When my wife saw me playing with my new encrypted radio, she asked what it was for. “Imagine,” I said, “if I could type a message on my phone and send it to you, and the message would appear on your phone. Instantly!” She wasn’t impressed. “It also works if phone lines are down due to a power outage… or societal collapse.” Still nothing. “If we’re not within radio range of each other, we can route ou...

We're been living on our smallholding in Wales for 3 years now. Here's how things have been going this year. I’m a little late with my update this year because I’ve had a few things going on at home. This has accidentally become an annual tradition at this point, so I’m gonna roll with it. I re-read last year’s update to see what I did and, more importantly, what I’d listed in the closing what’s next? section. It included: Renovating the brick shed on the drive into ...

I’ve had my VORON Trident for 2 years and I’ve run it for 2600 hours. Overall I’m happy with the printer but I’ve been itching to make some more mods to it. Having finally finished the VORON 0 ( with mods ) I now have a backup printer I can use to rescue myself when I screw up. As the printer was starting to crap out with a leadscrew starting to grind down again , the chamber thermistor stopped working, and PLA clogging up the Rapido hotend again it was time for a bit of a rebui...

Here is a peek at some lunar samples from China’s Chang’e 5 nearside landing mission as well as the Chang’e 6 farside one! Holding them is an incredible feeling that vividly reminds you of the immense and irreplaceable value of exploring our Moon . 🌙 Roughly two-billion year old lunar sample brought to Earth by Chang’e 5. Image: CNSA / CAS / HKU Roughly 2.8-billion year old lunar sample brought to Earth by Chang’e 6. Image: CNSA / CAS / HKU Chang’e 5 and 6 samples. Image: CNS...

I just discovered a new way to tell if a blogpost is AI slop or at least if someone blindly copied and pasted commands from Claude Code: the first line of a group of commands isn't indented but the rest are, like this: sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade sudo apt autoremove sudo apt autoclean This happens because the raw CLI output of Claude code for this question looks like this: > What are the commands to fully...

If you are reading this, you are considering building a brand new road! First, congratulations! Building a new road is a serious undertaking and you probably don't even know where to start. That's okay! This instructional will walk you through your first "roadie" considerations. Do "You" Want To Build This Road? Friends pressure us into things sometimes. Are you considering building a road because you want to or because your friend wants to? It's good to go along with friends—this is how we bu...

As of today, I run three different newsletters, all powered by Buttondown: there’s my recently announced Dealgorithmed , my outdoors-focused From the Summit , and the People and Blogs series. I also send my blog posts via email , if you prefer to consume content that way. They all require double opt-in. Which means that if you signed up for one of them, you should have received a second email, asking you to click a link to confirm your subscription. Sometimes those land in the spam fold...

Common JavaScript patterns. Common JavaScript patterns.

Last week we talked about some of the reasons why we want data independence. This week I want to talk about some of the historical steps that brought us to where we are today, and why the relational model is a good fit for modelling data. The first real database is often thought to be IDS, the "integrated data store," which was designed by Charles Bachman. Bachman won the Turing award for his work on databases and his Turing award speech The Programmer as Navigator is a really important...

I enjoy conversations, particularly with people I care about. I also have a social circle which is rather geographically dispersed. This, of course, presents the problem of “how do I stay in touch with people?” Facebook et al. haven’t solved this problem in a satisfactory way for me. Discord / private group chats are fine, but don’t feel socially fulfilling in a way that 30 minutes of even infrequent talking often is. One solution I stumbled into a few years ago was: Set up recurrin...

I don’t remember where I heard this story, but it stuck in my mind to this day. It goes something like this: A doorman is guarding the entrance of a very important corporate building. He lets people in and out based on their badges. One day, the owner of the company arrives. As she approaches the door, the doorman asks for her ID. The owner’s secretary says, “Don’t you know who she is? Let her in!” The owner of the company hands him her ID, and he lets her in. ...

While I work to round out the details of the Recovery Kit Ultra, I thought it would be a great time to share the smaller "desk buddy" that is the Recovery Kit Nano. The nano has a humorously small 5" screen from the company who brings you the many variants of the Raspberry Pi. This small 5" screen with a tremendous bezel is really left to act more as a showpiece on your desk, but it does so with a surprising amount in common with the Raspberry Pi Recovery Kit, the Recovery Kit Mini, and even t...

I will answer this question, but it’s best explained by telling you about the post I wrote on LinkedIn last week: Github’s Design System has banned toast messages. Toast messages are little messages that appear on top of the UI to give you feedback about an action you just took. Banning toast messages is an excellent decision because they’re not accessible and have bad UX. Here’s a few reasons why: (1) They disappear automatically after a few seconds - at best this is stressf...

Last week I ran a meetup for writers on the web . During the session, I brought up the topic of distance in writing. [1] We explored the topic in various ways – the distance between writing and publishing, the distance between reader and writer, how distance varies. As I write, I am thinking about the distance of poetic writing. When I write poetically, I can use the ambiguity of poetic language to create a space for the reader to interpret something in whatever ways come to mind. I find it e...

Base64 is a binary-to-text encoding scheme that converts arbitrary binary data (like images, files, or any sequence of bytes) into a safe, printable ASCII string using a 64-character alphabet (A–Z, a–z, 0–9, +, /). Browsers use it in JavaScript to embedding binary data directly in code or HTML or to transmitting binary data as text. Browsers recently added convenient and safe functions to process base 64 functions Uint8Array.toBase64() and Uint8Array.fromBase64() . Though they are sev...

https://austinhenley.com/blog/langjamgamejam.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/langjamgamejam.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/langjamgamejam.html

When it comes to hard problems, computer scientists seem to be stuck. Consider, for example, the notorious problem of finding the shortest round-trip route that passes through every city on a map exactly once. All known methods for solving this “traveling salesperson problem” are painfully slow on maps with many cities, and researchers suspect there’s no way to do better. But nobody knows how to… Source When it comes to hard problems, computer scientists seem to be stuck. Consider, fo...

Reddit is one of the longer-standing platforms on the internet, bringing together folk to discuss, rant, grumble, and troll others on all sorts of topics, from Kafka to data engineering to nerding out over really bright torches to grumbling about the state of the country —and a whole lot more. As a social network it’s a prime candidate for using graph analysis to examine how people interact—and in today’s post, hunt down some sneaky shills ;-) I’ve loaded data for se...

Name: Izumo Social media: X , YouTube SPONSORED Being productive at home is about getting the right things done, not everything do...

BILL: I honestly do not know whether ChatGPT will make programmers more productive. (I am not touching question of whether it puts programmers out of work. That's a problem for Future Bill.) Who can I ask? I found two people who disagree on the issue: Alice who supports developers in industry. She doesn't write code full time now, but she has written plenty before. She thinks that NO, ChatGPT and LLMs DO NOT help programmers. Bob is a  friend of a friend who writes code for a living and owns ...

A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure. — Segal’s Law Take this example: func validate ( input string ) ( bool , error ) { // Validation check 1 if input == "" { return false , nil } // Validation check 2 if isCorrupted ( input ) { return false , nil } // System check if err := checkUpstream (); err != nil { retu...

DragonFire laser being tested in 2024, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at NIMBYism and aesthetics, defibrillator drones, railway track detonators, a proposed mach-23 space gun, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. NIMBYism and aesthetics A common opinion I hear about opposition to new housing constru...

So far we’ve been collecting whatever data we want whenever something significant happens in the simulation, but we can’t do that in the real world. Since we need to tidy up the simulation a bit, let’s data collection a little more realistic as well. The Overall Simulation As before, we’re going to store the major pieces of the simulation in a Simulation object so that we don’t have to pass lots of bits and pieces to every function and method. This class holds: the simulatio...