Software History

At this week's Homebrew Website Club meeting, we had a discussion about Raspberry Pis. Most of the people in attendance had a Raspberry Pi. We all showed each other our Pis and where we had them set up. It was fascinating. I had to admit to everyone that my Pi has been sitting lonely in a drawer for a while. I haven't done much with it. I have a Sense HAT. The Sense Hat sits on top of the Pi.

While designing my LLM-powered chatbot that is designed to answer questions with reference to a limited subset of my writing, I have been thinking about source attribution. The intent is to help people better evaluate the veracity, balance, and context associated with an answer returned by a model. Hallucination and it’s implications are at the forefront of my mind. I want to do what I can to ensure people can easily fact check the outputs of an LLM retrieval system.

During the

A few weeks ago, I learned that the IndieWeb community aims to archive all of the Etherpad documents from meetups on the wiki. Etherpad documents are made available at online meetups so participants can document ideas and what happened in the call. Archiving these documents to the wiki makes them easily searchable and ensures their contents are preserved not only in a document that could be edited further down the line.

On my website home page, I have a

As a programmer, I often feel tempted to brainstorm ideas for

The reason this blog still exists today, after going through so many iterations, is that I always self-dogfood. This is a term in the IndieWeb community that means that I use my own creations. On my blog, everything has been built by me, for me. I haven't thought about whether my code could be used by other people. It probably could. It's all on GitHub for anyone to use. I have licensed my code under an MIT license so anyone can use it.

Have you ever wondered

The IndieWeb is all about scratching itches. When I think about what I want this site to become, I often say to myself that I am building a home for myself on the internet. Starting on the IndieWeb, this was enough. I needed to let my creative spirits run wild. I needed to try out different ideas. I looked at other people's websites and thought about what I could implement.

Writing an extension for Mozilla Firefox has been in my mental to-dos for a while. I like the idea of having my own new tab page. I used to use an extension called Momentum which displayed a nice image alongside the time. For my purposes, Momentum was a bit verbose. Every time I loaded a new tab, I had to render an image. Sometimes it took a second for that image to render. There were many customization features that I did not need.

In the first part of this series on my experiments with the Adafruit thermal printer I recently purchased, I mentioned how I was working on other modules for the thermal printer. A

There are two types of posts I write about programming. The ones I like writing most are those where I discuss how I built something, or how I intend on building something. It's fun to explain how I build projects. I like the technical details. This is not one of those posts. This is a post about what it's like to be a developer. The developer life, if you will.

I was just chatting with a friend and an idea came up that I have been thinking about for a few days: an email to RSS converter. This service would let you subscribe to an email newsletter via email and then send all posts from that newsletter into an RSS feed.

How would you like to send me a message that gets printed so that I can read it on paper? You can do this by sending me a webmention, which is a way of sending comments from your own website that I will then receive. Using webmentions, you can retain ownership over the comments you send other people. I know that webmentions are not widely used, and do require a bit of technical knowledge to use, but for now I can say I support printing webmentions.

This is the fifth post in the Advent of Technical Writing series, wherein I will share something I have learned from my experience as a technical writer. My experience is primarily in software technical writing, but what you read may apply to different fields, too. View all posts in the series.

I am tempted by all of the IndieWeb websites to add more features to this site. Yesterday evening, I had somewhat of a realization: the parts of my website that stand the test of time are those that are simple and do not require any overhead.

On this Tuesday evening, I found myself wondering: about what could I write? A question indeed. This was one of those times when I didn't have anything in particular on my mind, and went searching for inspiration anyway. As I thought I should prepare for bed, an idea came to mind. I could go to my bookmarks archive and see if I have read anything recently that would inspire me.

MIT's Scratch makes programming playful. Drag and drop blocks, then connect them together. Moments later, you can have a program that does exactly as you instructed. One doesn't even need to call it programming; instead, we can call it play. Like Lego blocks, you connect the blocks and make something that, at the end, is yours.

I have a blogroll page on this site where I list the blogs which I am actively reading. I love having a blogroll because it makes it easy for people to find other blogs to explore. If I am subscribed to a good blog, the least I can do is add a link to my site so that other people can discover that same blog. However, my current process for updating my blogroll is quite laborious. I have to remember to add links to my blogroll and then add them manually. This isn't too bad if I am adding one or two links but it starts to get tedious if I want to add many links to my blogroll. I am subscribed to around 100 feeds and I don't list them all on my blogroll.

Sometimes I feel like I have to be working on a coding project otherwise I am somehow behind. I do not like to feel that way. I like to code because I can build something meaningful, but what I build is only meaningful if I have a good idea. I'm slowly training myself to step back and to stop worrying about not having a particular project to work on. Making small changes to my existing work is more meaningful than starting something new.

On Thursday, Aaron noted an idea for a service that would, given a URL, return the profile photo associated with the h-card on that URL. I found the idea intriguing, noting my interest in building it. I agreed that it would be great to have an API to call to retrieve a photo, similar to Gravatar but using h-cards.

One of my favourite patterns in the Python programming language is the

This is the tenth post in the Advent of Technical Writing series, wherein I will share something I have learned from my experience as a technical writer. My experience is primarily in software technical writing, but what you read may apply to different fields, too. View all posts in the series.

I have enjoyed crafting my daily update that is printed with the thermal printer. So far, my daily update includes, among other things, my schedule, the weather for the day, my RSS feed, a news update from The Guardian, and a tech news update from The Guardian. But I wanted to keep experimenting with the printer. Then I got an idea: why don't I try to add an IndieWeb word of the day to the update?

I spent some time last night quizzing myself on the AP Style Guide, a topic on which I have never specifically studied but about which I am curious. My scores varied between the tests I tried. I certainly learned a thing or two. It got me thinking: to what style guide does the Guardian, the newspaper I read most regularly, adhere? I found in a Google Search that they have a series of articles in which they outline their style guide, divided into individual articles for each letter of the alphabet ^1 [^2].

I am writing a blog post every day from December 1st to December 24th, 2021, about a blogger whose writing or site I follow. My aim for this series is to help you discover new blogs and to help get the word out about content creators whose blogs I appreciate. You can read more about this series in the inaugural Day 1 post.

In 2021, I embarked on a journey to print out the content on my blog. The scope of the project was limited. I decided to print all of my coffee posts published both on this blog as well as Steampunk Coffee, for whom I had written numerous blog posts. I decided to print only the coffee posts so that the printed version would have a theme. I was excited by the prospects of being able to hold my writings on coffee in my hands, and looked forward to a day where I could print another volume. That time has come.

As I write, I am sitting next to a speaker in a coffee shop, after having read the newspaper and enjoyed a fulfilling breakfast. I am writing on my phone. Not my preferred tool for writing, but inspiration can strike anywhere. I need to get my thoughts on the proverbial notepad.

Last night, I was experimenting more with word surprisals (entropy), which are calculated using the probabilities of a word appearing in a specified corpus. For my analyses, I was using a corpus of articles from the New York Times to calculate word surprisals, which has proven effective for my blog [^1]. I started to think about whether you could use word surprisals for authorship verification.