jgrahamc

Huh?

In the middle of my doctorate I had a mini-crisis of "I'm not smart enough and I'm never going to manage this", got mononucleosis, and decided the cure was the US equivalent (the USA Rail Pass: https://www.amtrak.com/tickets/departure-rail-pass.html).

I spent weeks and weeks traveling around the US. The Amtrak system is much maligned but you get to move at a slow pace and see the country and meet people (some of which you would prefer to have not met).

I highly recommend doing it if you want to get a sense of the scale and diversity of the US.

During this trip, at the recommendation of a friend, I read (or tried to read) a number of "American classic" books which I would finish and then leave on the train for someone else to read. Catch in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, ... The only book I couldn't finish was, ironically, On The Road which I found utterly tedious.

I have an Apricot with the little LCD display on the keyboard. Six membrane keys just under the LCD and each of those keys has an LED in the bottom left corner.

https://lowbackgroundsteel.ai

I've tried this with my own blog posts from blog.jgc.org and the result was... not good. It basically wrote something that read like a parody.

I agree. It's very clearly a research prototype and they are talking about getting it working to do body composition.

I am here but I retired from being CTO of Cloudflare in March 2025 [1] and the current CTO is Dane Knecht (dknecht here). What advantage does decoupling Cloudflare Containers from Cloudflare Workers have?

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/three-chapters-at-cloudflare-pro...

It's blog.jgc.org and you should read it if you like a mixture of electronics, programming, history of computing and just plain randomness.

More great on screen code moments (I haven't got round to Superman III, yet): https://behind-the-screens.tv But Superman III is not just REM statements.

It was 100% not Excel: https://blog.jgc.org/2023/07/unfortunately-kelly-rowland-cou...

Also, we're really close to the 24 year anniversary of "Dilemma": https://hollawhenyougetthis.com

Doesn't the flag button serve that purpose?

That's not a project that excites me but good luck with it.

Wonderful!

At the bottom he notes: "I’m sitting in the UK as I write this. Under UK law, I believe this should constitute fair dealing: the purpose is quotation for criticism and review, and this single screen capture is in no way an alternative to paying to see the original film. The film comes from the USA, and under USA law I think it similarly constitutes fair use: it’s for non-profit educational purposes, the amount of the full work used is extremely small, and the effect on the value of the full work negligible."

I took down my entire "Behind The Screens" YouTube channel and transferred it to my own site: https://behind-the-screens.tv because of copyright notices from YouTube that were heavily skewed towards the studios and I didn't have the energy to fight what was clearly fair use in my videos.

These are still heavily used at airports and the sound of the dot matrix printer going at the gate is usually a sign that boarding is starting soon.

I am an older, low-level developer!

Me and some other friends used laptops (think they were IBM ThinkPads), PCMCIA Ethernet adapters (maybe from Xircom?) and thin Ethernet (coax) to play multiplayer DOOM on a Reno Air or AA flight from San Jose to Austin once. I think we were using IPX for networking and we just strung coax between the seats.

Needless to say this was before 9/11 and the flight attendants took it in their stride.

SoftICE

I have a Flipper Zero and I've used it... occasionally. Like that one time controlling the Taylor Swift Eras tour wristbands: https://blog.jgc.org/2024/05/controlling-taylor-swift-eras-t... but it's mostly sat around being an odd device.

I duplicated a couple of RFID things, used the IR for some stuff, and once in a while used the radio receiver, but mostly it looks pretty.

I'm not sure what I'd do with a Flipper One, but I guess I've done a lot of things with Raspberry Pis so... maybe?

I had not thought about it that way and to be clear some of the parameters (such as the sizes you mention and also the row numbers in ELEMENTS) were found by a bit of experimentation. With the fundamental algorithm in place there was a bit of iteration to get something that looks good on screen (almost all the time).

The other thing was the title. The code originally could have had two letters (e.g. P and E in APERIODIC) joined at a vertex and it looked odd (it looked like the word was broken) so there's specific code to make sure that doesn't happen.

On that machine there's Claude's authentication for my account so I can run Claude on it, a public key so I can SSH to the box, and a private key for GitHub access.

And this is partly why my development machine is a Raspberry Pi that I can image any time by removing the SD card: https://blog.jgc.org/2026/04/raspberry-pi-as-isolated-ai-cod...

I loved reading RISKS and looks like back in 1991 (35 years ago! Eek!) I was worried about trojan horses on Netware 286: https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/11/65#subj3

RIP

The code includes an ELEMENTS array with the layout of elements on the standard periodic table with H at the (1, 1) position. The tiles are laid out on the page and the code attempts to place the elements as close to the "standard" position (rectilinear) by calculating the Euclidean distance from the centroid of rhombi to the centre of the square that would be drawn for the element in the standard table.

So you've got 118 elements with ideal locations and a whole bunch of rhombi with known locations. The Euclidean distance (without bothering with the sqrt) is used as the "cost" function for the Hungarian algorithm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_algorithm): the idea is to minimize the cost (distance from ideal) for each element.

You will sometimes see some gaps in the periodic table as this layout isn't "perfect" (in the sense of without isolated rhombi inside the table) and I did work on having a post-layout pass where these islands were identified and filled by moving adjacent rhombus assignments, but I wasn't happy with how this tended to break the layout of the periodic table (I was going for some visual "looks similar to the classic U shaped periodic table) and so decided to accept them.

Do it! Make an aperiodic table jigsaw with tiles that are elements and a lot of blanks!

Without Claude I wouldn't have made this because I wouldn't have wanted to spend the time. Claude allowed me to try something out and I spent time with Claude experimenting with different ideas (for example, at one point I had it tile the entire plane with periodic tables but the effect wasn't as good as the single periodic table I ended up using).

In a very short period of time I got to try many different ideas and create the final site. The ideas were all mine, the implementation was Claude's. I view this as wonderful: I had an idea and was able to iterate an implementation very rapidly. I can't turn my back on a tool that helps me create more.

PS If it's any consolation, my blog posts are all hand written. I don't use AI for any of the prose; I do use a spell checker.

The code attempts to retain the "shape" and "layout" of the periodic table.

I am building a better interface for managing KNX systems than the ETS6 software. Code is here: https://github.com/jgrahamc/koolenex

1. I would not have attempted this without AI assistance because it's a big project.

2. I have built a functional program that I am able to use for real work in a handful of weeks, working part time on this (like literally a few hours per day prompting Claude and Kimi).

3. Had I decided to do this without AI assistance it would have been months of work.

Same here. I had installed Headspace long ago and deleted it. It's now reappearing if I delete it.

I just don't idolize individuals.

Oh wow. Enhancements for the Sharp MZ line! Wonderful. I spent a lot of time with those machines in the 1980s and own a few. Being able to emulate the Sharp MZ-80K's (https://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/in-which-i-switch-on-30-year-ol...) MZ80FD would be cool.