Nelson Minar

Semi-retired software engineer
Grass Valley, CA and San Francisco
Full stack homosexual
Social media is Mastodon nelson@tech.lgbt
Email is nelson@somebits.com

What I write now

Weblog Essays and notes, since 2001. Tech, maps, aviation, games, life. Linkblog Interesting things I find, a few a day, since 2003. Books Everything I read, with ratings and reviews. Postcards Travel notes and photos from the road, since 2009.

Lately

Projects and sites

Sites

Feditrends
News stories trending in the Fediverse, updated every half hour.
Wind History2011
Wind roses for weather stations across the US, from decades of hourly observations. The post about it

Maps

Fisk's Mississippi2011
Harold Fisk's 1944 maps of the Mississippi's former courses, as a slippy map. The post about it
Zip Decode2013
Ben Fry's zipdecode, redone in JavaScript with D3. The post about it

Research and software

Hive1996–1999
Distributed agents for networking things, at the MIT Media Lab.
Swarm1994–1996
A toolkit for building multi-agent simulations, at the Santa Fe Institute.
HTML Helper Mode1993–1995
An Emacs mode for writing HTML.

Archives and old things

Twitter archive (one, two)2007–2022
All my tweets, kept after I left.
Popular Power2000–2001
My distributed computing startup.
MIT Media Lab home page1996–1999
My old home page from grad school, research and all.
Santa Fe Institute home page1994–1996
My old home page from the Santa Fe Institute.