The Pandemic Productivity Plan When the pandemic started one of my positive early reactions was “I want to make sure I come out of this having made the most of it. I don’t want to just fall into languishing depression and Netflix binging. Since I’m trapped at home, I’m going to make this time produc...

Title: Deep Work (Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World) Author: Cal Newport. He is a writer and an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He writes and blogs on productivity and making yourself useful. See his full bio on his site. My Overall Thoughts: This book...

Title: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity Author: David Allen In my own words: Fantastic. Read it. This book offers processes and techniques to make your work less stressful and get things done. While I don't use the full system in this book, becoming a believer in "inbox zero"...

There are two types of people in the world: those who have organized groups of friends and those who haven’t. If you are planning something, perhaps a vacation, or a weekend trip or perhaps you are already going on a trip but need to agree on things like accommodation, budget, or buying certain tick...

I recently spent a few hours struggling over how to convert RGB to HSV ranges in openCV. Most of the google results I got from my searches assumed I already knew something about colorspaces.  I did know some things. But there were “unknown unknowns”. If you can get your openCV color range to wo...

Since we're very limited for travel and road trips during the pandemic, I decided to take my friends on a virtual road trip using Google Maps. We would travel the Silk Road from west to east. This was inspired by Trabant Trek, a reality show where a group of westerners with next to no money buy four...

Here's how I used to try to start new habits: Decide why, what, where, when, and how I'm going to do something.Do it.Keep doing it.Eventually from some reason or another, stop doing it. As you can see, item #4 was causing me problems. Here's the my improved process: Decide why, what, where, when, an...

Looking through the reviews of business, self-improvement, or any how-to books on Amazon and you’ll invariable see a lot of these two types of reviews: Reviewer A: “Wow. This was life-changing. I learned so much.” and Reviewer B: “Nothing new in here. It’s just a bunch of common sense. Waste of mone...

Warning: Spoilers. If you are planning on visiting The Eureka Room, I suggest you not read this post until after your visit. Background This was the first program I made for the Eureka Room in its new 3D incarnation. During the summer I had applied to be in the East Austin Studio Tour, despite the f...

Note: This post is part of my “Museums Project“, a collection of 200+ high-concept ideas for museums. I saw a blog post recently asking the question, "What would a museum for robots would look like?" It was asking bigger questions about the future of AI, but it got me thinking about how nearly all m...