I’ve always found it pretty cool that some types of spiders can “fly” using webs. I had believed it involved airflow, but that’s apparently not it. According to “Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity”, that doesn’t even make a lot of sense. Instead, a pair of biologists have demonstrated that spiders can use electric fields to lift them into the air. From the article:

By request, I was taking the boys to the Science Center on Father’s Day. We were on the Packster and I saw a Greenpeace ship in South Lake Union. Tours were being hosted on board! It’s not often that I have a chance to tour an ocean-going ship, but the boys resisted and we moved on.

A while back I created the Rust Code of Conduct Conformulator to help address a consistency problem.

In most situations I prefer to not use key pairs with EC2 instances. I just want to use my own SSH keys. Thus, most of the time I opt out of specifying or creating a key pair in the last step of launching an instance. Instead, I use cloud-init to install my keys when the instance is created. This isn’t groundbreaking, but I have to look up the syntax each time I do it. Hopefully putting it here will save me time in the future.

Over the past several months I’ve slowly, but surely been learning Rust in my spare time. I started back in December by working my way through the first nine, or so, chapters of The Rust Programming Language (a.k.a. “The Rust Book”). After going that far I yearned to actually apply some of what I learned, and I did that primarily through contributions to rustfmt.

I’ve been enjoying watching Playing & Writing Stories with Shanna Germain and Charles Ryan. Shanna and Charles (and the host, Darcy) are members of Monte Cook Games, a tabletop roleplaying game company. I’ve additionally been occasionally reading the Numenera core book and watching videos of MCG employees playing.

SQLite’s use of Fossil – a software configuration management system – came up today on Hacker News (thread). Like Git, Fossil is a distributed SCM, but it also has integrated bug tracking, a built in web interface, and other features. There’s discussion on those pages comparing it to Git. If I had a reason to try out other source control systems, Fossil might be fun to take a look at.

A recent bridge-burning post titled “Why OpenStreetMap is in Serious Trouble” covered a variety of issues the author (a former long-time contributor and advocate of OpenStreetMap) feel are holding OpenStreetMap (OSM) back.

In my last post I wrote about our new bike. It was a beautiful day today, and we got some good time in on the bike.