Posts

Robert Edison Fulton was the first solo round-the-world motorcycle tourer. He made his worldwide trip on a two-cylinder Douglas motorcycle between July 1932 and December 1933, more or less 90 years ago. On his way from London to the colonial Middle East, Fulton crossed Nazi Germany. Some of the countries and places he passed do not exist anymore. Most have changed dramatically; others, not so much. I suspect, for example, that his adventures in Syria, Afghanistan, or at the Indian-Pakistani borders might have been written today. ...

The official Git documentation presents the following example as a valid use-case for the worktree command: You are in the middle of a refactoring session and your boss comes in and demands that you fix something immediately. You might typically use git-stash1 to store your changes away temporarily. However, your working tree is in such a state of disarray (with new, moved, and removed files and other bits and pieces strewn around) that you don’t want to risk disturbing any of it. (source) ...

Only 24 people have journeyed far enough to see the whole Earth against the black of space. The images they brought back changed our world. Here is a selection of the most beautiful photographs of Earth — iconic images and unknown gems — digitally restored to their full glory. Toby Ord’s recent Earth Restored project is a must-see.

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. This time, my gratitude goes to Adrian Cin. ...

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. I quickly dismissed the information as “nice, not gonna get it” and moved along. ...

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 paper linked to the piece demonstrates that people consistently consider changes that add components over those that subtract them. ...

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. Which, in the real world, happens way more frequently than we all imagine. ...

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. Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed. What follows is a dazzling and profoundly moving conversation about what makes us human. ...

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. It’s called the Real Book. ...

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. Maybe the browser, or Postman, on the right, and my favourite editor on the left. Stuff like that. ...