h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

I made a thing: it's called the DNS Museum, and it's because I kept joking at the start of my talk, "Bizarre and Unusual Uses of DNS" that a lot of the things weren't alive anymore - so it was more like a museum of DNS and I was the curator. Anyway, I'm on holiday right now so I finally got around to doing something about that joke.

Consider this a first draft, I have way more notes about other things to add at some point. It's also a little bland, but one thing I'm not is a designer. Let me know about any issues - AI was used to help create the site, but of course I'm responsible for any mistakes. It's on GitHub too, so PRs are welcome.

https://dns.museum

For my birthday, my brother-in-law gave me a 4992-digit hex number that, when used as a seed for Python’s random number generator, makes it so that printing a sequence of “random” ASCII characters actually prints a birthday greeting.

I find it rather amazing that this is possible!

This is the program he sent with the seed:

with open("seed.txt", encoding="ascii") as handle:
seed = int(handle.read().strip(), 0)
r = random.Random(seed)
pending = ""
while True:
character = chr(r.randrange(128))
if pending + character == "\x1e\x1f":
break
print(pending, end="")
pending = character
print()

Huge updates to my transmission constraints dashboard!

✨ An entirely new layout
📊 Loads of new charts
⚖️ Comparison stats
📈 Cumulative data
🔥 Turn-up volume by fuel type

And much, much more…

https://renewables-map.robinhawkes.com/curtailment

🔥 Annual reminder for Northern Hemisphere inhabitants. Test your central heating before it gets really cold! 🔥
Bleed the radiators, top up the boiler and run a test for an hour.

The price of diesel is now effectively £2/litre so it costs about £140 to fill my tank which at 46mpg gives me a range of 700 miles: 20p/mile

Assuming an average electricity cost of 26p/kWh and a Polestar 2 with efficiency of 287 Wh/mi, that's about 7.5p/mile.

The cost of fuel and maintenance on the fully deprecated 'bangernomics' ICE car is now heavily outweighed by the EV savings, even with a higher purchase price.

Trump is doing a great job killing the oil industry long term 😀

World Standards Day and World Standards Day 2026 #Standards https://improbable.com/2026/09/26/world-standards-day-and-world-standards-day-2026/

Bird migration is changing. What does this reveal about our planet? – visualised | Birds | The Guardian.

This is a really beautiful and fascinating article about bird migration, following several different species around the globe.

#birds #nature

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2025/oct/16/bird-migration-is-changing-what-does-this-reveal-about-our-planet-visualised-aoe

"If I'd had more time I'd have written less code"

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

This year's Geoguessr World Championship final is absolutely incredible

https://youtu.be/BU6rXYv726I?t=30917