I offer this site as a resource and a safe haven for people who have similar interests to mine, and I make no income off this site. I don’t do affiliate links. No paywalls. There are no stupid subscription pop-ups. Just my space to write. It’s a labour of love. But a side effect is that I don’t owe anyone anything. This is particularly true of supporters of Donald Trump. If you voted for Trump, or support Trump, or regularly vote for members of the party formerly known as the U.S. Republican party, but which is now a fascist political enterprise, please just click the back button.

One of the browser conveniences that I appreciate is ready access to commonly used links, presented in a neat and categorized way. Every time I create a new tab, I just want to see those links. There are of course many browser extensions that present a page when the user opens a new tab. Mozilla has its own default ad-ridden page on Firefox. For my part, I don’t want news, weather, “trending stories,” or ads. I just want my curated links. That’s why I created Slinky.

I’ll admit to being a pushover for lists of pithy advice for living. One that I return to frequently are those compiled by John Perry Barlow.

In 1977, John Perry Barlow wrote a list of twenty-five principles of adult behaviour.

Reading through these principles in the midst of the self-serving, self-enriching careless chaos that Donald Trump has wreaked on the world, I decided to write a parallel set of principles as Trump himself might do. I give you - by way of contrast - Donald Trump’s Principles of Adult Behaviour.

Yesterday I posted about a small utility that parses and explains ARINC 424 records. I have updated it.

For each field, the tool now cites the specific tables in the ARINC 424 specification that describe that field. The field-content explanations are also more detailed, so you can spend less time flipping between the parsed output and the printed standard. Here is an example for an Airport SID/STAR/Approach primary record:

This is still a work in progress. Not all record types are supported yet; I am filling those in as I need them.

N.B. An enhanced version is now available, with specification table references and more detailed field explanations. 2026-08-03.

The ARINC 424 specification is the universally accepted standard for encoding aeronautical navigation data. Databases that follow it store that data in fixed-length, 132-character records. I created a utility that parses a single ARINC 424 record and prints the fields along with column numbers and plain-language explanations. The Python arinc424 module does the heavy lifting; I provide a wrapper around it, plus the logic that maps fields to the column numbers used in the official specification.

The news site politicalwire.com is a well-regarded site that covers U.S. political news. Like other similar sites, it features a comment section; and like many comment sections on political sites, it attracts personality-disordered internet trolls. One such troll on politicalwire.com goes by the handle Reasonable. This commenter is a troll in every sense of the word, engaging users with deliberately provocative nonsense.

This user has been banned on multiple occasions and escapes both bans and blocks by repeatedly creating new Disqus accounts using the same name and avatar. Since it cannot be blocked at the account/server level, I’ve written a Violentmonkey script to expunge his comments at the level of the browser. To use the script, you will need to use the Violentmonkey (or related) extension and create a new script with the following code. It works perfectly in Firefox.

As a Challenger 650 captain, I fly routes between North America and Europe with some frequency. Dealing with the interconversion of imperial and metric units is a challenge; so I create a Lua script that runs in the X-Plane FlyWithLua plugin.

Once installed, the script allows you to enter the required trip fuel, current onboard fuel, fuel density and metric vs imperial units and outputs the desired fuel uplift. You can also select to take 10%, 15%, 20% extra fuel. This is a feature that I added because SimBrief seems to underestimate my fuel burn.

As a pianist, I use Calendar on macOS and iOS to plan each day’s practice. On heavy days I may have over a dozen practice blocks, so the calendar gets crowded quickly and it becomes easy to miss non-practice events. A calendar that looks like this makes the problem obvious:

What I really wanted was a quick way to toggle a group of calendars at once on macOS. In my case, that group is the set of works I am currently practicing (for example, specific Brahms and Schubert calendars). Your grouping might be completely different, depending on your purpose, but the same approach applies.

PCB fabricators require a board outline on the `Edge.Cuts` layer to specify the board size and shape. While drawing the board outline in the PCB editor is straightforward and uses the standard line and shape drawing tools, it is convenient to retain standardized board outlines and related parts, such as fasteners, as reusable footprints. During the board layout process, you can simply plop a board outline, along with perfectly-placed mounting holes into the editor and you can concentrate on placing components and routing. Also, having a standard library of board outlines gives you a predictable set of size choices for enclosures and for ordering SMD stencils.

This is why I created KiCadBoardOutlineGenerator, a script to generate board outlines from dimensions you specify.