Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

#askfedi Expanding on my earlier laptop query: I'd love to find a site with a comprehensive database of laptops from say the past ten years that lets you search by filtering on specs like:

* Weight
* Ports
* Screen size, resolution
* Screen brightness
* Claimed battery life

Know of anything like this? It would be a much more direct and efficient way for me to build up my shortlist of machines I look for in the used market. TIA.

Well, here I am on Mastadon.
Intro in order, I suppose. That's how it works, right?

Me:
- That datetime guy. Ask me about time zones, DST, leap year bugs, etc.
- Been doing .NET/C# longer than I can remember. 20+ years. These days I code mostly on a Mac.
- I work at Sentry, and used to work at Microsoft.
- I live in the forests of Woodinville WA, with wife Maggie, my son, and our three dogs.
- I like Star Trek, home improvement, and playing stupid pop music on the piano.

HI! 👋🙂

This is an old project, but by some miracle it's still working and I woke up this morning wanting to celebrate the things I love more.

This Inkplate e-ink screen shows Conway's Game of Life, seeded from tarpits I have on the Internet. The tarpits are programs on my computer that superficially look like insecure Telnet and Remote Desktop services, but actually exist to respond super slowly and make bots scanning the Internet 'get stuck'.

When a bot connects to the tarpit, the data it sends gets squished into a 5x5 grid and 'stamped' onto a Game of Life board. Data from a bot at the IP address 1.1.x.x will get stamped on the top left corner, data from a bot at 254.254.x.x will get stamped on the bottom right corner.

Conway's Game of Life, a set of simple rules that govern whether cells should turn on or off, updates the display once per second. The result is that bot attacks end up appearing as distinct 'creatures', that get bigger and more angry looking over time (as their centre is updated with new data). After the attack finishes, the 'creature' eventually burns itself out.

Despite that description, it's a really chill piece of art that doesn't draw too much attention but I can happily watch for a long time.

Credit for the idea goes to @_mattata, I had been wanting to make a real-life version of XKCD #350 for years before seeing his Botnet Fishbowl project.

#projects #inkplate #esp32 #eink #infosec #tarpit

📣 #Python News:

Let's welcome the newest Python core developer: @hugovk. Hugo has been contributing to Python for years, improving our docs, devguide, toolings, and infrastructure. He's also one of the PEP editors and an active member of the Python docs community.

Hugo's promotion to become core dev was approved by Python Steering Council yesterday. 👏🥳

https://discuss.python.org/t/vote-to-promote-hugo-van-kemenade/20990

How can a music notation data format encode the music of a concert-pitch score along with individual transposed-instrument parts, without duplicating information? What's the right level of abstraction?

If that question makes any sense to you, check out my proposal and the current discussion in this GitHub issue:

https://github.com/w3c/mnx/issues/287

Office hours are going to be starting in about 10 minutes at YouTube.com/jayofdoom

Why did nobody tell me that in #Python 3.11, datetime.fromisotimestamp() can parse arbitrary ISO timestamps!? #gameChanger

(Before it could only parse the output from datetime.isoformat(); e.g. choking on timestamps ending with a Z for UTC.)

PyCon US CFP is still open but only for another 3 weeks or so! (Closes Dec 9)

Your tasks:
- submit a talk
- tell others about the CFP
- encourage others to submit a talk
- do an #IceCreamSelfie after your talk

Go!

https://us.pycon.org/2023/speaking/guidelines/

#PyConUS #CFP #Python #conference #publicspeaking

I unravelled `lambda` expressions for my #Python syntactic sugar blog series: https://snarky.ca/unraveling-lambda-expressions/

And with that, I am done with the series (again 😅)! https://snarky.ca/tag/syntactic-sugar/

The summary post at https://snarky.ca/mvpy-minimum-viable-python/ has been updated with my latest posts, getting the list of Python syntax you need an interpreter to support down to 11.

Whenever I think "This person in the Python community is so awesome, surely they've already received the Community Service award/already a PSF fellow member", and when I looked into it, turns out I was wrong.

Then I make it right by actually writing up the PSF Fellow/Community Service award nomination for them so that they'll be properly recognized.

You too can nominate people who are doing great work in the #Python community! PSF Fellow nominations are due Nov 20!

https://www.python.org/psf/fellows/

We are #obspy, resistance is fudel.

We make code that other people use to make code to make everybody understand this piece of rock better that we all sit on.

observations are that person that operates the seismometer their own

#introduction #python #scicomm #seismology #earthquakes #foss

Does anyone have tried using https://github.com/tds-fdw/tds_fdw to connect to a #SQLAnywhere? I’m keenly interested in experience reports of any kind. #postgres #db #sybase