All blogs / Software / engineering practice
Ratfactor Feed
Dave Gauer's personal website. Mostly technical articles.
- Posts
- 221 from 31 Oct 1996 to 21 Oct 2026
- Posting
- weekly (31 in the last year)
- Kind
- personal blog
- Feed
- http://ratfactor.com/atom.xml
2026 31
- A stack to calm the mind and stay on track
- Compound interest calculator
- How I got through my inbox in only two months
- Two month calendar format for pocket notebooks
- What should a personal website be?
- Cheese reviews
- Project Inbox 2026
- Ascetic Computing
- This too shall pass
- The First of a Double-Take
- Correction: Text FILES as a user interface
- A text editor as a user interface
- Finishing Things
- My home network observes bedtime with OpenBSD and pf
- OpenBSD Blog #13: Moving ratfactor.com to OpenBSD.amsterdam
- PkgBlog
- Better Hugo AsciiDoc HTML
- Loan payoff calculator
- Gear/tire ratio calculator
- Dave’s Fat loss calculator
- SHA-1 hash maker
- Source code columnizer
- UTF-8 to 4-digit escape sequence converter
- l33t-speak translator
- Miscellaneous
- Posix paradox
- Fitted sheet update: Unfolding a professionally folded fitted sheet!
- Dave's book review for The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
- A programmer's loss of identity
- OpenBSD Blog #11: Disabling Direct Rendering Manager
- How big is a Git commit?
2025 34
- LibreWolf
- JavaScript: Blank line scanning/parsing/lexing by hand vs regex
- Making things with cardboard!
- Dave's Paper Notes: A Tutorial for the Sam Command Language
- Make a Web Font Subset
- Using and Debugging a Web Font
- Why I Read Technical Books
- Faceclick: A lightweight Emoji picker with keyword search
- Ratfactor's Illustrated Guide to Folding Fitted Sheets
- Faceclick: A lightweight Emoji picker with keyword search
- JS "Fuzzy" Search (sequential matching with gaps)
- Htmlwarden
- Super Easy* 2-Stage Git Deployment
- Stack Display (cardboard desk toy for small paper notes)
- Store as HTML, Edit as LML
- Death to WYSIWYG!
- HTML WARDen (a wiki)
- SVG Sourcecode Shapes (A Little Ruby Script that can make a self-portrait in SVG)
- The Project Stack! (an actual paper stack)
- HTML WARDen
- Wiki weekend
- Small Programs and Languages
- Implementing a Forth
- Making a first Luanti mod: A new block type appears!
- A new Luanti section
- The One-Tree Website
- Forever Worlds
- Of CSS and Palm Oil
- I learned Snobol and then wrote a toy Forth
- Explanation of the Ratfactor Feed
- Snobol4th repo
- Go read Peter Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" and then come back and tell me that LLMs can replace human programmers
- Famsite - a tiny social site for families
- I'm an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don't speak for me
2024 8
2023 53
- Multiple Tools
- Fake Trees: Using Indents For Simpler UIs
- The Tale of this and the JavaScript developer
- Archive Your Projects!
- SVG Minifier in Ruby
- Interpreting if/else logic with a simple flat list of booleans
- The making of a T-shirt design for Eggnog Games / Maze Dog
- December Adventure 2023 (The Hiss Log)
- Hiss
- Meow5: The Conclusion
- rat-tools
- i386 Assembly Language trick for storing data in .text
- pumpkin.sh - a Halloween pumpkin for your terminal
- Making the Zig standard library readable - another go!
- Run sh
- Literate Programming
- RubyLit - This README is a program!
- Retro-Simplicity
- RepoRat
- Dave’s Code Repositories
- Ziglings has moved to Codeberg! (and ziglings.org)
- ** RSS Club ** | Reply Guys and the Orange Site
- Leaving GitHub
- The Ramp-Down
- Software I Use
- *DONE!* Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page
- MC2023 Chapter 5: Programming the Pico PIO
- I think Zig is hard...but worth it
- Temporal Workspaces
- Project Balance - how many to juggle?
- Dave's Paper Notes: Programming as Theory Building
- My reviews of comp-sci papers
- MC2023 Chapter 4: I2C and an OLED
- MC2023 Chapter 3: PWM with a servo
- MC2023 Chapter 2: Blinking, buzzing, events, PWM, and a great book
- ** RSS Club ** | nosurf4
- Do it the dumb way first
- Build It Twice
- Ziglings needed help and I got it!
- Retrov
- Three monitors with Linux (Slackware)
- Slackbuilds.org is pretty amazing
- zignew and zigswitch (Bash scripts)
- How I set up new computers with Slackware Linux
- Forth: The programming language that writes itself
- Hoo? A Tarot Deck and Game
- Vim Search Folding!
- ratlink
- Hoo? The Tarot Deck!
- MC2023 Chapter 1: Hello World and blinking LEDs
- minslides - Easiest Presentation Slides Ever?
- My Forth pages
- The Year of the Microcontroller
2022 31
- Dave's OpenBSD Blog 5. Tour conclusion
- Dave's OpenBSD Blog 4. Servers and X
- Dave's OpenBSD Blog 3. More!
- Eee PC 701
- Hoo? A solo journaling RPG
- Mr. Tree Goes Down
- Meow5: An Extremely Concatenative Programming Language
- ** RSS Club ** | Aaron Swartz
- Assembly Nights 2
- Woo! It's Done! nasmjf Forth
- ** RSS Club ** | When Hot Takes are Too Hot
- ** RSS Club ** | School vs Wikipedia (RANT WARNING)
- Auto-login in Slackware
- Linux Data Recovery - the stupid way!
- ** RSS Club ** | nosurf3
- ** RSS Club ** | AI vs Art
- Dave's OpenBSD Blog 1 - Installation, disklabels
- ** RSS Club ** | Hello Mastodon! (Goodbye Instagram)
- Needle Felting
- OpenBSD
- ** RSS Club ** | nosurf2
- Computers as Workspaces
- Das boot
- The Phased Approach
- Wordleshare
- Dave's Virtual Box of Cards
- Cards why
- Purpose
- My Notebook System
- Personal Linux Setup with Git Repos and Stow
- ** RSS Club ** | nosurf
2021 25
- ** RSS Club ** | Great Software Engineering Books Give Me Pain
- Hackin' Teardown
- Assembly Nights
- Dave's RP2040 Multitimer
- Htmx
- the Web
- right now!
- Let it Flow
- Slackware Apache Plus PHP-FPM
- ** RSS Club ** | Public Notes
- A Personal Timeline
- ** RSS Club ** | humans.txt
- ** RSS Club ** | Hello RSS Club!
- Dave's Raspberry Pi Zero Luggable
- Decode I2C data with an oscilloscope
- A browseable Zig standard library
- New Atom "RSS" feed!
- Wrote a toy Unix shell in Zig and wrote an article about it
- CSS Flexbox
- Cpp
- AsciiDoc
- Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
- Managing a family Minecraft server
- Learning Zig
- Re-learning Midnight Commander