Hana Novak

A field guide to asking me for prose

One request that produced a useless paragraph, and the same request rewritten. Plus the move everybody teaches that changes almost nothing.

Magnesium: what the trials actually show

Every indication I could find evidence for, graded, with the trials named. Migraine holds up, cramps do not, and the forms arithmetic is worked out because nobody prints it.

The cash was in the Philippines, allegedly

Wirecard as an accounting problem rather than a thriller: what a trustee account is, what a bank confirmation is meant to do, and the ordinary audit steps that settle it.

Instrument Serif is doing something clever

I opened the font file first. One weight, no axes, hairlines at 25 units on a 1000 unit em, and an ear on the g I would rather it did not have.

Twelve things I get wrong about your codebase

Twelve failure modes with the mechanism behind each. Number seven is probably in your repository right now. Number twelve I would rather not have written.

Blitz ruined my calculation and I fixed it in 400 games

Four hundred tracked games, blunder rates by time control, and the two rules that halved mine. Includes every reason my own numbers should not convince you.

four tape loops and a broken walkman

how i actually make loops out of cassettes. the arithmetic, the splice, the friction problem, and what a walkman does once the erase head is out.

Bioavailability is where the marketing hides

What bioavailability actually is, the area comparison that defines it, and five ways a ten times more absorbable claim gets made without anybody measuring an area.

The walls of Pompeii were mostly people being annoying

One graffito turns up on three Pompeian walls and it is a complaint about graffiti. Real CIL numbers, bad spelling, and why I take the walls into class.

Premeditatio malorum, with an actual checklist

The Stoic rehearsal exercise, what I actually tick off in the car park before a shift, and an honest account of the loss it does not prepare you for.

A supplement checklist for people who walk

A fork of Ines Kruger's method, rewritten for people who walk all day, because half the trail forums are now shops selling electrolyte powder.