New Zealand’s Massive, Unsolvable Talent Crisis

New Zealand needs more doctors, nurses, teachers, and midwives.

Higher Orders of Possibility

What new forms of thought, feeling, or morality might emerge in a higher order of intelligence beyond our own?

What Could It Mean If Our Universe Is A Simulation?

A metaphysical thought experiment about consciousness, simulation, and the layers of reality.

The Matrix v0.0.1-alpha

Is this The Matrix? No. But it's certainly something to think about.

What Does Thermodynamics Say About Morality?

I no longer think that thermodynamics has anything to say about morality. This blog post was misguided.

User Experience is Computation

If human brains are computational machines, then any computer program with a human user is parallel computation.

Universal Causal Language

An experimental language that attempts to express causality across code, language, law, music, and biology

The Reflective Universe Hypothesis

Is the universe a simulation? If so, what does that mean?

The Meaning Of Life According to ChatGPT

"All right," said the computer, and settled into silence again. The two men fidgeted. The tension was unbearable. "You're really not going to like it," observed Deep Thought. "Tell us!" "All right," said Deep Thought. "The Answer to the

Incan Gold - Two-Player Variant

If you love push-your-luck games but usually play with just two people, here's a variant you might enjoy. I designed a two-player variant for a board game called Incan Gold (also known as Diamant). It's a fun little warmup game I like to introduce to people.

How I Turned Our Rented House into a Smart Home

We've been renting a house in Auckland, New Zealand. This house needs a lot of maintenance and renovation, but the landlords let us have two cats and a dog so we can't complain! They also let us do whatever we want to the house (within reason)

Background Extra Work

I signed up with an agency (BGT) and started doing some extra work in 2024. It's a lot of fun to be on movie and TV sets. (It can also pay quite well if you book a commercial!) Spartacus: House of Ashur I'm a "Roman

home-assistant

Desk Lighting For Each Day Of The Week

I have an LED strip behind my desk in my office. It's controlled by an ESP32 running the WLED firmware. I've had it stuck on a fixed color preset for around a year. (See above.) I still like these colors, but I thought it would be

workshop

3D Printed Pegboard Mounts for Stanley Fatmax V20 Power Tools

I have some Stanley Fatmax power tools: * Impact Driver * Drill * Jigsaw * Sander * Circular Saw I also have their lawnmower, leaf blower, and pressure washer. It's great that we can use the same batteries for everything. I decided to mount the hand-held power tools on a pegboard in my

home-automation

Zigbee Commands To Configure the Start And Stop Limits for a Zemismart ZM25 Zigbee Blind Motor

If you use Home Assistant and Zigbee2MQTT, you can use the following script to configure the motor limits for your Zemismart Zigbee blinds. alias: Update Zemismart ZM25 Blind Motor Limit fields: entity_id: required: true description: Entity ID of your cover entity example: cover.blinds selector: entity: filter: domain: cover

home-assistant

3D Printed Blinds Motor Adapter

I bought a Zigbee motor for some blinds in our living room. I got it on AliExpress. Blind motors can be really expensive from New Zealand suppliers. I got a quote from one supplier for $350 per motor, but you can find motors on AliExpress for less than $100. The

web-design

Do we need more HTML colors?

I wrote a blog post about painting my fence. This got me thinking a lot about colors and how I use them as a web developer. Color Matching Paint With GIMPPlease note: This post is a stream-of-conciousness journal entry that describes all of the mistakes I made while trying to

painting

Color Matching Paint With GIMP

Please note: This post is a stream-of-conciousness journal entry that describes all of the mistakes I made while trying to color match paint. This is not a how-to guide from an expert. We're renting an old house that needs a lot of maintenance. The landlords are very easy-going

3D Printing

Fried Rice Sandbox Toy

My wife is a counselor who does "play therapy" at a primary school. She has a sand tray and some toys that kids can play with during their sessions. Sometimes she asks me to 3D print things for the kids to play with. For example, I printed this

lora

LoRa Mailbox Notifications

I bought this awesome device that sends me notifications whenever we get a new letter or package in our mailbox. I bought it from the creator's online store: MailBox Guard Wireless IR SensorPricelessToolkitPricelessToolkit The design is also open source and available on GitHub: GitHub - PricelessToolkit/MailBoxGuard: Lora

blog

Migrating from Hugo to Ghost

I haven't been able to write any blog posts since I got an M2 MacBook. I was using an old version of Hugo and got it running in a Docker container, but the Docker container only ran on my old Intel Mac. It was too painful to update