Links, November 7, 2025

§Math’s Hidden Groove: The Secret Sauce of Synthesis

A fun read about math, electronics, and synthesizing sounds; explains some of the math behind electronics as well. It can feel a bit abstract at times, but it gave me a bunch of new ideas for using my modular synth.

§What’s the Difference Between AI Glasses and an iPhone? A Helpful Guide for Meta PR

404 Media does important work:

In fact, the entire motivation for building these glasses is that they are discreet and seamlessly integrate into your life. The point of putting a camera in the glasses is that it eliminates the need to take an iPhone out of your pocket.

§Typst

A markdown-like document compiler for PDFs, web pages, and images. The compiler is open-source and there’s a LSP support for easy integration into most editors, and a (abandonned) math renderer plugin for Obsidian. It’s a commercially-oriented product with a closed-source, subscription-based GUI editing app that has a focus on collaborative features, but it seems you can ignore that.

I’m using a heavily-modified markdown rendering chain for this site using Remark and custom plugins (including some I haven’t released yet) to emulate many of the things Typist appears to make easier. Markdown is nice for many things, and writing out HTML by hand is also not something I want to do; I’m not sure if Typst would cover all my use cases (in fact I highly doubt it), but I’m happy to see some effort in the area of making a more user-friendly LaTeX.

§building an analog week calendar with a deck of cards

Ever since realizing that the number of cards in a deck matches the number of weeks in a year, I’ve been planning an analog calendar built purely with an ordinary deck of cards.

I love little things like this. The author of this piece uses week dates for personal organization, a practice I’ve come to use as well. You can divide 52 weeks into four 13-week quarters; personally I further break those quarters down into a single planning week followed by four 3-week arcs.

§My chilling week on Roblox: sexually assaulted and shat on as a child avatar roaming the online world

Too late for last week’s “scary things”, and a day after I endured yet another tirade from my kid about how all their friends play Roblox so why can’t they?:

“Roblox games are actually monetising that kind of desire to troll and mess with and negatively impact other players,” he says.