It's always interesting how some toys rise and fall in popularity. Pogs were popular just before my time, but haven't made a comeback. I grew up with the craze of Pokemon cards, and Magic: The Gathering, the latter of which seems to still be popular with my nephews.

Rubik's cubes seems to be another game that has lasting enjoyment, and my nephews recently wanted to learn how to solve one. So, I took this as an opportunity to learn a more modern method myself, and put together small cheat sheet that is handy to use when teaching someone to solve a cube.

If you use Zoom on Linux, you may have noticed that about a month ago, they pushed an update which scaled the UI elements to be very large. There are a couple of suggestions on reddit for how to address this.

Usually you want asynchronous communication for remote work. But when you don't, consider Mumble as a potential tool for maintaining a community-like feel for synchronous communication and serendipitous interactions.

Cable lacing is a technique for managing cables by lacing them together or to harnesses using a series of running lockstitches. This is done using waxed cord or flat lacing tape, often made of nylon or polyester. Where most people reach for plastic or Velcro zip ties to do this job, I've found that spending some time to use string is quite enjoyable. I'm not trained in the high standards of cable lacing used by NASA, the Navy, or other experts. But, for just managing cables around the house, these references work well.

It's important that research be accessible and reproducible so that results and evaluations can be verified. As part of Stanford's graduate course on computer networks, students have been reproducing parts of network systems research papers for several years on the public Reproducing Network Research blog.

Knowledge bases are incredible enablers of valuable downstream applications such as information retrieval, question answering, medical diagnosis, and data visualization. However, building high quality knowledge bases can be incredibly difficult. While extensive efforts have been focused on unstructured text, troves of information remains untapped in richly formatted data, where relations are conveyed using textual, structural, tabular, and visual cues.

Because many of the existing webpages out there are from the old (pre-2015) quals format, I've open-sourced some of the study resources that my group and I used to prepare. Because it's on GitHub, we would encourage future students to contribute to the repository as they study.