brainwagon

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 […]

I’ve found that there are three basic strategies that have helped me in the past. They are probably not comprehensive, or even the best, but they are pretty simple to remember, and cover more situations than you might think. I categorize them as Plan, Act, and Ignore. Perhaps the most productive and generally the best […]

So, in an effort to get back to blogging about things that may not matter in the grand scheme of things, but which provide some measure of joy to me, I present something that I have not blogged about, but which might be of interest to others: my astrophotography tinking using a nifty gadget: the […]

Or does it? It’s not like gravity attracting bodies together. It’s not a force of nature. It’s something that we all have to work toward together, because the moral universe is something we can only create collectively. Prosperity does not come at the expense of others. Freedom does not come when we deny it to […]

When I was a young, one of the things that frequently had was pickled salmon. Sadly, it was also a recipe that I never bothered to learn, and which my sister and I had thought was lost to time in forgetfulness when she found this recipe hand written in one of her inherited canning books. […]

Annoying: the videos which I inserted in here late last night seemed to not be working this morning. Granted it was late and my COVID soaked brain may not be working at full efficiency and I haven’t done this in a while but… I’ll get it sorted out later today. It’s been sometime since I […]

I wonder if i trained a large language model on the contents of this blog and used it to generate new posts, whether it would generate interesting enough stuff to at least shame me into creating new posts? This would require that I actually learn something about this topic at least. Although it probably would […]

It was twenty years ago today that I first posted something to my brainwagon blog. While I have sort of fallen out of the habit of posting to this site, it still remains as an testament to my inability to concentrate on a single topic for more than a couple of days. I keep thinking […]

Hey gang, I know it’s been quite some time (since last May apparently) since I posted anything new on the blog. It is not that I haven’t been doing projects. The continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic generally means that I’ve had a lot of extra time, and have been tinkering with a bunch of different […]

Sigh. The new version of WordPress is doing stupid things with images. I’ll fix them later. Okay, so roughly a month ago, I said that I was interested in rebooting this blog, and then once again I lapsed into silence. It’s tough to make something a new habit, even if it is something that you […]

Okay all, it’s been a while. If anyone is reading this, then welcome back to the brainwagon blog. I’ve been blogging off and on for about fifteen years, but in the last year have found that it’s basically been hard to do anything meaningful here. Between the COVID-19 pandemic and the unfortunate illness and passing […]