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.

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.

I'm starting to do more on a raspberry pi I've got in the house, and I wanted it to survive short power outages. I looked at buying an off the shelf Uninteruptable Power Supply (UPS), but it just struck me as silly that I'd be using my house's 120V AC to power to fill a 12V DC battery to be run through an inverter into 120V AC again to be run through a transformer into DC yet again. When the house is out of power that seemed like a lot of waste.

I spent a few hours trying to get the Jenkins Git & Github plugins to:

• run pylint on all remote branch heads that:
  • arent' too old
  • haven't already had pylint run on them
• send the repo status back to GitHub

I'm sure it's possible, but the Jenkins Git plugin doesn't like a single build to operate on multiple revisions. The repo statuses weren't posting, the wrong branches were getting built, and it was easier to write a quick script.

I've been using Charlie Lee's excellent Google Spreadsheet Bitcoin tracker sheet for awhile but it pulls data from a single exchange at a time and relies on the ordering of those exchanges on the bitcoinwatch.com site, which vary with volume.

I figured out I could get better numbers more reliably from bitcoinaverage.com, which (predictably) averages multiple exchanges over various time periods. They offer a great JSON API, but unfortunately Google spreadsheets only export JSON -- they don't have a function for importing it.

In our NY office We've got 40 people working in a space with two bathrooms. Walking to the bathrooms, finding them both occupied, and grabbing a snack instead is a regular occurrence. For a lark I took a Twine with the breakout board and a few magnetic switches and connected them to the over taxed bathroom doors.

The good folks at Twine will invoke a web hook on state change, so I created a tiny webapp in Go that takes the GET from Twine and stashes it in the App Engine datastore. I wrote a cheesy web front end to show the current state based on the most recent change. It also exposes a JSON API, allowing my excellent coworkers to build a native OS X menulet and a much nicer web version.

Last weekend we bought two Rodd lamps at Ikea for the guest room, and it struck me how amused I'd be if each one switched the other. Six hours and a few new parts later, and it came out pretty well:

The remote action is especially jarring because the switches are right next to the bulbs they would normally control:

I really lucked out with those lamps. The switches aren't integral to the bulb sockets as is often the case, and they're not even soldered. I was able to fit two extra wires through the lamp's main tube without going to a wire gauge that felt scarily thin -- LED bulbs helped there.

As a hack, when I need an append-only datastore with no authentication or validation, I use Amazon S3. S3 is usually a read-only service from the unauthenticated web client's point of view, but if you enable access logging to a bucket you get full-query-parameter URLs recorded in a text file for GETs that can come from a form's action or via XHR.

There aren't a lot of internet-safe append-only datastores out there. All my favorite noSQL solutions divide permissions into read and/or write, where write includes delete. SQL databases let you grant an account insert without update or delete, but still none suggest letting them listen on a port that's open to the world.