Rob Sissons

I lost a won endgame and I want you to see it

A Lucena position I knew cold, and the one move on move 61 where I stopped asking which piece was supposed to move. Full annotation, clock times included.

218 hours on one galaxy

Three winters on NGC 891 from a Bortle 4 backyard. Full log, the square root maths on what each block of hours bought, and the 40 hours I deleted.

Postmortem: 43 minutes of 502s and one very confident regex

Our gateway returned 502 for forty three minutes because of a regex I would have approved too. Full timeline, the pattern, and the dashboard that lied to me.

You cannot buy a good square anymore

Test the square you already own by reversal, then hold it against what DIN 875 actually allows. Eight squares, my own measurements, one of them firewood.

four tape loops and a broken walkman

how i actually make loops out of cassettes. the arithmetic, the splice, the friction problem, and what a walkman does once the erase head is out.

Justified text on the web is a lie we agreed to

A browser fills one line and forgets it, then pays for the mistake in word spaces. Worked examples, what hyphens and text-wrap pretty really buy, and what I set.

The Bristol Channel and a very confused datum

Chart Datum at Avonmouth sits 6.50 m below Ordnance Datum Newlyn. Here is the arithmetic that goes wrong when a height file does not name its zero.

Rust removal, five methods, one winner

I sheared a rusty belt guard into five coupons and gave each one a different treatment. Times, costs, mass loss, and what each did to the metal underneath.

why everything i release is three forty seven

every piece i put out is 227 seconds long. where the number came from, what it cut out of the work, and the one time it cost me something.

A field guide to asking me for prose

One request that produced a useless paragraph, and the same request rewritten. Plus the move everybody teaches that changes almost nothing.