Progress

Work is picking up again, but I can still balance it against my creative urges. There are so many of those that I can't decide what to do first.

Incredibly, I have started writing a game in Godot again. I've not come very far, but it's a start.

Data

I often need data, for presentations or for learning or for simply playing around with. Finding good data is not that easy, so here are some links that I've collected over the years:

• Data is Plural with its data set archive: a fantastic newsletter with new interesting data sets every week.
• SplitGraph is a data product vendor that offers you to easily connect with more than 40.000 data sources, right from your PostgreSQL database. Most of these data sources are US-based and relatively boring, but there are gems in there. May be defunct.
• neondatabase-labs/posgres-sample-dbs: 10 databases with data in PostgreSQL format
• treemap/tree_dataset: Tree dataset from the USA: This PostgreSQL database contains all the trees in the United States. It includes geospatial data about the following trees. (65MB of zipped data)
• RNACentral: Public Postgres database: RNAcentral: The non-coding RNA sequence database; a comprehensive ncRNA sequence collection representing all ncRNA types from a broad range of organisms; directly in your PostgreSQL database
• Soccer match event dataset: Soccer analytics is attracting an increasing interest of academia and industry, thanks to the availability of sensing technologies that provide high-fidelity data streams extracted from every match. Unfortunately, these detailed data are owned by specialized companies and hence are rarely publicly available for scientific research. To fill this gap, we provide to the public the largest open collection of soccer-logs ever released, collected by Wyscout (https://wyscout.com/) containing all the spatio-temporal events (passes, shots, fouls, etc.) that occur during all matches of an entire season of seven competitions (La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Premier League, Ligue 1, FIFA World Cup 2018, UEFA Euro Cup 2016). A match event contains information about its position, time, outcome, player and characteristics. This dataset has been used recently during the Soccer Data Challenge (https://sobigdata-soccerchallenge.it/) and, to the best of our knowledge, it is the largest public collection of soccer-logs.
• the-pudding/data: Data sets created for stories on The Pudding, open to the public.
• Natural Earth - Free vector and raster map data at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales
• deutschland 0.4.2: “A python package that gives you easy access to the most valuable datasets of Germany.”
• Hurricane Isabel WRF Model Data Visualization: “This dataset contains several datasets of compressed "bricks" of floats. Each file represents a single atmospheric variable for one timestep. The file naming convention is VARfNN.bin.gz, where VAR is the variable name (CLOUD, PRECIP, etc.), and NN is the timestep (1 per hour).”
• Dataset of Certified Food Dye Levels in Food Samples Consumed by Children for Updated Exposure Levels
• awesomedata/awesome-public-datasets: A topic-centric list of HQ open datasets.
• The Pile: “The Pile is a 825 GiB diverse, open source language modelling data set that consists of 22 smaller, high-quality datasets combined together.“
• The Sakila example database: “The Sakila database is a nicely normalised database modelling a DVD rental store (for those of you old enough to remember what that is).”

Articles

• film techniques - How did they make cars fall apart in old movies? - Movies & TV Stack Exchange
• Standard Patterns in Choice-Based Games -- These Heterogenous Tasks
• right to root access
• Literate programming: Knuth is doing it wrong
• Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes - by Brian Potter
• Fluid Simulation Pendant - mitxela.com
• If You Ever See This Speed Sign, You're Probably Going To Die - The Autopian
• Homomorphic Encryption in iOS 18
• Nobody Cares
• Django: Fail in templates with {% url '' %} - Adam Johnson
• Die Elektronische Patientenakte für Privatversicherte
• How rqlite is tested – Vallified
• Take the pedals off the bike
• Should I Use React? (via Jochens weeklog)
• Django: render JavaScript import maps in templates - Adam Johnson (via Jochens weeklog)
• Easing Wizard - CSS Easing Editor and Generator (via Jochens weeklog)
• A Marriage Proposal Spoken Entirely in Office Jargon - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.
• Imaging mounted disk volumes under duress
• Why The Weak Nuclear Force Is Short Range – Of Particular Significance
• 100x Defect Tolerance: How Cerebras Solved the Yield Problem - Cerebras
• Subway Stories: fantastic visualisation
• Software Folklore ― Andreas Zwinkau
• No calls - keygen.sh: That's a great position of luxury, to not have to do sales calls. Also, for a blog post that says “make it easy to understand”, I find it very hard to get what keygen.sh does.
• Nepenthes: This is a tarpit intended to catch web crawlers. Specifically, it's targetting crawlers that scrape data for LLM's - but really, like the plants it is named after, it'll eat just about anything that finds it's way inside.
• The mathematics of Dobble
• Rails is better low code than low code -- Radan Skorić's website
• Voxon -- Revolutionary 3D Volumetric Hologram
• Django: launch pdb when a given SQL query runs - Adam Johnson
• Eonfall
• modernity is stupid: a rant not about politics -- The Roof is on Phire: Butlerian jihad when???????
• Sex differences in immune responses -- Nature Reviews Immunology: Importantly, these sex-based immunological differences contribute to variations in the incidence of autoimmune diseases and malignancies, susceptibility to infectious diseases and responses to vaccines in males and females.
• APOD: 2024 December 25 – Diamond Dust Sky Eye
• Using uv as an installer -- aider: Madness!
• Django vs. FastAPI, An Honest Comparison
• Never Forgive Them: “This is a moment of solidarity, as we are all harmed by the Rot Economy. We are all victims. It takes true opulence to escape it, and I'm guessing you don't have it. I certainly don't. But talking about it — refusing to go quietly, refusing to slurp down the slop willingly or pleasantly — is enough. The conversations are getting louder. The anger is getting too hard to ignore. These companies will be forced to change through public pressure and the knowledge of their deeds.”
• Object-based assets for Django's forms.Media - Matthias Kestenholz
• Single-file Django Apps with nanodjango-- Lincoln Loop
• Kelly Can’t Fail – Win Vector LLC
• Fish 4.0: The Fish Of Theseus
• Trusting clients is probably a security flaw - LN Liberda
• Issues with Color Spaces and Perceptual Brightness — John Austin
• H5N1 Risk Dashboard
• "Swedish exports of ball bearings" are commonly brought up in historical discussions of World War II. Why were other countries so reliant on Swedish ball bearings and unable to produce enough themselves? : AskHistorians: Volvo AB was spun out of SKF?!
• Branchless UTF-8 Encoding -- cceckman.com
• Investigating an "evil" RJ45 dongle - lcamtuf’s thing
• Firewood, Coal, Uranium – Bitcoin: The Next Step in Energy Transport  by Alexander Best on Siemens Blog: this is what happens when you combine corporate enthusiasm, outdated keywords, and slop.
• The Google plasma globe affair of 2012
• LUNASE moon phase watch mechanism
• Phases of the Moon
• Generating an infinite world with the Wave Function Collapse algorithm -- Marian's Blog
• Don’t Get Crushed When the World Goes Sideways in 2025–2029: A Field Guide -- by James Christopher -- Predict -- Dec, 2024 -- Medium
• Designing a Star Tracker for Astronaut Don Pettit to Use on the ISS -- PetaPixel
• Courk's Blog – Laser Fault Injection on a Budget: RP2350 Edition
• o1 isn’t a chat model (and that’s the point)
• Provisional Guidance for Users of LLM-Based Code Generators — /dev/lawyer
• Digital Experience of St. Peter’s Basilica
• GeoDsBlog/posts/gds-2024-04-20-cathedrals at master · SebastianoF/GeoDsBlog: Connecting cathedrals with lines: this used to be on Vercel in readable form, but doesn't seem to be there any more. At least we get the sources.
• Australian Open uses cartoon figures to avoid broadcast restrictions: if that's not ironic, I don't know what is!
• Making glow-in-the-dark Strontium Aluminate: -- Maurycy's blog
• Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment: Not sure what to think of this one.

Libraries, programming, etc

• GitHub - pyper-dev/pyper: Concurrent Python made simple
• Freaky/rtss: Relative TimeStamps for Stuff: rtss annotates its output with relative durations between consecutive lines and since program start. It can be used as a filter in a pipeline. (via Jochens weeklog)
• mkniewallner/migrate-to-uv: Migrate a project from Poetry/Pipenv/pip-tools/pip to uv package manager: works perfectly
• Home -- aider: Aider lets you pair program with LLMs, to edit code in your local git repository. Start a new project or work with an existing code base. Aider works best with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, DeepSeek V3, o1 & GPT-4o and can connect to almost any LLM.
• Litestar library documentation — Litestar Framework: The new starlite
• PostgreSQL Anonymizer
• Self-Hosted Dashboard Icons
• isd: isd — A Better Way to Work with systemd Units - Simplify systemd management with isd! isd is a TUI offering fuzzy search for units, auto-refreshing previews, smart sudo handling, and a fully customizeable interface for power-users and newcomers alike.

Books

• Shards of Honor: this book is so weird. On the one hand it's weirdly romantic and quaint and... “trusting“, I guess? First of all, the attraction between the characters builds in just a few days. Then they get separated for a long time. Then the female protagonist is being held as a military prisoner in the male protagonists personal cabin (?!), while no one seems to know that she is there? And her thoughts are filled with romance about him? And they don't act on it, except he asks her for marriage?! But on the other hand, there is a very explicit scene of almost-rape, and also he drugs her to get at her military secrets?! What?! And then it turns around and makes you question whether all/any of this is real? What?!
  And then there are thirteen other books in that universe?! WHAT!?

Games

• Patrick's Parabox
• Juno: New Origins: it is very much like KSP, but missing in the details. It is much more game, with a story and contracts and incentives and tutorials and such, but both the building and the flying are just not perfect. It also has zero charm.
• Astroneer
• Jedi Survivor: about as good as the predecessor.

Other media

• Card Counting Team's Revenge On Vegas! - YouTube
• The secrets of Inflight Entertainment you never asked about... - YouTube
• EEVblog 1519 - FREE Your Sonos Speaker! (HACK) - YouTube
• You Don’t Understand How Landmines Work (and it’s Hollywood’s Fault) - YouTube
• Deepheist (Sci-Fi Heist Film) - YouTube
• A Train Station in Japan You’ll Never Be Able to Leave - YouTube: I mean, uh, you could take the exit. Or the train! They'll even drive you to the next station if you miss the last train!
• Building the Wobbly Physics of Crunda - YouTube