Technical on Lance Orner

Restored Fire Info Websites

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My latest custom website for the Bug and Hawk Fires has gotten more attention, so I thought I’d dust off a couple of the earlier fire info sites I’ve built.

Getting Railroad Tycoon II Running on Modern Linux Without Steam

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to play Railroad Tycoon II Platinum on my Linux box, but I haven’t seen it running in a long time, even using Steam. Libraries have moved on, but this is a really old binary. I remember playing the original Railroad Tycoon on my Mac in 1991, and this update came out in 1998. I put a bunch of hours in both.

The title screen at 2048x1536 — the game's native 1024x768 output scaled 2x with nearest-neighbor filtering, so every edge stays hard.

Steam Version Requires Steam

The binary downloaded from Steam has an encrypted wrapper, so it only works in Steam. This wasn’t working, and it seemed a little harder to debug when it’s still attached to the Steam binaries.

Keeping an Unofficial Emergency Site Honest

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sixth day of the Bug Fire, and the site is still up. About 5,800 unique visitors have loaded it now. Dad is still at our place and the fire is past 88,000 acres and 15% contained.

I wrote yesterday about the format and the traffic. Someone on Hacker News asked the question I should have led with:

What steps are you taking to ensure there’s nothing inaccurate or harmful posted?

Two days of doing this and it turns out that’s the whole job. Building the page took an afternoon. Everything since has been deciding what it will refuse to say.

Bespoke Websites for Emergencies are an Active Thing

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday near Reno, NV, we had the “Bug” Fire expand rapidly due to heat and wind, and evacuation orders were issued by the County for several nearby neighborhoods. Facebook, Reddit, and Social Media were aflutter with pictures of the fire, questions about the evacuations, and people looking for info. Dad was affected, so he and the dog are now staying with us for a couple days. All is good for now.

Enumerating Every Cribbage Deal

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Claude and AI tools now make it possible to analyse problems that come up while playing cards at lunch. In Cribbage, given six dealt cards and you must discard two, what is the optimum play? Years ago, we thought about this problem, but running through all of the possibilities would take significant processing time. Now, I can do it in under an hour.

The below text is AI generated, along with the code. Just thought I’d get that out of the way. All of this came with my discussion with Claude Opus 5.0, and I had it work out the details. Claude is saying this better than I could anyway.