These notes are a growing collection. Some of the notes are thoroughly developed pieces of writing (e.g. Alan Lakein’s Life Goals Exercise). Others are just stubs (e.g. juggling). Despite their length and level of polish, they’re all things that I thought were worth noting.
The best way to navigate them is to use the Archive and search. Alternatively, you might find the Tags helpful to find notes around a similar topic.
These notes were inspired by:
For more less formal ephemeral writing, see the blog.
This list generates an RSS feed.A braid group calculation showing the inverse relationship between Milky Way and Flock of Birds.
A math heavy list of recommended reading. Links to Toronto Public Library and UToronto Library are provided.
Some of my favourite math-y puzzles.
Against vim mastery.
How to prepare multiple versions of teaching documents easily.
Ways to get involved in math in Toronto.
How I’ve set up my ttys on Linux to be more user friendly. Switching fonts, keys, and backlights.
How I use a twenty year old word processor to write code and upload it to the cloud.
How I use newsboat and sfeed to generate a static page of RSS feeds that I follow.
Various thoughts on reading a classic.
What does this mysterious function do?
A list of people who got sent copies of LOOP
A description of all the paper in my life.
What I pack when I travel.
How to get your course evaluation data and format it in $\LaTeX$.
Thoughts about how to undo the effect of docstrip.
How to get all your kids photos from Lillio.
How to add line spacing and line numbering to a $\LaTeX$ document.
How to prepare a probationary review dossier as a teaching stream faculty at UTSC.
Language independent literate programming with noweb.
The art of mixing code and documentation.
Some pictures of samples of three loop braids.
A visual comparison of various low-tech ways of photographing a braid.
Some personal reflections on reading, writing, and worship.
A couple AI generated images of an emblem that says: Trust the Process. It’s all Connected.
A website can have visible and invisible parts much like an iceberg.
Instructions for the Australian aboriginal string figure Bunk.
A pair of string figures from Mary-Rousselière’s Les Jeux de Ficelle Des Arviligjuarmiut.
A summary of the Kangaroo Volunteer Orientation 2026.
How I sort exam papers using bucket sort.
When does a function have a nice antiderivative?
Thoughts on a persistent problem.
Hasty notes from an indigenous education retreat.
Notes and resources from a conference.
A little bit of biography copy.
An argument for why we should prove the fundamental theorem of calculus before introducing the concept of anti-derivatives.
A five hour mini-course in calculus aimed at proving Euler’s identity.
Making LaTeX2HTML output look modern.
Using spaced reptition to increase language fluency.
An article for FYMSiC about Seminar
Immediately after learning Schanpsen, I want to start mucking with the game. It is played with a small deck of AQKJT9 in four suits. The standard point values are as follows.
Some journal writing prompts about friendship.
Loose thoughts on more contemplative approaches to computing.
A long excerpt from an anthropologist talking with the Navaho.
A story that I often think about.
The $\LaTeX{}$ template that I use for writing lecture notes.
Attention conservation notice: This is a fix for a very niche problem. Unless your printer is eating certain character from your print job, you had best move on. The punchline is: flatten the PDF.
The printer at work, a Ricoh IM C6500, doesn’t get along well with me.
Sometimes, when printing a PDF it will garble the output and omit a lot of symbols.
It drops math symbols and particular kernings, in particular ff.
This makes it di icult to read papers.
A bit of projective geometry builds a Spot It deck or the Fano plane.
What is a commutator, really?
A brutal solution: downgrade zlib by compiling an old version.
An overview of course preparation for my own use.
The hands out and slides for a talk at Bridges 2026.
Recordings are great, until they are not.
How to apply to a lot of academic jobs using a spreadsheet.
If you’re a student doing interesting things, please make a website.
A talk about work on loop braids and string figures.
They are a magical mechanism for getting things from the library.
Various examples of thumb loop transfers in the string figure literature.
Information about penpals and the contact information of my penpals.
An old magic trick is used to introduce binary.
A draft of an article for The Canadian Friend on belonging.
A note about the expected size of a linearly independent set in a finite vector space.
Some quick calulations about gamma correction.
A little note about the equivalence of pigeonhole principle and the dimension bound theorem for finite vector spaces.
How TA hiring works at UTSC.
Various notes on gardening in the summer of 2026.
Slides for a talk on Supporting Undergraduate Research
Adding sums of powers of naturals via finite calculus.
A description of my writing ritual.
Recently, I wanted to read a scanned PDF on my Kobo. The white-on-black PDF was quite “bright” for my tastes as I usually read at night. The Kobo supports dark mode for epubs but it doesn’t seem to have a means of inverting the colour of PDFs natively. Moreover, I like to read things as amber-on-black. A bit of vibe-coding and fiddling around yielded the following terrible script to make a PDF “amber on black.”
Study tips, mental health stuff, and general best practice for life.
How to memorize things in mathematics.
How I sort my documents and e-mail for PTR.
A quick excursion through braiding in Desmos and CalcPlot3D.
A write-up of a very rudimentary time tracking gizmo.
Thoughts about organizing a one-day retreat.
Information about my porch vegetable garden.
What do you want to do with your life?
References and care tips for the plants in my office.
Why it is important, how to do it with minimal equipment, etc.
Do you have any questions?
Links to juggling resources.
A mathematical magic trick based on Markov chains.
This note collects various references related to blogging. Why people blog, how to blog, etc.
A list of common $\LaTeX$ errors that beginners make and their solutions.
What does the $\sin(x)$ button on a calculator really do?
My (personal) take on best practices for writing documents in $\LaTeX{}$.
A list of recurring topics of interest. It’s weird.
Getting an email from an mbox.
Convert a quote on a webpage to markdown.
Don’t read a book alone! Do something social.
A working draft of a short piece about sundials.
This is a checklist of things that I need to do on a weekly basis for work. It was inspired by Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.
Things I wish that I’d known when I started teaching.
A write-up of a question about loop manipulation and braid groups.
Thoughts on how to design assessments which are valuable to students beyond completion, and which can be re-used over multiple years.
Home / Now / Archive / Office Camera / Bookmarks / Tags / Feeds / Top of Page
Thanks for reading! If you have any comments or questions about the content, please let me know. Anyone can contact me by email.