CS PhD Student at the University of Chicago researching HCI, childrens' privacy, and AI safety. One day after futzing about with my Proxmox server I restarted it and noticed that it would not resolve the network name. However it was on the network and I could ping it from another machine. These are the steps I did on the physical machine to diagnose and fix... Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0600 /2026-02-09-proxmox1/ /2026-02-09-proxmox1/ I’ve been giving Logseq a try, especially as a daily task manager. One thing that piqued my interest was the Task Management Shortcuts plugin because it adds a richer set of task states than Logseq provides out of the box. Instead of the default TODO → DONE flow, the plugin... Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0600 /2025-12-01-logseq1/ /2025-12-01-logseq1/ Insights from Our Multi-Year Research Project - Automating Privacy Policy Analysis: Insights from Our Multi-Year Research Project Privacy policies are essential in defining how our data is used and protected, yet their complexity often makes them inaccessible to the average person and difficult to analyze for researchers. To address this challenge, my team and I embarked on... Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0500 /2025-07-14-PETS-2025/ /2025-07-14-PETS-2025/ In the summer of 2021, I wrote a blog post on how to make Likert-scale charts in R because I just wanted future-me to have a clear reference instead of spending another afternoon endlessly poking around stackoverflow for how to center diverging bars. That post ended up getting a lot... Sun, 01 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0500 /2025-06-01-R-likert-env/ /2025-06-01-R-likert-env/ Serving as the Paper Chair’s Assistant for CHI 2025 was an eye-opening experience. Seeing firsthand how a conference of this scale comes together gave me a new level of appreciation for the effort involved. CHI has always been a conference I enjoy attending, and it consistently publishes excellent research, so... Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0500 /2025-03-12-PC-A/ /2025-03-12-PC-A/ Set Up a Daemon-ized Bash Script to Automate File Scanning and Ensure Real-Time Protection - Keep your downloads folder safe (on your unix machine)! I developed a Bash script that automatically monitors my Downloads folder, updates ClamAV, and scans any new or modified files. This setup is great for ensuring that potentially harmful files are detected before I interact with them. The script can then... Wed, 05 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600 /2025-03-05-security-scan-deamon/ /2025-03-05-security-scan-deamon/ In a distant kingdom, a group of royal architects was tasked with designing a new marketplace for the townsfolk. The king wanted it to be the grandest, most efficient marketplace ever built. However, gathering input from the townspeople was a daunting task. The architects would need to travel to every... Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0600 /2025-01-12-the-wizards-mirror/ /2025-01-12-the-wizards-mirror/ A Guide For Tech Novices - Below are the steps I took to get MacOS ready to run message-book – bkettle’s excellent iMessage –> PDF book program. I was running this whole thing on someone else’s Mac who does not code so I had no preinstalled programs to rely upon. Since I had to work from... Tue, 02 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0500 /2024-07-02-imessage-export/ /2024-07-02-imessage-export/ Creating small tools that perform simple tasks to enhance the lives of others can be surprisingly rewarding. Let me tell you a short encounter that led to the creation of my dta to csv repository. […] Recently, a colleague of mine found herself staring at a .dta file, tasked with... Thu, 02 May 2024 00:00:00 -0500 /2024-05-02-joy-of-small-tools/ /2024-05-02-joy-of-small-tools/ What We Found About Privacy and Security in K–12 Schools When we started our research on technology in schools, we knew educational tools were everywhere. What we didn’t know was how deeply they might expose students’ personal information. Our study, Uncovering Privacy and Security Challenges in K–12 Schools, presented at... Mon, 10 Apr 2023 00:00:00 -0500 /2023-04-10-CHI-2023/ /2023-04-10-CHI-2023/ Notes from the front - openai command not found I have been working on fine tuning GPT3 for a research project recently. Things have been going smoothly until I opened up my terminal today and tried to finetune a new model with the standard openai api fine_tunes.create -t <TRAIN_FILE_ID_OR_PATH> -m <BASE_MODEL> . I got the... Wed, 08 Mar 2023 00:00:00 -0600 /2023-03-08-openai-CLI-tip/ /2023-03-08-openai-CLI-tip/ Pointers On The Hidden Curriculum - This blog post was adapted from a talk I gave during October of 2021. Literal books have been written on how to succeed in grad school. Having read several of them – and a healthy dose of blog posts – it can be overwhelming. This post is a distillation of... Sun, 16 Jan 2022 00:00:00 -0600 /2022-01-16-phd-pointers/ /2022-01-16-phd-pointers/ UPDATE – June 2025: Some of the underlying packages have changed, and this guide no longer works out of the box. If you’d like to run the original code, see this post (or the README in the repo) for instructions on how to recreate the older package environment. TLDR: use... Wed, 23 Jun 2021 00:00:00 -0500 /2021-06-23-R-likert/ /2021-06-23-R-likert/ 2022 UPDATE: Read chapter 1 of A Field Guide To Grad School in addition to this post. As a college senior I thought it would be nice to write the guide to applying to graduate school that I wish I had when I started this process. So without further ado... Mon, 19 Apr 2021 00:00:00 -0500 /2021-04-19-swatties-guide-applying-cs-programs/ /2021-04-19-swatties-guide-applying-cs-programs/ Disclaimer Below is the culmination of information that I received from various Professors when I was trying to write my statement of purpose. Like this entire process, for every piece of advice I received someone else has an equally valid, but opposite, piece of advice. The content of this post... Fri, 02 Apr 2021 00:00:00 -0500 /2021-04-02-cs-statement-of-purpose/ /2021-04-02-cs-statement-of-purpose/ This post is part of my series on getting into CS PhD programs from the perspective of a current (AY: 2020-2021) college senior. You can find the master post here. Advice on the CS PhD Grad School Interview Recall that this stage in the process is for the Professor to... Fri, 02 Apr 2021 00:00:00 -0500 /2021-04-02-cs-grad-school-interview/ /2021-04-02-cs-grad-school-interview/ Disclaimer Throughout the CS PhD application process the question of to cold email or not to cold email caused me great consternation. I talked with my advisors and scoured the web for useful advice and, predictably, found well reasoned arguments for both positions. Detailed below is my own take on... Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:00:00 -0500 /2021-04-01-cold-email-advice/ /2021-04-01-cold-email-advice/ An In Medias Res Take From A Senior In College - This post is part of my series on getting into CS PhD programs from the perspective of a current (AY: 2020-2021) college senior. You can find the master post here. Maybe? There are pros and cons for going to grad school. If you’re a student who is enrolled in a... Fri, 26 Mar 2021 00:00:00 -0500 /2021-03-26-should-you-consider-applying-cs-grad-school/ /2021-03-26-should-you-consider-applying-cs-grad-school/ Viewing 3D Plots - Quick Fix For 3D Rendering I started working with the plotly package this week. I tried to render a visualization in my Rmarkdown file and ran into the following error. WebGL is not supported by your browser - visit https://get.webgl.org for more info I thought this was rather odd since... Sat, 20 Mar 2021 00:00:00 -0500 /2021-03-20-R-3D-Tip/ /2021-03-20-R-3D-Tip/ One of the many things I did last summer (2020) was set up a up HAProxy as a load-balancer for my CS department’s incoming ssh connections. I completed this project in partnership with my CS Department’s wonderful Sysadmin Jeff Knerr. This page is a modified mirror of Jeff’s page that... Tue, 09 Mar 2021 00:00:00 -0600 /2021-03-09-load-balancing-ssh-with-haproxy/ /2021-03-09-load-balancing-ssh-with-haproxy/