Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

That's me!

About Me

TL;DR: {web,mad,computer} scientist; {tech,scifi} writer; home{brew,roast}er; serially enthusiastic; he/him; mozillian

I don't like writing my own bio. So, I've been kicking around that too-clever thing above for the last decade or so. Seems like it's been a stable description, if you don't mind reading curly braces.

Tinkering with data & code is something I like much better than writing a bio. So, the rest of this page is a collection of my personal data exhaust and featured projects.

If you feel like it, drop me an email or a tweet or a toot — or find me in one of the other usual places below.

Project: Firefox Test Pilot

I'm a core contributor on the Firefox Test Pilot project. Test Pilot invites Firefox users to try out experimental features. We build the features as rapid prototypes and measure usage to help decide whether the feature might be worth inclusion in Firefox.

Project: Snooze Tabs

"Snooze Tabs help you focus your attention online, whether you want to remove distractions for now or save something for later."

It's also a Test Pilot experiment that I helped build—both to play with a new feature and to try out new APIs for building add-ons.

Project: Panic Ranger

Panic Ranger is my latest attempt at building a video game using web technologies. To really dig into things, I'm writing the engine mostly from scratch. It's not actually a game yet, though I'm having fun building little sketches and slowly working toward something game-like.

Project: Poke the Mongo

The summer when Pokémon GO came out, I was a bit obsessed. I also got hooked on tinkering with cartridges for the Pico-8 fantasy console. Put those two together, and I made a parody game from the pocket monster's perspective.

Project: lmorchard.com

The page you see right now is one of my most recent projects! I wanted to learn more about Webpack & React & static page generation. I've also neglected my lmorchard.com home page for many years. So, two birds from one egg and here we are!

Blog (blog.lmorchard.com)

Toots (@lmorchard)

just nowretooted
1 hour ago
Hah, one of my old MODs from college is in the archive https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=93393
1 hour ago
And then I remember my super-cringey May 1994 "interview" with Sidewinder for Amiga Report, which was kind of a showcase of my high school newspaper writing skillz
http://www.amigareport.com/ar216/p1-8.html
1 hour ago
Some days I really miss the Amiga MOD scene. Pawing through a pile of old tunes by Sidewinder
https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_artist_modules&query=69561&page=1#mods
2 hours ago
Still not quite recognizable, but it was suddenly important to me to try to have a Shaven Yak emojo
:yak: :yak: :yak: :yak: :yak:
2 hours ago
This is probably a terrible emoji: :yak:
2 hours ago
Does this do something cute?
:domo: :domo: :domo: :domo: :domo:

TT-RSS

3 days ago Sonny Bono Memorial Collection : Free Texts : Download & Streaming : Internet Archive
I do not understand why there is a Sonny Bono collection, or why it is so weird.
4 days ago Millennials Still Don't Know OG Transformers
submitted by /u/hakoman720 to r/funny [link] [comments]
4 days ago How do you dump the firmware from a "secure" voting machine? With a $15 open source hardware board
One of the highlights of this year's Defcon conference in Vegas was the Voting Machine Hacking Vill...
4 days ago Git!! States in my profile that unsolicited sexual nonsense gets posted here immediately. Guess he doesn't get it.
submitted by /u/stareatthesun009 to r/creepyPMs [link] [comments]
5 days ago A Church of the SubGenius documentary is in the works
Folks, there's going to be a documentary about that crazy cult/religion known as the Church of the S...
6 days ago Facebook Announces Oculus Go, a $199 Standalone VR Headset
Oculus is preparing its first all-in-one VR headset known as the Oculus Go. It's coming to a face ne...
1 week ago deeplearn.js
hardware-accelerated machine learning in the browser
1 month ago Photo
3 months ago New Data Finds Coffee Increases Lifespan: How to Take Full Advantage
British researchers just completed the largest study ever on the health impacts of consuming coffee ...
3 months ago Larry David Wears a Toga in a CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM Season 9 Teaser Video
We’ve known for about a year now that HBO’s beloved Curb Your Enthusiasm is on its way b...
3 months ago David Hasselhoff Will Star in a Far-Out "Guardians Inferno" Video
Just a few months ago, the world fell back in love with the galaxy’s most capable A-holes in James G...
6 months ago jadelyn: O.o o.O O.O
jadelyn: O.o o.O O.O

Twitter (Haunted Orchard 🎃👻)

4 days agoOne last thing before I lay off for the weekend - I'll ramble about things and post kitten pictures over here https://toot.lmorchard.com/@lmorchard
4 days agoRT @justkelly_ok: #WomenBoycottTwitter Friday, October 13th. In solidarity w @rosemcgowan and all the victims of hate and harassment Twitte…
4 days agoRT @fireantprincess: @linkshund eldritch masculinity
5 days ago@joe_no_body in my case, i freak out about what wasn't mentioned and then back to normally scheduled background radiation anxiety
5 days ago@ryanvis I might misunderstand, but that sounds like what many folks are doing with Twitter right now
5 days ago@ryanvis One of my hunches is that the "just works" and not doing tech support is the cost borne by people & friend… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/918549284949282816 …
5 days ago@botimer This is exactly how I want to treat Slack. Dip in, skim through, maybe comment but mostly just maintain some awareness

Github (@lmorchard)

2 hours ago submitted Pull Request #2964 to mozilla/testpilot: Simplify fix for isFirefox prop name collision in App component
2 hours ago created branch isfirefox-fixes on lmorchard/testpilot
3 hours ago pushed a24aa95 to mozilla/testpilot (master): Document the l10n merge, and update the email address to which release notifications are sent (#2941)
3 hours ago submitted Pull Request #2941 to mozilla/testpilot: Document the l10n merge, and update the email address to which release notifications are sent
4 hours ago pushed 0f1e0d9 to lmorchard/testpilot (2943-babel-polyfill): updates last seen date wasnt being checked for dialog (#2949)
4 hours ago watched tzapu/WiFiManager
5 hours ago commented on Issue #2873 in mozilla/testpilot: Fix the zap baseline scan

Pocket (@lmorchard)

5 days agoTesting DRAM Using an Arduino
A couple of weekends ago I was in the mood to do some retrogaming and didn’t know what I wanted to play so I asked for some suggestions from Twitter.
5 days agoA Program from a 35 Year Old Magazine for “BASIC Month” and a Chat with Its Author
July was BASIC Month over at r/Retrobattlestations and for that competition I decided to reach for my TI-99/4A and type in a TI Extended BASIC game called Pearl Harbor from the 1983 issue of Electronic Fun with Computers & Games…for the second time in 35 years.
1 week agoAn overview of Containers for add-on developers
Containers enable users to log in to multiple accounts on the same site simultaneously, and give users the ability to segregate site data for improved privacy and security. At Firefox, we have been working on Containers for quite some time.
1 week agoA Watershed Moment
In 2004, a blue-ribbon commission issued its report on the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Many lapses had allowed the plot to succeed, the report concluded, but the central failure was a lack of imagination.
1 week agoDeploying ES2015+ Code in Production Today — Philip Walton
Most web developers I talk to these days love writing JavaScript with all the newest language features—async/await, classes, arrow functions, etc.
1 week agoA Program from a 35 Year Old Magazine for BASIC Month and a Chat with Its Author
1 week agoThe rise of the internet's 'dirtbag left'
Earlier this year, a sloppily doodled MS Paint comic appeared on Reddit—the online news aggregator and so-called “front page of the internet”—juxtaposing images of 20th-century fascism with more modern symbols of far-right political thought.