A few months ago, I got a cheap fitness tracker to help combat my daily inactivity, resulting from barely leaving my small studio apartment in Tokyo. While I knew 10,000 steps is generally recommended, I decided to aim for a lower and more manageable 5,000 steps, a number so achievable…

One of my dissertation projects when I was a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab was Build in Progress, a documentation platform and online community for sharing DIY projects. A main focus of Build in Progress was developing a tool that lets people visualize and navigate process-oriented documentation, or…

Last month, one of my favorite organizations, The Recurse Center, reached out to me about designing their new public newsletter, Still Computing. This weekly newsletter is intended to share the excitement and joy around computing that is at the core of the Recurse…

Since I moved to Japan a month ago, I’ve been keeping a food journal. It started out as an experiment ; I bought a cheap set of color pencils from Tokyo Hands (under $10) and a $8 notebook from Ito-Ya and wanted to see how long I could keep…

A recent realization I’ve had is how easily many people, myself included, disqualify themselves before they’re even considered. By disqualification, I mean that many people, particularly minorities, see themselves as other and thus do not necessarily feel they deserve certain rights or experiences. One example is qualifying for an application…

I intentionally tried to read fewer books in 2019. I realized in 2018, after reading 60 books, that reading was getting less fun. I felt that reading was getting in the way of me doing what I deemed to be more creative endeavors. You know that feeling when you get…

Earliest this year, I took the longest vacation I’ve ever taken and spent 9 days in Scandinavia. Our vacation started in Oslo, found us taking taking a train to Flam and a fjord tour to Bergen, brought us to Copenhagen for a couple days, and ended in Stockholm. At the…

I actually wrote this article 5 years ago, while I was a college radio DJ in grad school at WMBR, MIT’s radio station. At the time, I decided it would be fun to learn more about how bands eat on tour, given that I had a radio show called Eater’s…

I recently got an m5Stack, a small wi-fi-enabled development board with a built in screen, IMU (for measuring tilt and acceleration), buttons, and a speaker. I think it can be a really cool platform for building web-connected games (or even just an ambient display that’s controlled by the web) since…