talking to Philips Hue lights, part 1: connecting

January 18, 2023  ⚙️ 🧑🏽‍💻

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.

my stupid LED blinking server

January 14, 2023  ⚙️ 🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

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.

leaving perl v5.8 behind

January 8, 2023  📚 🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

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:

so many CPAN uploads! (code review mark iii)

December 31, 2022  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

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”.

befunge made me smile

December 23, 2022  🧑🏽‍💻

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.

Horror Movie Month 2022

November 5, 2022  🎃 🍿

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…

perl v5.36.0 has been released

May 28, 2022  🐫

Yesterday, I released perl v5.36.0. I think this is the most exciting release of perl in quite some time, and I’m hoping that in a few months, I’ll still be as pleased with it as I am today. Here’s a summary of what we got done, what we didn’t get done, and (to some extent) how it got done.

mutt and Fastmail go together

March 6, 2022  📧 🐶

This is not a long paean for mutt or Fastmail, although I’m a big fan of both. It’s more of a Stupid Mutt Trick.

I moved my blog to GitHub pages

March 5, 2022  📕

In 2004 or so I wrote Rubric, which was initially intended to be a bookmark manager, and then I added notes to it, and then it very quickly became the software powering my blog. It’s pretty crufty under the hood, being built in CGI::Application, which was a nice web framework in 2004, but never really modernized in the ways I would’ve liked.

I closed a lot of browser tabs

August 8, 2021  🧑🏽‍💻

I am widely admired at work for my ability to have many, many browser tabs open. (That, at least, is what I take from the frequent shouts of “holy cow, man, look at your browser!”) Nonetheless, I have long thought that it would be worth getting my total tab count down. I have tabs open for a bunch of reasons.