iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 9h

...and NBA (what is with this shape?! I know nothing about NBA...) nba.six-degrees.app/explore

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 9h

See also, football football.six-degrees.app/explore

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 9h

This one was satisfying. Spend today fiddling with force-directed layouts for my Hollywood graph. Each dot is an actor, connected to others via films they've been in together. Check it out: hollywood.six-degrees.app/explore

Graph network of hollywood actors with Mads Mikkelsen highlighted

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 29/09/2026

I'm pretty much building roller coaster tycoon at this point, which I'm OK with

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 26/09/2026

I made something to generate blueprints for solves of my son's railcube, using every piece. How long until it finds a duplicate? (hint: it's at 2k an hasn't found one yet)

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 24/09/2026

Tell me you've got time off work without telling me you've got time off work

line chart showing my github contributions going up

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 17/09/2026

Only took me 4 trips to Edinburgh to climb up Arthur's seat

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 08/09/2026

I'm never going back to smart watches, but I did miss being able to do wrist maths

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 23/08/2026

I challenge you to find a better way to sink £3.74

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 18/08/2026

I published the solves here so I can get them on my mobile owen-lacey.github.io/railcube-opt...

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 16/08/2026

I'm gonna post soon about how I made a program to generate thousands of possible solutions for my son's railcube. It will involve using my js port of google or tools to solve real-time in the browser. It's very fun

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 03/08/2026

See if you can spot the point where Strava (orange) put their API behind a paywall

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 22/06/2026

Pity people who spend money on stuff like clothes

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 08/06/2026

This has been on my list for ages

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 24/05/2026

Leaving for a family function with Claude on auto /goal

Joker walking away from a blown up hospital in the dark knight

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 24/04/2026

I found this book online for my next project

A book titled "six degrees of Kevin Bacon"

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 18/04/2026

I made a contexto.me solver. I was able to zero in on it using the GloVe 300d dataset. Uses lemmas under the hood (runs, run, runing -> run), and then "just" find the word(s) where the guess is X distance away. I think my best score before this was like 50.

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 16/04/2026

This is exciting. The majority of my projects involve using Googles CP-SAT solver in some way. Today, I got a PoC js port working

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 14/04/2026

There's also just six-degrees.app for you film buffs

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 14/04/2026

This is one of those things you make that barely anyone notices, but gives me endless joy. Site is football.six-degrees.app/daily

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 09/04/2026

Can confirm @samwho.dev is equally sound IRL

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 04/03/2026

I bet you can't find a button that's pressed less than this

Screenshot of WhatsApp's delete message modal. The 'delete for me' is circled

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 10/02/2026

We need to talk about WCAG, but for children's books (worse in real life)

A children's book with black text on a dark blue background

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 06/02/2026

Slack is giving me those marginal gains this morning

A screenshot of Slack's recap feature with text "You saved about 1 minute catching up on 1 message in 1 channel"

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 29/01/2026

Is this what A/B testing is

Photo of two containers of tea bags. One says "English breakfast", one says "Yorkshire tea"

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 23/01/2026

Heh. Tensorflow go brrrr

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 23/01/2026

Thank you for the heads up! Should be sorted now 🙏

screenshot of my site with JS elements working

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 22/01/2026

Enjoying doing a custom algorithm for actor placements. I need to find the sweet spot with the force directed inputs such that the nodes don't overlap.

A graph where the y axis is the number of pixels and the x axis is the optimisation stage. It shows a decrease in pixels as the optimisation stages progress

Force-directed graph with some nodes overlapping

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 14/01/2026

This inspired me to look at manual approaches for minimizing the edge distance for my hollywood actors graph (keeping the lovely vobel layout). Here's a before & after - with a >50% reduction in edge length 💪 Thanks @macwright.com !

Before graph picture showing sub-optimal layout

After graph picture showing optimal layout

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 12/01/2026

Playing with graph layouts using the golden angle. The best solutions are always the simplest 🥰

Cicles placed in a web application using the golden angle, evenly distributed

Code snippet of how the radius and angle are calculated

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 12/01/2026

Retrospectively added storybook support to this as well to allow you to click around (why didn't I think of this at the time?!)

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Owen Lacey @owenlacey.dev · 11/01/2026

In terms of "how": 1. Created a .gitmodules file referencing the new repo 2. Update build script to build the post-specific js (this is not scalable, I know), this means I don't need to build the components manually before I can deploy the site