freeform goodness

My current obsession is rooibos tea, served with a teaspoon of heavy cream and lightly sugared. Really hits the spot towards the end of the workday.

:: 18:08
:: /entertainment/foodanddrink | [+]
::Comments (0)

As someone who lived through the Syndication Wars, I find this interesting.

I’m way older and balder than last time. I also have a 4-year-old, so I’m sitting this one out. It looks like a PyBlosxom plugin would be a Saturday afternoon project or so, but I don’t really have Saturday afternoons free anymore.

:: 17:24
:: /tech/computers/internet | [+]
::Comments (0)

Woke last night to the sensation of something scurrying across my abdomen. Swatted instinctively, felt a handful of… something. Carried it into the bathroom, hit the light, and found a dead centipede in my hand.

:: 11:44
:: /misc | [+]
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We really liked the way Jake’s birthday cake (from a little over 2 weeks ago) turned out.

:: 12:15
:: /personal/family | [+]
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We wish you all things merry and cuddly.

:: 11:27
:: /beauty | [+]
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As they will do.

:: 13:50
:: /personal/family | [+]
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This is adapted from an email I sent to an internal "gadget fan" mailing list at work in response to a question someone asked about controlling lighting electronically.

I went “simple” and I’m pretty happy with it.

I bought this bulb from Amazon.

It’s made in China and sold under several different brand names, most commonly “Flux” and “Magichome.”

You can get the WiFi RGBW version from Amazon (and a domestic seller) for ~$35.

If you feel comfortable shopping via Alibaba (I don’t) you could probably get it for ~$20.

There are several client tools for interacting with them. I’ve used one written in Go and an (easier to work with, IMO) one written in Python.

It doesn't do the dumb thing (UPnP on the open internet) so no, my light bulb isn't helping to bring down Twitter.

In addition, if you live in the iOS universe there’s a plugin that makes it work with Homebridge (and hence HomeKit.)

I can tell Siri to control my lights. Useless, but fun.

More practically, I wrote a Python script that turns on the lamp in my son’s room in the morning and gradually eases him up with subtle color changes.

It kicks off from a cron job running on a Raspberry Pi. (It doesn’t have to be a Pi, of course — any Linux machine or Mac would work.)

I’m sure it could be made to work from Windows, too, but that’s Somebody Else’s Problem. 😁

:: 19:57
:: /tech/gadgets | [+]
::Comments (0)

This gal is enormous, probably almost as big across as a nickel (not counting the legs.) There are always flies buzzing around the bush below this web, so I imagine she eats very well.

I hate flies more than spiders, who generally mind their own business, so I’m not going to bother her.

:: 15:42
:: /beauty | [+]
::Comments (0)

Micro Center is selling the Raspberry Pi Zero for 99¢ as a loss leader. I bought one, then spent another few bucks for a boot disk and a USB-to-Ethernet adapter and a minimal case. Total investment: about $15.

I’m using it as a Pi-Hole machine.

:: 15:44
:: /tech/computers/os/linux | [+]
::Comments (0)

I bought this sampler back in 1981, when I was 13 years old and had a paper route. It was a double vinyl LP for $2.99, which was quite a steal.

In retrospect, it was a pretty much all over the place musically, but then, so was I.

Someone mentioned this comp on Facebook a few months ago and I ended up looking it up on Discogs.

I decided to try to see how many of the tracks I could track down, 35 years later, and was pleasantly amazed to find that, with only a little work, I was able to find that every track was legally streamable. (Re-assembling this on Spotify, Tidal, or other services is left as an exercise for the reader.)

When you think about it, that’s pretty incredible: a compilation of new artists, selected specifically for their relative obscurity, and 35 years later all of the songs are easily available through the mechanisms most used by modern listeners to play music in their homes and on the go. What are the odds that a slate of 22 catalog artists from 1946 would have been available in 1981?

(Apple Music playlist link)

:: 17:12
:: /entertainment/music/streamingplaylists | [+]
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Burgers were roasted, corn was eaten, little boys played with bubbles.

Aunt Carolyn, Jacob, and Mommy.

:: 22:48
:: /personal | [+]
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We’ve got a ton of them, and more every day. Better make some homemade spaghetti sauce or something.

:: 15:59
:: /entertainment/foodanddrink | [+]
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Over the years, I’ve had various boxes around the house that you could consider a home server. Often, these were just my desktop machine doing double duty. Occasionally, they’d be some old semi-retired tower machine shoved under a spare table, gobbling frightening amounts of electricity with spinning drives and cooling fans making way too much noise.

It’s really funny to think that this ~$50 guy is really just as powerful as the >$100,000 “medium iron” HP-UX box I was sysadmining barely more than a decade and a half ago.

These handled the typical home server tasks: holding photos, music, backups, whatever. Serving media inside the house. For many years, this very weblog lived on home servers. With the advent of ubiquitous cloud storage, I’ve outsourced most of these tasks.

It’s still useful to keep some of these things within the home network. What doesn’t really make sense anymore is devoting floor space and lots of watts to some ugly, oversized tower.

Earlier this year I finally bought my first Raspberry Pi system. They’re basically teeny tiny Unix boxes (roughly the size of a pack of cigarettes) for hobbyists. They basically pack a smartphone-level SoC on a small board that can be deployed with minimal fanfare for all sorts of applications.

:: 18:25
:: /tech/computers/os/linux | [+]
::Comments (0)

:: 11:49
:: /personal/family | [+]
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Every now and then, you need to stress test your tools.

:: 16:16
:: /tech/computers/internet | [+]
::Comments (0)

:: 15:52
:: /photo | [+]
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The old landing page for this domain had been pretty much unchanged since the 1990s. The logo was gif file I’d created in (no joke) 1994. The original logo was done in Adobe Illustrator, but at some point I lost the master. The page was all done with tables, and in an age of large, high-DPI screens (and small mobile ones), it looked increasingly ridiculous.

I spent 5 minutes (seriously, and 3 of those were checking style tag syntax on w3.org) in my text editor and created a new version that uses CSS and SVG and should look fine in every modern browser, desktop and mobile. I didn’t bother using hacks to make it work in IE < 10 because, sorry, IDGAF.

I spent a few minutes autotracing the old gif file, pulled it into Graphic and spent a few more minutes cleaning it up. It’s pretty obvious which era was happening when I did the original:

I took the opportunity to tighten the tracking and make the grunge slightly less obnoxious. I hope it’s still identifiably itself:

Of course, now that we can render vectors in web browsers I made it freely scale with the page size.

You can see the end result here.

At some point I’ll redo the blog layout too. Baby steps.

:: 17:25
:: /administrivia/general | [+]
::Comments (0)

I don’t know if this is useful at all if you don’t subscribe to Apple Music, but I wanted to see how their new(ish) embedding/linking tools work. It’s also an excuse to share a few songs from what has been my favorite record label for a few years now, Ghost Box Records.

A Young Person’s Guide to Ghost Box Records - Dave Walker

:: 12:09
:: /entertainment/music/streamingplaylists | [+]
::Comments (0)