Spent the evening getting the Python 3.9 build for PyOpenGL-accelerate running on Appveyor. In the end it was just knowing to add a tag "APPVEYOR_BUILD_WORKER_IMAGE: Visual Studio 2019" to the build-matrix for that one Python version so that it is built on the Python 3.9-compatible build-image. Will have to boot into Windows to test that ...

So with the move to 20.04 I've now run into my first package (rocketchat-desktop) that has given up on debian packages and only provides a snap package... and... well... it just doesn't run. It installs, it pretends to run and exits without any obvious error or message, but nothing happens.

Luckily this particular package is ...

There is something magical about asking Ubuntu to upgrade your desktop while you're running it. "Hey, Ubuntu, let's try focal" and it heads off to churn through downloading 6GB of stuff and unpacking/installing it. You head off to work in the meantime.

But it gets stuck because you have postgresql and it doesn't make it ...

So I finally sat down and finished off the work I was doing a while ago to get RunSnakeRun updated to run on Python 3 and support pyspy/speedscope files. There was a bunch of stuff needed to make us compatible with the wxPython Pheonix releases, a huge and horrible hack to let us load Python2 ...

So with the code-context, the dictation in Listener is getting okay-ish. It's still pretty frustrating and error prone, but I can use it maybe 1/4 of the time (mostly for doc-strings). Part of the frustration is just that the language models are not yet well tuned for some commonly needed phrases that the tokeniser didn't ...

There are Python packages that are basically a PITA to get compiled into your virtualenv. The one I constantly hit when doing GStreamer, DBus, IBus, etc is gobject-introspection (a.k.a. gi). So, there's now a trivial package available:

source path-to-venv/bin/activate
pip install venvhpl
venv-hpl gi

So a few years ago, as I was working on a project called Listener that used PocketSphinx to allow dictation into the Eric IDE, I got some feedback suggesting that the only practical solution these days would be to use a neural network based dictation engine. That led me down a rabbit hole from which ...

Figured I'd try to update the old Dell 15" XPS with the broken keyboard as a machine for the kids to use as a desktop (for at-home schooling, etc) and do a bit of testing on the new release while I'm at it. The machine has been on 18.04, was updated and rebooted right before ...

So having finally written down the thoughts on a carbon tax, that kept distracting me from actually working on Open Source, I finally got a bit of work done on Open Source on the last night of the vacation.

What I started work on was getting a sampling profiler format supported, and for that ...

So if we (Canada) were to set flat carbon cost at a reasonable $.6/kg ($600/ton) instead of our current $.02 rising to $.05 in two years with the big polluters excluded, what would happen? Would it be effective at changing people's behaviour?

Fuel

• Crude would go up by $258/barrel (currently $60)
• Oil Sands crude up ...