Tech books, free to a good home. Email or DM me your address and what book(s) you want and I’ll get them in the mail early next week.

How much of a pain is setting up some sort of TSDB (Influx? Grafana?) for my Home Assistant install? Mostly I want better long-term data visualization and analysis of things like temp, water and electricity usage, etc. HA has rudimentary charts, but I’m looking for something better. Metrics-based alerting would be nice too. But I don’t want to spend more than a couple hours AT MOST setting this up. Any pointers?

It’s common to say that “people suck at thinking about risk” — certainly it’s something that I’ve said often. And there are tons of examples of how our intuitive sense of risk goes wrong. But… what if we thought differently? What if, instead, we started from an assumption that people’s risk assessments are accurate _for them_? What are the implications of thinking this way?

What if We Thought About Risk Decisions Differently? - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Risk professionals often operate from the assumption that people are inherently bad at assessing risk, especially when it comes to low-probability...

I'm building a run-in shed for the horses, and for the first time in my building-things life, I fully modeled it in CAD. Originally I did this so I'd have an accurate cut list for ordering lumber and metal, but it's been WAY more useful than that. Viewing just specific parts multiple angles; custom drawings of specific layouts, even using analysis tools to figure out how much concrete I need. Super cool, I'm a convert. (This is OnShape BTW.)

Twenty years ago today we released the little web framework we’d developed at the Lawrence Journal-World to help us build news sites and apps. We hoped maybe a couple of other media outlets, and maybe a few in the Python community, might find it useful. Never in a million years could I have predicted what happened next…

Django Project

Happy 20th birthday Django!

Posted by Thibaud Colas & Benjamin Balder Bach on July 13, 2025