acb

A couple years ago I bought a bicycle front light with low-/high beam, with the low beam dynamo- and the high beam battery-powered.
My plan was to use a single 18650 plus a step-up transformer to get up to the required 12V for the battery part.

While this worked just fine on the table at home I never managed to package it all up properly for use on the road (rain, vibrations etc.).
And since the purely dynamo-ppwered light I'd bought in the meantime worked just fine, the part-battery-powered one gathered dust in some drawer.

But now I'm using father-in-laws e-bike, with its really really shitty light, so I though to hang it off the e-bikes battery. Which of course only does 6V on the ligth output . Then I thought "hey, fuck it, it's an electric bike, so weight is not an issue anyway", and put a 6x18650 battery pack in the bottle cage.

Original light:
https://youtu.be/FtDwrjq2MhY?t=2365

New one:
https://youtu.be/1356pQg2UP0?t=1962

And, because the cheap action cam does pretty badly in low light, I also filmed it with the company Iphone:
https://youtu.be/ZlowiXZr3BM?t=1967

I'm impressed. In this case, both by the light, and the Iphone.

(As a bonus, I got a pretty angry shout when I flashed an oncoming cyclist who had his own light angled for full blinding. Which is petty, but also oh-so-satisfying ;) )

fanf

https://dotat.at/@/2026-02-24-nsnotifyd-2-4-released.html

The nsnotifyd daemon monitors a set of DNS zones and runs a command when any of them change. It listens for DNS NOTIFY messages so it can respond to changes promptly. It also uses each zone's SOA refresh and retry parameters to poll for updates if nsnotifyd does not receive NOTIFY messages more frequently. It comes with a client program nsnotify for sending notify messages.

This nsnotifyd-2.4 release includes a new feature and some bug fixes:

The new -S option tells nsnotifyd to send all SOA queries to a specific server.

Previously, in response to a NOTIFY message, it would send a SOA query back to the source of the NOTIFY, as specified by RFC 1996.

(Typically, a NOTIFY will only be accepted from a known authoritative server for the zone. The target of the NOTIFY responds with a SOA refresh query and zone transfer. But it should avoid trying to refresh from one of the other authoritative servers which might not have received the latest version of the zone.)

Mark Felder encountered a situation where it would have been more convenient to fix the address that nsnotifyd sends SOA queries to, because the source of the NOTIFY messages wasn't responding on that address.

Since nsnotifyd is intended to work as glue between disparate parts of a system, it makes sense for it to work around awkward interoperability problems.
The nsnotify client program was broken and unable to create NOTIFY messages. D'oh!
I have adjusted the release process so that it works better with git archive and web front-ends that offer tarball downloads.

wildeabandon

So the Church of England has drawn the "Living in Love and Faith" process to a close, in a way that puts any pursuit of my priestly vocation out of reach for the foreseeable future. A new working group is being set up to continue looking at the question of priests in same-sex marriages, which is supposed to report back to Synod in 2028. Based on past experience, that probably means 2029 or 2030, at which point there will no doubt be a new round of painful arguments, and then I guess we'll see. But for now, that door is closed.

I think I am currently feeling less upset about this than I thought I'd be, although it might just be alexithymia fogging things up. It didn't really come as a surprise, so to some extent letting go of the uncertainty is something of a relief.

It also removes the potential complication that comes with having reinvigorated my academic vocation, coming back to the field with my mental health intact, my ADHD treated, and the general increased wisdom that comes with age. Of course academia and the priesthood is hardly a combination that hasn't been tried before, but I had been worrying slightly about what happens if I have to make a choice about which to pursue first, and now that that choice has been taken off the table I can just concentrate on my studies, and should at least be well into a PhD before the question of formal priestly discernment becomes pertinent again.

ludy

Watch on YouTube

Enjoy your pancakes or local equivalent* and/or your Lunar New Year treats

*Estonia has (kind of brioche-y) Shrove Buns/vastlakukkel filled with whipped cream (Wikipedia suggests they should have almond paste in too but that’s not how either of Nieceling’s families eat them)

fanf

https://dotat.at/@/2026-02-16-async.html

I'm writing a simulation, or rather, I'm procrastinating, and this blog post is the result of me going off on a side-track from the main quest.

The simulation involves a bunch of tasks that go through a series of steps with delays in between, and each step can affect some shared state. I want it to run in fake virtual time so that the delays are just administrative updates to variables without any real sleep()ing, and I want to ensure that the mutations happen in the right order.

I thought about doing this by representing each task as an enum State with a big match state to handle each step. But then I thought, isn't async supposed to be able to write the enum State and match state for me? And then I wondered how much the simulation would be overwhelmed by boilerplate if I wrote it using async.

Rather than digging around for a crate that solves my problem, I thought I would use this as an opportunity to learn a little about lower-level async Rust.

Turns out, if I strip away as much as possible, the boilerplate can fit on one side of a sheet of paper if it is printed at a normal font size. Not too bad!

But I have questions...

Read more on my blog...

rbarclay

First impressions: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xswxxVnAiTg

More when I figure out how to mount the camera (the double mounts for the light plus the switch plus the pedelec controls plus shifters plus brakes plus bell pretty much fill up all the available space on the handlebar).

Total light output is about that of a standard car highbeam: 1,500 lumens. No idea about how much Lux it brings down, but it's fucking bright.

ludy

Yesterday I forgot to do the “traditional” autocomplete valentine poem so you can have it for Lupercalia instead…

Roses are my new obsession,
Violets are the best flowers in this universe.
Sugar is a beautiful color(sic) in this photo of my heart,
And so much of this is just pure love from you guys in the comments.
(iPad - which is apparently a big hippo)

Roses are still very pleased with her husband.
Violets are the fandom I think you should get.
Sugar is dissolved,
And so it helped you get your own back.
(Kindle Fire - obviously living for teh drama)

Roses are good for the kids,
Violets are the best jokes on the wall.
Sugar is a bit of a serif but it’s impossible to get the train back from London
And so you don’t need it for the rest of the year.
(Phone - maybe a bit judgmental)

It’s interesting that the iPad and particularly the phone have learned some ludy-speak (and the phone is more aware of subjects I’m likely to be texting about) while the Kindle seems a bit more generic

Current Mood: silly

Network

Let there be light (in front of my bicycle)

nsnotifyd-2.4 released

Doors closing, windows opening.

Annual Earworm

One page of async Rust

I gave up, and finally installed the Laempie Mk4

(no subject)

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