This marks the first week of being temporarily free-range. I haven’t figured out the right term for it yet. I joked about this a bit 2 weeks ago, but “temporarily free-range” is my top contender for now. I’m avoiding calling it a sabbatical because it reminds me too much of tenured faculty, and “microdosing retirement” sounds a bit too laid back. What matters (and what’s kind of scary) about this time is that nobody can tell me what to do....

I’ve been thinking about documentation a lot lately because of my experience of helping South Asian workers navigate Singpass (Singapore’s digital identity service).1 Singpass interfaces and documentation support the 4 official languages – Malay, Chinese, Tamil and English – which makes navigating Singpass a challenging task for people who don’t speak any of these languages. I started my own page of quick links to speed up my own process of connecting workers to the right e-service (for account registration, password resets) etc, but realised that I could probably make a bigger impact if I:...

Inspired by The Zen of Python✨ Machine-readable is better than PDF. Avoid jargon. Documentation is not separate from your product - it is part of it. Good docs help people to help themselves. Multilingual support matters. Some links: Why GOV.UK content should be published in HTML and not PDF Accessibility for Content This is a living document, so please feel free to make a pull request if you want to add on something or just make your own!...

The strange thing about cameras is that brands keep calling the same thing by different names. Why can’t we just have a unique identifier for each thing that exists? It’s like how the Canon EOS 750D is also called the Rebel T6i (see Wikipedia). The Konica TZ-635 is no different - It appears to be called the Konica Zoom FR 635 too (like in this Youtube video by Meracasee or this random ebay listing)....

TL;DR: These two cameras are the same. If you can’t find manuals for the Fuji, use this Samsung one: https://cameramanuals.org/samsung/samsung_af-slim-zoom-e-s.pdf (Credits to Michael Butkus Jr, who’s been archiving camera manuals since 1997 with https://butkus.org/chinon/index.html) What ever happened? I had thrifted some cameras, and was unable to find any manuals for the Fuji Zoom Cardia Super 115 I got. It has a ton of modes like Fuzzy, Portrait, and something that looked like a self-timer and interval shooting....

I have now joined the legions of people who have started their free Github Pages blog with Jekyll, and moved to Hugo. I originally used the Tufte-Jekyll theme, but realised that my stated preference (sidenotes!!) was very far from my revealed preferences (I hyperlink in my text directly a lot more). I also value having a nice table of contents. I want faster builds because this blog will be pretty image-heavy in time to come, because I’ve got a bunch of film cameras to review....

Note: I originally wrote this on PubPub as I was still in the process of fiddling with my site. I hope this helps someone who’s thinking about going back to school too :^) Brief overview of the NUS GC-CF 1 This is a part-time programme that’s targeted at people who don’t have a formal undergraduate background in Computer Science (CS for short). It consists of three courses: IT5001 (Introductory programming course that everyone must take)...

Recently, I went to my friend’s office for lunch and joked that these were “reparations for harvesting my personal data since I was 11”. I also remarked that it was kind of impressive as I don’t think I could’ve monetized my personal data like this (to the point of having kombucha on tap, and more lunch options than one could meaningfully try in one meal). While somewhat funny, it also reflects the way I’ve been slowly socialised to think about software as in terms of these things:...

This is an overview of the various free sources of legal judgments in Singapore, and some of the limitations surrounding the status quo of access in Singapore. My leanings on this matter I’m highly influenced by the Free Access to Law Movement and think that legal information should be accessible to all. This means that all court judgments and legislation should be free for users to access. Here, I’m just thinking about access in terms of “Can I search, and find the full text of a judgment?...

I must confess that I’ve never written a test, but part of my work involves doing that now. I’m learning more about Github Classrooms and how to do autograding. Currently exploring check50 as it allows students to check their own work (as opposed to checks only occurring at the grading stage), but there’s a tradeoff in the form of not being able to make private test cases as check50 works with public Github repos....