fanf

fanf, 10 days ago to random

vague memory of someone else’s debugging story from i can’t remember where … :

they are called to an office which is complaining that the wifi stops working for two hours twice a day

this office is in portsmouth so it’s fairly obvious that the timing is related to the tides

but what on earth? how can the wifi be sensitive to the tides?!

fanf, 10 months ago to random

TIL the soldering iron that has been sitting in a box of misc stuff in the corner of my room is about as much use for melting solder as a rod of graphite wrapped in wood

so tomorrow i should be getting a pinecil https://www.pine64.org/pinecil/

it’ll be the first risc-v micro in this house that i know of
(certainly the first user-programmable one)

fanf, 2 months ago to random

i like this article from november last year, in the run up to the ITU world radiocommunication conference, about the increasingly firm plans to abolish the leap second

https://web.archive.org/web/20231103043101/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/science/time-leap-second.html

however the ITU-R WRC23 didn't agree on the "leap minute" proposal, instead they decided "the maximum value for the difference between UT1 and UTC should be no less than 100 seconds"

https://www.itu.int/pub/R-ACT-WRC.15-2023 pp. 398 - 400

fanf, 25 days ago to random

https://morsmachine.dk/tcp-consensus - TCP is an underspecified two-node consensus algorithm and what that means for your proxies.

fanf, 4 months ago to random

on my blog!

joining ellipses with matching tangents

https://dotat.at/@/2024-02-05-joining-ellipses.html

once again featuring an interactive diagram

fanf, 1 month ago to random

on my blog!

https://dotat.at/@/2024-05-02-sudo.html

sudon't

fanf, 1 month ago to random

2021 retro-link! https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/cstr100 - Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language. (troff source)

fanf, 4 months ago to random

my current WIP: keybird42 with matt3o's OPK keycaps (adapted to build123d), and @mwichary's Gorton Perfected for legends

fanf, 1 month ago to random

enjoying SIGBOVIK

« In bogoceptionsort the source code for bogosort is bogosorted and then compiled, this then runs and checks if the array is sorted. If the array isn't sorted then the source code is scrambled again. The bogoception sort performs similarly to bogosort for large n but excels at smaller n and need orders of magnitudes more iterations for small n. »

fanf, 29 days ago to random

well, i popped out to somewhere i hoped would be dark enough, the fields by the path from storey's way to eddington, between the astronomical observatory and huntingdon road

scores of people had the same idea, heh

the aurora was too faint to really see, i couldn't tell if it was actually aurora or just light pollution reflecting off hazy clouds

fanf, 1 year ago to random

this looks like a good chunk of time nerd catnip

ITU News Magazine – The future of Coordinated Universal Time

https://www.itu.int/hub/publication/s-gen-news-2023-2/

you have to jump through a clickwall but you don’t have to give them your email address

fanf, 27 days ago to random

on my blog!

https://dotat.at/@/2024-05-13-what-ident.html

Unix version control lore: what, ident

fanf, 4 months ago to random

i have been entertaining myself by constructing a four point egg https://dotat.at/@/2024-01-29-four-point-egg.html

fanf, 1 month ago to random

oh dear ansible your cryptography never fails to disappoint

def secure_hash_s(data, hash_func=sha1):

fanf, 3 months ago to random

oh good, C23 fixed one of the exasperating bugs in C11

C++11 introduced char8_t which is the same as unsigned char, and used it for u8"" utf-8 string literals, very sensible

but for some reason C11 decided to add u8"" without adding char8_t, so in C u8"" strings were EXACTLY THE SAME as normal "" strings

C23 belatedly adds char8_t and changes u8"" strings from arrays of char to arrays of char8_t

which changes them from signed to unsigned, fun footgun

fanf, 10 months ago to random

every so often someone reinvents “proof of work” for anti-spam

and i wheel out the evergreen link https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork.pdf

19 years old now! old enough to drink in civilized countries!

fanf, 2 months ago to random

i have resurrected my link log!

after an embarrassingly long hiatus

there is a lengthy backlog of links to be shared, which will appear a few times a day here

and on my link log's web page https://dotat.at/:/

and its atom feed https://dotat.at/:/feed.atom

fanf, 3 months ago to random

move aside, ellipses! shove off, eggs! we are now fans of squircles!

or as piet hein called them, superellipses and supereggs

fanf, 5 months ago to random

Paris, 08 January 2024

Bulletin C 67

To authorities responsible for the measurement and distribution of time

INFORMATION ON UTC - TAI

NO leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2024.

The difference between Coordinated Universal Time UTC and the International Atomic Time TAI is :

from 2017 January 1, 0h UTC, until further notice : UTC-TAI = -37 s

Christian BIZOUARD
Director
Earth Orientation Center of IERS
Observatoire de Paris, France

fanf, 17 days ago to random

the water is also coming up through the ground under the tent! fortunately i have a large 16 rib umbrella and sufficiently waterproof boots

fanf, 2 months ago to random

i’ve pushed a new release of nsdiff, my script for turning zone file changes into dynamic dns updates

https://dotat.at/prog/nsdiff/

https://metacpan.org/dist/DNS-nsdiff

thanks to @dwm for the bug report that prompted it!

maybe it would be less faff if i did a release more frequently than every 2 years, but on the other hand this is software that is very close to being done (tm)

fanf, 3 months ago to random

looking at a teletype model 33 manual and section 2-13 is titled “HUM SQUELCH (optional)” and describes how to change the wiring to reduce an annoying noise

fanf, 1 month ago to random

https://github.com/triliu/JESK56 - JESK56: a diodeless keyboard matrix derived using graph theory.

fanf, 1 month ago to random

had a fun conversation in the pub this evening about practical chemistry

TIL conical flasks are safety equipment!

when a reaction gets too energetic, a conical flask will blow its bottom out and drop the mess on the bench or the floor

instead of exploding in all directions

ie not towards the experimenter’s face and eyes

clever design!

fanf, 2 months ago to random

testing...