I’ve surveyed over 12,000 trees in parks across the five boroughs of NYC, mostly over the past month. Skipping the “why?” for a moment, I’ll jump straight to the how: by building a completely-unsanctioned-and-surprisingly-fully-featured citizen science app! It’s called Rootstock, and it features a comprehensive map of every tree in every park in NYC, along…

I made a one-tap solution for reporting roadway potholes to the NYC DOT using an ESP32 microprocessor, a GPS module, some long-range radio and just a pinch of agentic AI. (Just my little way of contributing to Mamdani’s ongoing pothole blitz.) I drive a 2005 Toyota Prius, which has turned out to be a mostly…

I made a homebrew photo booth for my oldest friend’s wedding in a marathon 48-hour one-man hackathon. Phew! Now that the dust has settled, I figured I’d write it up here because I’m pretty chuffed with how it turned out. Adam and I grew up around the corner from each other and our parents and…

Doubling-down on hyperlocal data after my recent drawbridge-sensing project, I present the Gowanus Data Dredger, a streaming real-time repository of maritime-skewed neighborhood data about everyone’s favorite Superfund site. The Gowanus Data Dredger may look on the surface like a simple thermal receipt printer, but it’s a lot more than that! It pulls data from a…

Last week, my brother and I took in a screening of the 1976 classic Network that just happened to be captioned. As a result, it really struck me how impressive the vocabulary in that movie is. Immane! Oraculate! Auspicatory! So many of what my dad used to call 50¢ words. So I went home and…

I built a tool for determining if the Hamilton Avenue Bridge over Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal is open or closed, in real-time. You can determine for yourself if the bridge is open or closed at hamiltontraffic.com, or read on to learn all about my very unhinged obsession with this very hinged drawbridge. But first, here’s a…

For my niece’s birthday this year, I decided to give her the gift every 6-year-old secretly dreams of: an old rotary phone! This wonderful phone came from Facebook Marketplace, the new craigslist where I spend an embarrassing amount of my free time these days. Seriously. It’s incredible. I drove down to the Jersey suburbs of…

Last week, the MTA expanded its rollout of the new open-gangway train, known as the R211T, to the G line. (There are only three of these experimental trains in service; until last week there were two, exclusively running on the C line.) If you’re a railfan or just want to experience a fancy new train,…

I like a good backstory. No — I mean, I really like a good backstory. Just check my lonely little corner of the alignment chart I filled out with my students last week: I also have felt more dissociated than usual lately, in the lead-up to my 40th birthday (which is probably why I celebrated…

It’s Christmas here in New York, my favorite day of the year. It is the one day I get to enjoy the most favorable driving conditions this city has to offer. The streets are mine, and mine alone. Free legal parking as far as the eye can see, paired with zero traffic: my own personal…

I built a tiny NES emulator that packs a surprising punch: 600 games and a capacitive touchscreen, all stuffed into the shell of an original NES cartridge. I’m calling it the NinTARDIS – because there’s more going on under the hood than you’d expect from the outside! The NinTARDIS was originally inspired by a Thingiverse…

Happy Halloween! I turned an old CRT into a fun stoop accoutrement to amuse our trick-or-treaters. It features a 3D animation of a jack o’ lantern that follows your head motions and facial expressions, much like an animoji. It also plays spooky Halloween classics via a little speaker hidden inside. Track o’ Lantern lives inside…

I learned long ago that my capacity for nostalgia extends well beyond the limits of my own lived experiences. I have records originally owned by my dad’s ex-girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. I have love letters written neither to me or by me. I have fliers my friend plastered around our college campus twenty years ago. I spent…

I spent this summer building a new app, for a machine that hasn’t been on the market since 1980 and wasn’t built to support graphics, sound, connectivity or even lowercase letters, sold by a company that went bankrupt a decade ago, tailor-made for an audience of one: my dad, who celebrated his 70th birthday this…

I made a Spotify remote that tweaks song recommendations across six axes, based on Spotify’s audio features: danceability, energy, acousticness, duration, valence and popularity. It uses the Spacetec Spaceball 2003, an incredible six-degrees-of-freedom CAD mouse from circa 1991. The Spaceball’s freedom of motion allows each axis of motion to tweak your music recommendations, while the…