It's A Binary World 2.0

Category: Science and Technology

  • Programming Update: September / October 2021

    Across both September and October I got a decent amount of programming done. I just about finished the Learn You Haskell for Great Good book (got up to just before Monads) and started Head First Go. Once I had enough Go language to get started on AoC, I knew I’d be ready for the 2016…

  • How to get around Elisa’s lack of last.fm scrobbling

    Elisa is currently the “default” KDE music player, replacing Amarok. I am just taking a guess, but I think that Amarok just ended up with too large a codebase to be maintainable at a reasonable pace. I’ve been using Cantata, an mpd player for KDE that’s currently on maintenance mode. On the one hand, I…

  • KDE Challenge (Fall 2021)

    With KDE’s 25th Anniversary and the release of KDE Plamsa 5.23, I got excited to check out a few KDE-focused distros. Kinoite First up was Fedora’s KDE-based RPM-OSTree distro, Kinoite. (summary after each video) Fedora provides a nice RPM-OSTree solution for folks who want to use the tech, but don’t want to use Gnome. The…

  • Completing Advent of Code 2015 with 3 Programming languages

    Throughout the spring and summer of 2021 a few of the times that I mentioned on the Advent of Code subreddit that I was doing the 2015 problem set in all 3 languages, some folks said they’d be interested in a writeup on the experience. Now that I’ve finally finished 2015 (my first set of…

  • Programming Update for July and August 2021

    I didn’t do much coding in July, so I decided to combine the July and August wrap-ups.  Python Dreamhost Dynamic DNS I decided to clean up and update some code that uses the Dreamhost API to allow for Dynamic DNS. I cleaned up the logging output so that I could figure out why it was…

  • 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…