Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 14hAnd just one pic of the legendary class in which the then real and original Substack invented NodeSchool, and we all gamed through its challenges. 000
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 14hThere'd been a "fireworks" show powered by JS on a microcontroller (The "Spark", I believe). 100
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 14hI'll share a couple from Nodeconf 2014 also: The foursquare court, and a crowd playing "Time Cat": The Max Ogden invented game where you enter `time cat` into your shell and try to exit the process in exactly 1 second. 100
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 14hCoping with the @nodeconf.eu fomo by digging up my only two pics from NodeConf 2013: The menu, and somehow a single slide from Domenic Denicola's speed run summary of all the Star Wars novels (pre-Disney canon obliteration!) 100
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/09/2026Ever see The Last Starfighter? 😛 (It’s not as good, but was a year earlier and has a VERY similar core plot). 130
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 10/09/2026I don’t know if any of you saw the new Wallace and Gromit movie, but it’s wildly prescient. The penguin returns and Wallace invents a gardening bot while Gromit preferred gardening as a hobby, and the penguin back doors the bots for nefarious purposes, and somehow comedy ensues. A+ 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/09/2026The bots aren't thinking, they're matrix multiplying with style. 030
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/09/2026Abusers seem to have learned that Bluesky's default of notifying people when they're retweeted is a spam vector. Here are the switches I made to close that port. 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 25/08/2026I don't know where I first saw this, but it's seemed validated in both Will's take today and Yegge's recent post. I think it even just feels better to cultivate/practice kindness. 031
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 18/08/2026I had a local AI generate this meme, but it still conveys the Idea, as Plato would say. 000
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 17/08/2026Apparently the aperiodic monotile is in a family of shapes that includes... this double diamond? And this comma guy? I kinda wish they'd led with those. It *looks* less mysterious that way. cs.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/hat/ani... 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 17/08/2026You didn't think the solution would be tiling, did you? We need gap space! This is a packing problem. 160
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 17/08/2026Ugh, I can't believe my 3d printer's software doesn't automatically optimally lay out the aperiodic monotile. Does it even have an agent in it? 1430
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 12/08/2026She could be the new Elizabeth I. commons.und.edu/cgi/viewcont... 020
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/06/2026Before and after on that pond. This after isn't as clear as it got, but I mean, you can see at least 12 inches deep in there. 020
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/06/2026As a guy who once turned a duck-sewage-green pond clear, I'd just share that my mental model is that you're going to have plants as long as you have unspent nitrogen in the water. If I were them, I'd throw in a bunch of those nitrogen-unfixing enzymes. 120
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 16/06/2026obligatory gridfinity paint set. I actually hadn’t known where I’d put my model paint for a few years, but I finally found them and I’ve been adapting a lot of my organization to gridfinity for some kinds of tool things and this made a great set. 000
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 16/06/2026I had some reflective paint I used to maybe make the power buttons have a glow hopefully. I think the optics it gives are similar to them being encased in glass. Might record a splat of it later in good light. 110
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 16/06/2026Finally looked up a painting guide for the TNG type II phaser model I bought at a convention when I was in like 3rd grade (my dad was awesome). I did NOT expect my "speed paint" to end up in the guide for allowing those grooves to pop in the handle. 140
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 30/05/2026Generated a first round of kinda intuitively generated motions, just to confirm the model leg mechanisms + simulation environment work. One of the generated motions managed to blindly generate balancing code without having trained at all. 100
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 30/05/2026I probably want the accurate model in here for looksmaxxing reasons.. 100
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 30/05/2026I gave Opus 4.8 a 3d model of one of the robots from the film "Batteries not included" and asked it to design me CAD and schematics to build it into an actual walking robot, and make it a digital twin to train with. So far, kinda plausible looking. 110
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 30/05/2026Opus 4.8 here working with levels of confidence here that are unheard of (guessing hashes) 1113
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 30/05/2026Well, you came this far. Let’s learn a few things. - Hooligan has anti-Irish roots - Scalawag goes back to making fun of shetland ponies. 000
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 14/05/2026I propose a new "R" to the three Rs of waste management: 🤖REPROGRAM💻 Breathe new life into old electronics! The motors can all still move! The sensors can all still sense! Reduce e-Waste: Make electronics do what you want them to do. 011
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 05/05/2026But these odd-sided prisms create focused zones that can be bent into lines perpendicular to the source, but their distribution isn't linear... 110
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 05/05/2026Ever waved a laser in front of a kettle's steam? You get a really great cross section of the smoke. I've meant to try this with a flat beam laser for a while, and then I'd been thinking of ways of recording multiple slices at once to get a sort of motion voxel cloud out of some vapor/smoke. 120
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 05/05/2026Hade Claude make a toy for me to play with different prism shapes with a laser to experiment with an idea for a kind of volumetric scanning. 120
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 28/04/2026The in-hand to in-bush exchange rate has been brutal lately. 040
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 28/04/2026So TIL that dental insurance can be... provably more expensive than not having it, and you can just ask your dentist what the insurance co pays, and then say "give me that price" as a cheap haggle. 100
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/03/2026The access control section of this summary blog post fits in this screen shot. Now let's run through some scenarios & problems, then I'll get to a proposed solution. 150
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 17/03/2026This new permissions modal is pretty nice. Not represented: I am fine being quote posted, but I don't want to be spammed when strangers do it. 111
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/02/2026Brand has an unforgiving perspective on people who strive to preserve the role of craftspeople over the results of their craft. It seems easy to transpose to modern AI sentiment. 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/02/2026“Maintenance of Everything” by Stewart Brand feels like such a grounded way of looking at the world, at a time that it’s easy to move so fast that we can easily get behind on what matters. 160
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 17/01/2025I’ve been chipping at my own take on his build. Been making a 3d printed keyboard mount for the leg. 171
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 15/12/2024I find myself in the bowels of irony. where the earliest instance of this misinformation I can find was shared by the apparent author of a book on misinformation. 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 14/12/2024When I buy a product, I expect it to shelter me from the reality of death in perpetuity. 020
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/12/2024Threw on the first movie of The Nutcracker recommended by Apple TV. Was surprised to find it starring Macauly Culkin soon after his Home Alone role. And then I noticed how similar the story arcs were, so now here you have it, Claude’s analysis of Home Alone as a retelling of The Nutcracker Suite. 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 07/12/2024Take Google Photos, for instance: On iOS, if a friend shares a google album with you (which is the default way to share a photo on Android), you’ll be taken to a page that pushes you hard to the google photo app, which promptly pushes for full photo syncing. 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 07/12/2024Bluesky: plz don’t ask to view my photos when I save a photo. I know it’s just a little careless coding, but it’s the kind of thing that Google and FB makes into a nasty policy, so it’d be nice to not provoke those vibes. 140
