Letters Remain

Category: technology

  • Project Euler and Other Programming Challenges

    Looking for something to flex your programming puzzle skills after Advent of Code? Me too, so I was researching some options. A perennial favourite in my household, the classic Project Euler is a more mathematics-driven collection of programming puzzles. If the maths-driven style is not for you, I also have two lists of programming contests:…

  • Comfort Noises and Electric Vehicle ‘Soundscapes’

    Before noise-cancelling microphones, voice activity detection algorithms, and the crisp audio clarity of modern phone and video calling, lulls in conversation were naturally filled with analogue background noise. These imperfections provided continuity, making silence feel natural. Without them, the silence in digital communication would be unsettling. To address this, synthetic background ‘comfort noise’ is added…

  • Locksmiths, Benevolent Deceptions, and the Benefit of Fake Effort

    In my last post, I discussed ‘the labour illusion‘—the idea that transparency about the effort involved in a process can enhance our perception of its value. I think of it as the ‘cousin’ of the IKEA effect. More intriguingly, this principle holds true even when the effort and delay is entirely unnecessary and fabricated. We…

  • The Labour Illusion, or Why Visible Effort Matters

    The accuracy of loading bars has long been a joke: reaching 66% takes mere moments, but 99% to 100% feels endless. Yet, progress bars—designed to offer “operational transparency”—play a key psychological role in building trust and satisfaction. A lot of business and marketing research has gone into identifying ways to improve idle wait times to…

  • Advent of Code

    Looking for a festive programming challenge? Advent of Code might be just what you need: Advent of Code is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, a…

  • The Nerd Urban Dictionary, or: The Overcomplication Compilation

    Seemingly frustrated at how ‘nerds’ throw around technical terms in order to sound smart, Chris Anderson (writer of The Long Tail, etc.) put together The Nerd Urban Dictionary to compile the most common and worst offenders. With terms coming from disciplines ranging from statistics to chemistry, finance to the military, here’s a small sample (mostly…

  • China, Cement, and the Great Wall’s Sticky Rice Mortar

    I’m fascinated by the scale of concrete usage in modern China, and some of the facts can be difficult to fathom on face value. For instance: Now I’ve just read about sticky rice mortar. As Liam said: “The Great Wall of China is held together with sticky rice” sounds like the kind of lie a…

  • The Three Important Response Time Limits

    There are three important response time limits in user interface design, and this has remained constant since 1968, says usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Those three time limits? Chess, anyone? It’s worth also looking at Nielsen’s Powers of 10, detailing further time scales of user interaction. My summary:

  • Intentional Delays in Apple Chess (so you don’t feel so bad)

    The source code for Apple Chess reveals the intentional inclusion of a time delay in the computer making its moves. As a comment in the source explains: Taking a rudimentary look at the code, it looks like kInteractiveDelay is for computer-human game modes (so an intentional delay to make us feel better), while kAutomaticDelay is…

  • The Statistics on Link Rot

    By sampling 4,200 random URLs spanning a 14 year period, Maciej Cegłowski, the creator of bookmarking website Pinboard.in, decided to gather statistics on the extent of link rot and how it progressed across time. Interested in finding out if there is some sort of ‘half life of links’, he found instead that it is a fairly linear, fast…