately, I was able to get it working. So a quick summary of how it works, some comments on why I don’t particularly like this approach, then some more detailed comments on getting it working. General approach Create a Notion database of prompts. Create a specific prompt for providing feedback on RFCs. Create a Notion database for all RFCs. Add an automation into this database that calls a Zapier webhook. The Zapier webhook does a variety of things that culminate in using the RFC prompt to provide feedback on the specific RFC as a top-level comment in the RFC. Altogether this works fairly well. The challenges with this approach The best thing about this approach is that it actually works, and it works fairly well. However, as we dig into the implementation details, you’ll also see that a series of things are unnaturally difficult with Zapier: Managing rich text in Notion because it requires navigating the blocks datastructure Allowing looping API constructs such as making it straightforward to leave multiple comments on specific blocks rather than a single top-level comment Notion only allows up to 2,000 characters per block, but chunking into multiple blocks is moderately unnatural. In a true Python environment, it would be trivial to translate to and from Markdown using something like md2notion Ultimately, I could only recommend this approach as an initial validation. It’s definitely not the right long-term resting place for this kind of approach. Zapier implementation I already covered the Notion side of the integration, so let’s dig into the Zapier pieces a bit. Overall it had eight steps. I’ve skipped the first step, which was just a default webhook receiver. The second step was retrieving a statically defined Notion page containing the prompt. (In later steps I just use the Notion API directly, which I would do here if I was redoing this, but this worked too. The advantage of the API is that it returns a real JSON object, this doesn’t, probably because I didn’t specify the content-type header or some such.) This is the configuration page of step 2, where I specify the prompt’s page explicitly. ) Probably because I didn’t set content-type, I think I was getting post formatted data here, so I just regular expressed the data out. It’s a bit sloppy, but hey it worked, so there’s that. ) Here is using the Notion API request tool to retrieve the updated RFC (as opposed to the prompt which we already retrieved). ) The API request returns a JSON object that you can navigate without writing regular expressions, so that’s nice. ) Then we send both the prompt as system instructions and the RFC as the user message to Open AI. ) Then pass the response from OpenAI to json.dumps to encode it for being included in an API call. This is mostly solving for newlines being \n rather than literal newlines. ) Then format the response into an API request to add a comment to the document. Anyway, this wasn’t beautiful, and I think you could do a much better job by just doing all of this in Python, but it’s a workable proof of concept.
When working on big JavaScript web apps, you can split the bundle in multiple chunks and import selected chunks lazily, only when needed. That makes the main bundle smaller, faster to load and parse. How to lazy import a module? let hljs = await import("highlight.js").default; is equivalent of: import hljs from "highlight.js"; Now: let libZip = await import("@zip.js/zip.js"); let blobReader = new libZip.BlobReader(blob); Is equivalent to: import { BlobReader } from "@zip.js/zip.js"; It’s simple if we call it from async function but sometimes we want to lazy load from non-async function so things might get more complicated: let isLazyImportng = false; let hljs; let markdownIt; let markdownItAnchor; async function lazyImports() { if (isLazyImportng) return; isLazyImportng = true; let promises = await Promise.all([ import("highlight.js"), import("markdown-it"), import("markdown-it-anchor"), ]); hljs = promises[0].default; markdownIt = promises[1].default; markdownItAnchor = promises[2].default; } We can run it from non-async function: function doit() { lazyImports().then( () => { if (hljs) { // use hljs to do something } }) } I’ve included protection against kicking of lazy import more than once. That means on second and n-th call we might not yet have the module loaded so hljs will be still undefined.
