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.

Coyote in the Neighborhood

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve caught this coyote roaming the local street the past couple of weeks. Here are the last few clips of him.

The first one is from the morning of the 22nd, just after six. He comes in from the left past the mailbox, works his way across the top of the driveway at an unhurried walk, and is out of frame again inside about twenty seconds.

Download the video.

22 August, 6:17 AM.

Cropped in close, from the same morning:

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.

Bug Fire Information

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

https://bugfireinfo.com/

The Bug Fire is causing evacuations in my neighborhood this afternoon, and I wrote this to gather all of the links I have - the evacuation map, shelters, air quality, road closures. It is not an official page and it says so. It just points at the people who are official.

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.

Green Tomato Pickle Recipe Card

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is the Family Recipe for “Green Tomato Pickle”, which is mostly used as a topping for a pot of beans. Sweet, vinegary, and a bit of cloves.

I went through some old files, and found the oldest family reference to this recipe, from Great-Grandma Box herself, and it’s dated 1917.

My PetRecipe for Green Tomatoe Pickle

Take 8 lbs. green tomatoes + chop fine. Add 4 lbs brown sugar and boil
down 3 hours. Add 1 qt vinegar, 1 teaspoon each of Mace, cinnamon, cloves, and
boil 15 minutes longer. Put into jars and seal. Good on meats and beans. From
Mrs. Scott at Trinity Center 1917.

About Us

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 21:34:00 -0800

The Orner family, Thanksgiving 2024

Lance Orner currently works at Oracle as “Principle Member of Technical Staff” which is a fancy title for a Senior Software Engineer. Currently working on custom internal web applications using Python and Django to manage thousands of Oracle cloud assets, along with writing custom scripts and utilities to reports on asset management and issues.

Roby the Costerbot

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is from 2010. We were building little Adruino robots using CD platters as a platform. Sarah was fascinated.

When a Tree Falls in Stirling City

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

That time in 2013 when a cedar tree split and fell on the roof of my little house.

Link Portal

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Projects

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Sites I have built or help run.