Amazon Dash (Wand) Teardown

From mpetroff.net 7 years ago in Blogs

The Amazon Dash, not to be confused with the Amazon Dash Button, is a device for adding items to an AmazonFresh order, either through voice commands or via its barcode scanner. Recently, a reader sent me one he had received … Continue reading →

Articles from Matthew Petroff

An Improved CMB Map Colormap

From mpetroff.net 3 weeks ago in Blogs

Although a variety of colormaps have previously been specifically developed for displaying cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps, none of these have been designed with perceptual uniformity or color-vision-deficiency (CVD) accessibility in mind. To improve upon this status quo, in support...

Galaxy Pie

From mpetroff.net 8 months ago in Blogs

For the baking contest at this year’s Center for Astrophysics barbecue, I made a blackberry pie containing a spiral galaxy made from a coconut pudding.1 The pie ingredients were mostly chosen based on color and texture, as well as to...

Building a Cosmic Coffee Table

From mpetroff.net 1 year ago in Blogs

Now that I finally have a couch (and am living in an apartment big enough to comfortably fit one, unlike when I was in grad school), I decided I also needed a coffee table. Instead of just buying one, I...

JWST Gingerbread Cookies

From mpetroff.net 1 year ago in Blogs

To get into the holiday spirit and in anticipation of the long-awaited launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST),1 I decided to bake some gingerbread cookies in the shape of JWST’s primary mirror, which is comprised of 18 gold-plated...

Square Equal-area Map Projection

From mpetroff.net 2 years ago in Blogs

Several weeks ago, my paper on a novel square equal-area map projection was published in ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems, titled A Square Equal-Area Map Projection with Low Angular Distortion, Minimal Cusps, and Closed-Form Solutions. For mathematical details,...

Climbing Cerro Zapaleri

From mpetroff.net 2 years ago in Blogs

Last month, I climbed Cerro Zapaleri, the 5648 m tall summit of which forms the tripoint of the borders of Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia.1 Its location is quite remote, ~105 km from San Pedro de Atacama, Chile and >40 km from the nearest...

Baking a Sierpiński Carpet Linzer Cookie

From mpetroff.net 2 years ago in Blogs

As a follow-up to my previous entries for the Ashley Book of Knots and Space-Filling Curves, I decided to enter a submission into this year’s Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries’ (virtual) Edible Book Festival contest for Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry...

Space-efficient Embedding of WebAssembly in JavaScript

From mpetroff.net 2 years ago in Blogs

Recently, I came across a blog post about converting parts of a JavaScript library into WebAssembly. The part that interested me the most was a section about efficiently embedding the WebAssembly binary into the JavaScript code such that the library...

Update on Figure Caption Color Indicators

From mpetroff.net 3 years ago in Blogs

Last year, I published a blog post on figure caption color indicators. The positive feedback I received on it from a number of individuals prompted me to revisit the subject. At the time, I did not have a good way...

Pre-calculated line breaks for HTML / CSS

From mpetroff.net 3 years ago in Blogs

Although slowly improving, typography on the web pages is considerably lower quality than that of high-quality print / PDF typography, such as that produced by LaTeX or Adobe InDesign. In particular, line breaks and hyphenation need considerable improvement. While CSS...