Adam Fontenot

Hi! I’m a graduate student in philosophy. Thank you for visiting my website, which hosts my personal blog. If you would like professional information or to contact me directly, please visit my about page. I also have an RSS feed you can follow to subscribe to this blog.


Improving font rendering in old UI toolkits with a one line Pango patch

11 April 2023 · Adam Fontenot

I enabled subpixel positioning in GTK 2 and GTK 3 applications with a one line patch to the Pango library.


LibreOffice 7.4 has a new approach to text rendering

18 August 2022 · Adam Fontenot

After many years of weird text rendering issues in LibreOffice, many problems have now been solved. Let's explore the changes and look at some before / after images.


Statistics-assisted weight loss with pyWeight

11 April 2022 · Adam Fontenot

I lost about 80 pounds on a scientifically credible diet plan I developed myself, using a software program I wrote for the purpose and have open sourced. I discuss the scientific justification behind the program's method and algorithms, and offer other observations around weight loss.


Looking at the distribution of ratings on Goodreads

27 February 2022 · Adam Fontenot

Goodreads is infamous for its terrible book ratings. Supposedly, almost all the ratings are between 3 and 4 stars. I take a look at what the actual range is, and see what could be done to improve them (including a userscript to show the percentile of each book). I also make an argument against using a Dirichlet distribution to model star ratings.


How I defeated Wordle with Python

05 January 2022 · Adam Fontenot

I built a solver for Wordle.


Solving the vehicle routing problem for research biologists

20 June 2021 · Adam Fontenot

It's rather difficult to solve traveling-salesman type problems using real world locations and data. I was recently in a position where I needed to do so, to provide sample collection routes for a group of research biologists. Here I discuss the solution I came up with, which uses entirely open source methods and software, and provide some code that could be adapted to solve similar problems.


Fixing a broken QR code in FEZ

13 January 2021 · Adam Fontenot

The video game FEZ contains a puzzle surrounding a broken QR code. I found a way to fix the code through a deep dive into the specification. It turns out that this is not the way that the game creators expected you to solve the puzzle.


How the pursuit of HD video ruined TV for half a decade

16 September 2020 · Adam Fontenot

Let's take a deep dive into the way that the adoption of HD digitally shot footage ruined the lighting of a bunch of different television shows, chiefly Battlestar Galactica.


Bart Ehrman and the “strictly historical point of view”

12 September 2020 · Adam Fontenot

Bart Ehrman has complex views of the relationship between naturalism and history. I try to develop an understanding of what the view is, and dispute several points.


The false claim that Bernie Sanders was sunk in 2016 by black voters

09 September 2020 · Adam Fontenot

It has been falsely claimed by many commentators, including some legitimate media sources, that Bernie Sanders does more poorly with black voters than with white voters. This has been used to explain his failing to win the 2016 primary, for example. I argue that this misunderstands the relevant statistics, and that Sanders actually did better with black voters in many states, including South Carolina. The problem comes from ignoring the enormous fraction of white Republicans.



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