RogerBW's Blog

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved tree searches. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list searches and permutations. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved checking dominoes and doing some floating-point operations. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved fiddling with arrays and searching game states. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list evaluation and poker hands. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list analysis and Luhn's checksum algorithm. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list evaluation and string manipulation. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved palindromic numbers and block searches. (Note that this ends today.)

I've been adminisitering a hidden-movement game over at the tekeli.li forums, and it occurred to me that this was a potentially enjoyable programming challenge.

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved password analysis and number parsing. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved quinelikes and list processing. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved network analysis and change calculation. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved a list search and an unusual sort. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list counting. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved string-searching integers and bouncing around a keyboard. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved chess-related problems. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved character repetition and a basic string parse. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved more string manipulations. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved decoding a string format and partially sorting characters. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved word hunting and integer combinations. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved combinations and counting. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved various flavours of string processing. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved string tweaking and bus route analysis. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved poking through strings. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved string replacement and character searching. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved matrix analysis, bit-counting and sorting. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved searching matrices and raising array elements. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved sequence testing and splitting. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list comparisons and rearangements. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved series multiplication and text fitting. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved word list comparison and matrix validation. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved hunting integers and filtering words. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved letter hunting and array construction. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list and hash hunting. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved various sorts of filtering arrays. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved digit sums and progressive multiplication. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved multi-level counts and word ordering. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved date offsets and parser construction. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved counting digits and matching bit-counts. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list processing and matrix testing. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved array analysis and string merging. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved a lot of counting. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved numerical searching and letter substitution. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved splitting strings and sorting rows. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list filtering and sequence generation. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved decomposing sequences and searching for limit values. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved searching sequences and parsing strings. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved breaking lists into groups and building a numerical sequence. (Note that this ends today.)

I did Advent of Code again, and had a really good time. Spoilers.

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved searching a string and adding matrix elements. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved gift allocation and letter pairs. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved random generation and spotting a linear recurrence. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved keyed sorting and digit searching. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved a list search and combinations. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved combinatorics and integer division. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved differentiating lists and processing matrices. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved sequence searching and another nested sort. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved substrings and array mapping. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved joining strings and matching characters. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved cumulative sums and complicated sorts. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved date calculations and didn't involve array permutations. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved calculating change and finding loops. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved spotting sequences, and duplicating list entries. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved messing about with lists. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved reducing lists in various ways. (Note that this ends today. And 232 was cancelled as the administrator was unwell)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved various list processing. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved number lists and word prefixes. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved analysing strings and picking over lists. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved inspecting integer elements and making iterative things less so. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved date calculations and Roman mathematics. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved string convolution and array reduction. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved splitting sentences and processing arrays. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved string construction and numerical sequence analysis. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved prime counting and list selections. (Note that this ends today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved sorted lists and iterative reductions. (Note that this closes today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved more finding strings that can be made out of letters, and a search for a subsequence. (Note that this is open until 18 June 2023.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved word breakdowns and perfect squares. (Note that this is open until 11 June 2023.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved sequence processing and a cost optimisation. (Note that this is open until 4 June 2023.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list manipulation and bit flipping. (Note that this is open until 28 May 2023.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved various sorts of sorting. (Note that this closes today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved mucking about with words. (Note that this is open until 14 May 2023.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved sorting words and modifying sequences. (Note that this is open until 7 May 2023.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved score ranking and sequence manipulation. (Note that this is open until 30 April 2023.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved an unusual sort and a pathfinding problem. (Note that this is open until 23 April 2023.)

I wanted to get dustbin collection days into the house calendar server. Shouldn't be too hard, right?

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved letter rearrangement and number grouping. (Note that this is open until 16 April 2023.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved matrix evaluation and integer searching. (Note that this closes today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved searching in lists of integers. (Note that this closes today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved decoding a sequence and merging lists. (Note that this closes for public solutions today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved searching through arrays. (Note that this is closes today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved letter sorting and an array calculation. (Note that this closes today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved lots of combinatorial searches. (Note that this closes today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list parsing and combinations. (Note that this closes today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list testing and matrix reconstruction. (Note that this is open until 19 February 2023.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list searching and directory evaluation. (Note that this is open until 12 February 2023.)

Here's how I use graphical emacs as the working editor on a remote machine.

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved various sorts of list filtering. (Note that this closes today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved an array search and a mathematical classic. (Note that this is open until 29 January 2023.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved array searching and an emulated seven-segment display. (Note that this is open until the end of today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved filtering pairs and triplets out of a list. (Note that this ends today.)

I did Advent of Code again, and had a really good time. Spoilers.

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved analysing a list and counting primes. (Note that this is open until the end of today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list filtering and a perverse sort. (Note that this is open until tomorrow.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved looking for patterns in arrays. (Note that this closes today. Merry Christmas!)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved integer filtering. (Note that this closes today.)

I recently got a Kobo Libra 2, after my Aura ONE died. And I've been looking into its series tagging features.

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved expanding a search space and running a character frequency test. (Note that this closes today.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved a binary expansion and string analysis. (Note that this closes today.)

I have a multi-channel home audio setup that works quite remarkably well.

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved a binary negation and list division. (Note that this is open until 27 November 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list sorting and permutation checking. (Note that this is open until 20 November 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved checking capitalisation and decoding an ambiguous string. (Note that this is open until 13 November 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved filtering character lists and finding subarrays. (Note that this is open until 6 November 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved more list searching and a variation on the greatest common divisor. (Note that this is open until 30 October 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved date overlaps and combination searches. (Note that this is open until 23 October 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved combining lists and squashing unicode characters. (Note that this is open until 16 October 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved various string manipulations. (Note that this is open until 9 October 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved modifying and picking things out of sequences. (Note that this is open until 2 October 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved array comparisons and date calculations. (Note that this is open until 25 September 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list searching and finding a common subpath. (Note that this is open until 18 September 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved string splitting and data sorting. (Note that this is open until 11 September 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved filtering strings and lists. (Note that this is open until 4 September 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved ordinal numbers and Unicode generation. (Note that this is open until 28 August 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved an unusual base representation and date calculations. (Note that this is open until 21 August 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved a check-digit function and more number reversals. (Note that this is open until 14 August 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved lots of number-string conversions. (Note that this is open until 7 August 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved date calculations and number theory. (Note that this is open until 31 July 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved disarium numbers and ranked permutations. (Note that this is open until 24 July 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved more mathematical tests. (Note that this is open until 17 July 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved prime partitioning and some basic statistics. (Note that this is open until 10 July 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved findind odd abundant numbers and first-class functions. (Note that this is open until 3 July 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved primes and an unusual form of matrix multiplication. (Note that this is open until 26 June 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved more numerical series. (Note that this is open until 19 June 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved more furkling about with prime numbers. (Note that this is open until 12 June 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved circular primes and the Lanczos approximation. (Note that this is open until 5 June 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved word searching and directory mangling. (Note that this is open until 29 May 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved generating SVG and fitting lines to points. (Note that this is open until 22 May 2022.)

Yes, I'm still programming in PostScript. Why? Because I enjoy it.

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved two number-sequence tasks. (Note that this is open until 15 May 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved various summation-like operations. (Note that this is open until 8 May 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved ISBN check digits and the Wheatstone-Playfair cipher. (Note that this is open until 1 May 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved word selections and manipulations. (Note that this is open until 24 April 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved English word lengths and array partitioning. (Note that this is open until 17 April 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved generating more sequences. (Note that this is open until 10 April 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved subsets of primes. (Note that this is open until 3 April 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved a variety of means and more number theory. (Note that this is open until 27 March 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved more number-theory definitions. (Note that this is open until 20 March 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved more number theory problems. (Note that this is open until 13 March 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved permutations and primality testing. (Note that this is open until 6 March 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved various progressions based on factorials. (Note that this is open until 27 February 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved finding minimum paths and overlapping rectangles. (Note that this is open until 20 February 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved a return to binary trees and an optimisation puzzle. (Note that this is open until 13 February 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved a Fibonacci-like word construction and a search for square-free numbers. (Note that this is open until 6 February 2022.)

I think this is the closest I've come to writing a Cthulhu Mythos document: if you don't know what's going on, it's harmless, but with a little knowledge it can be mildly disturbing…

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved just-in-time Fibonacci and squares without repeating digits. (Note that this is open until 30 January 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved various sorts of numerical search. (Note that this is open until 23 January 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved prime searches and pentagonal numbers. (Note that this is open until 16 January 2022.)

I've got up to nine programming languages for The Weekly Challenge (formerly the Perl Weekly Challenge). Why am I doing this? (And is it just envy of Abigail, who usually does 14 or more? I don't think so.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved prime-counting and fraction trees. (Note that this is open until 9 January 2022.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved vector multiplication and a recently-invented data structure. (Note that this is open until 2 January 2022.)

I did Advent of Code again, and had a really good time. Spoilers.

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved some interesting mathematical sequences. (Note that this is open until 26 December 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved counting divisors and another joke sort. (Note that this is open until 19 December 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved counting divisors and another joke sort. (Note that this is open until 12 December 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved an unusual binary encoding and indexing into a multiplication table. (Note that this is open until 5 December 2021.)

I don't generally use maps much when I'm role-playing; my games are fairly fluid, such that it's not very clear where things are going to be happening until the session has started, and exact tactical distances don't matter much. But since the pandemic began, particularly because I can't easily sketch something and hand it round the group, I've been experimenting with something a bit more sophisticated.

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved an unusual binary encoding and indexing into a multiplication table. (Note that this is open until 28 November 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved date calculations and numerical decompositions. (Note that this is open until 21 November 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved date calculations and numerical decompositions. (Note that this is open until 14 November 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved date calculations and numeric palindromes. (Note that this is open until 7 November 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved GCDs, powers of two, and an unusual numeric sequence. (Note that this is open until 31 October 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved digit substrings and securities validation. (Note that this is open until 24 October 2021.)

The torrent client rtorrent is the best I've found that runs on Unix systems, but its built-in logic is somewhat lacking. Fortunately one can extend this.

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved pandigital numbers and multiplication tables. (Note that this is open until 17 October 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved Smith numbers and square roots. (Note that this is open until 10 October 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved date calculations and inner joins. (Note that this is open until 3 October 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved splitting arrays and strings. (Note that this is open until 26 September 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved more binary trees and linked lists. (Note that this is open until 19 September 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved more binary trees and linked lists. (Note that this is open until 12 September 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved finding submatrices and counting trains. (Note that this is open until 5 September 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved set intersections and merging intervals. (Note that this is open until 29 August 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved numbers excluding 1, and Minesweeper. (Note that this is open until 22 August 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved Pythagorean triples and binary trees. (Note that this is open until 15 August 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved ASCII graphics and set partitioning. (Note that this is open until 8 August 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved regular numbers and geometrical squareness testing. (Note that this is open until 1 August 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved a progressive average and additive compositions. (Note that this is open until 25 July 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved more binary manipulation and a traditional problem. (Note that this is open until 18 July 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved more binary manipulation and analogue clocks. (Note that this is open until 11 July 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved fake binary manipulation and an unusual number sequence. (Note that this is open until 4 July 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved binary palindromes and a restricted Knight's Tour. (Note that this is open until 27 June 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved file analysis and combinatorial explosion. (Note that this is open until 20 June 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved lots of digit splitting. (Note that this is open until 13 June 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved chained strings and number construction. (Note that this is open until 6 June 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved unconventional solutions to numerical problems. (Note that this is open until 30 May 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved finding constrained integer decompositions and more binary tree furkling. (Note that this is open until 23 May 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved path canonicalisation and numerical compositions. (Note that this is open until 16 May 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved search optimisations and word sorting. (Note that this is open until 9 May 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved transpositions. (Note that this is open until 2 May 2021.)

Now that I'm involved in a boardgaming podcast as well as the role-playing one, and all recording is remote, I've been recording multiple tracks and editing them together.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved another numerical sequence and permutations. (Note that this is open until 25 April 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved bad things and triangular numbers. (Note that this is open until 18 April 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved several sorts of introspection. (Note that this is open until 11 April 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved integer differences and decimal expansion. (Note that this is open until 4 April 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved fractional exponentiation and sweating with the oldies. (Note that this is open until 28 March 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved the Stern-Brocot sequence (which Dijkstra named "fusc") and a variant of Nim. (Note that this is open until 21 March 2021.)

One of the podcasts I work on has been on iTunes for a while, which was done back when it was easier. Now the other two are as well, and they're all on Spotify too. Here's how to achieve this, from a standing start.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved lots of modulus arithmetic. (Note that this is open until 14 March 2021.)

I recently moved discussion.tekeli.li to a new host. Here's how I did it (with the false starts removed).

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved an obscure class of number and a self-consistent string format. (Note that this is open until 7 March 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved packing an array and a standard geometry problem. (Note that this is open until 28 February 2021.)

I have written and released software for running games of Flamme Rouge by forum.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved converting time formats and more tree traversal. (Note that this is open until 21 February 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved globbing and building sub-sequences. (Note that this is open until 14 February 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved reading tiny chunks from a file and searching a list. (Note that this is open until 7 February 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved implementing the Caesar cipher and breaking up binary strings. (Note that this is open until 31 January 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved reversing words in a string and calculating Levenshtein distance. (Note that this is open until 24 January 2021.)

I recently ran the vote for the Pearple's Choice Awards, which used to happen on the old Shut Up & Sit Down forum and now happen on discussion.tekeli.li.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved testing for palindromic numbers and building a stack class. (Note that this is open until 17 January 2021.)

I've been playing a lot of Letter Tycoon on BoardGameArena (it seems that losing at Scrabble to my wife is good training for this). I wanted a practice opponent. So I wrote one.

I did Advent of Code again, and had a good time. Spoilers.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved grouping anagrams and more furkling with binary trees. (Note that this is open until 10 January 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved colinear points and binary tree sums. (Note that this is open until 3 January 2021.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved string isomorphism and interval merging. (Note that this is open until 27 December 2020.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved breaking down numbers and following sequences. (Note that this is open until 20 December 2020.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved base sequences and a binary multiplication system. (Note that this is open until 13 December 2020.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved GCDs and magic squares. (Note that this is open until 6 December 2020.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved multiplications and spirals. (Note that this is open until 29 November 2020.)

Rust is a compiled language. How can I run a program directly from the shell?

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list searches and matrices. (Note that this is open until 22 November 2020.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list searches and combinatorial explosions. (Note that this is open until 15 November 2020.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved searching combinations and integer powers. (Note that this is open until 8 November 2020.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved reversing integers and a two-dimensional search. (Note that this is open until 1 November 2020.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved string manipulation and a numerical search. (Note that this is open until 25 October 2020.)

I have ended up maintaining a plugin for Discourse. As I got it, it had no tests. Fixing that was fun.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved common factors and string searches. (Note that this is open until 12 October 2020.)

I've now done a Flightgear-simulated tour at "every" airport in the United Kingdom.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved substrings and word frequencies. (Note that this is open until 11 October 2020.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved missing numbers and more ranking of neighbours. (Note that this is open until 4 October 2020.)

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved more bit counts and an innovative use of histograms.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved searching array values and rotating lists.

On 14 September 2015 I created the storage zpool that I'm still using.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved summing Fibonacci numbers and looking through a grid for neighbours.

I've been playing with Flightgear again, now with a decent joystick and rudder pedals.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved summing primes and performing a word search.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved building set values of coins and finding rectangles in histograms.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved finding minima in subsets of lists.

I've been renewing my interest in the Flightgear flight simulator. And it turns out there's a neat trick you can do with it.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved finding minima in subsets of lists.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved finding the trailing zeroes of a factorial and printing a range of lines from a file.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved finding peak elements and more mucking about with linked lists.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved swapping characters, and generating Gray code.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved finding numbers that looked the same inverted, and generating a very long string.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved zeroing parts of a matrix and reordering a list.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved generating combinations of numbers and expanding telephone keypad letters.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved dividing without dividing, and making a test of factors.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved generating large numbers and splitting strings into palindromes.

A friend is experimenting with LineageOS, and it's about two years since I started to use it, so I thought I'd review the apps that I'm still running frequently.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved searching for paths through a grid and breaking a word into tokens.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved finding the last matching word in a string and permuting a string.

An SSL certificate expired.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved sorting email addresses and solving a variant N-queens problem.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved searching for the maximum product in a sequence, and un-munging IPv4 addresses.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved working with a form of numeric encoding, and a very arbitrary numerical problem.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved working with a linked list and determining binary differences.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved comparing version numbers and generating an arbitrary order.

I've been running a small Discourse forum for role-playing and boardgaming for a while now, ever since UKRolePlayers shut down. It's suddenly got much bigger.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved inverting a binary tree and finding unique prefixes.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved searching arrays and summing tree paths.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved flipping bits and generating zigzag permutations.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved generating permutations and checking the Collatz Conjecture.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved a basic Markov chain.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved some game theory.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved a lot of nested loops.

I've been playing RPGs over Google Hangouts for a while but I don't like it. Here's how to do it with free software instead.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest was about merging intervals and determining noble numbers.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest was about searching for particular multiples of a number, and implementing a fixed-size cache.

I've been playing RPGs over Google Hangouts for a while, and recently several people have asked how to go about this as their regular groups move on-line. So here are my notes.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest was about calculating the survivor of a stabbing game, and determining palindromic dates.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest was about doing Roman arithmetic and generating gapful numbers.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest was about recovering a corrupted message and solving an iterative problem.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest was about a bad encoding scheme and producing the source of a program.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest was about arranging numbers and arithmetical operations.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest was about allocating numbers to rings and generating self-descriptive numbers.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest was about printing in octal and detecting balanced brackets.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest was about generating number sequences.

I've extended my mpd-tools suite to allow for a new mode of operation.

I did last year's Advent of Code, and had a lot of fun working on it. Spoilers.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest was about list manipulation.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. Last week's was about parsing a specific file format.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. Last week's was about parsing an odd date format and generating words in a Scrabble-ish manner.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. Last week's was about counting weekdays and working out total daylight.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. Last week's was about validating VINs and solving the knapsack problem.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. Last week's was about encoding and decoding to a binary representation of Morse code.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges Last week’s was about demonstrating specific coding techniques.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges This week’s was about counting letters and generating a multiplication table.

I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges (I missed 31 because of getting ready for Essen, and didn’t have time to do this one in Perl6). This week’s was about counting entities and generating ASCII bar charts.

I've been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. This one dealt with date calculations and exhaustive number searches.

I've been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. This one dealt with expanding braces and calling C functions.

I've been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. This one dealt with testing file contents and producing the current time.

I've been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. This one dealt with finding the intersection of two lines and doing worrying things to innocent variables.

I've been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. This one dealt with finding letters in words and the mean of circular quantities.

I've been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. This one dealt with building long strings and the Chaocypher.

I've been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. This one dealt with minimal programs and inverted-index text search.

I've been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. This one dealt with difference series and prime factorisation.

I've been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. This one dealt with sexy primes and LZW encoding.

I've been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. This one dealt with e, and URLs again.

I've been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. This one dealt with string splitting and amicable numbers.

I've been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. This one dealt with months and word-wrapping.

I've been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. This one was a couple of standard computer-science problems.

I've been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. This one was to implement the Ackermann function and parse URLs.

Why have a calendar server in the first place? Because I want to check my schedule from multiple devices, and because I don't want to sell out to Google. (Which of course just means that when Google takes over I won't have been paid.)

I've been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. This one was to do a fiddly numerical calculation, and to check Bitcoin addresses.

I've recently started doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. This one was to hunt primes and do "Vigenère" enciphering.

Viking is a powerful, but not always intuitive, program for handling geodata (position log recordings, maps, etc.). This post deals with how to plan a walking route using it.

I've been renaming my large music collection into UTF-8.

I've been improving the ways people can get access to the local music server during my barbecues and similar events.

My Nexus 6P is jolly good, but its battery has become increasingly unreliable. So I now have a new shinyphone – also running LineageOS. This post covers all the gory details of getting it set up.

As part of the procedure for making sure a large set of work-related data remains intact and recoverable, I keep backups at home.

After some strong hints, I joined Steam and bought Tabletop Simulator.

Every so often, after a LineageOS upgrade, the device starts to complain on reboot about a "Vendor Image Mismatch": the underlying Android code has become outdated. LineageOS doesn't fix this itself; this is firmware which the operating system can't change. Less forgivably, the LineageOS documentation doesn't appear to mention the problem. Here's a step-by-step guide to dealing with it, using the Linux command line.

I've recently set up HTTPS on the servers at work, running in parallel with HTTP. For reasons which were good at the time and are still not entirely wrong, we're using lighttpd as a front-end, and the process was less trivial than I'd have preferred.

I've been running a wireless network receiver while out (mostly driving) with the smartphone, logging beacons and locations.

Part 2 of an occasional series.

Since I have a bunch of useful things on servers at home, I was interested in using OpenVPN on the phone to get at them.

Because I knew I was going to be using Termux quite a lot, I got a bluetooth keyboard to use with my phone. It turns out to be really rather good.

I've replaced the fairly basic Maps program I was using on my shinyphone with Osmand+.

I've finally found a smartphone that falls within my parameters for the three Ps: price, performance and paranoia.

A reader (hi Dave!) suggested extending the supermarket-finder to locate supermarket fuel near motorway junctions.

Well, my wife wanted a sandwich while we were on the road. And unlike me she is particular about what she likes to eat, so she wanted to find branches of Tesco. This is a job for: COMPUTERS!

When I'm playing play-by-forum games, there's often a deadline. Because players are scattered across the world and many people are bad at time zones, it's helpful to have a countdown to remind people how much time is left. So I made one.

In this (probably final) part of the series on building a file server, I'll talk about keeping the thing running once you've got it. This is specific to the ZFS approach.

In this part of the series on building a file server, I'll talk about software.

In part 2 of this series on building a file server, I'll talk about hardware selection.

Many people these days want to store more data than can be conveniently accommodated on one hard disc. You can buy boxes to store files, or build your own. I've built and upgraded several, and in these posts I'm going to talk about how I did it.

I do actually like git. I find it needlessly obfuscatory and deliberately confusing in its syntax and terminology, but it basically does its job reasonably well. However, there are some popular blatant untruths that I think people would do well to know about.

Some recent experience using hotel- and guest-house Internet services while travelling through Germany, Sweden and Finland.

I wrote a CPAN module back in the day. Let's not talk about it; it wasn't very good. Recently the local Perlmongers group (ThamesValley.pm) encouraged me to modularise and release some newer code.

The units(1) program is available on many Unix systems (though rarely installed by default). Most people think of it as a simple interactive converter. It's actually much more powerful than that.

'Twas on a Wednesday evening that the laptop did break down... failing to come out of suspend after having been moved, with the 1-3-3-1 beep code that, on Lenovo machines at least, indicates a memory or system board problem. I cleaned up the DIMM contacts and it worked happily for a day, then died again on Thursday night, and more cleaning and re-seating didn't help. Time for a warranty repair.

I've been podcasting for over four years now, I'm now getting game recordings together for the Whartson Hall Æthernauts too, and I hope some of this advice may be useful to people who are getting started.

I think I have come up with a new and potentially useful paradigm for computer-related problem reports.

My wife likes to listen to the radio at night. But Radio 4 is getting increasingly annoying (even I notice this; I don't listen to the speech, but I do pick up the vocal intonations, which over the last couple of years have become increasingly aggressive even when the subject is not one that would seem to deserve it) and the World Service is preferred.

Getting "favourites" (stored locations) on and off the Garmin Drive navi is slightly more fiddly than it needs to be, but doesn't require Windows even slightly. Here's what worked for me.

I have recently purchased a Garmin DriveSmart navigation unit. It is quite possible to get this up and running, legally, without buying a copy of Windows or Mac OS. Here's how. I believe this will also work with DriveAware and DriveLuxe models.

I tried to give it a fair shake. Really I did. But systemd has now annoyed me to the point where I've been removing it from the systems for which I'm responsible and bringing back sysvinit.

We recently switched to a new search engine at work, largely written by me with a standard back-end library.

A recent news item on Revolv home hubs made me want to revisit my feelings on the Internet of Things.

This is simply the best wireless access point I have used.

The blog now has a search engine, powered by Lucy.

I've had a general-purpose IDE/SATA connector for a few years, but it runs into a 2TB limit with modern large drives.

Many modern Linux systems assume that you will never have a root shell. Instead, you are expected to prepend "sudo" to every root-type command.

It used to be traditional on a personal blog to rant about the horrible service one had received from a big company. (These days it does no good unless it's on Twitter or Facebook.) But there doesn't seem to be enough of the other side.

This has been a year when "Internet of Things" devices became relatively mainstream. Oh dear.

Let's Encrypt has moved to public beta, and I've taken advantage of it. Why? Because a non-zero proportion of the people intercepting your web traffic are bad guys. The less plain-text traffic is out there, the less they learn.

My old file server is Full. So it's time to build a new one. All images are cc-by-sa.

I don't like network-manager. It's too big and complicated and hard to persuade to do the things I want. Fortunately it's not too hard to do without it.

This blog remains spam-free, mostly because I see all comments before they go up.

Back in the day I played quite a lot of VGA Planets. Now I'm thinking, not for the first time, about writing a computer game in the same broad style.

"It all looks different this morning!"

I've been using chronicle since I started this blog in January of this year, but the time has come to replace it.

It was really useful to be able to plot arbitrary data onto a zoomable map. The only service to offer this was Google Maps; indeed, it was the last thing for which I was using any Google service.

It's often tempting, but usually an error, to allow control signals to be sent by the same channel as the data. This is an example of why.

When I'm driving, I may get caught in traffic or have to divert round roadworks. If that happens, I don't want to pull in to call whoever's at my destination; that'll just make me even later, and on the motorway there aren't many opportunities to stop. But the machinery that I'm already using to log my trips knows my position anyway…

Every so often a server for which I'm responsible fails, and I get it shipped to me for fixing. Usually this works reasonably well.

The podcast for which I do sound tech (yes, all right, I'm also one of the speakers and writers) sometimes uses old recordings as interstitial music.

Sometimes my interests intersect. I've been working on a way to plot markers and objects onto real-world charts.

I have a checklist for setting up a Raspberry Pi, which I run through before I do any task-specific customisation. It occurred to me that people might find this useful.

I've been keeping this blog since the beginning of the year, and it's gradually been accreting ancillary code.

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