Blog on Hayden Schiff

The street that has existed for 150 years that never existed

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 03:51:22 +0000

Originally published in my OpenHistoricalMap diary

I found something interesting while working on mapping historical streets in my hometown of Cincinnati. Take a look at Alexander St on J.H. Colton & Co.'s 1855 map, the oldest map I'm aware of that includes the street:

Here's how S. Augustus Mitchell depicted Alexander St on his 1860 map:

And just for good measure, here it is in Mendenhall 1867, Phillips 1868, Titus 1869, Robinson 1884, Fisk c.1893, Mendenhall 1900, and Mendenhall 1927:

Making inline scrollable bar charts in Google Sheets

Thu, 16 Apr 2020 11:42:00 -0400

Recently, I wanted to make a bar chart in Google Sheets from a dataset with hundreds of rows. When I used the built-in Chart functionality, it wasn't able to fit all of the bar labels on screen at once. I made the chart its own sheet (so it'd be as big as possible) and set the labels to use the smallest possible font, but it was still only showing half the labels. I needed to see all the labels, so this was no good.

Automating my Slack status based on my wi-fi location

Thu, 31 Aug 2017 16:08:23 -0400

I alternate between working at home and in the office a lot, and I like to keep my coworkers informed about where I am. Earlier this year, Slack added statuses, which allows you to show an emoji next to your name to indicate what you're up to.

I immediately took to this feature and always tried to set "Working remotely" or "In the office" each morning, but I'm very forgetful, and would often notice at the end of the day that I had been set to the wrong location for the entire day. My immediate thought when I'm getting fed up with a tedious daily task is, "can I automate this?"

Defcon preparation checklist

Mon, 24 Jul 2017 12:39:53 -0400

I'm heading to my first Defcon on Wednesday, and naturally, I'm a little bit anxious about prepping my devices so as to not get pwned. The advice I've seen for this varies wildly -- some people go all out and use a separate phone and laptop for the convention, while others simply turn off wi-fi and Bluetooth.

I'm thinking the best strategy for me is somewhere in the middle -- make sure I'm locked down and have backups, but don't put myself through hell when the odds of anything bad happening are realistically low. I'm not a worthwhile target; anyone who would waste 0days on the likes of me is probably not smart enough to have found a 0day in the first place.

Reverse engineering the Humble Bundle app to get API access

Fri, 21 Jul 2017 14:40:29 +0000

If you've been living under a rock for the past few years, you might not know there's this cool site called Humble Bundle that sells games and ebooks in very affordable pay-what-you-want bundles. They donate some of the profits to charity, and they have some really cool offerings -- definitely worth checking out if you've never seen it before.

I've been a patron of Humble Bundle for quite a few years and have built a fairly sizable collection of digital goodies. I'd like to be able to download these in bulk in the formats of my choice. Unfortunately, Humble Bundle doesn't make this easy -- they expect you to manually click "Download" for each and every item in your library.

Domenick Nati's obsession with Wikipedia

Sat, 23 Apr 2016 01:26:08 +0000

Holy crap man. Okay so there's this dude, Domenick Nati (@KingOfContacts), and he's a publicist/agent for celebrities — he has clients like the rapper DMX. For a while, Nati had a Wikipedia article. I somehow stumbled upon it in mid-March, and noticed it seemed to be kinda promotional and also didn’t sufficiently prove that he was a notable person according to Wikipedia’s guidelines, so I started a deletion discussion.

Nati responded to this by creating tons of fake accounts (or "sockpuppets", in Wikipedia lingo) and trying to vote to keep the article (side note: okay, I’m pretty sure the accounts were created by Nati, but I suppose it could have been an employee or friend or something; whatever). It was incredibly obvious that these accounts were sockpuppets, so all his accounts were banned, and the article was ultimately deleted by consensus.

Subscriptions won't fix online advertising

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 17:14:30 +0000

Everyone hates ads, but content can't survive without revenue. AdBlock is increasingly cutting into profit margins of websites that rely on advertising, and the problem doesn't look to be going away. These websites are desperately looking to innovate in how their bring in revenue.

Individual site subscriptions #

A few sites have tried launching their own ad-free services; for example, WIRED is launching a service where readers can pay $4/month for ad-free browsing. It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't scale. Maybe some readers will subscribe to one or two sites they really like, but very few modern web users limit their browsing to just one or two sites. People today are clicking all sorts of links on their social media news feeds or in emails from friends or what have you; I'd wager the average user visits dozens of ad-reliant websites in any given week.

County clerk emails

Fri, 11 Dec 2015 06:05:08 -0500

The names of the clerk, the county, and the state are all fake for anonymity. I also left out email signatures (except in her first email, because "Sincerely," doesn't make sense without it). Everything else is completely unmodified.

FROM: Hayden Schiff
TO: Jane Doe
DATE: Thursday, 5:46 PM

Hello,

I'd like to purchase the Foobar County voter registration list. I'd like records for all parties, all precincts, all districts, and both active and inactive voters. I'd like to get the list via email.