Arthur C. Clarke: The Nine Billion Names of God
One of my very favourite Clarke short stories.
Chicken
Chicken chicken chicken; chicken.
Sheet music for Still Alive
As the title says: it's the sheet music for the catchy Still Alive.
Substack CEO Chris Best failing on racist content
Answering a question like this should be straightforward. Actually… I’m thinking he actually did give a straightforward answer, just in a roundabout way.
Keychron K8 Key Combinations
Shortcuts built into the Keychron K8 keyboard.
Packaging a Python CLI tool for Homebrew
Handy writeup on how to make a Homebrew formula for packaging a Python-based application.
Text Editor Data Structures
Post about text editor data structures.
SideQuest HOWTO (Updated)
A handy HOWTO for setting up and using SideQuest.
How does iCloud work?
Handy wee blog all about how iCloud works; especially useful for those of us who sometimes run into problems with it not working.
Team management tips: 10 ways to kill a team
Yup, I've been on the receiving end of some of these all too often.
Render: Cloud Application Hosting for Developers
Like it says on the tin, pretty much. They seem to have a rather nice static site hosting tier that's free.
What's New in Emacs 29.1? - Mastering Emacs
Good rundown on what’s new in Emacs 29.
Writing Small CLI Programs in Common Lisp / Steve Losh
Common Lisp Nova Spec
A very clean presentation of the Common Lisp HyperSpec
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode in 2023 (Still No Excuses!)
Useful article talking about unicode stuff.
Page is annoying to read though with daft gimmicks.
Common Lisp: An interactive approach
Electronic book introducing Common Lisp.
My User Experience Porting Off setup.py
There seems to be a lot of confusion around setup.py and friends; and while I’ve seen pushback against this post (mostly sniffy gatekeeper stuff rather than helpful feedback), it’s a worthwhile read if only because the confusion is real.
Migrating from LSP-Mode to Eglot · Andrey Listopadov
Useful article talking about migrating from LSP mode to eglot in Emacs.
A Journey Into Shaders
An introduction to shaders.
La Terminal in VisionOS
La Terminal is now running in VisionOS. Based on the video, it looks exactly like the sort of VR terminal experience I’ve been wanting (albeit in PCVR or Quest native)for ages now!
HTTP raccoons
HTTP status codes as raccoons as a service.
Kinda like the cat one, only with less cat and more raccoon.
Genetic Algorithms for Evolution of QWOP Gaits
QWOP is a browser-based, 2-dimensional flash game in which the player controls an Olympic sprinter competing in a simulated 100-meter race. The goal of the game is to advance the runner to the end of the 100-meter race as quickly as possible using the Q, W, O, and P keys, which control the muscles in the sprinters legs. Despite the game simple controls and straightforward goal, it is renowned for its difficulty and unintuitive gameplay. In this paper, we attempt to automatically discover effective QWOP gaits. We describe a programmatic interface developed to play the game, and we introduce several variants of a genetic algorithm tailored to solve this problem. We present experimental results on the effectiveness of various representations, initialization strategies, evolution paradigms, and parameter control mechanisms.
Taking responsibility - why UK PLC needs better managers
A report from YouGov and CMI on the state of leadership and management in UK businesses.
Wins
Generally I'm a fan of and use Magnet; but this looks cool and is worth remembering if I ever want to try something else out.
pip.wtf: Inline dependencies for small Python scripts
A tool to include dependencies with a Python script, without the packaging faff. Not sure I need it, not even sure I want it, but damn do I love how it's written up and introduced. I feel the annoyance.
Context Free Art
Context Free is a program that generates images from written instructions called a grammar. The program follows the instructions in a few seconds to create images that can contain millions of shapes.
Terminal Emulators Battle Royale – Unicode Edition!
It turns out that Unicode support in Terminals is a lot more difficult than it first appears. A quick overview of special support for Unicode characters in Terminals:
- "Wide" or "Fullwidth" characters, particularly for East Asian languages and emojis, are codepoints that occupy two cells in a terminal instead of one.
- "Zero" width combining characters used in languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, or Hindi do not occupy any cells themselves; instead, they modify the previous character.
- "Zero Width Joiner" (ZWJ U+200D) reduces and combines many codepoints into a single emoji. This is similar to combining, but encoded in a completely different way.
- "Variation Selector-16" (VS-16 U+FE0F) is a special character that, for specific "Narrow" emojis consuming one cell, causes them to become "Wide", consuming two cells.
Estimate Github Worth Generator
Totally pointless but mildly amusing web app that checks the "worth" of your GitHub profile.
Using the Hacker News API
Blog post going over the main details of the Hacker News API (possibly one of the worst APIs I've ever seen).
HackerNews/API: Documentation and Samples for the Official HN API
The official documentation for the v0 version of the HackerNews API.