Christopher De Vries
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unnecessary.tech
Christopher De Vries
@unnecessary.tech
110 followers 220 following 250 posts
maker of unnecessary technology
maintainer of @auroraalert.bsky.social
he/him

https://unnecessary.tech
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unnecessary.tech
Sometimes I have trouble finding the words to describe it times. Luckily @michaelianblack.bsky.social finds the words.
December 10, 2025 at 12:41 AM
unnecessary.tech
Green northern lights behind a cloud taken from Fryeburg.
November 12, 2025 at 2:32 AM
unnecessary.tech
Its been hard to keep positive and not be overwhelmed by the cruelty in the world today. I try to remember there’s beauty in this world as well.
Mist rises over a lake before sunrise. There’s a island with pine trees poking out from the mist and some shoreline vegetation in the foreground. To the left is a small peninsula also covered in trees and reflected in the water below it.
November 4, 2025 at 12:26 AM
unnecessary.tech
Next time I attempt a multi day hike I’m going to do note practice hikes and pack a lot less. I was too worried about food and ended up eating only a fraction of what I brought. I also need to lighten my other equipment. I definitely have less carrying capacity than I did at 17.
A picture of part of the Appalachian Trail through Maine in the fall from the perspective of a hiker on the trail. The ground is covered in a dense carpet of leaves, but there are still a lot of green leaves in the saplings surrounding the trail. There is a tree trunk in the foreground and a felled trunk behind it.
October 15, 2025 at 1:46 PM
unnecessary.tech
I think I managed to parse those tzinfo files @lpil.uk . Still need a lot of cleanup and documentation.
verdandi:secunetics-code:time_now (main)> gleam run Compiled in 0.03s Running time_now.main New York: 2025-09-16 22:12:21 EDT Vevay: 2025-09-16 22:12:21 EDT Phoenix: 2025-09-16 19:12:21 MST Amsterdam: 2025-09-17 4:12:21 CEST London: 2025-09-17 3:12:21 BST Tokyo: 2025-09-17 11:12:21 JST Auckland: 2025-09-17 14:12:21 NZST Cairo: 2025-09-17 5:12:21 EEST
September 17, 2025 at 2:16 AM
unnecessary.tech
I tried Gleam because it has a friendly community, and I really like the language.
The unofficial pine tree and star Maine flag showing the standard pine tree in the center and the star, replaced by Gleam's logo Lucy, which is a pink star with a smiley face on it.
September 11, 2025 at 3:57 PM
unnecessary.tech
I just want to rest in the hammock!
Emergency alert that says “ FROM EINDHAM POLICE Gunman at large in North Windham. Shelter indoors, lock doors. Report suspicious behavior to 911. Last seen Windham/Raymond line. Stay inside. Tune to local news or Windham PD for updates.
August 15, 2025 at 8:23 PM
unnecessary.tech
I, for one, welcome our new computational overlords.
Colossus data center from “Colossus: The Forbin Project” (1970)
July 14, 2025 at 3:52 PM
unnecessary.tech
Smells like racism to me, but I’d really love it if any reporter could challenge him on what he means by “control.”
Tweet from Stephen Miller which says “NYC is the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration.”
June 26, 2025 at 1:38 AM
unnecessary.tech
I am overjoyed to have received a call out for my minor contribution to gleam 1.11. If you deploy containers to services like Cloud Run or Azure Container Apps this change can make your containers more responsive to scale down events.
Playing nicely with POSIX The Gleam build tool has a gleam export erlang-shipment command for compiling and preparing a project for deployment to a server or similar. It includes a script for starting the Erlang virtual machine and running the program, but unfortunately it was written in a way that meant that the program would not receive POSIX exit signals. Christopher De Vries has fixed this problem. Thank you Christopher!
June 3, 2025 at 12:46 AM
unnecessary.tech
Disappoint!
Satya Nadella and Elon Musk shooting the shit at Microsoft Build.
May 19, 2025 at 11:15 PM
unnecessary.tech
Is this really from @golden.house.gov? 1 in 3 of your constituents is on Medicaid [citation needed] and you can’t figure out if you should try to protect it? If only there was an opposition party to republicans!
Text message that says “Hi, it's Rep. Jared Golden. One in three people in Maine's 2nd District use Medicaid for health care, but the House GOP tax plan could take Medicaid away from millions of Americans. Should Medicaid be protected? Let me know at [url] Sources: KFF, CBO. STOP to optout The sender is not in your contact list.”
May 12, 2025 at 9:35 PM
unnecessary.tech
Literally every speaker at #CPAC.
February 22, 2025 at 2:32 PM
unnecessary.tech
Volodymyr Zelensky speaking in front of Ukrainian flags with the words, “ I’m here to chew bubblegum and keep Putin from gaining a foothold in Europe, and I’m all out of bubblegum.”
February 17, 2025 at 3:13 AM
unnecessary.tech
Age yourself with the first computer you used.
A photo of the Texas Instrument TI-99/4a computer.
February 17, 2025 at 1:42 AM
unnecessary.tech
A view from the Mountain Division Trail today.
A groomed snowmobile trail is shown going off into the distance ahead. To the left of the trail is a wooden fence and on both sides of the trail are trees. In the far distance in the direction in which the trail goes is a partially snow covered mountain. The sky is a blueish gray.
February 15, 2025 at 11:07 PM
unnecessary.tech
Nice end to a rough week.
A snow trail between pine trees. Snowmobile tracks are visible.
January 25, 2025 at 9:05 PM
unnecessary.tech
Everyone in the United States walking up today.
Couple in their pajamas with a toaster oven containing a block of evil.
January 22, 2025 at 12:35 AM
unnecessary.tech
People are out ice fishing on Lovewell Pond.
People in the distance with tents, ice houses, and four wheelers on a vast expanse of white. Behind them is the opposite bank of the pond and behind that the grey expense of the White Mountains. The sky is cloudy and darker than the snow covered pond.
January 18, 2025 at 5:48 PM
unnecessary.tech
Winter day in Fryeburg.
A snow covered fields in a New England intervale which is part of a small farm. In the distance are groups of trees and mountains. The solid gray of the sky gives way to the bare trees of the horizon below which can be seen the white snow-converted land. In the foreground is some brush surrounding a snowmobile trail.
January 11, 2025 at 8:41 PM
unnecessary.tech
I’m going to get the rust off these pieces of metal. Can anyone guess what they are from?
An assortment of rusty metal pieces in an aluminum bowl which includes a nut, a bolt, a washer, a round metal piece with a cylindrical pyramid protruding from it, a round metal piece with an upturned lip on one side, a piece shaped like a top hat with the top cut of, and a round piece with a large hole in it that has four spikes rising out of it forming what looks like a tiny bird cage with a hole in the bottom. At the top of the bird cage shaped one is a tube that is open on the and closed on the bottom.
December 7, 2024 at 7:43 PM
unnecessary.tech
Warning: Spoiler

I think today's #AdventOfCode problem (day 7) really shows off both the beauty of the Gleam language as well as the power of pattern matching on lists.
// The following gleam code is in this image: fn is_possible_part2(target: Int, values: List(Int)) -> Bool { case values { [] -> False [first, ..rest] -> is_possible_part2_acc(target, rest, first) } } fn is_possible_part2_acc(target: Int, values: List(Int), current: Int) -> Bool { case values { [] -> current == target _ if current > target -> False [first, ..rest] -> { is_possible_part2_acc(target, rest, concat(current, first)) || is_possible_part2_acc(target, rest, current * first) || is_possible_part2_acc(target, rest, current + first) } } } fn concat(x: Int, y: Int) -> Int { let xs = int.to_string(x) let ys = int.to_string(y) let assert Ok(r) = int.parse(xs <> ys) r }
December 7, 2024 at 1:22 PM
unnecessary.tech
This is how the day started. Up before dawn getting the smoker ready. Around this time I wonder if it’s worth it, but after eating it I realize it is.
A smoker comprised of a large metal cylinder whose axis is aligned horizontally, and a smaller metal cylinder also aligned horizontally to the right and slightly lower than the first. Both cylinders have hatches open. In the smaller cylinder there is some charcoal smoking in a starting chimney, and thermometer sits in the second cylinder. Eventually a turkey will be in the larger cylinder while charcoal will burn in the smaller one. Smoke will travel from the later to the former smoking the Turkey. It is very dark out and the photo is illuminated by a headlamp.
November 28, 2024 at 11:40 PM
unnecessary.tech
It started sleeting a bit, so I cut my hike a bit short.
A view of a small clear path down a hill in New Hampshire. It is well into fall so all the leaves are brown and most have fallen from the deciduous trees, but there are some pines that remain green.
November 25, 2024 at 2:09 AM
unnecessary.tech
Cloudy afternoon in Maine, but not too cold.
The sun tries to peak through the clouds above a row of tall pines in front of a small mountain. In the foreground is tall dead grass and a few pine shrubs.
November 23, 2024 at 9:46 PM