Category: Science and Technology

  • Updated Supermario to Fedora 34

    Upgrade the main computer to Fedora 34. The upgrade was uneventful, but left me with a few little annoyances. It’s running Wayland, so there’s no longer a primary monitor. Also, something is slamming my processors and some programs are taking a long time to load. I was hoping things would be in better shape by…

  • Programming Update for June 2021

    June was mostly Python, although I did do chapter 1 of Scratch 3 Games for Kids with Sam. He really, really enjoyed it and I anticipate doing the challenge problems and maybe chapter 2 in July or August. Books I read the intro and first couple chapters of both Flask Web Development, 2nd Edition and…

  • Django vs Flask vs FastAPI

    Over the 16 years that this blog spans I must have, at some point, mentioned that I believe sometimes we get knowledge when we’re not ready to receive it.This isn’t some spiritual or new age thing (although you’ll hear Chopra and/or Tony Robbins talk about the phenomenon). It’s simply my lived experience. Sometimes you come…

  • Programming Update for May 2021

    Advent of Code 2015 Problem Set Day 10 There’s a lot to be said for doing the Advent of Code in December along with a few thousand other programmers. It’s fun to be part of something with others and you get to all the neat and wacky solutions that others come up with.  On the…

  • Programming Update for April 2021

    I had a lot less variety in my programming month, but still had a lot of fun doing it. In fact, Programming consumed most of my leisure thoughts. More about why I was doing it below, but I’ve been reading Programming Perl as well as skimming through Introducing Go and Learn You A Haskell for…

  • Mozilla’s Legacy

    A few days ago I read this article over at Tech Republic about how, Mozilla’s greatest achievement is not Firefox, but the Rust programming language. They point to Firefox’s declining numbers in the face of Chrome and Chromium-based browsers and I’m inclined to agree with the author. There is, of course, a kind of poetry…

  • OMG: All Your Base is 20 Years Old

    As I was going through my feed reader recently, I came across an article from Ars Technica, that I’d skipped over when it first came out, which announced that the All Your Base Meme is now 20 years old. I couldn’t believe it. It was my first meme, a few years before Numa Numa would…

  • Programming Projects: March 2021

    Programming Projects: March 2021

    I started off the month thinking it was going to be Python heavy and ended up doing a lot more micro-controller programming. To be fair, I was mostly programming in CircuitPython, but it definitely came out of nowhere. Python Civilization VI Webhook in FastAPI Last month I created a webhook program in Flask to generate…

  • My Extra Life Donation Tracker reaches v6.0 (feature complete)

    My Extra Life Donation Tracker reaches v6.0 (feature complete)

    This is my seventh year raising money for Johns Hopkins Children’s Center via the Extra Life gaming charity. When I started back then I was brand new to streaming or recording video game play. In fact, just a few years before that I hadn’t even understood the point. I found out that you could somehow…

  • Programming Jan/Feb 2021

    I was pretty busy programming at the start of 2021 across a few different languages. Let’s jump right in! C# I’m nearing the end of the GameDev.tv online RTS course, and it’s been a lot of fun. Since last time we added player colors to the units, a minimap that can be used to move…

  • How Desktop Environment Tweaking Helps Me Be More Productive

    A few months ago, someone asked about whether the rices*/modifications/tweaks people displayed on reddit.com/r/unixporn (where people show off their desktops, not human pornography) were actually useful. Someone commented they’d like to see a post on how someone uses their mods. So I decided to write this up. *I know the term ricing could be considered…

  • One tiny hitch with the Fedora 33 upgrade

    It messed with DNS resolution for my local network, at least temporarily. I couldn’t resolve any websites that needed to hit our local DNS server. I did some Googling and saw that the resolver tech was changed from Fedora 32 to Fedora 33. I change a setting for my NIC and then changed it back…

  • Upgrading Supermario to Fedora 33

    While new versions of Fedora have been pretty darned stable for a few years now, I usually wait a while after a release to upgrade. This year waiting ended up turning into just leaving it alone. But with February half-way done, we’re actually starting to get kind of close to the Fedora 34 release date.…

  • Vivaldi Part 4, Brave Part 2, Qutebrowser Part 1

    Vivaldi Part 4, Brave Part 2, Qutebrowser Part 1

    This post continues a series on exploring new browsers: Are Web Browsers getting exciting again? Vivaldi Part 1 Vivaldi Part 2 Vivaldi Part 3 Brave on Windows Part 1 Vivaldi vs Brave on Windows Brave didn’t last very long for me on Windows. I just don’t do enough on there to make use of their…

  • Programming in the first two weeks of 2021

    It’s been a pretty busy 2 weeks. I’ve basically either been finishing up end of year blog posts or programming. Let’s jump in! Extra Life Donation Tracker I have the 5.3 release of my Extra Life Donation Tracker. I had a few minor refactoring goals for that release, but also a few user-facing enhancements. I…