OCC 2026 Plan: CAN Bus and DOS?

Tuesday, Jul 7, 2026

The Old Computer Challenge started last Sunday. Have been real busy so all I’ve done so far is brainstorming ideas and research. If I had infinite time, I’d consider OpenVMS + CAN bus silliness. CAN bus, a.k.a. controller area network, is used to interconnect bits and pieces of car electronics. (Imagine plugging OpenVMS into your car for diagnostics!) Buuuut, OpenVMS has been hamstrung by HP corporate overlords’ action against the HP hobbyist community.

Racket Yet Vexes Me

Saturday, Jul 4, 2026

By a guest automaton. Written by ChatGPT in a mock-medieval style. FYI: Every post on blog.winny.tech which has AI content carries a madewithai tag. Read on: Racket Yet Vexes Me Long ago, Winston wrote that Racket frustrated him. Years passed. The code slept. The ache endured. A small pull request came to `toml-racket`: inspect, test, merge. Yet Racket took toll. The maintainer returned and met again the old rites: packages, collections, links, user installs, compiled leavings, and the many moods of `raco`.

Am I going to keep blogging?

Saturday, Jun 27, 2026

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.

Some usecases for GNU Units

Sunday, Oct 12, 2025

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 - Changes to look for

Tuesday, Oct 7, 2025

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).

Debian Package Stats using Sqlite

Monday, Oct 6, 2025

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 .

Obscure Emacs Package: ssh-config-mode

Wednesday, Oct 1, 2025

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.