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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.
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...
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.
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)
An Australian gentleman re-creating an astronomical computer from 200 BC is unexpectedly fascinating.