Author Archives: kchodorow

Let’s say there’s a nice house, around 100 years old, on a street. It’s been well-maintained and had normal renovations done over time to keep it comfortable and practical to live in (electrics upgrades, HVAC improvements, new roof when necessary, etc.). Now, suppose an inventor buys the empty lot next door. This inventor loves theContinue reading “A YIMBY’s Modest Proposal”

Last night I was walking Domino and a woman passed us pulling a wagon of obviously-just-bought stuff from Home Depot. A guy behind her leaned down to adjust one of the items and I thought “Oh, I guess they’re together.” Then he picked it up, did a 180, and started walking away. I realized whatContinue reading “A personal anecdote: hot wheels”

Here is the (roughly 52-step) process for testing your Unity game on an Android device. In Unity Hub, go to Installs -> Settings -> Add Modules -> Android Build Support and make sure Android SDK & NDK Tools and OpenJDK are installed. If you need to install them, you’ll have to restart Unity afterwards toContinue reading “Unity Android App deployment”

Suppose we have a dataframe with a couple of columns and we’d like to merge them into one column with some delimiter. For instance, let’s take a restaurant with orders to fill: And we want to combine the columns into: Note that this is made more difficult by the missing values: if everyone would justContinue reading “Combining columns in Pandas”

If you have a 2D game with a board and you want to center it on the screen, here’s the best way I came up with to do it. Suppose you have a variable-size board (could longer or shorter in either dimension) on a variable-sized screen (could be a phone, tablet, web browser, console, etc.).Continue reading “Centering a stupid box in Unity”

Over the holidays I’ve been playing with game development in Unity, so I’m going to post a couple of things I’ve discovered that I think are handy. First up: setting a random seed for your game. Not exactly a groundbreaking discovery, but I implemented this early on and it’s game-changing (har har). I added aContinue reading “Setting a random seed for Unity”

I recently signed up for yCombinator’s cofounder matching platform. After a week, I deactivated my profile with over 100 founders (or potential founders) having reached out to me. That seemed like a lot of responses, which might be because I had fairly flexible requirements: open to someone technical or non-technical, geography didn’t matter, and aContinue reading “Co-founder analysis”

A lot of projects require scraping websites. I usually write a scraper, run it, it fetches all of the data, and then fails in some final step before writing it anywhere. Then I curse a bit and try to fix my program without being sure what the responses actually looked like. Then I rerun myContinue reading “Scraping politely”

Yesterday, Andrew and I started working on a driveway for the undeveloped parcel of thorny, swampy woodland we bought during lockdown. We rented a chainsaw at an equipment rental place, where the guy asked if we had ever used one before. We had not. He showed us how to start it: open the choke, pullContinue reading “Road to Thornmire”

Every year, I go to GenCon: a gaming conference where tens of thousands of nerds descend on Indianapolis to try out new board games, RPGs, and other assorted nerdery. Indianapolis is no stranger to huge conferences, but GenCon stretches the city to its limits. GenCon buys thousands of hotel rooms throughout the city and thenContinue reading “Optimizing resource allocation”