Since Marco d'Itri's whois(1) v5.5.0 released in July 2019, most sysadmins no longer need to do trial-and-error or detectivework to guess which of the 5 RIRs controls the IP attacking you and then hunt down the appropriate WHOIS server—the -I flag will now do that annoying accounting on your behalf
Switching to Picom (Compton) on the MATE desktop
You may have read some convoluted (and outdated—Compton was abandoned in 2017) tutorials on the matter like MakeTechEasier's, or perused the excellent Arch Wiki article's page on it to some despair, but if you are just a layperson who installed the MATE desktop for e.g. Ubuntu 20.04 (Fossa) and wants a slightly faster (i.e. GPU-accelerated) environment, there is a workaround that doesn't take too long to set up: …
[DRAFT] U.S. Obscenity Ban: Name & Blame
An 1873 federal bill to ban smut, abortion pamphlets, and sex toys was never found unconstitutional; instead, only the clauses that meaningfully impacted the ability of the American public to be sexually promiscuous were overturned, piecemeal, under the banner of "civil rights". I will attempt to give a breakdown (including partisan affiliation) of the people behind this bill's tortured history.
Transcript: Dr. Ryan Cole on Vitamin D and COVID
Transcribed from 0:52–24:13 of the Week 8 recording at lgo.idaho.gov/capitol-clarity/
[DRAFT] Ghetto Guide to CMS
Interpretive labor on RFC 5652 and RFC 5280
mcrcon: auto-parse password
alias mcrcon='env MCRCON_PASS="${MCRCON_PASS=$(sed -n -e '\''s/^rcon\.password=\(.\+\)/\1/p'\'' < server.properties)}" mcrcon'Python: Using XOFs for general-purpose Random
As always, one's own stack overflow answers make the best blog posts. In this case, we craft a version of random.Random with a few modifications: Pulls its data from an arbitrary stream (in our case, a DRBG such as a hash function or deterministic CSPRNG) Wastes noticeably fewer bits when generating random integers Has fixed code for .shuffle, on the offchance CPython ever changes theirs, and to make it …
Python: Rounding fractions half-up
By default, Python's fractions rounds halves to the nearest even number. If you, instead, want to round a fraction but send halves up, here's how that's done:
def roundhalfup(x: Fraction) -> int:
"""
Rounds x to the nearest integer, with ties being rounded towards positive infinity
"""
return floor(x + Fraction(1, 2))Javascript: Parsing query parameters
There are at least 2×5×7×3×3×1=630 different things you might unambiguously mean by "parsing" a query string in Javascript: …
Python: Nested in-line "for" statements
You must leave the fors in the same order as in the code-block form, only popping the inner expression itself to the front:…