brainwagon

I think I’ve had it. I’ve been using bluehost to provide WordPress hosting of brainwagon.org for years, but I think that’s going to come to a close. This is being accelerated by the fact that it appears that I have a serious hacking problem: somebody has repeatedly sabotaged the blog, injecting new code via the […]

I’m old enough to have used original VT-100 terminals to access mainframe computers like the DEC-1091 we had at the U of O, although we had a mix of terminals for which I have some nostalgia now, like the Televideo 912, or even the lowly ADM-3a. When playing around like emulators like simh to run […]

I’ve been pondering the classic board game Risk for a bit, and wrote a few chunks of code to help evaluate the odds of dice rolling. Hey, it’s what I do for fun. It’s just how I roll. But I remembered that I had a book somewhere that described a somewhat simplified cousin of the […]

It’s kind of amazing when things that you have been thinking about for a while come together and make you think that the world is trying to tell you something (or perhaps something that you have been trying to tell yourself). A couple of days ago I posted quick link to a short video that […]

Back on May 2, 2024, I was aboard a plane heading toward a real vacation: ten days spent on a cruise and visiting friends and family in Florida. While on the plane, I jotted these notes in Markdown, detailing some of the reasons why I was considering switching my blog (now past twenty years old) […]

I have always been a fan of books, and the craft of bookbinding has been particularly interesting. I have been trying to gather the necessary (modest) tools to get started, and today I cleared a small part of my garage workbench and made a small pocket notebook. Nothing too exciting, this just documents something I […]

In years past, I had developed some (largely academic) interest in slow scan television, and had implemented encoders for a variety of standard modes, using very straightforward C which I made available via my github page. But that was just the encoding side, not the decoding side, which I spent some time thinking about, but […]

I’m a bit of a puzzle fan. My wife and I do a daily gauntlet of puzzles, including Wordle, Quordle, Octordle, Stepdle, Worldle, and the New York Times Crossword Puzzles, both the mini and the regular one. It amounts to about an hour a day, with maybe a bit more on Saturday and Sunday, but […]

Hey readers, this post will be a bit unusual, as instead of being about some kind of cool tech or gadget, it’s going to be about me, and where I find myself entering 2025. 2024 was a bit of a mixed bag. There was in fact a lot of good things about 2024, particularly how […]

I’ve used the open source version of WordPress for some twenty years. In general, I’ve been pretty happy, although not without some misgivings, mostly technological, but increasingly ideological as well. There has been a trend over the last few years where the conflict between open source software and commercial entities has become seemingly problematic. For […]

Warning, spoilers ahead for those who are still interested in doing the problems themselves. Part 1 of Day 19 was pretty simple, really. You could go ahead and read the specification yourself, but basically you have a relatively large number of text patterns which consist of jumbles of a relatively small number of characters (examples […]

As part of my daily puzzling in December, I’ve been engaged in the Advent of Code 2024 challenge. This is the kind of thing that sane people only do when prepping for job interviews (which I suppose I could be) but I do more for fun, in some hope that I’ll buoy up my ego […]

This will be a bit of a rambling technical ride on a particularly nerdy topic, so buckle up (or bail out now while you still can.) I’ve been interested in Meshtastic for quite some time. It promises to be a decentralized network that allows users to create a mesh network which is independent of any […]

After tinkering with making a 3D stamp yesterday, I thought that maybe I would tinker together a stamp for the QR code that would send you to my resume-ish site mvandewettering.com. I had used the qrcode library in python to generate them before, but it wasn’t clear to me how to use that to generate […]

I posted this picture of my little friend Patchouli to the Facebook Seestar group, who decided to settle into the case for that smart telescope. She got way more hearts and comments than any of the astrophotographs that I posted to the same group over the last few months. I guess I should not be […]