An article from 2015 is making the rounds again because the internet has no new ideas and neither do we, that says Shakespeare (yes that Shakespeare) was quite possibly absolutely baked out of his mind the entire time. Pipes found in his garden. Cannabis residue. And honestly this explains so much. We are such stuff as dreams are made on,…
Monica Dinculescu
https://meowni.ca/ · 76 posts · history since 2014 · active
2 Jun
1 May
A Ritz-Carlton hotel in California closed an entrance after a hummingbird made a nest on a door handle and, amidst all the daily ambient horror of simply being a person with a phone in 2026, it is nice to be reminded of the kinds of small lives we still agree to make room for. --- Have you noticed that we…
13 Apr
There’s something good going on with music these days. Romance by Fontaines D.C. is a perfect album. I have listened to it almost every single day for weeks and have not gotten sick of it once, which is – and I mean this clinically – a medical miracle. Jack White is on SNL. The Strokes are touring. There is a…
6 Apr
Thinking about resuscitating regular written updates. Reasons, in order of honesty: vanity it might pressure me into actually doing something worth reporting on writing is a part of my brain that has been gathering dust and I am becoming increasingly concerned this is turning me into a bore. --- Found an interesting framework for evaluating art via Instagram Reels, which…
29 Sept 2024
I have 4 (rounded up) beefs with language-y AI bots that have resulted in me sort of avoiding them altogether: They have the personality of a middle manager who writes Google Docs all day that nobody wants to read They’re reallllly good at guessing but not actually that smart, which leads to very convincing lies (see: the “how many Rs…
1 Sept 2022
.floatie-bit img { object-fit:cover; transition: transform 0.3s ease-in-out; cursor: zoom-in} .floatie-bit img:hover{ transform: scale(1.5); z-index: 1000; } @media (max-width: 700px) { .floatie-bit > img { margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 24px; width: 100%; } } Wow, long time, no posts! Anyway, about them text-to-art generative models going about, eh? Surprising nobody: I am extremely into them. I’ve been using DALL-E and MidJourney…
18 Nov 2021
(This is a post mostly about art but I swear there’s a moral in here for all you tech readers, or at least a discounted therapy lesson.) As you may have noticed from these latest posts, at the beginning of this year I decided to “do more art”. This went really well for a couple of months: I was making…
15 Oct 2021
.floatie-bit { display: flex; flex-direction: row; } .floatie-bit > p { margin: auto; padding-left: 24px;} .floatie-bit > img { width: 35%; flex-shrink: 0; vertical-align: middle; border-radius: 10px; } .floatie-bit > .img-column { width: 30%; flex-shrink: 0; display: flex; flex-direction: column; margin-right: var(--spacing-s); } .img-column img { width: 90%; vertical-align: middle; border-radius: 10px; } @media (max-width: 700px) { .floatie-bit { flex-direction:…
16 Aug 2021
It’s been one week since you looked at me 8 months since I’ve been writing these weekly notes, and I think I’m going to take a small break from it. It’s been a good experiment, but I’ve been getting sloppy with remembering they’re due, and it’s starting to feel a bit self-indulgent. Because I don’t actually advertise that they exist,…
26 Jul 2021
On Monday Frances took me to the teamLab exhibition at the Asian Art museum. It was really wonderful! I hadn’t seen the one in Japan so I was new to it, but the interactive art nerd in me was all over the concept and trying to figure out what was static and what was interactive, and where the sensors were.…
19 Jul 2021
First off: I think I’ve done a bad numbering in some of these recent weeks, because I wanted to write about what I actually did on July 13/14, but apparently I’ve already counted that week? Counting, man, a hell of a thing. My good friend Maeghan who aside from being a top drawer human being and tswift fan is an…
12 Jul 2021
So here’s what happened: I went on vacation and because I’m leaning so hard into this funemployment life I didn’t open my laptop once. Every year Zach and I go to his parents’ (now my in-laws! hah!) lake in Minnesota for the 4th of July. Normally we fly there, but last year we drove (because of the panderoni) and this…
24 Jun 2021
The last time I changed something big on my site was 3+ years ago. I was really into gradient rainbow text and IBM Plex Mono. It was a mild increment over whatever I had before, which was just a cleaned up and colourful version of Left from like 6 years prior. Anyway, what I’m saying is: this website had hella…
21 Jun 2021
It’s true, I did. I also wrote a blog post about it because tbh I did a good job on it, and it’s a good read. As two ladies of leisure, Frances and I went to the MOMA on a weekday to see the new Nam June Paik exhibition. I didn’t love all of it, but the bits I really…
14 Jun 2021
Weird flex: been making cheese fondue for lunch because I make the rules here. One of the (many) amazing things about being a Canadian living in California is that this state (unlike, say, no-rules-nevada) doesn’t recognize non-US driving licenses. This means that after almost 20 years of getting my first driver’s license I had to do the whole circus show…
31 May 2021
Trying out titles because I have enough weeks that even I can’t tell them apart and I lived through them. Sports!!! We went to the Nations League ⚽️ semis and finals in Denver. If you don’t know this about me, I am a bit of a football (soccer) hooligan. Zach and I go to games, we sit in suporter sections,…
25 May 2021
Chopped off 10 inches of my hair and I feel unstoppable. I always think I can deal with mermaid hair when the reality is I cba to brush it and it keeps getting longer and drier until I’m ready to take the kitchen scissors to it. I resisted that impulse and got a professional to cut it. Am I finally…
17 May 2021
normalcy resumes chez nous. I know this isn’t true everywhere, so if you’re in a place of lockdown: I am sorry for how annoying these updates will be. I was a good girl and bunkered down for over a year, and now I’ve got antibodies in spades and taking advantage of it. first trip of the after times: Monterey! I’d…
3 May 2021
Ya look at that? It’s May already. My dog’s is turning 2 on the 14th, does anyone have any good dog cake recipes or should I just give her an almost-empty jar of peanut butter with the same success rate? I got my second fouchie outchie! (#teampfizer). I wouldn’t say it bodied me the next day, but I felt uncomfortable…
28 Apr 2021
.floatie-bit { display: flex; flex-direction: row; } .floatie-bit > p { margin: auto} .floatie-bit > img { width: 35%; flex-shrink: 0; vertical-align: middle; border-radius: 10px; } .floatie-bit > .img-column { width: 30%; flex-shrink: 0; display: flex; flex-direction: column; margin-right: var(--spacing-s); } .img-column img { width: 90%; vertical-align: middle; border-radius: 10px; } @media (max-width: 700px) { .floatie-bit { flex-direction: column-reverse; }…
26 Apr 2021
I’ve been skipping weeks because a) literally nothing happens and b) I don’t have a good system to update these notes. They’re a markdown file on a GitHub repo, and I kind of need a computer to edit it, but I also kind of don’t open my computer that much these days? I also keep forgetting which day is Monday.…
12 Apr 2021
First week of being funemployed! It was very weird. By Wednesday I had lost track of what day it was, and I kept thinking it was a Saturday. By Friday I was overwhelmed with capitalism guilt and thinking that I HAD to do something to “stay productive”. What a fake idea y’all; it hadn’t even been a full week of…
5 Apr 2021
Let’s not bury the lede: I quit my job. After 8 years of working there, Google feels like a very different company than the one I joined, one that aligns less and less with my values, and it was time to move on. It sucks, because my immediate team was a group of wonderful people who do great work; I…
29 Mar 2021
Calico came out and I finished it in 2 days! It’s an adorably cute game about running a pet cafe in a fantastical little world. It’s honestly the kind of game I would make. It has an incredible cooking activity interaction, which I can only describe as “shit, this game engine has physics and collision detection, let’s use it for…
22 Mar 2021
Trying something really revolutionary this week which is “doing nothing”. Bear with me here. I mean: listening to an audio book and NOT also cleaning the house. Just sitting, listening to that book and doing nothing. WASTING THAT TIME. In this economy??? Yes. Do I dislike the idea? Also yes. Related: I switched to the Samantha Irby (Wow, no thank…
15 Mar 2021
It’s been another week of people being shit, innit? I know I should be used to this by now, but it never ceases to amaze me the capability people have for violence and evil, and the capability the patriarchy has to excuse it. “Dude had a bad day”? For real real? If that excuse has legs then you’d expect every…
8 Mar 2021
I took the whole week off because I was very tired of life. It’s the year anniversary of the last time the world was normal and it’s bringing me down. Between covid and immigration delays it’s looking very 50/50 on whether I can attend my closest cousin’s wedding this fall in Romania, and I’m beyond gutted at the thought of…
27 Feb 2021
This week was entirely consumed by the fact that I opened an online store to sell generative “art” prints. Art is in quotations here because I have a deeply unhealthy relationship with calling anything I do art, or myself an artist, but we don’t have time to for a therapy session right now. It went really great. I sold out…
15 Feb 2021
I got deep into geocaching, friends. I found 3 caches in Arizona! I didn’t sign any of them because I kept forgetting to bring a pen, so now nobody will know I was there. Geocaching is mad in the US. We drove back from Arizona (flying? in this economy??), and there were HUNDREDS along the highway. First, who are these…
8 Feb 2021
I skipped week 5 because all I did in the panna cotta was watch 3 seasons of “how to get away with murder”. It’s a terrible show and I’m not ashamed of it. What is up with that star codex thing? I can’t believe there was a cult of assholes in tech I didn’t know about. I’m obviously not surprised…
25 Jan 2021
Tahoe (where we currently live during this pannie-d) got a ton of snow this week, so I’ve been in winter mode. Went skiing on Friday, went snowshoeing on Sunday. My calves are on fire. Skiing is pretty safe; everyone is wearing masks, they’ve closed all the lodges, and tbh nobody should be within 6 feet of me skiing on a…
18 Jan 2021
Monday was off which ruined any routine I had formed. I barely got used to waking up on Mondays to go to work and then bam, 2 weeks in, a Monday off. I had dreams all week about working part time, probably because my brain is clinging desperately to this hope of not having to ever wake up on Mondays.…
11 Jan 2021
Still into soups: I made a bomb cream of broccoli. I also bought a new vegan broth base to fuck with because buying the cartons of broth is like buying bottled water aka: bad and wasteful. My dog’s skin is turning grey. I know this sounds funny but it’s like, a thing. There could be a number of reasons for…
4 Jan 2021
I’ve been thinking for a while about setting this up, and this week seems as good as any. Both Alice and Frances have weekly updates that are a joy to read. Jenn has a live laugh blog. Maybe this is the year of long form tweets? I haven’t touched my site in like 6+ months so when I tried to…
21 Feb 2020
My one policy about blogging is “write the blog post you wanted to find in the search results”. I spent an inordinate amount of time yesterday trying to get typedoc to only show the docs for the files I’m actually exporting in my library, and didn’t find anything on the internet to help me, so here is the blog post…
19 Feb 2020
Back in the day when I worked on Polymer I got used to relying on a bunch of useful CSS classes that at the time we called iron-flex-layout. They were there partly because flexbox was a sadness on IE and you needed to say everything 3 times to maybe get it right twice, and add some very special flex-basis: 0.000000001px…
10 Sept 2019
img.plot { max-height: 400px !important; } My job nowadays involves a lot of music and JavaScript. You know what musicians really care about? Paychecks (support your local musicians, go to concerts, don’t steal music from indie musicians). But also: keeping time. Keeping time in JavaScript is kind of a joke, not just because time is a social construct (this is…
22 Feb 2019
One of the first things you stumble on when you start using TensorFlow.js is that sometimes you need your data as a Tensor, and sometimes you need it as a JavaScript number. Maybe it’s for logging it, maybe it’s for displaying it somewhere during training, maybe it’s because you don’t trust the robots to be better than you at math.…
15 Nov 2018
Inktober is a project where artists make an ink drawing every day for the whole month of October. This year I did an inktober but ignored all the rules, and made Internet Stuff™️ instead. That experiment lives here, but I want to tell you why I did it before you go ahead and judge it. I think that it’s also…
7 Nov 2018
Magenta.js is a JavaScript library that helps you generate art and music on the web. It’s also the team that I work on now! One of the things that I do whenever I join a new team is learn a bunch of things, and then make a bunch of tutorials that past Monica would’ve loved to stumble over. This is…
22 May 2018
iframe { height: 640px; width: 100%; margin: 0 auto; border: 5px solid #E0F7FA; border-radius: 3px; } Machine Learning (ML) is the dope new thing that everyone’s talking about, because it’s really good at learning from data so that it can predict similar things in the future. Doing ML by hand is pretty annoying since it usually involves matrix math which…
11 Apr 2018
iframe { height: 800px; width: 100%; margin: 0 auto; border: 5px solid #E0F7FA; border-radius: 3px; } When you have a float CSS property on a box (with a value different than none), this box must be laid out according to the float positioning algorithm. Loosely, it says: if the box has float:left, the box is positioned at the beginning of…
26 Feb 2018
img.otter { max-height: 220px !important; } iframe.otter { height: 800px; width: 100%; margin: 0 auto; border: 5px solid #E0F7FA; border-radius: 3px; } Before I wrote the JavaScripts, I got a master’s in AI (almost a decade ago 🙀), and wrote a thesis on a weird and new area in Reinforcement Learning. Or at least it was new then. It’s definitely…
31 Jan 2018
So testing, right? We should do it. The thing is, testing is hard, and good testing is reaaaaaaally hard, and tbh I’m pretty bad at testing. So I end up not testing my apps, and then I feel guilty about it, but I’ll stop you now: you can’t run guilt on Travis. If this sounds familiar, then this blog post…
2 Jan 2018
You can tell I hate writing year in reviews because this one is really, really late. I tend to hate bragging, and I definitely hate introspective and, in particular, I always think I am underperforming (and that’s fine). However, that’s usually not true, and writing a year in review forces me to see the awesome things I did, so even…
18 Dec 2017
Updated May 18, 2020 (get it? :: ? I made a funny) Shadow DOM is a spec that gives you DOM and style encapsulation. This is great for reusable web components, as it reduces the ability of these components’ styles getting accidentally stomped over (the old “I have a class called “button” and you have a class called “button”, now…
20 Sept 2017
There’s this thing I hate about the modern web which is that sites are rarely one giant html file filled with goodies. You can’t just “run a site” locally. You need an npm or a gulp step or a docker if you’re lucky. And probably a local server, but not the one you have installed. Which, I mean, makes sense,…
11 Aug 2017
Shadow DOM is a fairly recent-ish spec that gives you DOM tree encapsulation – it’s one of the superhero lions in the Voltron of specs called “Web Components”. Web Components let you create reusable, self-contained components in JavaScript; the Shadow DOM bit makes sure that the CSS and markup you bundle with your implementation is encapsulated, hiding the implementation details…
26 Jul 2017
.content img:not(.emoji) { border: 1px solid #efefef; margin: 24px 0; } The Meownica Web App Workflow™ goes like this: Write bad code until the file is too long Refactor that code into some web components Repeat steps 1-2 until done Realize you forgot to do the PWA dance, so your app is scoring 45 on Lighthouse Make it into a…
6 Jun 2017
img.otter { max-height: 220px !important; } iframe.otter { height: 250px; width: 100%; margin: 0 auto; border: 5px solid #E0F7FA; border-radius: 3px; } iframe.otter-two { width: 100%; height: 320px; border: 5px solid #E0F7FA; border-radius: 3px; padding: 0px 10px; } I work on a library called Polymer, which helps you write web components faster and easier. This is awesome, but it’s only…
31 May 2017
.highlight .err { color: inherit; background-color: inherit; } .highlight .s1, .highlight .s { color: #336699; background: inherit; } pre { margin-bottom: 30px; } pre, code { background: #f4f6f8; } p > code, li > code { font-weight: bold; } pre { border-bottom: solid 1px #CFD8DC; } This is a cheat sheet for the Polymer 2.x library. If you’re looking for…
21 Dec 2016
This year was pretty shit, so I wasn’t very keen on doing one of these posts. So many of my favourite musicians died, so many of my favourite countries made mistakes, so many of my favourite people are worried and sad, and I am worried and sad with them. But this year was not the worst year we’ve ever had,…
13 Dec 2016
.highlight .err { color: inherit; background-color: inherit; } .highlight .s1, .highlight .s { color: #336699; background: inherit; } pre { margin-bottom: 30px; } pre, code { background: #f4f6f8; } p > code, li > code { font-weight: bold; } pre { border-bottom: solid 1px #CFD8DC; } This is a cheat sheet for the Polymer 1.x library. It helps you write…
1 Nov 2016
phantom underlines. isn't this amaaaaaazing. i love waiting for 8 seconds and seeing this. look at it. srsly. looooookat it. I spent a week traveling around Taiwan, on my awesome free roaming 2G data plan, and friends, we need to talk about your web fonts. Also cats. They really love cats there. Anyway, the thing about 2G is that I…
4 Oct 2016
You know the scenes in Friends when Ross starts talking about dinosaurs and he’s SUPER excited but everyone else is losing the will to live? This is basically that, only instead of dinosaurs, it’s emoji, and unlike Ross, I have never successfully befriended a monkey. Last month, my coworker casually told me he still has a 2001 era DoCoMo phone,…
4 Apr 2016
You know that scene in The Rock where Nicolas Cage is super dreamy (like he is) and decides his life mission is to look for VX poison gas and save San Francisco (like he would)? That’s baaaasically me, if by “look for VX poison gas” you mean “nerd out on emoji”, and by “save San Francisco” you mean “and tell…
26 Jan 2016
Here’s the thing: I have this sweet pair of headphones that I got from a friend a gazillion years ago. I’ve always liked them because they were free and they look super quirky but it turns out they were a limited edition done for Ed Banger Records, which is the label that produces Justice and Mr. Oizo. It also turns…
22 Dec 2015
I’ve never really done a year in review. One day, I’d like to open source my goals, but since I’m still a chicken, this is a baby step towards that. Plus, this is one of the first years I’m really proud of, and things that you’re proud of tend to live on the Internet, for posterity. Here’s what my GitHub…
22 Oct 2015
Some people build furniture. Some people knit. Some people have hobbies that don’t involve HTML specs from the 90s. I am not those people. So here’s a story about <input>, how it got to be the jerk that it is, and why it needs to die in a fire. The early years 1995 was a good year. Friends, ER, Xena…
29 Sept 2015
One of the beefs (and there aren’t many) that I have with CSS is that it has a very weak opinion about style encapsulation. That opinion is basically “well, name your classes well” or else bad things happen. Know this: I come from C++, land of rules and disappointed compilers; this hand waviness drives me crazy. This matters because now…
2 Jun 2015
The keypress event works maddeningly differently in Chrome/Safari and Firefox, and this is the story of how I spent two hours discovering that, so that hopefully you don’t have to. Keypress what? A keypress event is one of the events you get when you mash on the keyboard. It’s special because according to the spec, you should only get a…
24 Mar 2015
My favourite thing about the Chromium code is this enum of cats and all the comments in that file. My second favourite thing is OWNER files. Guess what this post is about (hint: it’s not about cats NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT CATS, OK?) Edit: In a clear and deliberate conspiracy, the cats have been removed from Chromium. The old new…
10 Feb 2015
I gave a talk about how to get started contributing to Chromium, but it wasn’t recorded, and my slides by themselves look like cold-medicine induced hallucinations (which, to be fair, they were). So instead, here is a giant blog post that will take you through every step from “checking out the code” to “landing the code in the Chromium repo”.…
11 Aug 2014
I talked about Cat-DNS at Cascadia.js, and it wasn’t terrible! There is a video. Of me talking! On the internet! What a future we live in. =^..^= The internet needs more cats. DNS servers are the authority on all things internet. Therefore, the best DNS server is the one that resolves everything to cats. This talk is about that. We’re…
23 Jun 2014
lldb stands for Llama-DB, and is a database of llamas you can use to debug programs compiled with clang (lldb is to clang like gdb is to gcc). If you already know how to use gdb, then here’s a translation of the common commands. Disclaimer: There is a ton of tutorials and pages about all of the awesome features and…
17 May 2014
You’ve given a talk. It went great, and now everyone wants to see the slides. Hurray! Before we do anything else: give yourself a high-five. Giving a talk is hard, and you did it! This is something to be proud about. Here’s the thing about slides, though: if you did them right, your slides should be pretty sparse. They’ll have…
22 Apr 2014
But only if your family is code. So this is a bit of a terrible blog post because a) it’s about a really obscure atrocity that happens in C++ (as opposed to the common atrocities that happen in C++ on the regs) and b) there are not enough funnies in the world to make up for it. I recommend skipping…
9 Apr 2014
I am the poster child for writer’s block. I can’t write the #ifdef header guard correctly for a brand new C++ class, I don’t remember the order of the public static void main args incantation in Java, and for the life of me, I can’t start working on an empty presentation. Not even if you promise me pizza. (Please promise…
31 Mar 2014
Stats: a preamble I’ve been reading too much about March Madness brackets, so I thought I had to run some numbers around here like the cool kids do. Get your umbrella out, it’s about to rain cold facts. In the history of time, Chromium has had 205,095 commits made by 1,943 contributors representing 7,431,088 lines of code. In the last…
25 Feb 2014
Imagine this: you have forked a repo a long time ago and have since been in a happily committed relationship with the master branch, modifying files and committing from the hip. In case you have doubts about the likelihood of this scenario, we’re talking about my notwaldorf.github.com blog branch, which I forked from holman/left. All my changes are on the…
One of the hardships about being Canadian is that most programming languages are quite simply, rude. Descriptions like ‘imperative’ and ‘declarative’ are enough to fill even the most impolite of Canadians with a vague sense of discomfort. Fear no more! Ruby is the sort of language that addresses all these concerns, and adds a familiar, maple-syrupy feel to your code.…
18 Feb 2014
The internet needs more cats. DNS servers are the authority on all things internet. Therefore, the best DNS server is the one that resolves everything to cats. Guess what kind of DNS server this is (Hint: it’s the cat kind). Making it go First, get the code, and the npm packages you need (the instructions are with the code). To…
11 Feb 2014
Do you sometimes feel the internet is holding you hostage? Don’t you wish the internet would look like it’s holding you hostage? Worry no more! Dear-sir-or-madam is a bookmarklet that makes web pages look like they’re ransom notes. For example, like this: How to use Bookmark this by dragging it to your bookmark bar: ransomify!. Then go to a non-https…
6 Feb 2014
Here is my confession, internet: I am writing a cat DNS. That is, a DNS server that resolves everything to cats. You want your email? Cat! You want to check the weather? Cat! It’s always cat. Wait why? We were talking at work about DNSes, and it turns out I only hand wavingly know how they work. I also like…
30 Jan 2014
Because that would be crazy. Crazy is in the next blog post. I’ve had to write a sizeable chunk of (fairly mediocre) Objective-C code recently, and I’ve formed the following opinions: It’s easier if you just get over the thing with the brackets Event listeners are sooper cool Standard Cocoa controls are great if you want them to look exactly…
20 Jan 2014
Disclaimer: these aren’t new protipz. I didn’t make them up. They’re actually straight out of the Chromium code style, they’re pretty trivial, and you might already use them. But just in case you’re not a Chromium committer (the outrage), or are fairly new at C++ and want to make your code less suck, here they are. I think they’re neat.…