Morgan Makes

Imagine, if you will, going to the relatively new household of someone you know. Some people want to watch TV, so your friend or relative pulls out a couple remotes. With one, they turn on an old TV and ensure its input is on a specific HDMI option. With the second remote, which is wider than you would expect it to be but still looks like a remote, they control what's going on on the screen, navigating to a file system or streaming service. But they have to search for a specific file or show or something. You recall this as the most frustrating part of watching something on TV: pressing the arrow buttons or something to follow whatever on-screen keyboard the service uses. To your surprise, though, this isn't what the person does. Instead, they simply flip over their weird remote, unfold it into a keyboard, and start typing. Perhaps later you want to watch something advertised in their shelf of watchable media. You select what looks to be a DVD case, only to find a couple SD car...

I've been aware that there's something not quite right with my laptop since maybe 6 months after I got it. At least a year ago I decided to try and install Linux on it, in the hopes that that would fix some of my problems--the problems involving firmware made to break, at least. At some point last semester I came to the realization that there was also something wrong with my graphics card: The laptop was usually in one of two states. Either all of my GPU-requiring apps worked just fine but I had a constant risk of blue-screening over and over again, or it worked somewhat stably but apps such as Minecraft and OBS Studio wouldn't start, citing that I didn't have the right graphics cards. Neither updating my drivers nor reverting to the first ones I had fixed this problem, so I figured it was actually a hardware problem.  I still held out hope though that somehow installing Linux might actually fix it (giving it about a 5% chance, but it was my most doable option and that...

Git is a very useful tool in my life as a programmer. It allows me to collaborate with peers, contribute to open source, create NPM packages (etc), and just have a nice neat place to store my code. And that's what it's meant for, storing code. But what if we just used it for everything? At least everything that might need communicative collaboration--which, besides code, can range from a group project essay, to a gallery of art, to a web series. There are so many uses of collaboration software, which is one of the main reasons we have things like Google Drive and Microsoft Office. But I hate Google, and I hate Microsoft. And Office costs money if I remember correctly, and at least Google Drive isn't a great place to keep public projects because it exposes your email to everyone who sees the file. I could go on and on about reasons not to use either of these products, but the point is, I'd rather use git. GitHub is currently full of projects that are related to fields ou...

Just over a year ago, when I got back into sewing, I bought a bunch of patterns, including a vest, a corset, and a bunch of baby clothes. I had to edit one of the baby patterns in order to make my nephew a denim jacket, because there were none that actually had the shape I wanted (the closest I could find at the store had a zippered hoodie pattern and a long-sleeved t-shirt). I made myself a vest with the men's vest pattern, and last I tried it on it was simultaneously too broad for my chest and too small at the bottom. I haven't actually used any of the other patterns that I bought, but I'm sure they also wouldn't fit me very well because my body shape is like neither men's nor women's standard sizes. I've gotten a bit better at editing patterns, such as the edits I made to the Cypress Dress so it would fit my spouse, but sometimes it seems like it's almost as much work making standard patterns fit as it would be to make a brand new pattern for one pers...