Posts

  1. Unpaid Work (Visualization) Week 14, 2020 of #MakeoverMonday. I intended for this to be a bit of practice with different styles of visualization; it ended up being mostly a deep-dive into dataframe.js, which I hadn't used before…
  2. Hard drive backups I recently changed how I'm storing personal files and backing up my computer. As background, I use an older 2012 Apple laptop with a 500GB SSD, and that hard drive has been ~90% full for a while. I've…
  3. Three.js NodeMaterial introduction Node-based materials have been an experimental part of the three.js library for a few years now under three/examples/js/nodes/, thanks to the efforts of Sunag. There are great examples, but…
  4. Creating animated glTF Characters with Mixamo and Blender End result: Rigged glTF 2.0 character with multiple animation clips. Mixamo, by Adobe, provides an easy way to get started with character animation: Automatic character rigging. Upload a 3D model…
  5. Creating a nav mesh for a WebVR scene This tutorial shows how to create a navigation mesh for a scene with Blender, and use it in A-Frame to do basic pathfinding. For the short version, watch this video at 6:08. The key parts are covered…
  6. Exporting glTF 2.0 from Maya LT Updated Febrary 2018: The tools available for glTF have changed since last June, and I've tried to update things accordingly. Unfortunately there is still no direct path to glTF from Autodesk tools…
  7. On Immigration, Refugees, and Faith The executive branch of the U.S. government has just stopped entry of refugees for 120 days, and stopped admission of Syrian refugees…
  8. Gamepad Support on the Web Overviews state of the Gamepad API on the web, as of early 2017.
  9. NPM Version Bumping and Extra Files NPM has a handy little feature for bumping the versions on your packages, and it works like this: npm version [major | minor | patch] Want to run tests first, minify your code, and only publish the…
  10. What Can a Technologist Do About Climate Change From an essay by Bret Victor (@worrydream), on how the tech community "can contribute to tech and/or policy solutions," and why this is important — You cannot calibrate your sense of what’s valuable…
  11. Using ES6 Generators with Callback-based Libraries ES6 introduces generators (and yield expressions) to JavaScript. Kyle Simpson has written a nice introduction to generators, if you're looking for more about how they work. They're a very welcome…
  12. Recommendations A short list of things I enjoy, to be updated at undisclosed and inconsistent intervals.
  13. Grayscale CSS and Bookmarklet A bit of code that can be used to convert any webpage (or part of a page) to grayscale.
  14. Using an iPhone with Google Cardboard I haven't heard much about iPhone users trying Google Cardboard, so this post is basically my way of saying "Oh hey, it works." And yeah. It does, assuming you have a large enough screen for a…
  15. Getting Involved in Open Source Software Contributing to open source is something I am improving at, along with finding enjoyable ways to get involved. I’m not where I want to be yet, but here are some things that have made the process…