Data Conditioning for Snowflake ID Compression

I was reminded recently of a question that had been in the back of my mind when I was working at Twitter. With the exception of very old content, IDs of tweets and other entities like users are so-called “snowflake IDs” – unique timestamped integer IDs, constructed specifically to try and avoid ID collisions in …

Swapping Drives After a PC Hardware Replacement

Late last year, I replaced my main desktop PC, after using it for just about 7 years – a pretty good run. I decided to just buy an off-the-shelf system from Dell, rather than build my own (which I have done many times in the past), since my current computing needs are not super unusual, …

Upgrading the Wireless Adapter of a Dell XPS 8900

Because it was kind of difficult to find information about this, I figured I would post some details about a tiny little upgrade that I did to a Dell XPS 8900. It originally came with a Dell DW-1801 wireless adapter, which only supports 802.11 b/g/n, and not ac. Also, it doesn’t support the 5 GHz …

Ludum Linguarum: Aurora

(Ludum Linguarum is an open source project that I recently started, and whose creation I’ve been documenting in a series of posts. Its purpose is to let you pull localized content from games, and make flash cards for learning another language. It can be found on GitHub.) In this post, I’ll talk a little bit …

Ludum Linguarum: The Simple Stuff

(Ludum Linguarum is an open source project that I recently started, and whose creation I’ve been documenting in a series of posts. Its purpose is to let you pull localized content from games, and make flash cards for learning another language. It can be found on GitHub.) When I started this project, I figured that …

Ludum Linguarum: The Tools

(Ludum Linguarum is an open source project that I recently started, and whose creation I’ve been documenting in a series of posts. Its purpose is to let you pull localized content from games, and make flash cards for learning another language. It can be found on GitHub.) When I started working on Ludum Linguarum, I …

Introducing Ludum Linguarum

I’ve been working on a side project for some time now, and it’s gotten far enough along that it’s worth releasing it, and discussing it. It’s called Ludum Linguarum (LL) – a little awkward, yeah, but I figured that a unique name would be better in this case than spending a lot of time trying …