https://neilpa.me/ Recent content on neilpa.me Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://neilpa.me/2026-01-01-essential-sf-arkham-sampler-1949/ Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://neilpa.me/2026-01-01-essential-sf-arkham-sampler-1949/ A recent fixation of mine has been “collecting” book lists, looking for forgotten classics and hidden gems that don’t make it onto modern “best of” lists. Classics of Science Fiction and science fiction awards+ database (SFADB) have a number of lists that fit the bill. Today’s focus: “A Basic Science-Fiction Library” from The Arkham Sampler Winter 1949 issue. A symposium from twelve contemporary science fiction writers, editors, and aficionados, producing an aggregate list of 17 titles. https://neilpa.me/2025-12-29-a-year-in-reading-books-2025/ Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://neilpa.me/2025-12-29-a-year-in-reading-books-2025/ Following my reading list from last year, here’s the 2025 version. 58 books amounting to over 6M words for the year. The VirginianOwen Wister 2024-Dec-27 → 2025-Jan-05western | 132,517 words Enjoyed this slightly more than Riders of the Purple Sage. Classic brooding man western and love story. Source: Riders of the Purple Sage intro. The Satanic VersesSalman Rushdie 2025-Jan-05 → 2025-Jan-20fiction | 193,888 words This book is all over the place. https://neilpa.me/2024-12-28-a-year-in-reading-books-2024/ Sat, 28 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://neilpa.me/2024-12-28-a-year-in-reading-books-2024/ A couple years ago I saw a post on hackernews for Art Garfunkel’s Library. That triggered my listing tendecies so I started to track the books I read on a spreadsheet. While I somewhat agree with the top comment, this practice has greatly increased my reading frequency and retention. I’ve include some extra details to make this list mildly more interesting than a pure “checklist”. A short blurb that I wrote for most of the books when I finished them, and a few retroactive ones for this post. https://neilpa.me/2020-03-20-gh-actions-mac-windows-linux/ Fri, 20 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://neilpa.me/2020-03-20-gh-actions-mac-windows-linux/ Small example of setting up GitHub Actions to run on MacOS, Windows, and Linux with GitHub-hosted runners. In this case what a basic checkout, build, and test pass looks like in go. # <repo>/.github/workflows/main.yml name: CI on: [push] jobs: basic: runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }} strategy: matrix: os: [macos-latest, ubuntu-latest, windows-latest] steps: - uses: actions/checkout@v1 with: path: ./src/neilpa.me/<package> - name: Build run: go build ./... - name: Test run: go test . https://neilpa.me/2020-03-03-go-list-os-and-arch-targets/ Tue, 03 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://neilpa.me/2020-03-03-go-list-os-and-arch-targets/ Potential values for $GOOS/$GOARCH. $ go version go version go1.13.8 darwin/amd64 $ go tool dist list aix/ppc64 android/386 android/amd64 android/arm android/arm64 darwin/386 darwin/amd64 darwin/arm darwin/arm64 dragonfly/amd64 freebsd/386 freebsd/amd64 freebsd/arm illumos/amd64 js/wasm linux/386 linux/amd64 linux/arm linux/arm64 linux/mips linux/mips64 linux/mips64le linux/mipsle linux/ppc64 linux/ppc64le linux/s390x nacl/386 nacl/amd64p32 nacl/arm netbsd/386 netbsd/amd64 netbsd/arm netbsd/arm64 openbsd/386 openbsd/amd64 openbsd/arm openbsd/arm64 plan9/386 plan9/amd64 plan9/arm solaris/amd64 windows/386 windows/amd64 windows/arm source https://neilpa.me/2020-02-29-html-heading-size-defaults/ Sat, 29 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://neilpa.me/2020-02-29-html-heading-size-defaults/ The first post in a potential series to collect short snippets of web search results. This is an experiment to see if it helps better curate my notes. Also looking to for ways to reduce the barrier for writing/posting. h1 { font-size: 2.0em; /*32.0px*/ } h2 { font-size: 1.5em; /*24.0px*/ } h3 { font-size: 1.3em; /*20.8px*/ } h4 { font-size: 1.0em; /*16.0px*/ } h5 { font-size: 0.8em; /*12.8px*/ } h6 { font-size: 0. https://neilpa.me/2020-02-29-naive-ping-pong-motion-timing/ Sat, 29 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://neilpa.me/2020-02-29-naive-ping-pong-motion-timing/ The “ping-pong” in the title is catchy but a misnomer. The following derives the travel time across a line segment with max speed and acceleration. Starting from one of the endpoints and reversing direction at the opposite produces ping-pong-esque motion when repeated, hence the title. Note: Assumes max speed is actually reached but is easily adapted otherwise (0) This was derived from my $DAY_JOB1 so let’s use real values to motivate the example https://neilpa.me/2019-01-02-freebsd-uhk-panic/ Wed, 02 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://neilpa.me/2019-01-02-freebsd-uhk-panic/ I’ve been using FreeBSD on and off as my desktop OS for a couple months (after ~5 years on OSX/macOS). Overall, I like the simplicity and design of the system. However, there’s been a non-trivial amount of hacking and debugging to get some things working. Most recently I discovered that my new UHK keyboard causes a kernel panic when booting. Early in the boot process I was greeted with the following message (stack addresses omitted). https://neilpa.me/2018-12-07-mac-photos-library/ Fri, 07 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://neilpa.me/2018-12-07-mac-photos-library/ My photo collection is a mess. Getting it under control has proven a challenge in terms of de-dupe, metadata cleanup and just general organization. I’ve tried numerous photo management apps and online backup strategies over the years. That’s resulted in many different backups scattered across various thumbdrives and SD cards. One such backup is a snapshot of the *.photoslibrary folder from my MacBook. This is where the builtin Photos.app (formerly iPhoto) stores files and metadata. https://neilpa.me/2018-07-01-un-distracted/ Sun, 01 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://neilpa.me/2018-07-01-un-distracted/ It’s been almost four years since setting up this blog and it’s still empty. I’m sure living up to that “easily distracted” tagline. I plan to change this and actually make use of this space. I’ve got a decent backlog of material in various stages of complete. Hopefully some of it will make for good blog fodder. Assuming I can clean it up for publishing before getting distracted by some new shiny problem. https://neilpa.me/2014-10-26-hello-world/ Sun, 26 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://neilpa.me/2014-10-26-hello-world/ This is my blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine.