By complete coincidence I ended up watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Friday (each for the first time) back to back this week. I watched Fast Times because it was being covered by Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson were covering it on Unspooled, their film podcast. As for Friday, well, that’s a slightly more convoluted story. Five Iron Frenzy, one of my most consistently favorite bands, was doing a Kickstarter for their new album. As part of promotion for the campaign, Reese Roper appeared on Mike Herrera’s podcast, The Mike Herrera Podcast. Herrera is the lead singer and songwriter for MxPx, a band I’ve been listening to off-and-on since 1996ish. The Roper episode led me to lookup MxPx’s latest release, MxPx. There’s a song on there called Friday Tonight that had some lyrics that didn’t make sense to me:

You may notice it’s been a while since I last wrote about programming. Well, a lot of the programming I was doing with the kids was due to having more time on my hands thanks to COVID. With Scarlett back in school full-time, there’s a lot less time for that as we focus on making sure she gets the most out of her education as well as teaching the twins to make up for not being in preschool this year. This has left me with reduced time for all my projects and entertainment (games, TV, and reading). Up until now that has meant the programming was put off to the side - kind of. Because I’ve been loving my exercises from the Python Morsels website and I’ll be talking about that when I get to the Python section. But first up, Ruby!

InvestiGators by John Patrick Green

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Read this to my four-year-olds and I found it to be a blast. Most of the word-play went over their heads. In fact, after finishing it with my four-year-olds, I recommended it to my 8-year-old. We’ll see what she thinks. This is definitely one of those books you can read with the kids and, if you like Dad Jokes and Puns, you’ll be enjoying it rather than wishing you were doing something else.

Jumpstarting the Onion Omega2 by Wolfram Donat

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A good intro to the Onion Omega2 and Omega2+ boards. Unfortunately, the Onion folks have changed their interface, making a large portion of the book no longer accurate. You can kind of work your way through it if you’re technical and have a history with Linux on embedded devices.

View all my reviews

Getting Started with Soldering: A Hands-On Guide to Making Electrical and Mechanical Connections by Marc de Vinck

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I haven’t soldered in at least a good 15 years, if not more. I couldn’t remember the technique and I didn’t want to mess up my components for a new project I’m working on, so I read this book. It does a VERY good job of walking you through the basics, including what to do when things get messed up. It even has an advanced chapter at the end for surface mount soldering. I would highly recommend anyone who’s either new to soldering or wants to renew their skills.

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 142 by Neil Clarke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An almost perfect issue (in terms of my tastes) in which I loved all but one of the stories. Here are my thoughts-per-story, which may have some more text than my status updates if I came up against character limits during updates:

Gubbinal: In a future where we’ve colonized Saturn’s moons, our protagonist hunts for artifacts created by self-replicating robots. The plot then shifts into something perhaps more fantasy than SF and ends in quite a fascinating way.

Jumpstarting the Raspberry Pi Zero W by Akkana Peck

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is a great introduction to creating electronics projects with the smallest raspberry pi at this time. Seriously, it’s the same size as an Arduino MKR board - like a stick of gum. I wish I’d read it before starting my raspberry pi adventures, because I learned a few tips, particularly for running headless. The author spots a good job providing code examples and a decent variety of projects. The wearable project is the most impractical when you compared to an adafruit flora, but still provides important information. Overall a great resource if you want to go the raspberry pi route for electronics hacking.

The Crimson Campaign by Brian McClellan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This trilogy is definitely turning out to be one of those 1 book broken up into 3 trilogies than a series of stories following the main characters. The last book was a slightly cleaner break, but still ended with a lot still unresolved. This one, on the other hand, ends on a cliffhanger….well on a cliff….a mountain. Almost nothing is resolved in this book. Although one of the plots was, thankfully, resolved; that’s a good thing because I don’t think the protagonist involved in that plot could take much more.

This post continues a series on exploring new browsers:

• Are Web Browsers getting exciting again?
• Vivaldi Part 1
• Vivaldi Part 2

Vivaldi

I’ve been meaning to get to this post for a while now, but the recent Vivaldi update blog post spurred me to go ahead and write it. Vivaldi continues to do a decent job for me on Windows. As I’ve been planning on posting, I don’t do much web browsing on Windows. It’s mostly just uploading videos to YouTube and looking up various sites related to the games I’m playing. Pretty much any browser could fit in there. That said, in Vivaldi’s blog post they have a video demonstrating their new pause mode and before they pause things, they have the tabs tiled. I had completely forgotten that was a thing! It would have changed the way I did my FunkWhale vs Ampache video. That is, of course, a common issue with Vivaldi (and its predecessor, Opera). It has a million features and if you aren’t always making use of them, it’s easy to forget about them.

One of the categories of software people often go to /r/selfhosted to ask about, is for software to host music. This has become even more important with the dissolution of Google Music and Amazon and others removing the ability to upload your own music to listen to. I’ve got some experience with both FunkWhale and Ampache, so I decided to create a video to compare and contrast the two.

https://youtu.be/0dBcKNoJAso