Recently updated blogs

The workshop, it is painted! At last! Brick red can look pretty exotic in the sunshine you know.

It's time for some personal and professional news!TL;DR: I started a podcast with James, I'm stable on antidepressants, I'm giving a P99 CONF about my Rust/io_uring/HTTP work, I'm trying on "they/them" as pronouns, I'm open-sourcing merde_json, rubicon and others, I got a divorce in 2023, I found a new business model.

I’m looking for work. My experience doesn't neatly fit standard job titles or sectors, and I've got an eclectic set of criteria for what I want to do, so maybe you can help me find a job which brings them together. I've got a broad set of management, tech and sustainability skills. I've experience with products, operations, organisations; with open stuff and non-profit stuff and systems engineering and shared infrastructure …

5/5 golden merles “Goo Goo” is Sacramento-based noise punk with cutting phrasing and instrumental hooks concerning the crimes of Johnson & Johnson. How can a culture appropriately reply to grievous wrongdoing committed that effectively goes unpunished? In spitting their own legalese and cowardice back at the bastards, BLOUS3 gives it a worthy attempt. Conveying your contempt is a valuable and worthy endeavor in art as well as in life, especially …

Maps are fascinating things that show us a world that is both deeply personal and excitingly unfamiliar. As professional cartographers, we understand the joy of browsing parts of the world where you’ve never been before, but we also know that the first thing people usually do when they see a map is to find their own house. One of the often-overlooked aspects of maps that give this feeling of familiarity …

Olympic Silver Medal Finally Awarded to Tim Koleto Today, my friend Tim Koleto was awarded the Olympic Silver Medal with the Japan figure skating team in Paris at the Victory Ceremony near the Eiffel Tower and the River Seine. His mother, his constant cheerleader, was there to see it. Olympic Victory Ceremony The “Victory… Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian billpetro.com Subscribe to have future articles delivered to your email. …

Today I’m giving the closing keynote address at PyCon US 2024, sharing “Untold stories from six years working on Python packaging.”I aim to post a fuller transcript with slides within the next several weeks. But, …

I wasn’t really mentioning this publicly, but now that the papers are all signed, I’m happy to announce we just bought a house! It’s a very, very, very fine house in a quiet neighborhood in Rutland, Vermont. Which means, yep, I’ll be a Vermont resident again. It feels like a nice culmination to spending the last year exploring the country (almost exactly a year – we left August 17th, and …

Wednesday, Aug 7 IPA (phonetic) wordle solver (permalink) made and submitted by rfong find words that fit phonetic criteria! a total cesspool of regex. don't actually use it to cheat at phonetic wordle though, it's better for your linguistics brain to solve puzzles yourself. — rfong

AI bots, scrapers, and crawlers are no longer welcome on my blog I'm an independent content creator that uses my content partly as a way to to get interest in my paid services. I don't know about you, but for me the idea of an AI LLM scraping my content to regurgitate it without any benefit to me seems like a dumb business decision. When Cloudflare announced their new service …

I’m just back from a productive week working with Mika Satomi and Lizzie Wilson on a mini project ‘Modulating Time’ at the annual, week-long PIFcamp gathering in Slovenia’s Julian Alps. We worked on handheld stick-based and woven devices for tactile control of musical pattern and tempo, so that audience members could manipulate our live coding performance. Here’s a sneak peak at what we ended up with!

I recently got my hands on a USB drive with Kakasoft USB Copy Protection (DRM protection). This software promises to let you share data without the fear of it being copied by the end user. However, the pseudo-hacker in me couldn’t resist the challenge. After all, “If it can be read, it can be copied.” In this article, I’ll walk you through the entire process I used to crack this …

I’ve always been careful to ensure Curious British Telly doesn’t become a rose tinted, nostalgia-for-the-sake-of-nostalgia borefest - you know the thing, see all those Channel 5 documentaries about the 1980s. Nonetheless, it’s sometimes difficult to deny that the past had some amazing opportunities.Sure, there was nothing as conveniently lazy as, for example, Deliveroo in 1981. But did you need really need it back then? Especially when your hunger could be …

This modest (and, of late, fitful) undertaking owes its name to Edward Thomas. I expressed my thanks to him (accompanied by the touching elegy "To E. T.: 1917" written by his friend Walter de la Mare) in my first post here: Tuesday, March 9, 2010. A month later, I posted this comment about "Adlestrop": "No doubt many of us first encountered Edward Thomas by discovering 'Adlestrop' in an anthology. And …