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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.

Python 3.13 is already shaping up to be the fastest release yet. While not due for release until October of 2024, its third alpha release came out yesterday. Even this early in development it's already running more than 10% faster than Python 3.12 (and 11% faster than 3.11, and a whopping 54% faster than 3.10).

The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 is here! It took six years, but my favourite little computer has finally been upgraded. It's not as jaw-droppingly cheap as it used to be, but $15 for a quad core Linux server still catches my imagination. Mine is still in transit, more to come when it arrives.

Python 3.10 has been released. It's not a huge release, but solid, building on the new parser introduced last year in 3.9. From that has come my favourite change: the improved syntax error messages, brilliant for those of us teaching kids during a COVID lock-down. The banner feature is structural pattern matching - it's like a switch statement, but more. Much more. Performance has also had a nice bump! About 20% better than 3.9 for a simulation I like to test with.

Auckland is under COVID-19 lock-down, so my home office is infested with children. My nine-year-old just demanded that we edit a video and add a voice-over. We found OpenShot, a simple Open Source editor. She finished her project alone after only a little setup help, leaving me to get back to actual paid work. Well worth a crack.

"I’m pretty sure, I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure if you die, the cancer dies at the same time. That’s not a loss. That’s a draw"
Norm Macdonald (1959-2021)