It was time to take some portrait shots of Scarlett. As I was getting set up, I decided that I wanted to try something new; something I’d struggled with before, but never been able to succeed at - a flash highlight of a black background. I’d seen Gavin Hooey use the technique to great success on his Adorama TV show on Youtube. But somehow I’d just never been able to get it to work well. So I decided to try and mess around with the setup before the photo shoot. Eventually, I found something that worked well for me. I think, reviewing the photos for the fifth time now, that as I have it set up, it works best for the closeup shots. For the 3/4 shots, it probably should have been either dropped a little lower or maybe pulled away from the background a bit more to spread it out a bit more. The setup looked like this:

It’s been 5 months since I last wrote about ELDonation Tracker, my software for tracking Extra Life donations for use during a livestream or VOD. I’ve been quite busy since then! First, I used Github pages to make a site for the software to make it a little easier for those who are just users and don’t intend to do any development. They don’t have to navigate Github to try and figure out how to get the program and use it. Then, by reading Serious Python I learned about Sphinx, which can automatically create documentation out of your docstrings. I also learned that all these “readthedocs” pages I’d seen springing up with all the projects I care about were leveraging the fact that readthedocs.io will use your Sphinx documentation to create hosted documentation. So now I have some great documentation for my software. Finally, it’s my SECOND bit of software to go up on PyPi:

I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation.

Public Radio

Radiolab – Heard about them because sometimes their stories are used on This American Life. Radiolab is a lot like TAL except with a much bigger focus on sound effects. It is, in a way, the descendant of the old radio shows of the 30s and 40s. (Approx 30-45 min)

Soleil by Jacqueline Garlick

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

It is a real bummer for me to give this book 1 star. I really enjoyed the first book in the trilogy. The second book was fun. But this book… kind of just felt like perhaps this series should have been a duology instead of a trilogy. While the first third or so was a good bit of fan service, it could have maybe just been a post-script novella? The rest of the book was just full of the introduction of all sorts of new rules and technology to the way the world worked that I didn’t think made sense in the third book of a trilogy. On top of that, the last chunk - from when our main characters end up in a canyon until the end just didn’t make any god forsaken sense. (view spoiler)[Who rebuilt the dead people? I kept thinking it was all going to end up being a dream or parallel universe or something (hide spoiler)]

Serious Python: Black-Belt Advice on Deployment, Scalability, Testing, and More by Julien Danjou

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an AWESOME book that has completely transformed the way I code in Python. That might sound like the opening to a parody review, but I’m being sincere. One of the best things about Python is that it has a low barrier to entry and it’s easy to get started programming. One of the worst things about Python is that it has a low barrier to entry and it’s easy to get started programming. I’ve been going through the past 15ish years with just a surface-level understanding of my favorite programming language.

Over the Wine-Dark Sea by H.N. Turteltaub

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the second time I’ve read this book, the first time being nearly 20 years ago when it first came out. A few key bits had stuck with me, like Menedemos’ womanizing and a battle at sea. But after 20 years, most of the details had faded, so it was almost like reading it anew.

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 134 by Neil Clarke

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wasn’t quite into this one as much as some other recent issues. Here are my reviews per story:

Prasetyo Plastics - Less of a traditional story and more of a meditation on unbridled capitalism that does not descend into a libertarian dystopia. Rather, it’s another that asks if we truly realize what we’re doing to this planet on a scale that we believe has never been attempted before.

Starswept by Mary Fan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I met Ms. Fan at Farpoint 2019 at her booth after seeing some of the panels she was on. We started talking about her books and I was intrigued and put this book and Stronger Than a Bronze Dragon on my To Read list. I also started following Ms. Fan on Twitter, and from getting to know her via tweet, she has put a lot of herself into this book: She went to college for music and has original compositions on her site: https://www.maryfan.com/songs.html. There are silks performances in the book and Ms. Fan is currently attending classes to get better at performing silk (Cirque de Soliel type stuff) routines.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been really improving my cooking by leaps and bounds thanks to America’s Test Kitchen’s books. They make sure recipes are perfect (or as near as can be) in terms of directions, ingredients, etc. They have truly spoiled me to the point that I often hate other cookbooks. But, as my wife says, you’re not truly cooking until you can just look at the ingredients in the house and come up with food on the fly. Or know how much salt the food needs by tasting it. So, after seeing Samin Nosrat’s Netflix show (which shares its name with this book), I added the book to my wishlist.

I wrote about GitQlient a while ago. A few days ago I got a GitHub notification that GitQlient had finally reached 1.0. Consequently, the author created an Appimage version of the client so I was finally able to try it without having to compile on my own. As I started taking screenshots for blog post, I realized that the points I wanted to make would be more easily made if I could show them via a video, so I made a video comparing the two.