The Autodidacts

Hello. You’ve found the blog of three thing-building, self-educating, perpetually-experimenting brothers. It includes reports from the world of DIY neuroscience and Brain-Computer Interfaces, posts about some things we’ve built and programmed, and occasional philosophical musings on life and happiness. ¡Bienvenidos!

Wallabag wins, despite its flaws

Freedom and flexibility make up for the rough edges (and the competition has its own usability issues) … »

Sleep is a continuum

Don’t believe the Hypnograms … »

Updated main.lua allows you to star Wallabag entries from the comfort of KOReader on your Kobo e-reader

Patching KOReader Wallabag Plugin to add star support

Now you can star Wallabag entries from the comfort of your Kobo e-reader … »

#100DaysToOffload

A list of public Wallabag instances that seem legit

Especially free-to-use instances that might be around for a while … »

Graph of sleep duration and all cause mortality

An unsolved question in sleep science

Or, a display of my ignorance of sleep science … »

Filtering RSS feeds by tag

Use CommaFeed filter expressions to hide irrelevant posts like this one … »

Cerelog’s ESP-EEG is a new 8 channel biosensing board at a hobbyist-friendly price

The same number of channels of EEG/EMG/ECG for half the price … »

I’m trying #100DaysToOffload

A blogging challenge where you publish 100 posts in the space of a year … »

Foodie vs Athlete

I have always liked food: I enjoy cooking, I like eating, and I especially value sharing mealtimes together with family and loved ones. I also enjoy snacking, and I like going out to … »

Quality, Quantity, and Effective Iteration

The blogosphere abounds with free advice, and one of the more frequently-repeated morsels is to “be prolific”, and quality will naturally follow. The following story, from Art & Fear by David Bayles and … »

I can haz knowledgebase

I’ve often felt sheepish about my personal knowledgebase: it’s just a pile of text files. Everyone else has their own self-hosted MediaWiki or Obsidian or Digital Garden and mine is stuck … »

My Favourite Ways to Avoid Spending Money

The other day I happened across a pair of Lululemon shorts on Facebook marketplace. They were beautiful, they were my size, and they were a deal: only $35! I wanted to buy them. I left the tab open for a while, then I closed it. … »

Tortoise Mode vs Hare Mode

When I was a boy, I had a ride-on lawnmower with no blades. I’d wanted a ride-on lawnmower for years, ever since my brothers and I found and restored-to-life a John Deere … »

On Troubleshooting

Much of what I do, in multiple fields, could be reduced to one skill: troubleshooting. I’ll define troubleshooting as systematically determining the cause of unwanted behaviour in a system, and fixing it. … »

Scroll-to-text fragment bookmarklet

TL;DR I made a thing and think it’s cool. Have you ever wanted to send someone a link, not to a huge and confusingly-laid-out webpage, but to the one sentence that’ … »

How to Migrate a Discourse Forum from DigitalOcean to Linveo

When we launched NeuroBB in 2015, as the first (and only) independent EEG, BCI, and neurofeedback discussion forum, we chose the forum software Discourse. We chose Discourse not because it is easy, but … »

Days Are Easily Made

Days, it turns out, are rather easily made. The time required varies, but trends closer to making the bed, or making a cup of tea, than to making Ravioli. (If you are crazy … »