I’ve been trying to read a Sci-Fi(ish) short story to the kids at bedtime, in between other longer books. This is how it’s been going.

Really Successful Stories

These are the stories they love, that they ask for and that we’ve read multiple times.

The stories that have really worked generally get this kind of “mind blown” reaction from the kids at the end – which is very satisfying!

These are short stories by some of the greatest Science Fiction/SF authors in history. They are all well written and well put together, to say the least. These are mostly not written for children, but I’ve trawled the history of the genre and found some that are suitable and that my kids enjoyed.

I’ve found that 40s & 50s sci-fi shorts are sometimes quite suitable for …

Want “Reader Mode” for almost the entire web - and have every page load nearly instantly? Here’s how.

There are three main constellations of Web Browsers - ones based on Google’s Blink rendering engine (used in Google Chrome, MS Edge, Vivaldi, Brave and others), ones based on WebKit (used in Safari on MacOS & iOS 7 iPadOS) - and on Mozilla’s Geko engine (used by Firefox & Thunderbird).

There are also a few other, “non-mainstream browsers”, that have their own engines. Cosmic wanderers, not part of the main constellations, that chart their own course, building everything themselves: Flow, Servo, LadyBird, NetSurf - and Dillo-Plus.

It’s too easy to overlook the countless hours of dedication poured into the open source software that powers our digital lives. I want to take a moment to express my appreciation and admiration for one of the many unsung heroes of my digital world, who’s software I use all the time.

David Peter / sharkdp

GitHub Profile

• Location: Stuttgart, Germany
• Followers: 5684
• Public Repositories: 104
• https://david-peter.de/
• Sponsor David Peter (sharkdp)

These are the projects of theirs that I love & use the most:

bat

A cat(1) clone with wings.

Bat is a cat clone with syntax highlighting for loads of languages, Git integration - and it’s written in Rust, so it works on Linux/Windows/MacOS. It’s completely replaced cat for me:

alias cat="bat"

fd

A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to ‘find …

Open source developers are often the unsung heroes of the technology world, creating & maintaining the software that powers our digital lives. Sadly, their contributions often go unnoticed, but without their dedication and expertise, much of the software & digital infrastructure what we take for granted today wouldn’t exist.

I want to recognize the brilliant work of one developer and express my gratitude to them for making the world a better place through open source.

Zachary Yedidia / zyedidia

GitHub Profile

• Location: Stanford, CA
• Followers: 644
• Public Repositories: 175
• Stanford University
• https://zyedidia.github.io

These are the projects of theirs that I love & use the most:

eget

Easily install prebuilt binaries from GitHub.

Most of the software on my machine comes from the systems package manager, and is automatically kept up to date. The problems with this, is that …

Open source developers are often the unsung heroes of the technology world, creating & maintaining the software that powers our digital lives. Sadly, their contributions often go unnoticed, but without their dedication and expertise, much of the software & digital infrastructure what we take for granted today wouldn’t exist.

I want to recognize the awesome work of one developer and express my gratitude to them for making the world a better place through open source.

Andrew Gallant / burntsushi

GitHub Profile

I love to code.

• Location: Marlborough, MA
• Followers: 7905
• Public Repositories: 156
• @salesforce
• https://burntsushi.net

These are the projects of theirs that I love & use the most:

ripgrep

ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore

Ripgrep is a superfast replacement for grep, ag, ack etc…​ It’s not just way faster than all …

I run a Miniflux instance on my desktop computer, which fetches all my feeds and makes the content available locally.

Inspired by a discussion the other day on HackerNews, I wrote a little script that asks Miniflux for a list of my feeds in OPML format and turns it into an AsciiDoc page, which I publish on here, as my BlogRoll & Links page:

import os
import sys
import urllib.request
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
from datetime import datetime

key = os.environ["MINIFLUX_API_KEY"]

if not key:
    print("$MINIFLUX_API_KEY not set.")
    sys.exit(-1)

url = "http://miniflux.home/v1/export"
hdr = {"X-Auth-Token": key}
request = urllib.request.Request(url, headers=hdr)
opml = ET.fromstring(urllib.request.urlopen(request).read())
updated = datetime.now().astimezone().replace(microsecond=0).isoformat(" ")

header = f"""
:title: Blogroll & Links
:slug: blogroll-links
:created: 2022-11-15 13 …

Music great, lighting great, encore fantastic. Loads of audience participation, singing and dancing throughout. Fun!

I don’t particularly like the Commodore Ballroom, as a venue. It’s OK, but it’s a bit of an echoey box. The sound for Loviet, the warm-up band, was a bit echoey and too loud, lyrics indistinct.

They pulled it together though and the sound for Morcheeba was great. I was about four people from the front, great view & atmosphere - although I seemed to be in the unofficial tall guys section for some of the gig.

The band seemed to be having a good time - just like the audience. They were all excellent, from Skye Edwards huge stage presence and amazing voice, to Ross Godfrey’s great guitar work. It was lots of fun, music was great, lighting was great, encore was fantastic …