Recently updated blogs

Garth Ennis sends up fantasy? Sounds like fun.

IntroductionHi everyone! Do y'all still remember me? I seriously doubt it. It's been so long since my last post, but I'm BACK for an arc review of this amazing book!Do you ever stumble upon a book so electrifying that you forget the world around you? That's exactly what happened to me with Jane Buckingham's A Lie for a Lie. This novel is not just a page-turner; it’s a white-knuckle ride …

Overview The Skilhunt MiX-7 (affiliate link) is a flashlight with seven LEDs and five colors of light output: white, red, green, blue, and ultraviolet. It runs on an 18350 battery, which is usually associated with small, pocket-friendly lights, but the wide head required for all those LEDs and their individual reflectors means that the MiX-7 is a wide flashlight best suited to carry in a bag or jacket pocket. When …

I’d been to Lochnagar, Càrn a’ Choire Bhòidheach, Càrn an t-Sagairt Mòr, Cairn Bannoch, and Broad Cairn several times over the years, but I hadn’t yet visited them all in one continuous circuit. Since I had the free time last week, and the weather wasn’t horrendous, I went and ran & hiked this classic Aberdeenshire round. It’s a good day out. Something worth repeating in a different season. I started …

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!