TIL on Luis’ Corner

Recording cell execution time in Jupyter notebooks

Tue, 19 May 2026 12:04:07 -0500

The jupyterlab-execute-time extension for Jupyter Lab records the time it has taken / took to execute a cell.

It was developed by the D. E. Shaw group (never heard of them), so one can be reasonably sure it has been tested to some extent.

Disabling Yomitan per-site

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 11:56:00 -0500

Yomitan is a browser extension that lets you hover over words, press a key, and get a definition from a dictionary. For language learners, it’s a godsend.

However, sometimes you want to avoid the modifier key, usually Shift.

To that end…

Open the Yomitan Settings.
Click on Profiles → Configure profiles…
Click on Add to create a new profile. Give it a descriptive name, like “Blocklist”.
Close the dialog.
Click on the dropdown list next to “Active profile” to switch to the “Blocklist” profile.

Disabling the Firefox full-screen animation and popup

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:32:03 -0500

Note: I’m using Firefox 149.

To disable the full-screen animation and popup that get triggered when you press F11, which I personally found annoying, do the following:

Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter to open the advanced config window.
It will, most likely, prompt you for confirmation before going ahead. Click “Accept the Risk and Continue”.
Type full-screen-api in the search bar to filter the options.
And perform the following changes:

Tango trees in Computer Science

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:48:18 -0500

I was reading about specialized variants of Dijkstra’s algorithm when I saw the name Van Emde Boas and it grabbed my interest.

I skimmed that page and saw another article in the “See also” section: Tango tree.

A tango tree is a type of binary search tree proposed by Erik D. Demaine, Dion Harmon, John Iacono, and Mihai Pătrașcu in 2004.[1]

As for its etymology:

It is named after Buenos Aires, of which the tango is emblematic.

Open a tmux window in the same working directory

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:06:22 -0500

To open a tmux window in the same working directory as your current pane, modify this keybinding in your .tmux.conf:

bind c new-window -c "#{pane_current_path}"

Splits

This can be extended to splits if you want:

bind '"' split-window -c "#{pane_current_path}"
bind % split-window -h -c "#{pane_current_path}"

Source

From this answer at Unix Stack Exchange.

Creating a new tmux session or attaching to an existing one with WSL

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:57:08 -0500

The default “Command Line” argument for the WSL profile looks like this:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\wsl.exe -d Ubuntu

Append this to create a new tmux session or attach to an existing one:

tmux attach || tmux new

So that it looks like this:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\wsl.exe -d Ubuntu tmux attach || tmux new

From this Stack Overflow answer.

Entropy can, in fact, go down

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 10:38:00 -0500

From Aatishb’s Entropy explained with sheep (emphasis mine):

There’s something curious here. Although the equal energy state is the most likely, it’s still very possible to find all the energy in one solid (the left or right extremes of the graph). In fact, there’s about a 1 in 8 chance of this happening. So the entropy in this system can fluctuate, sometimes going up, other times going down.

So when we look at really tiny solids, energy doesn’t always flow from a hot object to a cold one. It can go the other way sometimes. And entropy doesn’t always increase. This isn’t just a theoretical issue, entropy decreases have actually been seen in microscopic experiments.