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It’s maintenance day in my little Python world. I just released new versions of two small but apparently quite popular packages: eve-swagger, the OpenAPI/Swager extensions for Eve-powered APIs, hits v0.1.4. It’s just a single fix for API breakage introduced with the previous release; details available here. Thanks to Asger Gitz-Johansen for the help with this release. Flask-Sentinel, an Oauth2 Provider for Flask, hits v0.0.8. This also is a small release that fixes 500 errors if you were using unpinned versions of redis....

As I was browsing my RSS feed this morning, I came across a [new blog][1] from Nat Friedman over at GitHub. The piece was titled “Open source goes to Mars”, and, of course, it caught my interest. In the article, Nat announced a Mars 2020 Helicopter Mission badge added to GitHub profiles contributing to open-source projects and libraries used by Ingenuity. Some time ago, like many others, I was granted the Arctic Code Vault badge, so I am familiar with the concept....

Consider the 10x10 grids of green and white boxes below. How would you make them symmetrical? Most people would add green boxes to the emptier half of the grid rather than remove them from the fuller half. Even when the latter would have been more efficient. The case, along with a similar problem revolving around the stability of a peculiar lego structure, is reported by an intriguing Nature article on the topic of psychology and human behaviour....

The name SQLite is a nice name, but the “lite” part is misleading, it sounds like it is only useful for tiny things - which is very wrong. SQLite should be named AwesomeSQL, because that is what it is. SQLite is probably the only database you will ever need in most cases Yeah. This article resonates with me. SQLite is the de-facto standard engine for embedded systems. But it should also be the go-to database for all those websites and services that don’t need to scale to multiple machines....

It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity....

What a fascinating read. It sits right at the intersection of two of my (too many) vicious interests: Jazz music and books. Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style logo, and a black plastic binding. It’s delightfully homemade-looking—like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers at a Kinkos. And inside is the sheet music for hundreds of common jazz tunes—also known as jazz “standards”—all meticulously notated by hand....

I never see my macOS desktop. It’s always cluttered with way too many open windows. When I spot those fantastic, tidy and clean Desktops on the internet, I envy their owners. I wonder if and how they manage to keep those desktops tidy like that the whole workday. It must feel so good. I try to keep my windows well arranged. The typical setup might be two windows, from two different apps, tiled side by side....

Giulia got an exciting assignment from her teacher: Write a C program that simulates (a simplified version of) COVID outbreak spreading across a population of 200 people. When a healthy person comes into contact with a sick person, the healthy person becomes ill, too. After some time, a sick person will recover. A recovered person cannot infect a healthy person nor become sick again after coming in contact with a sick person....

While reading Erebus, The Story of a Ship, my attention was caught by a brief mention of the Whaleship Essex. Being the sucker that I am for exploration and dramatic adventure stories from the early days, I researched it, only to surface with Nathaniel Philbricks’ In The Heart of the Sea in my hands. In the Heart of the Sea brings to new life the incredible story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex - an event as mythic in its own century as the Titanic disaster in ours, and the inspiration for the climax of Moby-Dick....

This is a maintained technical guide that aims to provide introduction to various online tracking techniques, online id verification techniques and guidance to creating and maintaining (truly) anonymous online identities including social media accounts safely and legally. No pre-requisites besides English reading are required. At a glance, I suspect most people will be tempted to dismiss The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Online Anonymity as borderline paranoia. But make no mistake, it is a great resource....