Jonathan Dobres

posted February 8 2024

of Oz the Wizard

Matt Bucy recuts every word of The Wizard of Oz into alphabetical order. There’s some kind of statistical mania on display here, making the movie somehow precise but meaningless, or at least meaningful in a new way. Judy Garland only says the word “rainbow” six times (five in the song). I first saw this years ago, and I still think about it.

running the current python file in the vscode terminal

Suppose you’re like me, and you find Jupyter notebooks unwieldy and sluggish. Maybe, like me, you’re coming to Python from R, and what you really want is an equivalent of R’s source function. You just want a way to execute a plain .py file in a live Python session (preferably without printing every individual line to the terminal), and then keep that session open.

Well, good news! If you’re using Visual Studio Code, you can just add the following to your keybindings.json file (change shift+cmd+enter to whatever you’d like, of course). This executes the current file in the active terminal. Think of it as a Jupyter-style “Run All Cells” command, but for plaintext Python.

[{
    "key": "shift+cmd+enter", 
    "command": "workbench.action.terminal.sendSequence",
    "args": {
        "text": "exec(open('${file}').read())\n"
    }
}]

posted January 8 2023

every zelda is the darkest zelda

Jacob Geller’s lovely video essay on the darkness of the Zelda franchise. He starts with the obvious entries (Twilight Princess, Majora’s Mask) and ends up somewhere I didn’t expect.

It is the arrogance of every age to believe that yesterday was calm.

Tom Peters, Wired 5.12, Dec 1997

The solution of any problem is good only for that problem, but the method of working out the solution may have a lot to teach us.

Walter Dorwin Teague