A friend has long run a non-profit, called Futel, that’s sort of a hybrid community service and art project providing free payphones. As they describe it:
At Futel, we believe in the preservation of public telephone hardware as a means of providing access to the agora for everybody, and toward that goal we are privileged to provide free telephone calls, voicemail, and telephone-mediated services.
All services, including telephony and human interaction, are free from any Futel telephone.
Back in 2018 I gave a 15 minute talk at Ann Arbor Nerd Nite, and I just came across the video again. I think it holds up, and I was glad the video shows the audience seemed to have a good time too.
I really like public speaking because it’s terrifying. I get a huge adrenaline rush and stuggle to control my breathing. It’s like skydiving but without the actual risk.
After 30 years of steady employment in the tech industry I’ve gotten the family on board with my taking a one year sabbatical. My employer didn’t offer extended unpaid time off as a benefit, so I resigned in June and am now two months into a year’s leave. I’m hoping to return to the tech industry re-energized and with some new perspectives. I’d be kidding if I didn’t say the current tech job market is concerning relative to when I first made this decision, but I’m counting on a large network of past coworkers and some AI-resistant skills to smooth my reentry in 2026.
I’ve been blogging, unreliably, at ry4an.org since 2003, and just changed the software powering it for the third time. Up until today I was using blohg. It worked great, but hadn’t had a release in seven year and still required python 2.7, which is annoying to install cleanly these days.
A quick look around showed that the static site generator space has exploded since last I checked. Hugo is mature and doesn’t require a javascript runtime, which was good enough for me.
Back in 1994 my circle of high school friends spent a lot of time sitting around talking (there were no cell phones) and for about a week we were all playing one handed solitaire. In suburban St. Louis we called it idiot's delight solitaire (which turns out to be an entirely different game), because there is absolutely no human input after the shuffle. As soon as you've started playing it's already determined whether you've won -- you just spend five minutes learning if you did.
An 11 year old in our house needed to do a book report for school in the form of a board game and selected a gamebook, apparently the generic name for the trademarked Choose Your Own Adventure books. The non-linear narrative made the choice of board layout easy -- just use the graph of pages-transitions ("Turn to page 110").
The graphviz library is always my first choice when I want to visualize nodes and edges, and the python graphviz module provides a convenient way to get data into a renderable graph structure.
I've been running my (this) vanity website and mail server on Linux machines I administer myself since 1998 or so, but it's time to rebuild the machine and hosting static HTTPS no longer makes sense in a world where GitHub or AWS can handle it flexibly and reliably for effectively free. I did want to keep running my own mail server, but centralization in email has made delivery iffy and everyone I'm communicating with is on gmail, so the data is going there anyway.
Python has a uniquely bad title case function which turns my already silly name into Ry4An, capitalizing the 'a' because it follows a non-letter character. I can't be sure that all the bulk email I get that's sent to Ry4An Brase has passed through Python's .title() function, but I've not found another language or framework with so bad an implementation.
At least Python warns you that their version is terrible right in the docstring for title and provides a slightly better one they suggest you paste directly into your code. There are, of course, better versions available in libraries like titlecase which handle things like not capitalizing articles.
When reading I've always underlined sentences that make me happy. Once the kids got old enough to understand there's no email or fun on a Kindle I switched from dead tree books, and now the underlining is stored in Amazon's datacenters.
After a few years of highlighting on Kindle I started to wonder if the number of sentences that I liked and the eventual five-star scale rating I gave a book had any correlation. Amazon owns Goodreads and Kindle services sync data into Goodreads, but unfortunately highlight data isn't available through any API.
Home security system projects are fun because everything about them screams "1980s legacy hardware design". Nowhere else in the modern tech landscape does one program by typing in a three digit memory address and then entering byte values on a numeric keypad. There's no enter-key -- you fill the memory address. There's no display -- just eight LEDs that will show you a byte at a time, and you hope it's the address you think it is. Arduinos and the like are great for hobby fun, but these are real working systems whose core configuration you enter byte by byte.