Technical Innovations in Podcasting and Dynamic QR Codes

• * rathole*
• * pre-commit: install with uv*
• A good example of what functools.Placeholder from Python 3.14 allows
• Converted 160 old blog posts with AI
• Extras
• Joke

About the show

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Michael #1: rathole

• A lightweight and high-performance reverse proxy for NAT traversal, written in Rust. An alternative to frp and ngrok.
• Features
  • High Performance Much higher throughput can be achieved than frp, and more stable when handling a large volume of connections.
  • Low Resource Consumption Consumes much fewer memory than similar tools. See Benchmark. The binary can be as small as ~500KiB to fit the constraints of devices, like embedded devices as routers.
    • On my server, it’s currently using about 2.7MB in Docker (wow!)
  • Security Tokens of services are mandatory and service-wise. The server and clients are responsible for their own configs. With the optional Noise Protocol, encryption can be configured at ease. No need to create a self-signed certificate! TLS is also supported.
  • Hot Reload Services can be added or removed dynamically by hot-reloading the configuration file. HTTP API is WIP.

Brian #2: pre-commit: install with uv

• Adam Johnson
• pre-commit doesn’t natively support uv, but you can get around that with pre-commit-uv
• $ uv tool install pre-commit --with pre-commit-uv
• Installing pre-commit like this
  • Installs it globally
  • Installs with uv
  • adds an extra plugin “pre-commit-uv” to pre-commit, so that any Python based tool installed via pre-commit also uses uv
• Very cool. Nice speedup

Brian #3: A good example of what functools.Placeholder from Python 3.14 allows

• Rodrigo Girão Serrão
• Remove punctuation functionally
• Also How to use functools.Placeholder, a blog post about it.
• functools.partial is cool way to create a new function that partially binds some parameters to another function.
• It doesn’t always work for functions that take positional arguments.
• functools.Placeholder fixes that with the ability to put in placeholders for spots where you want to be able to pass that in from the outer partial binding.
• And all of this sounds totally obscure without a good example, so thank you to Rodgrigo for coming up with the punctuation removal example (and writeup)

Michael #4: Converted 160 old blog posts with AI

• They were held-hostage at wordpress.com to markdown and integrated them into my Hugo site at mkennedy.codes

• Here is the chat conversation with Claude Opus/Sonnet.

  • Had to juggle this a bit because the RSS feed only held the last 50. So we had to go back in and web scrape. That resulted in oddies like comments on wordpress that had to be cleaned etc.
  • Whole process took 3-4 hours from idea to “production”duction”.
  • The chat transcript is just the first round getting the RSS → Hugo done. The fixes occurred in other chats.

• This article is timely and noteworthy: Blogging service TypePad is shutting down and taking all blog content with it

• This highlights why your domain name needs to be legit, not just tied to the host. I’m looking at you pyfound.blogspot.com. I just redirected blog.michaelckennedy.net to mkennedy.codes

• Carefully mapping old posts to a new archived area using NGINX config. This is just the HTTP portion, but note the /sitemap.xml and location ~ "^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(.+?)/?$" { portions. The latter maps posts such as https://blog.michaelckennedy.net/2018/01/08/a-bunch-of-online-python-courses/ to https://mkennedy.codes/posts/r/a-bunch-of-online-python-courses/

  server {
      listen 80;
      server_name blog.michaelckennedy.net;
  
      # Redirect sitemap.xml to new domain
      location = /sitemap.xml {
          return 301 <https://mkennedy.codes/sitemap.xml>;
      }
  
      # Handle blog post redirects for HTTP -> HTTPS with URL transformation
      # Pattern: /YYYY/MM/DD/post-slug/ -> <https://mkennedy.codes/posts/r/post-slug/>
      location ~ "^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(.+?)/?$" {
          return 301 <https://mkennedy.codes/posts/r/$4/>;
      }
  
      # Redirect all other HTTP URLs to mkennedy.codes homepage
      location / {
          return 301 <https://mkennedy.codes/>;
      }
  }
  

Extras

Brian:

• SMS URLs and Draft SMS and iMessage from any computer keyboard from Seth Larson
• Test and Code Archive is now up, see announcement

Michael:

• Python: The Documentary | An origin story is out!

Joke: Do you know him? He is me.