In pursuit of a sense of wonder
Lost is the occasional blog of Leon Matthews, programmer, and master of miscellanea.
Links
I've been using my own private git server for years and years, but have decided to be a little more public. I've settled on Codeberg.org, a donation-supported service.
Reading the news can erode your faith in humanity. Learning about the work being done on Africa's Great Green Wall reawakens mine. What an incredible project!
My 3D modeling skills are still pretty basic, but I did manage to scratch a personal itch and made an anti-vibration stand for external hard-drives. The size is customisable, and when 3D printed in TPU does a good job of keeping the drive upright — and quiet.
The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality.
- Ariel Durant
Doctests & Metaclasses & Multiprocessing, Oh My!
I've been programming in Python for more than a decade, but it's only now that I have had to bring out the big guns: writing a metaclass.
RErename
My little bulk file renaming script. Inspired by the venerable rename Perl script, my version uses Python regular expressions and focuses on safety. That's not just important, it's super-duper important! Bulk renaming is dangerous enough, but add regular expressions into the mix and It's all too easy to shoot yourself in the foot!
Can Snakes & Ladders last forever?
Several Christmases ago I found myself horribly bored. I was stuck at my mother-in-law's house. In the absence of anything else to do, my kids and I spent the morning playing Snakes & Ladders. They found it dull. I was about ready to jump through window just to escape one game that just never, *ever* seemed to end.
Childrens' Game to Punish PCs
Snakes and ladders is a boring game. But just how boring, exactly? Is it possible to bore a computer so much that it self-destructs? Let's try it and find out...
Tidy Caseless Ordering in Django
Sorting by name in Django is a common admin annoyance. By default upper-case names come before lower-case ones because of their raw ASCII encodings. This isn't fun to try and explain to clients. For years I've ordered my models using a forced lower-case slug, but sometimes you need the big guns: database functions. Let's use that powerful ordering, while keeping our code nice and neat.
AVR Multi-Programmer
I'm about 10 years late to the party, but in this project a cheap Arduino UNO clone becomes a very handy AVR programmer for everything from a little 8-pin ATtiny13 to a 28-pin ATmega.
