There are secret messages flying all around you all the time, being transmitted via, most of the time, electromagnetic waves going from antenna to antenna.

ELOs “Secret Messages” is a song about posting conspiracy theories via WiFi.

But what if you need to get a few bytes from device A to device B (one of the hard problems in computer science!) and you don’t feel like making sure they’re both connected to the same network? Well, fortunately, another channel is available to us - sound, or for a more fun and less-audible experience, ultrasound.

Just like used to be the case with Twitter, there are a lot of very nice third-party apps for Mastodon. I’m not neccesarily very good at making those, or at least do not usually feel like writing good software for fun most days, but I do maintain Mastodon.py …

Today, I learned that PyScript exists. PyScript is, at its core, some rigging to make Pyodide, a WebAssembly port of the CPython Python interpreter, real easy to use as a proper client-side web scripting tool. Just include one <script> tag and now <script type="py"> is a valid thing you can have in your website. Put Python code inside of it, interact with the DOM, the works. I think that rules and/or is kind of horrifying, depending. Obviously, for me, the immediate question was: Can this run Mastodon.py? And the answer is: Yes, very competently.

Over the weekend starting on Saturday, the 8th of February 2025, the Baltic states’ electricity grid is switching from being synchronized with the Russian electric grid to being synchronized with the continental European electrical grid. This involves first disconnecting from the Russian grid, then operating a while as an island system, regulating the frequency alone and doing various tests, and finally, synchronizing frequency and phase with the EU grid and throwing the breaker. Which made me wonder earlier today: How hard would it be to watch the frequency changing?

I like Perry Rhodan a lot.

If you’re not German, and even if you are German, you might not have heard of Perry Rhodan, so here is a quick high level summary. Perry Rhodan is a German pulp magazine sci-fi series. It has, somehow, been in continous publication since 1961. It is still very much published as pulp issues - at time of writing, we’re on issue #3226. This makes it probably the longest continuous story ever written. The series is written collaboratively by many authors taking turns with overarching guidance from a core team.