Harris Lapiroff

Roughly a century ago, labor organizing gradually, but successfully, reduced the 6-day work week to a 5-day work week.

It’s been said, “if you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”

Jerry Lapiroff · February 11, 1947 – March 22, 2026 When I was an elementary schooler my father would read me such bedtime stories as Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” and Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” – stories well above…

You’re relatively tech- and security-savvy.

Just want the files?

Earlier this year, while designing the songbook for Emma’s Magnolia Sun album, I encountered the challenge of creating “chord over lyrics” style chord charts.

As of June 23, 2026, I am now mostly using Claude and I have refined my global prompt to: Keep responses concise, informative, and impersonal.

Earlier this week I posted about rough edges I encountered using WebC.

I’ve rewritten this blog’s templates in WebC.

One minor travel annoyance I’ve regularly encountered is that airplane outlets don’t hold U.S.

Jump to shortcut ↓ The web is full of links designed to track and surveil the people who share and receive them.

I’m in the process of a major technical rearchitecture of this website¹ and as part of that restructure I’m foregoing the use of CSS preprocessor SASS in favor of vanilla CSS.

Recently, as some of my friends are leaving or thinking about leaving Facebook, I’ve had more of them share forms to collect contact information from friends they might otherwise lose touch with.

First off, here are two things that are true and not contradicted by my writing that follows: The Trump administration is full of people who are incompetent, malicious, and bad at their jobs, whose primary qualifications are sycophancy.

Many contra dance callers use The Caller’s Box, a phenomenal dance choreography database from Chris Page and Michael Dyck.

TL;DR: Bridging your Bluesky account will allow me and others who use the Fediverse (including Mastodon) to interact with you on Bluesky.

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Last year my 2015 (or possibly late 2014) iMac died after a decade of service.

In December 2023 the Massachusetts State Legislature considered adopting the flawed IHRA definition of antisemitism.

I just got a fraudulent call from someone pretending to be my bank, so I thought I’d share this tidbit of security wisdom that I hope a lot of people already know, but just in case you don’t: Don’t share personal information with your bank if they called…

Last year I decided it was time to replace my bed frame.

I’ve been working on a CD album insert for Emma as a design project.

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September 15, 2025: As of recently the Blacksky project seems to have successfully launched independent implementations of the core parts of the ATProto stack (a personal data store, a relay, and an app) that allow someone to interact with Bluesky users w…

My blog is now generated by Eleventy 3.0, which was released last month.

It occurred to me recently that I don’t think there are any contra dances that feature a set and link figure.

One micro-idea that occurs to me in our new era of fragmented social media is maybe we should bring back the primacy of URLs in place of social media handles.

In the wake of the 2024 U.S. election, a bunch of my friends are abandoning other corporate social media options and flocking to Bluesky.

One thing I think is a best practice is receiving notifications on your phone for all credit and debit card transactions.

In my travels in Morocco for the past week, I’ve mostly stuck to destinations that I can reach by train and the occasional short petit taxi (more on this name later) trip to get to a Medina or Riad.

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about Web Components, a set of fairly recent web technologies seemingly poised to replace some of the role frameworks like React have filled for much of the past decade.

I am trying, today, Rosh Hashanah, to think about the sweetness of the new year.

You can now view the source file for any blog post on my site by replacing the trailing slash with .txt in the URL.

Now that I’m taking more photos again, I’ve resurrected my Flickr account to share them!

Over the spring and into the summer of this year, I took lots of photos with a Nikon D70.

Roughly six months after my first bout of covid, I got it again.

For most of my CAD I use OpenSCAD, a coding-language–based modeling environment that appeals to my programmer/mathematician brain.

Polymaker PolyWood is a 3D printing filament designed to be ultra-matte and mimic the appearance of wood filaments – plastics with wood particles mixed into the material – without the hassle of actual wood particles, which can cause nozzle clogging.

On my summer tour with Kingfisher the organizers of one dance told me that their group would tolerate Larks/Robins for role terms, but preferred Ladies/Gents.

I just wrapped up a weeklong summer contra dance calling tour with Kingfisher (Jeff Kaufman and Cecilia Vacanti).

If you would like to just use the iOS Shortcut click here.

Here’s a small collection of quick designs I’ve made since I wrote my previous 3D printing blog post “Solving Niche Problems Quickly With 3D Printing.”

In response to my most recent post about calling dances in Nantucket, Maia wrote to me: Harris, I have the world’s stupidest bone to pick with you.

Photo by Tom Stoddart This week I called the Nantucket’s First Community Contra Dance.

Photo by Julia Wise For the second year in a row Jeff invited me to call contra dances with his band Kingfisher on his porch for Somerville Porchfest, for dancers in the street.

I’ve since taken more photos with the D70 which can be seen here.

The most recent 3D printing project I wrote about was a months-long process of design and iteration, but one skill I’m particularly interested in honing with my 3D printer is solving niche problems quickly. 3D printing is particularly good for this because

Irish whistles¹ each play a limited set of pitches and therefore come in a particular key: you can have a D whistle, a G whistle, etc.

One way I’ve found to counteract the anesthetic quality of a months-long day-in-day-out massacre – the sense of inevitability and resignation of the state of the world and the gradual acclimation to an ever increasing death toll – is to revisit what I tho…

This week I had a couple IKEA Skådis pegboards delivered¹.