Posts

I set up two Raspberry Pi SBCs with GPS boards as NTP servers earlier this year. I used an oscilloscope to see how far apart the “pulse per second” (PPS) pulses that the GPS boards output.

QAA Podcast (nee’ Qanon Anonymous), Premium Episode 238 and Unclear and Present Danger 2025-09-14 episode, cover Starship Troopers in very different ways.

Early in March 2025, I noticed that a web crawler with a user agent string of

meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)

was hitting my blog’s machine at an unreasonable rate.

What happens when pacman fails when you’re trying to recover from uninstalling a package that pacman needs?

1023 % sudo pacman -Syu
[sudo] password for bediger: 
pacman: error while loading shared libraries: libicuuc.so.78: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

What To Do When Nothing Has Happened?
Raymond “Randy” Freeman
Process Safety Progress September 2011 (Vol. 30 No. 5)

How should you estimate the probability of some catastrophic event that hasn’t happened yet?

Interesting paper:

Impact-induced initiation of a Snowball Earth: A model study
Minmin Fu, Dorian S. Abbot, Christian Koeberl, Alexey Fedorov
Science Advances, 10 eadk5489 (2024) 9 February 2024

Wikipedia has this entry for Benford’s Law, which deals with the distribution of leading digits of a collection of samples.

The old Daily Coding Problem email list gave us this problem around 2020:

Daily Coding Problem: Problem #237 [Easy]

A tree is symmetric if its data and shape remain unchanged when it is reflected about the root node. The following tree is an example:

        4
      / | \
    3   5   3
  /           \
 9             9

Given a k-ary tree, determine whether it is symmetric.

This problem is less well described than I thought when I worked on it in 2020.

Idly looking up a coding problem got me to investigate Dyck Languages, which led me to update my binary tree Go package.

I’ve got even more ideas for Starship Troopers fanfic. If you think you can write one of these, do it! Let me know so I can read it.