I saw this post by Ed Hawkins of a simple, compelling, and depressing visualization that shows the rapidly increasing global temperatures over the past century. Each vertical stripe in the "barcode" plots represents the temperature of a single year, ordered from the earliest available data to the present.

I wanted to use these as a desktop background, so I replicated the figures in R. I posted the code to my charts repository on Github.

​Here are some of the versions I made:

​Data Sources:

NASA (2017) "Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS)".
retrieved on May 26, 2018 from
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/

NOAA National Centers for Environmental information, Climate
at a Glance: National Time Series, published May 2018,
retrieved on May 26, 2018 from http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/

If you were a professional guitarist, wouldn't you play on a premium guitar?
If you were a chef, wouldn't you invest in a premium chef knife?

Well, as someone who types literally millions of keystrokes a year for my profession, I decided to invest in a premium keyboard by combining Karabiner-Elements with a customized WASD Keyboard. 

WASD Keyboards creates customized mechanical keyboards. I decided to go with a V2 87 key layout board with Cherry Brown switches, but with virtually limitless options for further customization, I started exploring how else I could extend the functionality of my keyboard.

Enter Karabiner-Elements.

Karabiner-Elements (formerly just "Karabiner", and before that "KeyRemap4MacBook") is a keyboard customization software for macOS that can change any key or combination of keys on the keyboard to do just about anything. I use Karabiner-Elements for all sorts of keyboard modifications, including:

• Use J / I / K / L as arrow keys for navigating the cursor and selecting text.
• Create more convenient and comfortable shortcuts for common commands, like cut, copy, paste, delete, backspace, undo, redo, find, and escape.
• Launch applications like Google Chrome or Terminal with a single hotkey.
• Open Google Chrome to a webpage (e.g. gmail) with a single hotkey.
• Type my usual email send off ("Cheers, John") with a single hotkey.

After I settled on a particular configuration, I customized my WASD keyboard design to align with the expanded functionality provided by Karabiner-Elements. The result is a beautiful and efficient typing experience on a one-of-a-kind keyboard. 

Of course I also regularly use my Macbook laptop, which has a standard Apple keyboard. No worries - I have the same Karabiner-Elements configuration on my Macbook keyboard (minus a few specific keys that only exist on the WASD keyboard). 

You can find my Karabiner-Elements settings as well as the Adobe Illustrator files to create my WASD keyboard on my github page:

In my continuous search for the ultimate computer workstation, I decided to give a reclining desk a try. While I love my treadmill standing desk, I have found that too much standing can be just as rough as too much sitting. Even with frequent breaks, my legs got tired and my low back would hurt after a day's work. Inspired by this way-too-expensive reclining desk by Altwork, I sought out to design and build my own version for a fraction of the cost. I built two versions, starting with a prototype model (V1) and later an improved model (V2) with more structure and better aesthetics. Here's how I did it.

As a Ph.D. student, I spend a tremendous amount of time at my desk, and over the next year I will be living at it as I write my dissertation. This realization sent me on a quest to find an affordable ergonomic battle station for doing my work. The trend of using standing desks over sitting desks has been growing for a while now. After a lot of reading, it looks like a pretty strong consensus that sitting all day is pretty bad for your health over a lifetime. Standing is better, but the real problem is just immobility. Staying mobile is the best thing you can do, so rather than build a standing desk, I built a treadmill desk so I can walk while I work. Inspiration for the idea came from the Baltimore Sun article on the awesomeness of my friends Dorry and Somer, where I first heard of the treadmill desk idea.