GitLab emailed me about a failed Let’s Encrypt renewal. Had to press the Retry button to encourage GitLab’s LE stack to do its thing. This has happened a couple times but not a big deal. It reminded me to check up on my winny.tech GitLab namespace and see what my last post was all back on October 12, 2025. 8½ months ago. I’ve been focused on keeping the proverbial boat afloat.
As a studious GNU Units user, I have a small body of notes documenting various ways to perform calculations with unit conversions. Here are a few select ways that I found use of GNU units. But first, a word about using GNU Units GNU Units is a powerful, free calculator that performs unit conversions for you. Please check out the examples on GNU Units’ homepage to see what it is capable of.
Python 3.14 was released today and I caught myself reading the Python 3.14 release notes so figured I’d type up what changes caught my eye. Installing Python There are probably better ways to do this. I opted to manually build and install Python 3.14: ./configure --prefix=$HOME/python3.14 && make -j && make install export PATH="$HOME/python3.14/bin:$PATH" which python3 # Should print out a path equivalent to $HOME/python3.14/bin/python3 python -m json This is a nice way to pretty-print JSON (both indentation and color).
I am curious regarding how many packages existed on my system. Then I got to wondering how many are Google projects? How many are Apache projects? Are all packages fully installed? Get a list of packages into sqlite First, one needs to create the sqlite3 file. The following bash script generates a .csv file with a header (that’s the echo command on the third line) and a dpkg-query incantation. Then the script prepares a sqlite file and imports the .
There’s this cool blog-o-sphere Emacs party going on, with September’s theme of everything about obscure packages. And woops, I’m a day late to the party, so here goes nothing. The idea is to post a weird package that you use but is sort of obscure! M-x winny/visit-configuration RET and I’ve selected uhhh… ssh-config-mode ssh-config-mode Syntax highlighting for your SSH configs, known hosts, and authorized keys files. Nuff said. I have the following line in my Emacs configuration.
Figure 1: Blasting off from planet Racket to other planets. Thanks ChatGPT. It’s been almost two years since I took a public step away from the Racket diaspora. I’m writing this post to air out how my Racket projects have gone since then. I believe, as of now, I have zero Racket codebases to maintain — hooray! I want to show how to handle old codebases. Let’s reaffirm the importance of handing off inactive projects instead of holding on to them.
The sky above the port was the color of television, turned to a dead channel. — Opening paragraph from William Gibson’s Neuromancer. So I thought to myself, why not write a screensaver for Emacs? Enter snowcrash.el. It’s not on MELPA or anything, but it does live on GitHub within my Emacs configuration repository. M-x snowcrash RET looks like this: It’s fun to look at or leave running as a screensaver!