It’s been three years since the last Perl Toolchain Summit. In 2019, I wasn’t sure whether I would go. This time, I was sure that I would. It had been too long since I saw everyone, and there were some useful discussions to be had. I think that overall the summit was a success, and I’m happy with the outcomes. We left with a few loose threads, but I’m feeling hopeful that they can, mostly, get tied up.

I ignored Mastodon for a long time, but eventually I had to stop. Now that I stopped ignoring it and started using it, I feel like I’m either going to lose interest or (ugh) get involved.

I made two recent posts about writing code to connect software and connect hardware to Philips Hue lights. I thought I was done, except maybe for something really straightforward: making a tiny web service for the lights. Here I am, though, making a (quick) third post.

Okay, so last time, I wrote about connecting to my lights. This time, I’m going to write about what I actually did to put my code to use. It’s all well and good to have a working library to control the lights, but I was going to need a way to actually cause useful network calls to be made.

Last time, I posted about goofing around with little LED lights. This time, I’m posting about goofing around with larger LED lights. Specifically, Philips Hue lights.

I decided, today, to spend thirty minutes trying to get my little blinking LED working again. Now, six hours later, I am ready to tell you about it.

On New Year’s Eve, I posted that I’d uploaded 114 updated distributions to the CPAN. Many of those, in addition to updating distribution metadata, made some changes to the version of perl they require, or say they may require in the future. I mentioned that in my last post. I was adding text something like this:

Today, I uploaded 114 new versions of things to the CPAN. This is a lot, but none of them was very interesting. Mostly, I was updating my email address or adding some documentation about what Perl I plan to worry about in future releases. In some cases, there were typo or bug fixes. I thought I’d just write a little bit about this, from “why” to “how” to “how but another kind of how”.

I like Advent of Code, in theory, but in practice I never get very far. Around ten days on average, it looks like. (In 2015, I made it to 23! I didn’t remember that.) Anyway, it’s just, well, a lot. I don’t make enough time for it, and mostly I think that’s the right decision. On the other hand, I love a little coding challenge, and I love it twenty times more when other people are doing it and we can compare notes.

Another year, another thirty-one days of horror movies. Actually, we missed quite a few days as far as watching things all together. I worked a fair number of late nights, and I left town for a few days to see family in New England. We started a few days early, in fact, knowing that this would happen. So, plenty of things were watched, and here’s how it went…