It's a safe bet that most of us have encountered the age-old admonition to "never judge a book by its cover" at some point in our lives. There is a deep wisdom in that advice---wisdom that seems to go completely out the window as soon as a certain type of person spots a certain type of punctuation.| Scott Smitelli
Toasted Frontega Chicken sandwich, no sliced tomatoes. There's that feeling again, why are my teeth clenched? And a cup of Mac & Cheese. I remember getting locked out of my online loan servicing account a few years ago, that sucked. And a regular Dr Pepper. How long have my hands been shaking?| Scott Smitelli
A human interest piece about a person who never existed, who has spent his entire adult life doing something I don't know anything about.| Scott Smitelli
Join me on a brief foray into one of mankind’s most disreputable pastimes: Attempting to analyze and critique Christmas music. Today’s subject is “Deck the Halls” as performed by Mannheim Steamroller. You know, the 80s synthesizer version with that bad note in it. More »| Scott Smitelli
The powered chainsaw was developed nearly a century ago. Its rise in prevalence has fundamentally changed the shape of human work in forestry and logging industries. But when was the last time you personally needed to use a chainsaw in your daily life? More »| Scott Smitelli
Twenty years ago, it was not difficult to find songs that used the word “fake” somewhere in the lyrics. This is not nearly as prevalent in music today, nor was it all that common before that era. This article explores the phenomenon to try to see if there’s really something to it. More »| Scott Smitelli
Everybody has their own unique way of processing and dealing with grief. There’s not really any right or wrong way to do it. Except for Google Calendar—they are absolutely doing it wrong. More »| Scott Smitelli
A detailed look at a few different sources of visual distortion that commonly occur when developing a raycaster. Covers fish eye distortion, projection plane angle distortion, and outlines a technique to disentangle the rendered wall height from the screen’s aspect ratio. More »| Scott Smitelli
Depending on how you interpret the numbers, you can make any country come out on top. More »| Scott Smitelli
An exploration of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) message format, the interpretation of each of its data fields, and the underlying variables that time servers track to keep their clocks accurate. More »| Scott Smitelli
Drawing onto a <canvas> element doesn’t need as much code as online tutorials and example pages might lead you to believe. This page contains a handful of demos that show exactly what you need and almost nothing that you don’t. More »| Scott Smitelli
A deep dive into hidden data encoded in the BMP files saved by the Klein Tools TI250 thermal imager. More »| Scott Smitelli
The semi-complete teardown of Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure (1992). More »| Scott Smitelli
A reconstruction of the source code of Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure (1992), using the original C compiler and x86 assembler from 1988. More »| Scott Smitelli
A utility that removes tweets from Twitter after they reach a specified age. Because nothing good ever came from a ten-year-old tweet. More »| Scott Smitelli
Windowbox is a photo-hosting website where I post pictures directly from my phone camera. More »| Scott Smitelli
The configuration management code that automatically built this web server and everything running on it. More »| Scott Smitelli
Scott’s dotfiles. More »| Scott Smitelli
A cache object that actually deletes the least-recently-used items. More »| Scott Smitelli
An absurd tale of my experience trying to reset the security questions on an Apple ID account. More »| Scott Smitelli
A dynamic CMS for mostly-static content. This site was powered by Docroute from 2012 to 2024. More »| Scott Smitelli
A web service that uses a proprietary and jealously-guarded algorithm to determine if a given company is “real.” More »| Scott Smitelli
It will soon be stapling time. More »| Scott Smitelli
Inspired by the popular (and eventually debunked) Twitter account @horse_ebooks, The Sort of Face is my attempt at creating a Twitter bot that generates funny gibberish. More »| Scott Smitelli
The Trigger and Freewheel CMS powers a webcomic of the same name that I started drawing in 2008 and have been sporadically updating since. More »| Scott Smitelli
I assembled and uploaded a video showing a timelapse road trip from Pittsburgh, PA to San Mateo, CA. Here I share the tricks and pitfalls I discovered in my work. More »| Scott Smitelli
A series of tests designed to try to thwart the audio portion of YouTube’s Content ID digital fingerprinting system. More »| Scott Smitelli
Working in conjunction with twitstash, twanslationparty corrupts the English text in one Twitter account’s timeline and posts the result to another account. More »| Scott Smitelli
twitstash is a cron script that archives a Twitter user’s timeline into a MySQL database for search, data mining, or as a foundation for twanslationparty bots. More »| Scott Smitelli
Determining the speed and tempo variations in Barry Manilow’s 1974 hit “Mandy.” More »| Scott Smitelli
Synthesizing Futurama’s “Angry Machine” sound effect from scratch using a noise generator and a few filters. More »| Scott Smitelli
A self-made block diagram for the Behringer SL2442FX-PRO mixer. More »| Scott Smitelli
In January 2008, Apple released version 7.4 of QuickTime which had the unfortunate side-effect of breaking video rendering in Adobe After Effects. This article explores a method to revert the installed version of QuickTime back to 7.3. More »| Scott Smitelli
A list of some of the loudest-sounding songs in my music collection, and a plea to bring back dynamic range. More »| Scott Smitelli
An analysis of strange digital compression artifacting present on certain tracks of _Chef Aid: The South Park Album_.| Scott Smitelli
At some companies, it is expected that certain engineers will serve as part of a formal on-call rotation. On paper, this seems like a reasonable way to ensure the reliability of the product. In practice, it is a miserable burden and you probably won't even get paid for it.| Scott Smitelli
When you're improvising a comedy scene, the golden rule is to respond with "yes, and" to everything your partners say and do. This unwavering acceptance can produce riotous bouts of laughter. In an engineering team, it just creates unholy messes.| Scott Smitelli
Look up in the sky! It's a bird! It's hundreds of thousands of birds! What are all these birds doing with my patio umbrella? And why do they all collectively believe that "scrappiness" is a good example of a corporate value?| Scott Smitelli
The description suggests that this is some kind of extended metaphor about work. It appears to be written in that _Choose Your Own Adventure_ style second-person voice, yet there are no choices to be found within. Against your better judgment, you follow the link.| Scott Smitelli
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, where none of the light switches do a damn thing. And you may ask yourself, "How do I work this?" And you may ask yourself, "Am I right, am I wrong?" Same as it ever was.| Scott Smitelli
This is the website you are currently looking at.| Scott Smitelli
Long-form content about whatever topic happens to be on my mind at any given time.| Scott Smitelli