It’s been mentioned a few times, but things were left in an unfinished state at the end of the second book. This novella, from April’s point of view, finally finishes things. McGuire does a good job portraying April’s alien state of mind as the world’s only Cyber Dryad. This seems to be one of the short stories/novellas that’s definite worth reading in publication order.
Up until now we’ve barely seen much of Amandine the Liar. We know that she is considered spoiled by The Ludiaeg and that Winterrose looks down at her. Toby’s relationship and desires to know her have changed as Toby has learned more about who she truly is and what her mother did to her (psychologically and physically). Well, she makes an appearance here and we realize that Toby is lucky she has not been too involved before.
Ark of Light (Victor Lavalle) - a bit of micro-fiction about using sci-fi to escape. Political of you consider when it was written. Potentially timeless otherwise. I thought it was a great example of what you can do in just a few pages.
How We Burn (Brenda Peynado) - this short story immediately made me think of China’s One Child policy taken to the extreme. It does a great job of showing the burden of being the only child with many prior generations depending on you.
It was pretty clear to me as soon as Toby and gang developed a cure for Elf Shot that it was going to cause a huge problem with the balance of power. I don’t know how true it is, but it’s accepted knowledge that the USA and USSR having nuclear weapons throughout the cold war prevented large scale war. (There were plenty of wars, but most of them were civil wars that the USA and/or USSR gave support to - or participated in) In the same way, removal of the ability to simply send your rivals to sleep for a while would definitely cause problems.
What I really liked about this book: At the end we got a bunch of POV chapters, not just Rierson.
What I really hated about this book: The use of the trope where if people will just take time to talk to each other instead of being cryptic (or following up if things are busy) then things would go better for the protagonists. I know sometimes we need certain tropes “so the plot can happen!” (to paraphrase Pitch Meeting YT) but this one is just SO annoying and seems the most unlike real life. If something is that important - like lives on the line important - then you keep following up.
A fun short story that shows us how Patrick and Dianda met. As far as I can tell, it’s completely optional - nothing key learned - but it’s a ton of fun.
This one’s a bit longer than most of the other short stories. It’s great to get into Quentin’s head, given what we learned in recent books. It also helps explain why, after the adventure with Arden, his parents didn’t immediately recall him. It’s also fun to see how Quentin sees the others.
Since the previous book ended the first cycle, this one doesn’t move to answer a few of the remaining mysteries - what will the night haunts want in return? Where is August? Where is Amy? Will October and Sylvester reconcile? But this book does tie off one loose end from the last cycle as things move to Portland, OR for this book.
I think the Tybalt-based short stories are my favorites. I love when McGuire writes from his point of view. In fact, for all the short stories, while it’s nice to get more backstory on the October Daye universe, what I love most is getting to be in the headspace of different characters.
This short story takes place before anything else in the timeline (at least so far). It explains a lot, but should definitely not be read until this point in the narrative (that is, don’t read it until after October Daye #8).
If it sets up any new plot points, I couldn’t see them, but it does provide backstories for a few of the histories we’ve heard until now. SO FAR, of all the short stories this one seems the most skippable. We’ll see if time proves me wrong.
Seanan McGuire mentions that this book is what all the previous books have been working towards. I believe McGuire. This book truly does feel like the end of an era for Toby. Almost every single plot from the first book to the last one is touched upon as we finally (FINALLY) start getting answers about Toby’s life and why all the fae in her life act the way they do towards her. Of course, it’s an October Daye book so triumph comes with tragedy, pain, and sadness.
We saw bits of this in the last full book and now we get to see the whole scene. This is much shorter than other short stories so far, definitely worth reading, because I think it’s probably going to be important for the setup going forward.
Another short story about Tybalt’s past. It picks up a while after the last short story. We learn yet another bit about what things were like for him and why he acts the way he does with October Daye. It also builds on what we’ve learned about Selkies in both mainline book One Salt Sea and short story In Sea-Salt Tears. So, definitely read those first if you want to get the most out of this short story.
The Men Who Change the World (Christopher East) - this story gives me serious “Severance” vibes, but it was written before that show came out. I think there was something in the air they were both tapping into.
All Together, Now (Jason Hough and Ramez Naam) - even though we know where the story is headed, it still managed to surprise me in the final paragraph. Because humanity doesn’t change, this remains so relevant today as so many civilians die to try and kill a small enemy
When I saw that this book topped the lists for most checked out book in 2023 in multiple library systems my curiosity was piqued. But it was this episode of Our Opinions are Correct that pushed me over the edge into getting this book. Boy am I glad I did!
How to describe this book? One of my thoughts was Ender’s game meets Harry Potter, but with college kids. But then I cam up with a better comparison: RF Kuang’s Poppy War Trilogy (first book: The Poppy WarThe Poppy War, but with Western settings. Is it dark academia? I’m not sure. I was a kickstarter funder for a few dark academia anthologies, but haven’t read them yet. No matter how it’s classified, it does (eventually) have some really graphic sex. Like, the beginning of the book has a warning about all the violence and how graphic the sex is. I think if you’ve read a romance book before, it’s probably nothing you haven’t heard before. But if you’re used to the usual sex scenes in SFF, this is quite a bit more.
Science Fiction
———————
The Concubine’s Heart (Matthew Bright) - I could not even Begin to predict the turn the story would take. It was quite a fascinating story. I wonder at the culture (a sort of sci-fi Chinese culture) that would lead to the events in the story. Very well done.
Her Appetite, His Heart (Dominica Phetteplace) - a continuation of the world we first saw in “One Thousand Beetles in a Jumpsuit” back in Lightspeed #111. Interestingly, most of the story is a character study and it’s not until the end of the story where we see the consequences of the events of the previous story.
I’m usually not a fan of the middle books in planned trilogies. They often can’t resolve anything because most trilogies are just one gigantic book split into three. While that’s also somewhat true in this book, McClellan has done a great job giving us a mini try/fail cycle that makes this book pretty satisfying on its own. We learn a TON about Ka-Poel. There’s also a good amount of character growth for Vlora and Ben Styke.
This strange, COVID-filled year was the year WorldCon was local to me, so I figured it was the best time to check it out. I didn’t need to pay for a hotel or flight, just a few days of parking and metro line fees. Overall, I thought it was fine. I enjoyed the panels I attended, especially when Scalzi read from his upcoming book, Kaiju Preservation Society. But I didn’t become a convert like the folks at the First Time Attendees panel who have been attending for decades. Outside of that, I had a few thoughts about my experiences this year:
I enjoyed all the stories but one on here - the one about the pick-lock. One of my favorites turned out to be the last one, which I think is the shortest story. But the there’s still a very compelling story told. I was disappointed with the GRRM story because I thought it was going to be an original short story. It just just part of a Dany chapter from ASOIAF. But, on the plus side I got to compare how it’s different from the HBO show, I got to see that I enjoy the way GRRM writes, and it was my favorite part - when Dany reveals to the Astaporians that she understands Valarian. As I mentioned in my updates, I enjoyed the Conan story and other than the vocabulary being a bit more formal, not much gives away that it was written 70-80 years ago. Also, having just read Gail Simone’s first Red Sonja arc, it was neat to see one of the stories call out Red Sonya (who Sonja is based on). Other top story was the one with the “Chinese” soldier. But really, lots of them were great.
It’s been mentioned a few times, but things were left in an unfinished state at the end of the second book. This novella, from April’s point of view, finally finishes things. McGuire does a good job portraying April’s alien state of mind as the world’s only Cyber Dryad. This seems to be one of the short stories/novellas that’s definite worth reading in publication order.
Up until now we’ve barely seen much of Amandine the Liar. We know that she is considered spoiled by The Ludiaeg and that Winterrose looks down at her. Toby’s relationship and desires to know her have changed as Toby has learned more about who she truly is and what her mother did to her (psychologically and physically). Well, she makes an appearance here and we realize that Toby is lucky she has not been too involved before.
It was pretty clear to me as soon as Toby and gang developed a cure for Elf Shot that it was going to cause a huge problem with the balance of power. I don’t know how true it is, but it’s accepted knowledge that the USA and USSR having nuclear weapons throughout the cold war prevented large scale war. (There were plenty of wars, but most of them were civil wars that the USA and/or USSR gave support to - or participated in) In the same way, removal of the ability to simply send your rivals to sleep for a while would definitely cause problems.
A fun short story that shows us how Patrick and Dianda met. As far as I can tell, it’s completely optional - nothing key learned - but it’s a ton of fun.
This one’s a bit longer than most of the other short stories. It’s great to get into Quentin’s head, given what we learned in recent books. It also helps explain why, after the adventure with Arden, his parents didn’t immediately recall him. It’s also fun to see how Quentin sees the others.
Since the previous book ended the first cycle, this one doesn’t move to answer a few of the remaining mysteries - what will the night haunts want in return? Where is August? Where is Amy? Will October and Sylvester reconcile? But this book does tie off one loose end from the last cycle as things move to Portland, OR for this book.
I think the Tybalt-based short stories are my favorites. I love when McGuire writes from his point of view. In fact, for all the short stories, while it’s nice to get more backstory on the October Daye universe, what I love most is getting to be in the headspace of different characters.
This short story takes place before anything else in the timeline (at least so far). It explains a lot, but should definitely not be read until this point in the narrative (that is, don’t read it until after October Daye #8).
If it sets up any new plot points, I couldn’t see them, but it does provide backstories for a few of the histories we’ve heard until now. SO FAR, of all the short stories this one seems the most skippable. We’ll see if time proves me wrong.
Seanan McGuire mentions that this book is what all the previous books have been working towards. I believe McGuire. This book truly does feel like the end of an era for Toby. Almost every single plot from the first book to the last one is touched upon as we finally (FINALLY) start getting answers about Toby’s life and why all the fae in her life act the way they do towards her. Of course, it’s an October Daye book so triumph comes with tragedy, pain, and sadness.
We saw bits of this in the last full book and now we get to see the whole scene. This is much shorter than other short stories so far, definitely worth reading, because I think it’s probably going to be important for the setup going forward.
Another short story about Tybalt’s past. It picks up a while after the last short story. We learn yet another bit about what things were like for him and why he acts the way he does with October Daye. It also builds on what we’ve learned about Selkies in both mainline book One Salt Sea and short story In Sea-Salt Tears. So, definitely read those first if you want to get the most out of this short story.
The previous entry in the series introduced us to the dangers of Goblin Fruit. It’s an intoxicant that blisses out purebloods, but leaves changelings and humans dangerously addicted (even after only one taste) until they die. This book is about October dealing with that threat to the non-pureblooded community in the San Francisco area. It quickly spirals out from there because, of course it does when October Daye is involved.
McGuire makes use of all we’ve learned about the fae and all the characters we’ve met to produce a great bit of detective fiction here. We also get some character growth for October. That’s always a great thing in a long-running series to keep it from getting boring.
I don’t want to ruin the plot so I’ll keep this short, but a couple little random notes:
There’s a reason Seanan McGuire has stated that their preference for the reading order is published order. This story takes place before any of the other mainline books thus far, but it would be a spoiler for book 5 to read it before then.
McGuire knows how to write tragedy - it’s evident in the October Daye books and the Wayward children series. The world is an unforgiving place and the same is true in her books. They aren’t good books to escape the brutality of the world. But they ARE good books to empathize and sympathize with others who may be going through similar problems as you are. She writes universal themes through a fantasy lens and really brings the emotional response out of the reader.
The latest Wayward Children book gives us Nadya’s backstory. She was mostly a secondary character in the main series, but since she did get an ending in a prior book, it was nice to see her backstory. Well, I say “nice”, but as usual these stories are emotional roller coasters. Most kids don’t find a door if everything is perfectly awesome in their lives. As usual McGuire has cutting insight into the ways that adults can be cruel to children, often without realizing it.
It’s been a while since I posted a book review on here and rather than have a whole bunch of book review posts, I thought I’d collect the most recent ones into this post.
I listened to the audiobook, so, in all likelihood, I’m going to mispell everyone’s names
As I said with the first entry in this series, Yarros does a great job writing a compelling fantasy story. The romance is there, but it’s not what brings me into the story. We’ll get back to that momentarily. The best thing I could say about novel is that when I got to the end, I was upset that I have to wait until some time next year to continue the story. Yarros gives us a complete story (well, 2 of them - more on that as well) and does leave us with quite a compelling reason to come back, but even without the events of the last chapter, I would be there for the aftermath of the macro events of this book. If you need another reason to get into this book before I get to the details - there were multiple moments where Yarros had me reacting strongly to events in the book - like the precursor feeling to crying. Usually this involved Violet’s squad mates, but the penultimate chapter (not including Xaden’s epilogue) with the Sorengale family - I almost had to pull off the road for a moment.
Ark of Light (Victor Lavalle) - a bit of micro-fiction about using sci-fi to escape. Political of you consider when it was written. Potentially timeless otherwise. I thought it was a great example of what you can do in just a few pages.
How We Burn (Brenda Peynado) - this short story immediately made me think of China’s One Child policy taken to the extreme. It does a great job of showing the burden of being the only child with many prior generations depending on you.
The Miracle Lambs of Minane (Finbarr O’ Reilly) - The story has an indirect way about it that I usually don’t care for, but this time it works for (and is almost key to) the story. There’s always a potential conflict between what society declares is good and right and what works for any given individual. This story tells of a future just slightly past where we’re at and how folks have to deal with an age-old situation. It goes to show that SF doesn’t have to be about robots and space and The Internet.
The Men Who Change the World (Christopher East) - this story gives me serious “Severance” vibes, but it was written before that show came out. I think there was something in the air they were both tapping into.
All Together, Now (Jason Hough and Ramez Naam) - even though we know where the story is headed, it still managed to surprise me in the final paragraph. Because humanity doesn’t change, this remains so relevant today as so many civilians die to try and kill a small enemy
Valerie Valdes continues the Gen X/Millenial pastiche that the Chilling Effect in this third, and final, entry.
A few of the references across the trilogy:
- Voltron
- Portal (from previous books)
- Smash Bros (crash sisters)
- Death Star-like weapon
- Solid snake reference?
- Transformers
- Pokemon (in previous books)
-Captain Planet
Sometimes the references are just in the chapter titles and other times they are important plot points. The insane thing is that this WORKS for three whole books! You may or may not shake your head, but this doesn’t feel like Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs. This feels like a real, cohesive universe. It’s not jokey (although it’s not overly dramatic). I don’t know how Valdes pulled this off.
Science Fiction
———————
The Concubine’s Heart (Matthew Bright) - I could not even Begin to predict the turn the story would take. It was quite a fascinating story. I wonder at the culture (a sort of sci-fi Chinese culture) that would lead to the events in the story. Very well done.
Her Appetite, His Heart (Dominica Phetteplace) - a continuation of the world we first saw in “One Thousand Beetles in a Jumpsuit” back in Lightspeed #111. Interestingly, most of the story is a character study and it’s not until the end of the story where we see the consequences of the events of the previous story.
First off, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy listening to the science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod. Today I listened to episode 949, A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls. Large Language Models (LLMs), what we have colloquially called AI for the past few years, have been a giant source of wonder and consternation in the world. AI in general has long been a topic for science fiction, but this short story tackles the current LLM version of AIs. I found it to be a very fun episode that is a master class in providing a huge amount of backstory without an exposition dump. I don’t want to spoil anything about this story, but they naturally drop all these background details about the world that make me want more stories in this universe. It also has a fun, light tone to it. I highly recommend you either listen or read (the full text is available at the episode link above)
When I was looking at my SFF magazine covers on Calibre-web, I noticed there seems to be somewhat of a house style to the images chosen for the covers. I know I could write a python program to give me a definitive answer, but I’m not currently in the mood for that. So here’s what I saw as the main theme for each of the magazines I’m subscribed to:
Lightspeed Magazine
The main impression I get with the covers (from the issues I own) is that a successful Lightspeed Magazine cover has orange in it.
This strange, COVID-filled year was the year WorldCon was local to me, so I figured it was the best time to check it out. I didn’t need to pay for a hotel or flight, just a few days of parking and metro line fees. Overall, I thought it was fine. I enjoyed the panels I attended, especially when Scalzi read from his upcoming book, Kaiju Preservation Society. But I didn’t become a convert like the folks at the First Time Attendees panel who have been attending for decades. Outside of that, I had a few thoughts about my experiences this year:
(warning: This whole review is full of spoilers!) When I first heard about this book I thought about it in the same way that I thought of the Battleship movie. The Red Shirt joke is a fun joke that’s been parodied endlessly. But is it enough to sustain a book? Yes, and it works because of the way that Scalzi does it. He essentially turns it into a space version of Stranger than Fiction. The characters learn quite quickly that things are a little off and that some of the individuals on their ship appear to be impervious to death. They act with a realistic amount of skepticism until too much evidence mounts for them to be able to ignore the idea that something screwy is going on.
Wrote this over the course of a few days as a creative exercise.
----
“¡Carajo Coño!” he muttered under his breath as he ran. His wife had just started to get into the mood when the call had come in. It was on the mobile that he never turned off, not even during moments of planned intimacy. He’d had no choice but to answer and, despite her threats of finding electromechanical means of satisfaction, he was forced to bolt out the door. “¡Coño!” he wagered to utter a little louder, he had left so quickly he only had the small pistol that was always in his right pocket. He hoped it wouldn’t matter.
Ark of Light (Victor Lavalle) - a bit of micro-fiction about using sci-fi to escape. Political of you consider when it was written. Potentially timeless otherwise. I thought it was a great example of what you can do in just a few pages.
How We Burn (Brenda Peynado) - this short story immediately made me think of China’s One Child policy taken to the extreme. It does a great job of showing the burden of being the only child with many prior generations depending on you.
The Miracle Lambs of Minane (Finbarr O’ Reilly) - The story has an indirect way about it that I usually don’t care for, but this time it works for (and is almost key to) the story. There’s always a potential conflict between what society declares is good and right and what works for any given individual. This story tells of a future just slightly past where we’re at and how folks have to deal with an age-old situation. It goes to show that SF doesn’t have to be about robots and space and The Internet.
The Men Who Change the World (Christopher East) - this story gives me serious “Severance” vibes, but it was written before that show came out. I think there was something in the air they were both tapping into.
All Together, Now (Jason Hough and Ramez Naam) - even though we know where the story is headed, it still managed to surprise me in the final paragraph. Because humanity doesn’t change, this remains so relevant today as so many civilians die to try and kill a small enemy
Science Fiction
———————
The Concubine’s Heart (Matthew Bright) - I could not even Begin to predict the turn the story would take. It was quite a fascinating story. I wonder at the culture (a sort of sci-fi Chinese culture) that would lead to the events in the story. Very well done.
Her Appetite, His Heart (Dominica Phetteplace) - a continuation of the world we first saw in “One Thousand Beetles in a Jumpsuit” back in Lightspeed #111. Interestingly, most of the story is a character study and it’s not until the end of the story where we see the consequences of the events of the previous story.
First off, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy listening to the science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod. Today I listened to episode 949, A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls. Large Language Models (LLMs), what we have colloquially called AI for the past few years, have been a giant source of wonder and consternation in the world. AI in general has long been a topic for science fiction, but this short story tackles the current LLM version of AIs. I found it to be a very fun episode that is a master class in providing a huge amount of backstory without an exposition dump. I don’t want to spoil anything about this story, but they naturally drop all these background details about the world that make me want more stories in this universe. It also has a fun, light tone to it. I highly recommend you either listen or read (the full text is available at the episode link above)
What I really liked about this book: At the end we got a bunch of POV chapters, not just Rierson.
What I really hated about this book: The use of the trope where if people will just take time to talk to each other instead of being cryptic (or following up if things are busy) then things would go better for the protagonists. I know sometimes we need certain tropes “so the plot can happen!” (to paraphrase Pitch Meeting YT) but this one is just SO annoying and seems the most unlike real life. If something is that important - like lives on the line important - then you keep following up.
It’s been a while since I posted a book review on here and rather than have a whole bunch of book review posts, I thought I’d collect the most recent ones into this post.
I listened to the audiobook, so, in all likelihood, I’m going to mispell everyone’s names
As I said with the first entry in this series, Yarros does a great job writing a compelling fantasy story. The romance is there, but it’s not what brings me into the story. We’ll get back to that momentarily. The best thing I could say about novel is that when I got to the end, I was upset that I have to wait until some time next year to continue the story. Yarros gives us a complete story (well, 2 of them - more on that as well) and does leave us with quite a compelling reason to come back, but even without the events of the last chapter, I would be there for the aftermath of the macro events of this book. If you need another reason to get into this book before I get to the details - there were multiple moments where Yarros had me reacting strongly to events in the book - like the precursor feeling to crying. Usually this involved Violet’s squad mates, but the penultimate chapter (not including Xaden’s epilogue) with the Sorengale family - I almost had to pull off the road for a moment.
The team arrived at Moonlight where the scrawler dropped them off in the middle of town. The old orc and Silgre both also got off the Scrawler. After a brief conversation, the adventurers decided to go to the mayor’s house first. There they were hired to rid the town of kobolds. They agreed on a payment of 25GP per person and 3 nights room and board paid at the tavern.
If you’ve been reading my blog for the last few months, you know that I have fallen in love with the TTRPG publisher Kobold Press, creators of Tales of the Valiant. They recently held their second virtual convention, KoboldCon. I wanted to write up a quick review of what is effectively my first TTRPG convention.
First of all, the virtual aspect of the convention. During the COVID pandemic convention season (2020-2021), I attended quite a few virtual conventions - usually programming language conventions like PyCon. Many of those attempted to recreate the physical aspects of the convention like having virtual hallway tracks and profile areas where you can get to know your fellow attendees. Kobold Press went for a lower tech solution, but one that I think worked perfectly for what they were trying to do.
The adventurers had been working with Kylana for the past month to try and figure out how the mycaloid water source was poisoned. A gnome arrived with a wedding invitation for Ariana from her college friend, a gnome named Favienne Northcord. The wedding is in a town called Moonbright. It’s far enough away that they decide they will take a scrawler to get to the town.
As they are waiting at the ticket booth to purchase a ride on the scrawler, two dwarves show up looking beaten up. They tell the townsfolk that there are some goblins attacking all wagons headed into the town. The mayor tells the adventurers that if they help eradicate the goblins, their tickets on the scrawler will be covered. The team agrees to deal with the goblins.
I’m the forever-GM for our house. The kids prefer for me to GM and I don’t know anyone in person who can match my schedule for a regular game and who wants to take on the GM responsibilities. When one of my players from last week’s New Gamemaster Month game wanted to host their own game, I jumped at the chance to be a player. Also, I wanted to repay their kindness for being in my game.
January flew by and it was time to read the last two lessons before running the game as the capstone project for this class. Tuesday’s generic lesson was about gathering what you need to run the game. I didn’t really learn anything with that lesson, although I did like the acknowledgement that VTTs can offer some benefits over in-person play. The Tales of the Valiant part of the lesson included links to the character sheets as well as their ToV extra Lineages and Heritages PDFs for free (normally ~$3-$5 each).
The first time I played D&D my brother, the Dungeon Master, did the math for me. Later, when I was ready to start serving as the dungeon master for my kids we had dndbeyond. The character creator on dndbeyond does a great job of bringing together information from across the Players Handbook into one easy to use location. Since the web app is doing the math for the player, it’s easy to select various different options and see how the changes ripple through the system and result in different bonuses to the characters. It wasn’t until late last year when I was getting ready for Tales of the Valiant that I had to do character creation manually. (Kobold press does not maintain an automated character creation app) It took a LOT longer (as does leveling up), but I think it’s worth doing it at least once. (If not making it your default)
The only constant in the universe is change and so of course I should come to tabletop roleplaying games right when there’s a big shift. Dungeons and Dragons 5e came out in 2014, but I didn’t know that when I picked it up about 2 years ago at the behest of my kids. And it was D&D instead of Pathfinder because that’s what my brother had introduced them to at Christmas the year before. As soon as I spend a bunch of money on the big three source books (Players Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide) they decide to revamp the game in 2024. Perhaps learning the (right? wrong?) lesson from D&D 3.5, they don’t christen this new version as 5.5e. The publisher, Wizards of the Coast, goes to great lengths to say that the game is both backwards and forwards compatible. That is, old adventures will work with new 2024 characters. New adventures (or at least recently published ones) will work with 2014 characters and monsters. Somehow in all that chaos I also found and became interested in Kobold Press’ Tales of the Valiant. Tales of the Valiant is a fork (in the free and open source sense of the word) of the 5e system. For now it remains highly compatible with D&D 2024. The forks may eventually diverge, making Tales of the Valiant the Pathfinder (which split off from D&D 3.5) of this generation. (The fork happened because of the OGL license scandal of 2023 when Wizards of the Coast attempted to change the terms of the deal. What I found interesting is that there was a certain feeling in the air - either among the players or the developers - that led to a lot of convergent evolution in both D&D 5.5e and ToV despite the ways in which they are different. (quick disclaimer to say that this isn’t a post about which is better or which you should play, just what I’ve noticed is different)
New Gamemaster Month continued this week by building on the idea of the encounter. Tuesday’s blog post defined an encounter and the homework was to read Homework to read Encounter and Spell Casting pages from Tales of the Valiant (pp221-245). Also read ch 1 of Guide to Labyrinth. (This gave me many new ideas for my Midgard campaign). Thursday’s blog post and homework were to think about the atmospherics of the encounters.
I honestly cannot remember what made me decide to check out Tales of the Valiant as an alternate 5e ruleset. But we decided to check it out and start our first Tales of the Valiant campaign. If I have my way, this will end up being our longest running campaign. Time will tell.
Character Introduction
Appaluna Harrietdaughter (Female Human Warlock)
Stats
Heritage: Vexed
Background: Courtier
28 years old
6 feet tall
Brown eyes and hair. Caucasian skin color.
Backstory
Appaluna was born to a noble family. She grew up in comfort, but was often bored and unhappy. When she was 20 she made a deal with an otherworldly creature. Some of the maids found out, and word got out that Appaluna had made a deal with the devil. Appaluna was cast out of the court in disgrace, and now works to try and earn enough money to buy her way back to nobility.
As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class.
On Tuesday our homework was to learn the rules of Tales of the Valiant and watch the creators of Tov play the game. I learned a lot from watching the video, especially with how the GM often invited the players to contribute to their shared history rather than dictating it. I also enjoyed how the players would play along (“yes and”) if the players had their characters forget the name of their nemesis.
It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a blog post reflecting on being the family dungeon master for the past year. So I’m going to try and avoid repeating too much of what I wrote there. At the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t considering making tabletop gaming one of the topics I reflect on at the end of the year. However, it has become a pretty large part of my leisure and it may continue to grow in the amount of my free time that it takes up. I think, for this year, I will divide my post according to campaign. We’ll see what makes sense next year.
As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class. Whether you’re on the main page of the blog or reading through an RSS reader, click through to see the YouTube videos of my session prep. (Walls & Lighting, Character Creator, and vanilla combat)
The organizers recommended practicing what you’ve learned by the end of the month by running a game. The second class was about selecting an adventure and finding players. Kobold Press recommended The Impregnable Fortress of Dibs as it’s short, fun, and is a great level one introductory adventure. For finding players they had a few recommendations, including the #LFG channel on their Discord server. (LFG stands for lookign for group) Finally, potential new GMs were supposed to read the introduction to the Players Guide. I’d read it before, but I re-read it to get it fresh in my mind.
Spend enough time on the internet, (especially /r/dnd or /r/dndbeyond) and you’ll come away feeling like TTRGPs are over, Wizards of the Coast is ruining your childhood, and a million other negative thoughts. But as I was watching the latest promotional video from Wizards of the Coast for the “2024” Monster Manual, I realized that the hobby is in the midst of a creative spurt. So I wanted to write this short post to share some joy as we start 2025.
Whenever I get the chance, I like to watch the Kobold Press YT series Kobold Chats. Kendo, the community manager for Kobold Press, goes over various tabletop RPG topics - usually revolving around Kobold press releases or blog posts from that week. Occasionally they do interviews with Kobold Press employees or with others in the TTRPG space (like someone from Roll20). Kendo has a very fun personality on the chats and it’s hard not to find myself grinning at his antics. This last week’s video (linked earlier) mentioned something I wish I’d known about last year - New Gamemaster Month, an annual event to increase the number of game masters (also sometimes called dungeon masters) by providing a month-long tutorial on the process. Last January I would have been about 6 months into my GM journey and could definitely have made use of the month. However, that doesn’t mean all is lost for me. Whenever I teach myself a new skill - programming, photography, TTRPGs, etc - I will usually eventually seek out a class if it interests me enough. I’m not sure how unique I am, but I find that whenever I’m self-taught I end up with gaps in my knowledge compared to learning in a class. ALSO, I’ve always found that if I’m learning any skill that isn’t TOO basic, I learn it much better the second time through. (Obviously, if it’s too basic, it would just be boring the second time through) So I’ll be participating in New Gamemaster Month this month. If I’ve piqued your interest, follow the prior link. There are a bunch of game companies participating and you can use one of their games to learn how to GM. As is often the case, most of the companies are small-to-midsize (ie Wizards of the Coast is not represented). The games represented are:
I don’t have time tonight for the photo editing required for my Dice Envy advent calendar post, but I did have time to turn your attention to a couple professionals in the TTRPG space that have done some retrospectives on the year. They also happen to overlap with my 2024 a bit, which is what made me want to share them.
First up, game designer Richard Green shares his year in 2024 TTRPG gaming. Mr Green worked on the Labyrinth World Book for the Kobold Press kickstarter that I pledged to. I’m excited about the concept behind the campaign setting as described in the kickstarter. The titular Labyrinth not only ties together worlds created by Kobold Press, but they encourage DMs to also use this to tie into campaign settings from Wizards of the Coast (since ToV is currently pretty compatible with 2025 D&D 5e) or from any other publisher of D&D or ToV content. I know I already have some plans to have a lot of fun with my kids and the 5e Multiverse once this book comes out some time next year. (I’m also interested in his Parsantium world which is also now an official world in The Labyrinth)
When I first played D&D with David maybe 3 Christmases ago, one of the most baffling things for me to understand was my character sheet. Take a looka t the first page of Sam’s Dungeon in a Box character sheet:
Ignoring how busy this page is, one of the biggest design issues I see right away is that all of the trait boxes are incorrectly prioritized. I have seen people argue for completely eliminating the scores from the sheet because you don’t ever use those scores. Instead, you use the modifiers (the +# or -#). Yet on this sheet those numbers are teeny, tiny compared to the numbers that are functionally useless. (Except during character creation) I would otherwise say there’s not too much that’s bad about this page - it gives you the information you will need most often. The second page has information you might need to refer to so that you don’t need to keep referring to the Player’s Handbook (PHB)
As I was looking back over my old blog posts, searching for things that needed fixing in this migration over to the Hugo static site platform, I saw that I used to write brief blog posts about the Kickstarter campaigns I was backing. Since 2013 I’ve backed somewhere around 70 or more kickstarter campaigns. Since I usually don’t back anything that involves hardware, so far I haven’t had any of the campaigns disappear without giving me what I backed. Recently I realized I had backed an inordinate amount of D&D campaigns (I tend to fall pretty deep into hobbies). So I thought I might resurrect my Kickstarter posts to follow along with the D&D campaigns I’ve backed.
I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).
Marketing is often lies or half-truths dressed up to try and trick our stupid animal brains - pushing past our rationality. I’m happy to report that in this case, the marketing was, in my humble opinion, not a lie. We were told that this was a new, useful Dungeon Master’s Guide - more useful than the 2014 guide. I found this to be true. I don’t think I’ve re-opened the 2014 DMG since first reading it. It was really structured as a reference book or manual. The 2024 DMG is full of very useful information.<
The adventurers are offered Bastions. Minla and Iris take up the offer and tree shapers are sent to create the bastions. Minla chooses to start off with a bedroom, kitchen, garden, and a library. Iris chooses to have a bedroom, kitchen, smithy, and armory. She also named it The Spiked Defenders.
The session starts off in Minla’s very cramped bastion kitchen. A strig in the employ of the Council delivers a letter to Minla explaining the Council’s need for the party to explore Hamlin’s rumor of The Loper because they are afraid of ignoring rumors after what happened with the fire elemental.
The first time I played D&D my brother, the Dungeon Master, did the math for me. Later, when I was ready to start serving as the dungeon master for my kids we had dndbeyond. The character creator on dndbeyond does a great job of bringing together information from across the Players Handbook into one easy to use location. Since the web app is doing the math for the player, it’s easy to select various different options and see how the changes ripple through the system and result in different bonuses to the characters. It wasn’t until late last year when I was getting ready for Tales of the Valiant that I had to do character creation manually. (Kobold press does not maintain an automated character creation app) It took a LOT longer (as does leveling up), but I think it’s worth doing it at least once. (If not making it your default)
Once the party was back on the ship after the events with the mermaids they let Hal know that dragonfire is needed to melt the adamantine on the star. Hal consults his charts and they head towards the Archipelago where Lux lives. The since the adventurers have the star, the Blackrift compass points towards them. Many Blackrift ships approach and they’re boarded. They fight a Far Elf Lunar Monk and 2 Link Acolytes. Before more enemies can board, Aurora arrives and incinerates the ship nearest them. They end the battle and Aurora lands on the deck of the ship.
The only constant in the universe is change and so of course I should come to tabletop roleplaying games right when there’s a big shift. Dungeons and Dragons 5e came out in 2014, but I didn’t know that when I picked it up about 2 years ago at the behest of my kids. And it was D&D instead of Pathfinder because that’s what my brother had introduced them to at Christmas the year before. As soon as I spend a bunch of money on the big three source books (Players Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide) they decide to revamp the game in 2024. Perhaps learning the (right? wrong?) lesson from D&D 3.5, they don’t christen this new version as 5.5e. The publisher, Wizards of the Coast, goes to great lengths to say that the game is both backwards and forwards compatible. That is, old adventures will work with new 2024 characters. New adventures (or at least recently published ones) will work with 2014 characters and monsters. Somehow in all that chaos I also found and became interested in Kobold Press’ Tales of the Valiant. Tales of the Valiant is a fork (in the free and open source sense of the word) of the 5e system. For now it remains highly compatible with D&D 2024. The forks may eventually diverge, making Tales of the Valiant the Pathfinder (which split off from D&D 3.5) of this generation. (The fork happened because of the OGL license scandal of 2023 when Wizards of the Coast attempted to change the terms of the deal. What I found interesting is that there was a certain feeling in the air - either among the players or the developers - that led to a lot of convergent evolution in both D&D 5.5e and ToV despite the ways in which they are different. (quick disclaimer to say that this isn’t a post about which is better or which you should play, just what I’ve noticed is different)
After dealing with the lich and the leviathan, the characters find themselves alone on the ocean. They sail on in the direction the compass directs. Eventually they reach a point where the compass is going in circles like it did when the leviathan was near. Everyone looks over the edge, but only Hazel and Amelia have the prior knowledge to recognize that they are above some merfolk architecture. They sail in the direction of the merfolk architecture, but are dragged a mile back by water elementals.
When we got to this trilogy, we had already played every other trilogy in the DnD Adventure Club world. We’d mostly, but not entirely, gone through the adventures in order. DnD Adventure Club provides some very awesome, simplified, pre-created character sheets. Back when we played the introductory adventure (which is referenced in this trilogy) the GM guidance was to have one or more of the players be an orphan raised by Baba (I don’t remember if it’s explicitly mentioned before this trilogy that this is Baba Yaga of Russia lore, but we figured it out at some point). The kids looked at the backstories of the characters they chose, and it didn’t really fit with any of them, but they chose to have Sasha (Scarlett’s character) have spent some time in the orphanage that Baba runs at the outskirts of the Tumbledowns.
It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a blog post reflecting on being the family dungeon master for the past year. So I’m going to try and avoid repeating too much of what I wrote there. At the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t considering making tabletop gaming one of the topics I reflect on at the end of the year. However, it has become a pretty large part of my leisure and it may continue to grow in the amount of my free time that it takes up. I think, for this year, I will divide my post according to campaign. We’ll see what makes sense next year.
This was our second non-kiddie Dungeons and Dragons 5e campaign after Humblewood. As it says on the tin, this is a very dungeon-focused adventure. I reviewed the first 3 adventures from the point of view of the Dungeon Master a while back. This is a session recap of the adventure as experienced by the players. If you’re not a DM, but someone who might play, there are spoilers below!
Note: we didn’t play in a VTT, I’m just using it to illustrate some key moments from each session.
Last year running the Humblewood campaign setting for my kids was the experience that really leveled up my skills as game master / dungeon master. I previously made a commentary post after the first session This post collects the session notes as well as my commentary on those session notes. Spoilers ahead if you plan to be a player in a Humblewood campaign (rather than GM/DM).
Session 1
Meadowfen
Player Character backstories
Minla
Minla was a normal Jerbeen in a big, happy family. Until a band of vulpin raiders came and, while plundering Minla’s family, killed her entire family.
Spend enough time on the internet, (especially /r/dnd or /r/dndbeyond) and you’ll come away feeling like TTRGPs are over, Wizards of the Coast is ruining your childhood, and a million other negative thoughts. But as I was watching the latest promotional video from Wizards of the Coast for the “2024” Monster Manual, I realized that the hobby is in the midst of a creative spurt. So I wanted to write this short post to share some joy as we start 2025.
Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.
This batch of dice contains my favorite die, topping the candle die from day 12. It also confirmed that I’ll be getting 2 full Dice Envy sets. A Dice Envy Set has the usual 7 plus a chonky d20, an oversized d6 with the Dice Envy logo and an infinity d4 (those pill-shaped d4s that I already got 2 of).
I don’t have time tonight for the photo editing required for my Dice Envy advent calendar post, but I did have time to turn your attention to a couple professionals in the TTRPG space that have done some retrospectives on the year. They also happen to overlap with my 2024 a bit, which is what made me want to share them.
First up, game designer Richard Green shares his year in 2024 TTRPG gaming. Mr Green worked on the Labyrinth World Book for the Kobold Press kickstarter that I pledged to. I’m excited about the concept behind the campaign setting as described in the kickstarter. The titular Labyrinth not only ties together worlds created by Kobold Press, but they encourage DMs to also use this to tie into campaign settings from Wizards of the Coast (since ToV is currently pretty compatible with 2025 D&D 5e) or from any other publisher of D&D or ToV content. I know I already have some plans to have a lot of fun with my kids and the 5e Multiverse once this book comes out some time next year. (I’m also interested in his Parsantium world which is also now an official world in The Labyrinth)
Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.
I thought that by not having to worry about solving the advent of code problems to write a post along with the dice I would be able to keep up with writing a post each day. Twas not to be as I’ve been incredibly busy at work recently.
Although the main sets are definitely the Elsa-blue and the glittery set, we had another of their neat pill d4s during this time period.
Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.
There isn’t too much to say today that I haven’t already said while going through this dice Advent Calendar. It looks like the two main sets are the Elsa-blue and the yellow-which-photographs-green-glitter. (Hmm…need a better name). Today it’s a d4 for the former and a d6 for the latter.
Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.
I got extremely busy with both work and my personal life, so I fell behind a bit. I also decided to drop Advent of Code from these posts (and from my life) as I can’t fit it in with the other things I’m busy with this month.
Today I did not attempt the advent of code problem. It involved solving a word search in which there could be overlapping words as well as, if I read it correctly, multiple words starting from the same place. I’m guessing it’s to be done with a depth-first or breadth-first search in which you kill off searches if you can’t continue. I know these sorts of problems present themselves every year, but I never have time to learn during the AoC period (with work, life, and Christmas in the way) and I never make it a priority to relearn (I was taught this back in undergrad). So rather than waste my time on something I know that I won’t know how to do, I’ll save it for another time - maybe when I’m taking time off closer to Christmas/New Years Day.
Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
Advent of Code
As the years have piled on, Eric Wasl has thrown in references to past years’ problems. However, as of day 3 we now have 2 references (perhaps that’s what the historian story line is about). Day 02 had you visit the location of 2015 Day 19 and today visited the location of 2020 Day 2 (my first year doing Advent of Code!) The only thing I’m slightly worried about is if this signals that this year will be a grand finale for the annual event.
Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
December has finally arrived and with it my favorite activity of the month - Advent of Code! I also wanted to give myself a fun little present this year, so I bought the Dice Envy Advent Calendar. Every day I’ll get a fun new die (or dice!). Scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
Advent of Code
Let’s start off with Advent of Code. This year I haven’t done any of the Advent of Code problems ahead of December so I was a bit rusty. One is not often using the same algorithms or libraries for Advent of Code as one does for everyday programming. I started off with Python since that’s my most comfortable language. First you can head over to today’s page to see the prompt. If you’re not solving the problems yourself, you won’t be able to see the prompt for part 2, so in summary:
When I first played D&D with David maybe 3 Christmases ago, one of the most baffling things for me to understand was my character sheet. Take a looka t the first page of Sam’s Dungeon in a Box character sheet:
Ignoring how busy this page is, one of the biggest design issues I see right away is that all of the trait boxes are incorrectly prioritized. I have seen people argue for completely eliminating the scores from the sheet because you don’t ever use those scores. Instead, you use the modifiers (the +# or -#). Yet on this sheet those numbers are teeny, tiny compared to the numbers that are functionally useless. (Except during character creation) I would otherwise say there’s not too much that’s bad about this page - it gives you the information you will need most often. The second page has information you might need to refer to so that you don’t need to keep referring to the Player’s Handbook (PHB)
I mentioned before that my kids have, so far, been more about the D&D fights than the roleplay. (It’s a generalization, as they do ocassionally get into the roleplay). But a couple weeks ago when we were doing our Humblewood week (we’re rotating through a few of our different campaigns) Sam really impressed me by getting into the head of his character. He had been charmed by one of the characters and the spell specified that he would not attack the charmer. He would only attack the other enemies. I said, “it’s as if you were friends with her.” After a couple more rounds of combat he looks up at me during his turn and he says, “If she’s my friend. I would want to heal her, wouldn’t I?” I thought about it and didn’t see any flaw to the logic. (I also wanted to reward the creativity) So I told him that made sense. His only healing spell required him to get much closer to the enemy who had charmed him so he used his turn to start moving in that direction. The fight had been going on for a bit so his sister realized this could lead to a pretty bad situation so she decided to use her turn to grapple him and keep him from healing the enemy.
In my reflections on a year of being the family DM I mentioned we started playing the Dungeon in a Box campaign Voyage of the Fallen Star. It’s a monthly subscription that provides a connected story that takes place over a year. I’ve finished DMing the first 3 adventures, so I wanted to talk aobut my impressions with the content so far.
Minis, Skinny Minis, and one of the Dungeon in a Box maps
As I was looking back over my old blog posts, searching for things that needed fixing in this migration over to the Hugo static site platform, I saw that I used to write brief blog posts about the Kickstarter campaigns I was backing. Since 2013 I’ve backed somewhere around 70 or more kickstarter campaigns. Since I usually don’t back anything that involves hardware, so far I haven’t had any of the campaigns disappear without giving me what I backed. Recently I realized I had backed an inordinate amount of D&D campaigns (I tend to fall pretty deep into hobbies). So I thought I might resurrect my Kickstarter posts to follow along with the D&D campaigns I’ve backed.
I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).
About a year ago, I wrote a blog post about how my kids got themselves (and, by extension, me) into Dungeons and Dragons. I wanted to reflect on how far I’ve come since then and where I might go in the near future. Starting off with a quick recap of the linked blog post, my brother David had introduced the kids to D&D via Muk, a module for introducing your kids to D&D. Unfortunately, it was written for an experience adult D&D player or DM to DM for the kids, so we had a few fails with my first time as the DM. Then we moved on to DnD Adventure Club. That was, and continues to be, a huge hit with the kids.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
This book is the definition of a niche product. The only people I think would enjoy this are the intersection in the Venn diagram of D&D fans and Rick and Morty fans. I know I’ve been watching Rick and Morty since the first season and I can’t imagine that I would find this collection if my kids hadn’t gotten me into D&D a year or so ago. Almost all of the humor comes from D&D jokes and Easter Eggs.
Last weekend I decided to try the Humblewood D&D campaign setting with the kids. For the past year (give or take) we’ve had a lot of fun playing DnD Adventure Club campaigns. Our one major foray in to regular D&D, Dragons of Stormreck Isle, was a failure. I think there were a few reasons for that. First of all, I was fairly new to DMing and so probably not doing as good of a job as I am a year-ish later. Second, since it was a campaign meant to introduce people to both playing and DMing, it came with pre-made characters. I think that meant the kids had less of an attachment to the characters. Also, the session went very slowly as I had to go back and forth through the player handbook, monster manual, and campaign sheet to look up spells, monsters, etc.
This weekend we finished The Wild Trilogy from DnD Adventure Club. The first challenge involved sneaking around an Owlbear. The kids asked about their options and I noted that in addition to sneaking, they could try and distract it. Sam’s dwarf, Grumpy McGrumbles, has a cooking hobby, so he took hits pots and pans and made a bunch of noise so that the Owlbear would follow him around the camp.
After that there was a mini “dungeon” crawl in the basement beneath a wizard’s tower. The girls finally started to get the hang of investigating chambers rather than blindly setting off traps.
I’ve written a lot about DnD Adventure Club, including my lasttwo posts. Today while I was looking at the Pathfinder Humble Bundle, I went to the Pathfinder website to see if they had a page listing differences (since Pathfinder started as a fork of D&D 3.5). I found this page - Adventure Paths. It looks like they’re doing the same thing as DnD Adventure Club, except in Pathfinder 2e and without a kid focus. Also, it seems like each trilogy is building to a larger story (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer with its villain of the season, but also overarching story). It makes me wish that Wizards of the Coast (the Hasbro subsidiary that runs D&D) would do something similar - or if a 3rd party creator did it that it would be tightly coupled to D&D beyond. One advantage of WotC doing the mini-adventures is that they could use them to highlight different aspects of the mechanics or classes. I love that DnD Adventure Club comes with a new character each month with some example backstories. It really helps demonstrate the different races and classes. Also, upon further examination of the Pathfinder adventures I saw that each trilogy is written by a different person (creating opportunities to showcase new writers) and that (at least the one I clicked on) is tied to a campaign setting book. This is SO smart from a marketing point of view. “If you enjoyed your little trilogy in this corner of our world, you might enjoy learning more about it…” Yeah, WoTC should DEFINITELY look into this.
Scarlett was inspired by my previous post and made an animatic-style drawing of some of her favorite moments from the campaign.
The top panel is the party questioning the guards. (The ninja-looking character is Sasha, the character that Scarlett plays)
The next panel is Grumpy using intimidation to question a gnoll. The middle panel is the throwing of gnolls I referenced in my previous post. The last panel on that row depicts the characters examining someone who was shot mid-exposition.
I was DMing the first third of a DnD Adventure Club campaign for my kids today. My son likes to mostly play as Grumpy Mcgrumbles, a dwarven fighter. The kids were attacked by a group of Gnolls. Normally, most of the time, the kids play pretty straightforwardly although they are starting to get more creative. My son decided that since he’s a strong dwarf, he wanted to pick up the Gnolls and throw them into the river or into each other. I wanted to encourage the creativity, so I had him do an athletics check. Between his +7 and a series of lucky rolls, he ends up almost always successfully tossing the Gnolls and the kids and I erupted into fits of laughter as the battle became more and more chaotic. It was even funnier when he finally had a bad roll and so he just picked up the Gnoll and dropped him at his feet.
If you’ve been reading my blog for the last few months, you know that I have fallen in love with the TTRPG publisher Kobold Press, creators of Tales of the Valiant. They recently held their second virtual convention, KoboldCon. I wanted to write up a quick review of what is effectively my first TTRPG convention.
First of all, the virtual aspect of the convention. During the COVID pandemic convention season (2020-2021), I attended quite a few virtual conventions - usually programming language conventions like PyCon. Many of those attempted to recreate the physical aspects of the convention like having virtual hallway tracks and profile areas where you can get to know your fellow attendees. Kobold Press went for a lower tech solution, but one that I think worked perfectly for what they were trying to do.
When I first played D&D with David maybe 3 Christmases ago, one of the most baffling things for me to understand was my character sheet. Take a looka t the first page of Sam’s Dungeon in a Box character sheet:
Ignoring how busy this page is, one of the biggest design issues I see right away is that all of the trait boxes are incorrectly prioritized. I have seen people argue for completely eliminating the scores from the sheet because you don’t ever use those scores. Instead, you use the modifiers (the +# or -#). Yet on this sheet those numbers are teeny, tiny compared to the numbers that are functionally useless. (Except during character creation) I would otherwise say there’s not too much that’s bad about this page - it gives you the information you will need most often. The second page has information you might need to refer to so that you don’t need to keep referring to the Player’s Handbook (PHB)
In my reflections on a year of being the family DM I mentioned we started playing the Dungeon in a Box campaign Voyage of the Fallen Star. It’s a monthly subscription that provides a connected story that takes place over a year. I’ve finished DMing the first 3 adventures, so I wanted to talk aobut my impressions with the content so far.
Minis, Skinny Minis, and one of the Dungeon in a Box maps
If you’ve been reading my blog for the last few months, you know that I have fallen in love with the TTRPG publisher Kobold Press, creators of Tales of the Valiant. They recently held their second virtual convention, KoboldCon. I wanted to write up a quick review of what is effectively my first TTRPG convention.
First of all, the virtual aspect of the convention. During the COVID pandemic convention season (2020-2021), I attended quite a few virtual conventions - usually programming language conventions like PyCon. Many of those attempted to recreate the physical aspects of the convention like having virtual hallway tracks and profile areas where you can get to know your fellow attendees. Kobold Press went for a lower tech solution, but one that I think worked perfectly for what they were trying to do.
It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a blog post reflecting on being the family dungeon master for the past year. So I’m going to try and avoid repeating too much of what I wrote there. At the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t considering making tabletop gaming one of the topics I reflect on at the end of the year. However, it has become a pretty large part of my leisure and it may continue to grow in the amount of my free time that it takes up. I think, for this year, I will divide my post according to campaign. We’ll see what makes sense next year.
I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).
About 4 years ago I decided to start exploring various web browsers. Eventually I settled on Vivaldi as my main browser both on Windows and Linux. When I first installed Vivaldi, I mentioned that vertical tabs are very helpful on a wide screen monitor. I also really like the ability to tile my tabs and to name my tab stacks (because other browsers like Chrome have also added tab stacks) While at PyConUS I posted to Mastodon:
It’s been seven months since I last wrote about testing out new browsers on my computers. In addition to talking about what I’m doing, I wanted to muse about whether Mozilla really missed the mark with Firefox.
I’m going to start with the second point first. I forgot what brought them to my attention, but it turns out that while there are less browsers based on Firefox than there used to be (most of them are based on Chromium nowadays), there are at least two browsers based on Firefox that are still being developed: Waterfox and Palemoon. Waterfox is privacy-focused. They make a big deal about that on their site and FAQ. Palemoon is focused on being efficient and (it seems to me) still uses the old Firefox extensions. Why does this mean that Mozilla messed up? Well, first of all, I believe that Mozila sees Firefox as a privacy-focused browser. They may or may not have the same protections as Waterfox, but if they do, they have done a very bad job of marketing it. When it comes to Palemoon, I remember (at least according to commenters on Ars Technica) that when Firefox changed their extension format and caused all the old extensions to be deprecated, a lot of folks left for Chrome. At the time there wasn’t really much distinguishing the browsers, but getting rid of all the extensions, which are heavily used by power users, seemed like a really bad way to keep market share.
A few days ago I read this article over at Tech Republic about how, Mozilla’s greatest achievement is not Firefox, but the Rust programming language. They point to Firefox’s declining numbers in the face of Chrome and Chromium-based browsers and I’m inclined to agree with the author. There is, of course, a kind of poetry to this. Although Netscape was one of the first dot-com companies and beat Microsoft to the punch at creating the first mainstream web browser, it’s not Netscape Navigator which is its greatest legacy. Instead it’s spinning off into Mozilla and, the most poetic part, the creation of the Javascript programming language. (Javascript was written in just a week and a half and this episode of Red Hat’s Commandline Heroes podcast does an excellent job documenting it)
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.
[caption id=“attachment_6153” align=“aligncenter” width=“450”] Firefox (aka Red Panda) busy Not Spying on You[/caption]
A 1 May Ars article and 30 April Wired article mention that a UK company known as Gamma International is selling spyware that pretends to be Mozilla Firefox. Both articles mention that repressive governments have used it to spy on dissidents, but it’s unclear from the article whether the company purposely sells to evil governments or whether it sells this to anybody, including foreign governments. The Wired article mentions that Gamma markets it to governments in general and so, if pressed, would probably say that it’s not meant to be used by evil governments - just people like the FBI trying to catch criminals. Either way, Mozilla has sued for trademark infringement. I applaud them for doing so. Governments may have both legitimate and illegitimate reasons for spying on computer communications, but I don’t think they should be abusing the good will of other companies to do it. Imagine if Gamma was selling Ford cars that were bugged. No one would want to buy a Ford car for fear it might be a bugged version. Come on, guys! Figure out a solution that doesn’t screw over the folks at Mozilla.
I’ve been using web browsers since Internet Explorer 1 and Netscape Navigator 3. I’ve blogged about my browserhistoryquiteabit. I’ve ended up using Chrome on all my platforms. It works on Linux and Windows and I can have my bookmarks synced up across all those platforms. Now, I’m not a huge user of bookmarks. From my earliest days back in the 1990s when I used to perfectly curate my bookmarks into folders and subfolders to the mid-2000s when Epiphany and Firefox implemented tags on bookmarks, pretty much anything I’ve ever bookmarked has gone into a status of “out of sight== out of mind”. In fact, the only way I’ve been able to effectively use bookmarks is to use the space under the address bar to store them so I can see them. This is what Chrome looks like on my machines:
From NYC to our nation’s Capital for today’s Top 200 Photo.
photo #166 is:
As I mentioned before, we loved to go to the National Zoo to go see the Pandas. Well, thanks to Tai Shan, the zoo got a huge injection of donations which it used to revitalize its Asian section of the zoo. Eventually they got a pair of fire foxes. The fire fox is also known as the red panda. Back when we were in college I was visiting Danielle during summer classes and we took a trip to Syracuse. While there we went to the zoo. I saw they had a sign for a red panda. Whoa! I only knew about the black and white ones! I was quite annoyed that it was just some raccoon-looking thing.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Firefox is now 5 years old”] [/caption]
I can’t believe Firefox has been around for five years! I remember first being introduced to tabs and it totally changing the way I surf the web. Back then it was a plucky upstart and didn’t even work with many websites that had been coded specifically for Internet Explorer. Now it has around 20% market share!
At first I used Internet Explorer because we had a free trial of MSN. Then we switched to MCI, who used Netscape (although you could also use IE) and I mostly used Netscape. I think this was around Netscape 4 or 5. I really liked Netscape A LOT and used it almost to the exclusivity of Internet Explorer. Of course, those were the exciting days when every few months Netscape and Internet Explorer would release a new version. As I’ve commented in previous posts, whether or not Firefox ever gains a dominant share (and the same with Linux vs Windows), its mere presence will necessitate innovation from Microsoft. You may have noticed that IE stayed at version 6 for a very long time until Firefox started getting really popular. But I digress. Netscape had all the best plugins and I thought it was the ultimate in the Web experiences. I coded all of my websites with Netscape in mind.
I was trying to pay my Verizon Wireless bill a few weeks ago and it kept having problems. I checked the credit card number, the expiration date, and every other field, but it was still not working. Finally I got fed up enough to call tech support rather than risk being locked out or something. So I gave them a call and the lady says to me, “oh, you’re using Firefox aren’t you?”
“Yes I am” (because I don’t like viruses and other M$ exploits taking over my computer)
“Oh well, I’m sorry, but you can’t use that browser here to pay your bills.”
“What?”
“Oh, don’t worry, our engineers are working on it.”
The adventurers are offered Bastions. Minla and Iris take up the offer and tree shapers are sent to create the bastions. Minla chooses to start off with a bedroom, kitchen, garden, and a library. Iris chooses to have a bedroom, kitchen, smithy, and armory. She also named it The Spiked Defenders.
The session starts off in Minla’s very cramped bastion kitchen. A strig in the employ of the Council delivers a letter to Minla explaining the Council’s need for the party to explore Hamlin’s rumor of The Loper because they are afraid of ignoring rumors after what happened with the fire elemental.
The first time I played D&D my brother, the Dungeon Master, did the math for me. Later, when I was ready to start serving as the dungeon master for my kids we had dndbeyond. The character creator on dndbeyond does a great job of bringing together information from across the Players Handbook into one easy to use location. Since the web app is doing the math for the player, it’s easy to select various different options and see how the changes ripple through the system and result in different bonuses to the characters. It wasn’t until late last year when I was getting ready for Tales of the Valiant that I had to do character creation manually. (Kobold press does not maintain an automated character creation app) It took a LOT longer (as does leveling up), but I think it’s worth doing it at least once. (If not making it your default)
Once the party was back on the ship after the events with the mermaids they let Hal know that dragonfire is needed to melt the adamantine on the star. Hal consults his charts and they head towards the Archipelago where Lux lives. The since the adventurers have the star, the Blackrift compass points towards them. Many Blackrift ships approach and they’re boarded. They fight a Far Elf Lunar Monk and 2 Link Acolytes. Before more enemies can board, Aurora arrives and incinerates the ship nearest them. They end the battle and Aurora lands on the deck of the ship.
The only constant in the universe is change and so of course I should come to tabletop roleplaying games right when there’s a big shift. Dungeons and Dragons 5e came out in 2014, but I didn’t know that when I picked it up about 2 years ago at the behest of my kids. And it was D&D instead of Pathfinder because that’s what my brother had introduced them to at Christmas the year before. As soon as I spend a bunch of money on the big three source books (Players Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide) they decide to revamp the game in 2024. Perhaps learning the (right? wrong?) lesson from D&D 3.5, they don’t christen this new version as 5.5e. The publisher, Wizards of the Coast, goes to great lengths to say that the game is both backwards and forwards compatible. That is, old adventures will work with new 2024 characters. New adventures (or at least recently published ones) will work with 2014 characters and monsters. Somehow in all that chaos I also found and became interested in Kobold Press’ Tales of the Valiant. Tales of the Valiant is a fork (in the free and open source sense of the word) of the 5e system. For now it remains highly compatible with D&D 2024. The forks may eventually diverge, making Tales of the Valiant the Pathfinder (which split off from D&D 3.5) of this generation. (The fork happened because of the OGL license scandal of 2023 when Wizards of the Coast attempted to change the terms of the deal. What I found interesting is that there was a certain feeling in the air - either among the players or the developers - that led to a lot of convergent evolution in both D&D 5.5e and ToV despite the ways in which they are different. (quick disclaimer to say that this isn’t a post about which is better or which you should play, just what I’ve noticed is different)
After dealing with the lich and the leviathan, the characters find themselves alone on the ocean. They sail on in the direction the compass directs. Eventually they reach a point where the compass is going in circles like it did when the leviathan was near. Everyone looks over the edge, but only Hazel and Amelia have the prior knowledge to recognize that they are above some merfolk architecture. They sail in the direction of the merfolk architecture, but are dragged a mile back by water elementals.
It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a blog post reflecting on being the family dungeon master for the past year. So I’m going to try and avoid repeating too much of what I wrote there. At the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t considering making tabletop gaming one of the topics I reflect on at the end of the year. However, it has become a pretty large part of my leisure and it may continue to grow in the amount of my free time that it takes up. I think, for this year, I will divide my post according to campaign. We’ll see what makes sense next year.
This was our second non-kiddie Dungeons and Dragons 5e campaign after Humblewood. As it says on the tin, this is a very dungeon-focused adventure. I reviewed the first 3 adventures from the point of view of the Dungeon Master a while back. This is a session recap of the adventure as experienced by the players. If you’re not a DM, but someone who might play, there are spoilers below!
Note: we didn’t play in a VTT, I’m just using it to illustrate some key moments from each session.
Last year running the Humblewood campaign setting for my kids was the experience that really leveled up my skills as game master / dungeon master. I previously made a commentary post after the first session This post collects the session notes as well as my commentary on those session notes. Spoilers ahead if you plan to be a player in a Humblewood campaign (rather than GM/DM).
Session 1
Meadowfen
Player Character backstories
Minla
Minla was a normal Jerbeen in a big, happy family. Until a band of vulpin raiders came and, while plundering Minla’s family, killed her entire family.
Spend enough time on the internet, (especially /r/dnd or /r/dndbeyond) and you’ll come away feeling like TTRGPs are over, Wizards of the Coast is ruining your childhood, and a million other negative thoughts. But as I was watching the latest promotional video from Wizards of the Coast for the “2024” Monster Manual, I realized that the hobby is in the midst of a creative spurt. So I wanted to write this short post to share some joy as we start 2025.
About a year ago, I wrote a blog post about how my kids got themselves (and, by extension, me) into Dungeons and Dragons. I wanted to reflect on how far I’ve come since then and where I might go in the near future. Starting off with a quick recap of the linked blog post, my brother David had introduced the kids to D&D via Muk, a module for introducing your kids to D&D. Unfortunately, it was written for an experience adult D&D player or DM to DM for the kids, so we had a few fails with my first time as the DM. Then we moved on to DnD Adventure Club. That was, and continues to be, a huge hit with the kids.
This book is the definition of a niche product. The only people I think would enjoy this are the intersection in the Venn diagram of D&D fans and Rick and Morty fans. I know I’ve been watching Rick and Morty since the first season and I can’t imagine that I would find this collection if my kids hadn’t gotten me into D&D a year or so ago. Almost all of the humor comes from D&D jokes and Easter Eggs.
I’ve been backing a few different D&D 5e adventures on kickstarter, but the one I’m most excited about getting fulfillment on is Obojima: Tales from the Tall Grass. It’s so freakin’ beautiful that I had to hold myself back from getting the package that came with everything. But I’m not the only one excited bout it, I also read this article about it in Wired today. One of the points they make in the article is about how gamers and readers are moving away from Grimdark because there’s already enough of this in the world:
This post contains my thoughts on a few stories I’ve been saving up that don’t merit a post on their own.
D&D Romance
Just a day after posting about my kids getting into D&D, I came across this article on Tor.com about The Golden Age of D&D Romance. I had no idea it was a genre, but I’m not surprised. Pretty much every genre can be crossed with every other. See The Dresden Files for fantasy mixed with detective noir, for example. After a brief introduction, the author of the piece lists 6 books in the D&D Romance genre. I don’t hate on romance as much as I did before I read a few books in the genre, but these aren’t my cup of tea. That said, they may work for you.
Two years ago, while spending time with my brothers, I played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time ever. David had been introduced to D&D by a coworker during COVID. Tony and Alex apparently had played in high school. I’m not sure when David’s wife started playing, but she joined us that night, too. David played the role of DM and selected a one-off campaign. I had a blast and couldn’t believe that I’d somehow gone most of my life without ever having had someone convince me to play. Incidentally, in our campaign, we accidentally murdered Santa Claus. Ask me about it some time.
The adventurers are offered Bastions. Minla and Iris take up the offer and tree shapers are sent to create the bastions. Minla chooses to start off with a bedroom, kitchen, garden, and a library. Iris chooses to have a bedroom, kitchen, smithy, and armory. She also named it The Spiked Defenders.
The session starts off in Minla’s very cramped bastion kitchen. A strig in the employ of the Council delivers a letter to Minla explaining the Council’s need for the party to explore Hamlin’s rumor of The Loper because they are afraid of ignoring rumors after what happened with the fire elemental.
Last year running the Humblewood campaign setting for my kids was the experience that really leveled up my skills as game master / dungeon master. I previously made a commentary post after the first session This post collects the session notes as well as my commentary on those session notes. Spoilers ahead if you plan to be a player in a Humblewood campaign (rather than GM/DM).
Session 1
Meadowfen
Player Character backstories
Minla
Minla was a normal Jerbeen in a big, happy family. Until a band of vulpin raiders came and, while plundering Minla’s family, killed her entire family.
Last weekend I decided to try the Humblewood D&D campaign setting with the kids. For the past year (give or take) we’ve had a lot of fun playing DnD Adventure Club campaigns. Our one major foray in to regular D&D, Dragons of Stormreck Isle, was a failure. I think there were a few reasons for that. First of all, I was fairly new to DMing and so probably not doing as good of a job as I am a year-ish later. Second, since it was a campaign meant to introduce people to both playing and DMing, it came with pre-made characters. I think that meant the kids had less of an attachment to the characters. Also, the session went very slowly as I had to go back and forth through the player handbook, monster manual, and campaign sheet to look up spells, monsters, etc.
The adventurers are offered Bastions. Minla and Iris take up the offer and tree shapers are sent to create the bastions. Minla chooses to start off with a bedroom, kitchen, garden, and a library. Iris chooses to have a bedroom, kitchen, smithy, and armory. She also named it The Spiked Defenders.
The session starts off in Minla’s very cramped bastion kitchen. A strig in the employ of the Council delivers a letter to Minla explaining the Council’s need for the party to explore Hamlin’s rumor of The Loper because they are afraid of ignoring rumors after what happened with the fire elemental.
It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a blog post reflecting on being the family dungeon master for the past year. So I’m going to try and avoid repeating too much of what I wrote there. At the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t considering making tabletop gaming one of the topics I reflect on at the end of the year. However, it has become a pretty large part of my leisure and it may continue to grow in the amount of my free time that it takes up. I think, for this year, I will divide my post according to campaign. We’ll see what makes sense next year.
Last year running the Humblewood campaign setting for my kids was the experience that really leveled up my skills as game master / dungeon master. I previously made a commentary post after the first session This post collects the session notes as well as my commentary on those session notes. Spoilers ahead if you plan to be a player in a Humblewood campaign (rather than GM/DM).
Session 1
Meadowfen
Player Character backstories
Minla
Minla was a normal Jerbeen in a big, happy family. Until a band of vulpin raiders came and, while plundering Minla’s family, killed her entire family.
I mentioned before that my kids have, so far, been more about the D&D fights than the roleplay. (It’s a generalization, as they do ocassionally get into the roleplay). But a couple weeks ago when we were doing our Humblewood week (we’re rotating through a few of our different campaigns) Sam really impressed me by getting into the head of his character. He had been charmed by one of the characters and the spell specified that he would not attack the charmer. He would only attack the other enemies. I said, “it’s as if you were friends with her.” After a couple more rounds of combat he looks up at me during his turn and he says, “If she’s my friend. I would want to heal her, wouldn’t I?” I thought about it and didn’t see any flaw to the logic. (I also wanted to reward the creativity) So I told him that made sense. His only healing spell required him to get much closer to the enemy who had charmed him so he used his turn to start moving in that direction. The fight had been going on for a bit so his sister realized this could lead to a pretty bad situation so she decided to use her turn to grapple him and keep him from healing the enemy.
Last weekend I decided to try the Humblewood D&D campaign setting with the kids. For the past year (give or take) we’ve had a lot of fun playing DnD Adventure Club campaigns. Our one major foray in to regular D&D, Dragons of Stormreck Isle, was a failure. I think there were a few reasons for that. First of all, I was fairly new to DMing and so probably not doing as good of a job as I am a year-ish later. Second, since it was a campaign meant to introduce people to both playing and DMing, it came with pre-made characters. I think that meant the kids had less of an attachment to the characters. Also, the session went very slowly as I had to go back and forth through the player handbook, monster manual, and campaign sheet to look up spells, monsters, etc.
I don’t have time tonight for the photo editing required for my Dice Envy advent calendar post, but I did have time to turn your attention to a couple professionals in the TTRPG space that have done some retrospectives on the year. They also happen to overlap with my 2024 a bit, which is what made me want to share them.
First up, game designer Richard Green shares his year in 2024 TTRPG gaming. Mr Green worked on the Labyrinth World Book for the Kobold Press kickstarter that I pledged to. I’m excited about the concept behind the campaign setting as described in the kickstarter. The titular Labyrinth not only ties together worlds created by Kobold Press, but they encourage DMs to also use this to tie into campaign settings from Wizards of the Coast (since ToV is currently pretty compatible with 2025 D&D 5e) or from any other publisher of D&D or ToV content. I know I already have some plans to have a lot of fun with my kids and the 5e Multiverse once this book comes out some time next year. (I’m also interested in his Parsantium world which is also now an official world in The Labyrinth)
When I first played D&D with David maybe 3 Christmases ago, one of the most baffling things for me to understand was my character sheet. Take a looka t the first page of Sam’s Dungeon in a Box character sheet:
Ignoring how busy this page is, one of the biggest design issues I see right away is that all of the trait boxes are incorrectly prioritized. I have seen people argue for completely eliminating the scores from the sheet because you don’t ever use those scores. Instead, you use the modifiers (the +# or -#). Yet on this sheet those numbers are teeny, tiny compared to the numbers that are functionally useless. (Except during character creation) I would otherwise say there’s not too much that’s bad about this page - it gives you the information you will need most often. The second page has information you might need to refer to so that you don’t need to keep referring to the Player’s Handbook (PHB)
I mentioned before that my kids have, so far, been more about the D&D fights than the roleplay. (It’s a generalization, as they do ocassionally get into the roleplay). But a couple weeks ago when we were doing our Humblewood week (we’re rotating through a few of our different campaigns) Sam really impressed me by getting into the head of his character. He had been charmed by one of the characters and the spell specified that he would not attack the charmer. He would only attack the other enemies. I said, “it’s as if you were friends with her.” After a couple more rounds of combat he looks up at me during his turn and he says, “If she’s my friend. I would want to heal her, wouldn’t I?” I thought about it and didn’t see any flaw to the logic. (I also wanted to reward the creativity) So I told him that made sense. His only healing spell required him to get much closer to the enemy who had charmed him so he used his turn to start moving in that direction. The fight had been going on for a bit so his sister realized this could lead to a pretty bad situation so she decided to use her turn to grapple him and keep him from healing the enemy.
In my reflections on a year of being the family DM I mentioned we started playing the Dungeon in a Box campaign Voyage of the Fallen Star. It’s a monthly subscription that provides a connected story that takes place over a year. I’ve finished DMing the first 3 adventures, so I wanted to talk aobut my impressions with the content so far.
Minis, Skinny Minis, and one of the Dungeon in a Box maps
As I was looking back over my old blog posts, searching for things that needed fixing in this migration over to the Hugo static site platform, I saw that I used to write brief blog posts about the Kickstarter campaigns I was backing. Since 2013 I’ve backed somewhere around 70 or more kickstarter campaigns. Since I usually don’t back anything that involves hardware, so far I haven’t had any of the campaigns disappear without giving me what I backed. Recently I realized I had backed an inordinate amount of D&D campaigns (I tend to fall pretty deep into hobbies). So I thought I might resurrect my Kickstarter posts to follow along with the D&D campaigns I’ve backed.
I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).
About a year ago, I wrote a blog post about how my kids got themselves (and, by extension, me) into Dungeons and Dragons. I wanted to reflect on how far I’ve come since then and where I might go in the near future. Starting off with a quick recap of the linked blog post, my brother David had introduced the kids to D&D via Muk, a module for introducing your kids to D&D. Unfortunately, it was written for an experience adult D&D player or DM to DM for the kids, so we had a few fails with my first time as the DM. Then we moved on to DnD Adventure Club. That was, and continues to be, a huge hit with the kids.
This book is the definition of a niche product. The only people I think would enjoy this are the intersection in the Venn diagram of D&D fans and Rick and Morty fans. I know I’ve been watching Rick and Morty since the first season and I can’t imagine that I would find this collection if my kids hadn’t gotten me into D&D a year or so ago. Almost all of the humor comes from D&D jokes and Easter Eggs.
Last weekend I decided to try the Humblewood D&D campaign setting with the kids. For the past year (give or take) we’ve had a lot of fun playing DnD Adventure Club campaigns. Our one major foray in to regular D&D, Dragons of Stormreck Isle, was a failure. I think there were a few reasons for that. First of all, I was fairly new to DMing and so probably not doing as good of a job as I am a year-ish later. Second, since it was a campaign meant to introduce people to both playing and DMing, it came with pre-made characters. I think that meant the kids had less of an attachment to the characters. Also, the session went very slowly as I had to go back and forth through the player handbook, monster manual, and campaign sheet to look up spells, monsters, etc.
This weekend we finished The Wild Trilogy from DnD Adventure Club. The first challenge involved sneaking around an Owlbear. The kids asked about their options and I noted that in addition to sneaking, they could try and distract it. Sam’s dwarf, Grumpy McGrumbles, has a cooking hobby, so he took hits pots and pans and made a bunch of noise so that the Owlbear would follow him around the camp.
After that there was a mini “dungeon” crawl in the basement beneath a wizard’s tower. The girls finally started to get the hang of investigating chambers rather than blindly setting off traps.
I’ve written a lot about DnD Adventure Club, including my lasttwo posts. Today while I was looking at the Pathfinder Humble Bundle, I went to the Pathfinder website to see if they had a page listing differences (since Pathfinder started as a fork of D&D 3.5). I found this page - Adventure Paths. It looks like they’re doing the same thing as DnD Adventure Club, except in Pathfinder 2e and without a kid focus. Also, it seems like each trilogy is building to a larger story (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer with its villain of the season, but also overarching story). It makes me wish that Wizards of the Coast (the Hasbro subsidiary that runs D&D) would do something similar - or if a 3rd party creator did it that it would be tightly coupled to D&D beyond. One advantage of WotC doing the mini-adventures is that they could use them to highlight different aspects of the mechanics or classes. I love that DnD Adventure Club comes with a new character each month with some example backstories. It really helps demonstrate the different races and classes. Also, upon further examination of the Pathfinder adventures I saw that each trilogy is written by a different person (creating opportunities to showcase new writers) and that (at least the one I clicked on) is tied to a campaign setting book. This is SO smart from a marketing point of view. “If you enjoyed your little trilogy in this corner of our world, you might enjoy learning more about it…” Yeah, WoTC should DEFINITELY look into this.
Scarlett was inspired by my previous post and made an animatic-style drawing of some of her favorite moments from the campaign.
The top panel is the party questioning the guards. (The ninja-looking character is Sasha, the character that Scarlett plays)
The next panel is Grumpy using intimidation to question a gnoll. The middle panel is the throwing of gnolls I referenced in my previous post. The last panel on that row depicts the characters examining someone who was shot mid-exposition.
I was DMing the first third of a DnD Adventure Club campaign for my kids today. My son likes to mostly play as Grumpy Mcgrumbles, a dwarven fighter. The kids were attacked by a group of Gnolls. Normally, most of the time, the kids play pretty straightforwardly although they are starting to get more creative. My son decided that since he’s a strong dwarf, he wanted to pick up the Gnolls and throw them into the river or into each other. I wanted to encourage the creativity, so I had him do an athletics check. Between his +7 and a series of lucky rolls, he ends up almost always successfully tossing the Gnolls and the kids and I erupted into fits of laughter as the battle became more and more chaotic. It was even funnier when he finally had a bad roll and so he just picked up the Gnoll and dropped him at his feet.
I’ve been backing a few different D&D 5e adventures on kickstarter, but the one I’m most excited about getting fulfillment on is Obojima: Tales from the Tall Grass. It’s so freakin’ beautiful that I had to hold myself back from getting the package that came with everything. But I’m not the only one excited bout it, I also read this article about it in Wired today. One of the points they make in the article is about how gamers and readers are moving away from Grimdark because there’s already enough of this in the world:
Two years ago, while spending time with my brothers, I played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time ever. David had been introduced to D&D by a coworker during COVID. Tony and Alex apparently had played in high school. I’m not sure when David’s wife started playing, but she joined us that night, too. David played the role of DM and selected a one-off campaign. I had a blast and couldn’t believe that I’d somehow gone most of my life without ever having had someone convince me to play. Incidentally, in our campaign, we accidentally murdered Santa Claus. Ask me about it some time.
Once the party was back on the ship after the events with the mermaids they let Hal know that dragonfire is needed to melt the adamantine on the star. Hal consults his charts and they head towards the Archipelago where Lux lives. The since the adventurers have the star, the Blackrift compass points towards them. Many Blackrift ships approach and they’re boarded. They fight a Far Elf Lunar Monk and 2 Link Acolytes. Before more enemies can board, Aurora arrives and incinerates the ship nearest them. They end the battle and Aurora lands on the deck of the ship.
After dealing with the lich and the leviathan, the characters find themselves alone on the ocean. They sail on in the direction the compass directs. Eventually they reach a point where the compass is going in circles like it did when the leviathan was near. Everyone looks over the edge, but only Hazel and Amelia have the prior knowledge to recognize that they are above some merfolk architecture. They sail in the direction of the merfolk architecture, but are dragged a mile back by water elementals.
This was our second non-kiddie Dungeons and Dragons 5e campaign after Humblewood. As it says on the tin, this is a very dungeon-focused adventure. I reviewed the first 3 adventures from the point of view of the Dungeon Master a while back. This is a session recap of the adventure as experienced by the players. If you’re not a DM, but someone who might play, there are spoilers below!
Note: we didn’t play in a VTT, I’m just using it to illustrate some key moments from each session.
In my reflections on a year of being the family DM I mentioned we started playing the Dungeon in a Box campaign Voyage of the Fallen Star. It’s a monthly subscription that provides a connected story that takes place over a year. I’ve finished DMing the first 3 adventures, so I wanted to talk aobut my impressions with the content so far.
Minis, Skinny Minis, and one of the Dungeon in a Box maps
In my reflections on a year of being the family DM I mentioned we started playing the Dungeon in a Box campaign Voyage of the Fallen Star. It’s a monthly subscription that provides a connected story that takes place over a year. I’ve finished DMing the first 3 adventures, so I wanted to talk aobut my impressions with the content so far.
Minis, Skinny Minis, and one of the Dungeon in a Box maps
I’ve written a lot about DnD Adventure Club, including my lasttwo posts. Today while I was looking at the Pathfinder Humble Bundle, I went to the Pathfinder website to see if they had a page listing differences (since Pathfinder started as a fork of D&D 3.5). I found this page - Adventure Paths. It looks like they’re doing the same thing as DnD Adventure Club, except in Pathfinder 2e and without a kid focus. Also, it seems like each trilogy is building to a larger story (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer with its villain of the season, but also overarching story). It makes me wish that Wizards of the Coast (the Hasbro subsidiary that runs D&D) would do something similar - or if a 3rd party creator did it that it would be tightly coupled to D&D beyond. One advantage of WotC doing the mini-adventures is that they could use them to highlight different aspects of the mechanics or classes. I love that DnD Adventure Club comes with a new character each month with some example backstories. It really helps demonstrate the different races and classes. Also, upon further examination of the Pathfinder adventures I saw that each trilogy is written by a different person (creating opportunities to showcase new writers) and that (at least the one I clicked on) is tied to a campaign setting book. This is SO smart from a marketing point of view. “If you enjoyed your little trilogy in this corner of our world, you might enjoy learning more about it…” Yeah, WoTC should DEFINITELY look into this.
Because I had to fix a bunch of posts on here due to the transition from Wordpress to Hugo, I was reminded that I wrote a bunch of posts when Civilization IV came out 20 years ago. With the massive changes to the game mechanics in Civilization VII I thought I would at least make a post about my initial impressions of Civilization VII.
[caption id=“attachment_3224” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Civilization IV: Colonizaton: My First Colony”] [/caption]
Do not be fooled by the Civ IV part of the title to the updated to the classic Colonization. You do so at your own peril; well, your colony’s peril. Colonization is primarily a game of economics while Civilization is primarily a game of domination. In Civ you work the tiles around your city and either get “money”, production, or food. In Colonization you work the tiles around your city and get cotton, tobacco, ore, sugar cane, and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting. And, while in Civ you simply use the production to build units and city structures, in Col you take all these raw products and produce finished products: cloth, cigars, tools, guns, rum, and coats.
Because I had to fix a bunch of posts on here due to the transition from Wordpress to Hugo, I was reminded that I wrote a bunch of posts when Civilization IV came out 20 years ago. With the massive changes to the game mechanics in Civilization VII I thought I would at least make a post about my initial impressions of Civilization VII.
There are many times that The Giant Bombcast or other video game podcasts have led me to discover games I wouldn’t have otherwise considered: Peggle, Saint’s Row the Third, Assassin’s Creed, and The Witcher. But there was one time they did me wrong: XCOM: Enemy Unknown. They made it sound like it was just an exercise in frustration in which you died at every turn and it since it was made by Firaxis, I thought it was just going to look like Civ. Nothing wrong with that, but I already had Civ. But Dan got an extra copy at some point and gifted me this one. It’s been a blast and I’ve loved playing it even as it has started to kick my butt as the difficulty ramps up. If I had more time, I’d be playing this game A LOT.
I’m a seasonal Team Fortress 2 player. Although I play it here and there at any time of year, I tend to really play a lot during October for the special Halloween missions. This year Valve was busy working on a new mode that was released earlier this week so they released a community-made Halloween mode: Invasion. It’s the first time I’ve spent any money since I spent $2.50 to get a bigger backpack a few years ago. Overall, the new modes were a lot of fun and I’m glad that Valve has gone from what should be the basic level of video game company support- supporting community mods- to allowing the best of the best to make money by sharing in the profits made during community events.
Assassin’s Creed was the first game series Vinnie of Giant Bomb convinced me to try by talking about it endlessly on the Bombcast. The Witcher is the second. (This is why I miss his voice on that podcast so much) It has turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would. It’s based on the Bioware engine of the time, so it plays a lot like Mass Effect 1. The story is good so far and full of nice little jokes. You can watch my progress (I’ve been recording it for Extra Life) on this Youtube playlist.
Civilization: Beyond Earth (7 hrs): This game was a great evolution on Civ V. I enjoyed that they continued with the same sense of humor. I also thought they did a good job evolving things so that it felt different enough. It’ll probably take a few games before I get the hang of all the government options.
Super Mario Galaxy (1 hr): Just wanted to get past the opening section on my emulator so I could not have to repeat that silly story section again if I even want to play some SMG. Also wanted to test the USB sensor Dan got me for Christmas.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
Civilization 5 (5 hours): Still haven’t caught up on the blog posts. Still entirely consists of games with Dan and Dave. Dan gifted me the latest expansion pack during the Winter Steam Sale, so I may fire up a solo game. Time will tell - I still have a ton of indie games from Humble Bundles and even games Dan gave me for my birthday last year like LA Noire.
[caption id=“attachment_7503” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Back to the Future: The Video Game - The Pseudonym Fun of the series continues[/caption]
Back to the Future: The Video Games (5 hrs) - As is the usual situation with these types of games, I figured out I had to get to the 1920s about 2 hours before I had triggered the right series of events that would allow me to get there. Got to see the sense of humor of the writers as I ended up meeting the high school principle’s sister who’s just as crotchety as he is. Apparently Doc is in trouble for starting a fire. Other than that I don’t know much as I wasn’t able to play very much of the game beyond the first 1920s scene with the principle’s sister.
[caption id=“attachment_5805” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Saint’s Row The Third: The Ho Boat[/caption]
Saint’s Row the Third (14 hrs): I got a lot of video games for my birthday and Christmas (mostly on Steam). So I wanted to finish up the last narrative game I had started before playing those games. I played a few missions in Saint’s Row The Third. As I had surmised before, the loose narrative based mostly on archetypes and stereotypes made it extremely easy to jump in. It wasn’t like in Mass Effect or Final Fantasy 10 where I couldn’t remember why I should be caring about these characters. The missions with the VTOL planes (STAG missions) were pretty hard.
Civ V (11 Hrs) - talk of the expansion pack made me want to play some more Civ. I played a scenario and then I played a regular game. I had a blast and I can’t wait to buy the expansion pack.
Peggle Deluxe (5 hrs) - Worked on some of the challenge puzzles
Team Fortress 2 - (3 hrs) - played when the Pyro pack came out. Really enjoyed the new mode.
Civilization V (75 hrs) - What can I say about this game that I haven’tsaidalready? This is the series that made “One More More Turn…” famous and it still works today. If I were to start a game tonight, I would not go to bed at a reasonable time.
To finish up talking about the game I left off in my last post, I won my first civ 5 game via conquest - a new one for me. I usually turtle and do a culture victory or science victory. It was only near the end of my time playing Civ IV that I started to become comfortable with domination victories. I ended up with a score of 2679, a score I have yet to best. The way the ending is now structured makes it easy to miss the old charts and graphs they’d always make you click through. So on that first game I missed out on finding out what historical leader I compared with. And, there doesn’t seem to be a way to access that. Other thoughts from this first game include that the construction pace feels a bit slower (like less buildings units built in a game) and Dan concurred once he played his own games. Great people now make their buildings outisde the city. This makes using them to make their special building more of a strategic process than in Civ IV. Great artists make monuments and those could end up obliterating a farm or some other tile modification. A final fun bit of art imitating life: in this game the Americans had taken over middle east.
?At first I ridiculed achievements/trophies. The idea that grown men and women (and, heck anyone over 12 years old) would care about getting these achievements enough to continue playing through their games until they earned them all seemed ludicrous. Then, I acknowledged it was a fun way to compete with friends in games that are otherwise single player experiences. In time I came to understand the idea behind achievements, both for compulsive people and regular folks. From my non-scientific observations, it appears that people who play video games tend to be more likely to be compulsive people. The video game companies figured this out and then realized that if they created trophies for all kinds of situations in a game, that most people would keep playing until they got all of them. Perhaps this would keep them from trading in a game long enough that it would kill the market for used games.
[caption id=“attachment_3621” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Civ 5 tells me I need to set some city production”] [/caption]
Interestingly, the game appears not to pop up and tell you to choose city production, you have to notice that in the bottom right, same for science and so on…..At least it doesn’t let you skip a turn before you worry about that. So I actually like it better. It was far too easy to say you’d deal with something later and then forget. And all the messages queue up there for you to read. I used ALWAYS lose track of those in civ 4. Especially since they used to appear when I was busy on something else and disappear before I could act on them. And here’s what it looks like when you decide to what to build.
[caption id=“attachment_3606” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Civilization 5 choosing the game to play”] [/caption]
The opening movie is AWESOME. Most of the visuals were from the trailers, but the frame story was great. Best intro thus far. I decided not to play the tutorial first since it appeared to be for those new to the Civ franchise. I chose Wu Zetian of China since I’ve been playing the Chinese almost my entire time with Civ IV. She has the “Art of War” which makes Great Generals spawn more often. Also the Cho-Ku-Nu unit (like Civ 4) and Paper Maker. I did a small continents map. And I made myself Settler, marked “for learning the game” so I figure it’ll be tutorial enough. And a standard game pace. I REALLY like the new menu system. It’s very well done. Sounds like Leonard Nimoy is still the narrator. I love how it describes my ruler and China in history. Pretty awesome. I let the wonderful narration read out before I “begin my journey”. I take a while to look for the screenshots and it comes up with hints. Pretty awesome. The Chinese music is great. Here are some screenshots. Another post later. Right now I want to play and the game gets annoying (freezes cpu) if I alt-tab out of it to get the screenshots.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Everything but the RAM”] [/caption]
14 Sept
Sometime in my junior or senior year of college I came across a book about building my own computer and resolved to do it. My tribulations with my Dell computer were enough to convince me that building computers with generic parts was the way to go. Later experience with my Emachine and the inability to tack on a DVD-writer (because they had blocked the slot with a metal mesh) confirmed this was the case. Just under five years ago I was finally able to do this and built my [first computer](/2006/01/03/new-computer-built/ /2006/01/07/building-the-computer/). I can’t believe it took me four hours to put that first one together. Nowadays, if things go well, it takes about an hour. In the time since then I’ve built 8 other computers. Of course, those weren’t all for me. I also built Dan and Dave’s newest computers, my father-in-law’s computer, his sister’s computer, and a bunch of others.
Because I had to fix a bunch of posts on here due to the transition from Wordpress to Hugo, I was reminded that I wrote a bunch of posts when Civilization IV came out 20 years ago. With the massive changes to the game mechanics in Civilization VII I thought I would at least make a post about my initial impressions of Civilization VII.
Because I had to fix a bunch of posts on here due to the transition from Wordpress to Hugo, I was reminded that I wrote a bunch of posts when Civilization IV came out 20 years ago. With the massive changes to the game mechanics in Civilization VII I thought I would at least make a post about my initial impressions of Civilization VII.
January flew by and it was time to read the last two lessons before running the game as the capstone project for this class. Tuesday’s generic lesson was about gathering what you need to run the game. I didn’t really learn anything with that lesson, although I did like the acknowledgement that VTTs can offer some benefits over in-person play. The Tales of the Valiant part of the lesson included links to the character sheets as well as their ToV extra Lineages and Heritages PDFs for free (normally ~$3-$5 each).
New Gamemaster Month continued this week by building on the idea of the encounter. Tuesday’s blog post defined an encounter and the homework was to read Homework to read Encounter and Spell Casting pages from Tales of the Valiant (pp221-245). Also read ch 1 of Guide to Labyrinth. (This gave me many new ideas for my Midgard campaign). Thursday’s blog post and homework were to think about the atmospherics of the encounters.
As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class.
On Tuesday our homework was to learn the rules of Tales of the Valiant and watch the creators of Tov play the game. I learned a lot from watching the video, especially with how the GM often invited the players to contribute to their shared history rather than dictating it. I also enjoyed how the players would play along (“yes and”) if the players had their characters forget the name of their nemesis.
As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class. Whether you’re on the main page of the blog or reading through an RSS reader, click through to see the YouTube videos of my session prep. (Walls & Lighting, Character Creator, and vanilla combat)
The organizers recommended practicing what you’ve learned by the end of the month by running a game. The second class was about selecting an adventure and finding players. Kobold Press recommended The Impregnable Fortress of Dibs as it’s short, fun, and is a great level one introductory adventure. For finding players they had a few recommendations, including the #LFG channel on their Discord server. (LFG stands for lookign for group) Finally, potential new GMs were supposed to read the introduction to the Players Guide. I’d read it before, but I re-read it to get it fresh in my mind.
January flew by and it was time to read the last two lessons before running the game as the capstone project for this class. Tuesday’s generic lesson was about gathering what you need to run the game. I didn’t really learn anything with that lesson, although I did like the acknowledgement that VTTs can offer some benefits over in-person play. The Tales of the Valiant part of the lesson included links to the character sheets as well as their ToV extra Lineages and Heritages PDFs for free (normally ~$3-$5 each).
New Gamemaster Month continued this week by building on the idea of the encounter. Tuesday’s blog post defined an encounter and the homework was to read Homework to read Encounter and Spell Casting pages from Tales of the Valiant (pp221-245). Also read ch 1 of Guide to Labyrinth. (This gave me many new ideas for my Midgard campaign). Thursday’s blog post and homework were to think about the atmospherics of the encounters.
As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class.
On Tuesday our homework was to learn the rules of Tales of the Valiant and watch the creators of Tov play the game. I learned a lot from watching the video, especially with how the GM often invited the players to contribute to their shared history rather than dictating it. I also enjoyed how the players would play along (“yes and”) if the players had their characters forget the name of their nemesis.
It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a blog post reflecting on being the family dungeon master for the past year. So I’m going to try and avoid repeating too much of what I wrote there. At the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t considering making tabletop gaming one of the topics I reflect on at the end of the year. However, it has become a pretty large part of my leisure and it may continue to grow in the amount of my free time that it takes up. I think, for this year, I will divide my post according to campaign. We’ll see what makes sense next year.
As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class. Whether you’re on the main page of the blog or reading through an RSS reader, click through to see the YouTube videos of my session prep. (Walls & Lighting, Character Creator, and vanilla combat)
The organizers recommended practicing what you’ve learned by the end of the month by running a game. The second class was about selecting an adventure and finding players. Kobold Press recommended The Impregnable Fortress of Dibs as it’s short, fun, and is a great level one introductory adventure. For finding players they had a few recommendations, including the #LFG channel on their Discord server. (LFG stands for lookign for group) Finally, potential new GMs were supposed to read the introduction to the Players Guide. I’d read it before, but I re-read it to get it fresh in my mind.
Whenever I get the chance, I like to watch the Kobold Press YT series Kobold Chats. Kendo, the community manager for Kobold Press, goes over various tabletop RPG topics - usually revolving around Kobold press releases or blog posts from that week. Occasionally they do interviews with Kobold Press employees or with others in the TTRPG space (like someone from Roll20). Kendo has a very fun personality on the chats and it’s hard not to find myself grinning at his antics. This last week’s video (linked earlier) mentioned something I wish I’d known about last year - New Gamemaster Month, an annual event to increase the number of game masters (also sometimes called dungeon masters) by providing a month-long tutorial on the process. Last January I would have been about 6 months into my GM journey and could definitely have made use of the month. However, that doesn’t mean all is lost for me. Whenever I teach myself a new skill - programming, photography, TTRPGs, etc - I will usually eventually seek out a class if it interests me enough. I’m not sure how unique I am, but I find that whenever I’m self-taught I end up with gaps in my knowledge compared to learning in a class. ALSO, I’ve always found that if I’m learning any skill that isn’t TOO basic, I learn it much better the second time through. (Obviously, if it’s too basic, it would just be boring the second time through) So I’ll be participating in New Gamemaster Month this month. If I’ve piqued your interest, follow the prior link. There are a bunch of game companies participating and you can use one of their games to learn how to GM. As is often the case, most of the companies are small-to-midsize (ie Wizards of the Coast is not represented). The games represented are:
Last weekend I decided to try the Humblewood D&D campaign setting with the kids. For the past year (give or take) we’ve had a lot of fun playing DnD Adventure Club campaigns. Our one major foray in to regular D&D, Dragons of Stormreck Isle, was a failure. I think there were a few reasons for that. First of all, I was fairly new to DMing and so probably not doing as good of a job as I am a year-ish later. Second, since it was a campaign meant to introduce people to both playing and DMing, it came with pre-made characters. I think that meant the kids had less of an attachment to the characters. Also, the session went very slowly as I had to go back and forth through the player handbook, monster manual, and campaign sheet to look up spells, monsters, etc.
I was DMing the first third of a DnD Adventure Club campaign for my kids today. My son likes to mostly play as Grumpy Mcgrumbles, a dwarven fighter. The kids were attacked by a group of Gnolls. Normally, most of the time, the kids play pretty straightforwardly although they are starting to get more creative. My son decided that since he’s a strong dwarf, he wanted to pick up the Gnolls and throw them into the river or into each other. I wanted to encourage the creativity, so I had him do an athletics check. Between his +7 and a series of lucky rolls, he ends up almost always successfully tossing the Gnolls and the kids and I erupted into fits of laughter as the battle became more and more chaotic. It was even funnier when he finally had a bad roll and so he just picked up the Gnoll and dropped him at his feet.
January flew by and it was time to read the last two lessons before running the game as the capstone project for this class. Tuesday’s generic lesson was about gathering what you need to run the game. I didn’t really learn anything with that lesson, although I did like the acknowledgement that VTTs can offer some benefits over in-person play. The Tales of the Valiant part of the lesson included links to the character sheets as well as their ToV extra Lineages and Heritages PDFs for free (normally ~$3-$5 each).
New Gamemaster Month continued this week by building on the idea of the encounter. Tuesday’s blog post defined an encounter and the homework was to read Homework to read Encounter and Spell Casting pages from Tales of the Valiant (pp221-245). Also read ch 1 of Guide to Labyrinth. (This gave me many new ideas for my Midgard campaign). Thursday’s blog post and homework were to think about the atmospherics of the encounters.
As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class.
On Tuesday our homework was to learn the rules of Tales of the Valiant and watch the creators of Tov play the game. I learned a lot from watching the video, especially with how the GM often invited the players to contribute to their shared history rather than dictating it. I also enjoyed how the players would play along (“yes and”) if the players had their characters forget the name of their nemesis.
It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a blog post reflecting on being the family dungeon master for the past year. So I’m going to try and avoid repeating too much of what I wrote there. At the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t considering making tabletop gaming one of the topics I reflect on at the end of the year. However, it has become a pretty large part of my leisure and it may continue to grow in the amount of my free time that it takes up. I think, for this year, I will divide my post according to campaign. We’ll see what makes sense next year.
As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class. Whether you’re on the main page of the blog or reading through an RSS reader, click through to see the YouTube videos of my session prep. (Walls & Lighting, Character Creator, and vanilla combat)
The organizers recommended practicing what you’ve learned by the end of the month by running a game. The second class was about selecting an adventure and finding players. Kobold Press recommended The Impregnable Fortress of Dibs as it’s short, fun, and is a great level one introductory adventure. For finding players they had a few recommendations, including the #LFG channel on their Discord server. (LFG stands for lookign for group) Finally, potential new GMs were supposed to read the introduction to the Players Guide. I’d read it before, but I re-read it to get it fresh in my mind.
Whenever I get the chance, I like to watch the Kobold Press YT series Kobold Chats. Kendo, the community manager for Kobold Press, goes over various tabletop RPG topics - usually revolving around Kobold press releases or blog posts from that week. Occasionally they do interviews with Kobold Press employees or with others in the TTRPG space (like someone from Roll20). Kendo has a very fun personality on the chats and it’s hard not to find myself grinning at his antics. This last week’s video (linked earlier) mentioned something I wish I’d known about last year - New Gamemaster Month, an annual event to increase the number of game masters (also sometimes called dungeon masters) by providing a month-long tutorial on the process. Last January I would have been about 6 months into my GM journey and could definitely have made use of the month. However, that doesn’t mean all is lost for me. Whenever I teach myself a new skill - programming, photography, TTRPGs, etc - I will usually eventually seek out a class if it interests me enough. I’m not sure how unique I am, but I find that whenever I’m self-taught I end up with gaps in my knowledge compared to learning in a class. ALSO, I’ve always found that if I’m learning any skill that isn’t TOO basic, I learn it much better the second time through. (Obviously, if it’s too basic, it would just be boring the second time through) So I’ll be participating in New Gamemaster Month this month. If I’ve piqued your interest, follow the prior link. There are a bunch of game companies participating and you can use one of their games to learn how to GM. As is often the case, most of the companies are small-to-midsize (ie Wizards of the Coast is not represented). The games represented are:
About a year ago, I wrote a blog post about how my kids got themselves (and, by extension, me) into Dungeons and Dragons. I wanted to reflect on how far I’ve come since then and where I might go in the near future. Starting off with a quick recap of the linked blog post, my brother David had introduced the kids to D&D via Muk, a module for introducing your kids to D&D. Unfortunately, it was written for an experience adult D&D player or DM to DM for the kids, so we had a few fails with my first time as the DM. Then we moved on to DnD Adventure Club. That was, and continues to be, a huge hit with the kids.
January flew by and it was time to read the last two lessons before running the game as the capstone project for this class. Tuesday’s generic lesson was about gathering what you need to run the game. I didn’t really learn anything with that lesson, although I did like the acknowledgement that VTTs can offer some benefits over in-person play. The Tales of the Valiant part of the lesson included links to the character sheets as well as their ToV extra Lineages and Heritages PDFs for free (normally ~$3-$5 each).
When I first started really playing D&D with the kids, the starter kit came with a flyer advertising dndbeyond. At the time they had the encounter builder and the character creation; maps didn’t exist yet. I made use of the encounter builder (which was free at the time - and I think remains free with some limits) and character creator. Around the time that Humblewood was released for dndbeyond, maps started its alpha, available only to Master Tier subscribers. It was quite useful to set up encounters so that the players could visualize where they were relative to the enemy. Since then we’ve continued using dndbeyond (with my Master Tier subscription). Mostly I’ve made use of the maps when playing one-shots with my brother on the other side of the country and occasionally with the kids for the map. I was happy and I was constantly wishing more creators would get their content onto dndbeyond so that I could make use of all the stat blocks without having to “homebrew” anything to add it to the system. Then Brandon Sanderson launched the Cosmere RPG kickstarter. I looked around at the various virtual tabletops that would be supported. I wanted something I could pay for once and own vs a subscription. I ended up choosing FoundryVTT. This eventually led me down a decision matrix that led to the writing of this blog post.
New Gamemaster Month continued this week by building on the idea of the encounter. Tuesday’s blog post defined an encounter and the homework was to read Homework to read Encounter and Spell Casting pages from Tales of the Valiant (pp221-245). Also read ch 1 of Guide to Labyrinth. (This gave me many new ideas for my Midgard campaign). Thursday’s blog post and homework were to think about the atmospherics of the encounters.
As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class.
On Tuesday our homework was to learn the rules of Tales of the Valiant and watch the creators of Tov play the game. I learned a lot from watching the video, especially with how the GM often invited the players to contribute to their shared history rather than dictating it. I also enjoyed how the players would play along (“yes and”) if the players had their characters forget the name of their nemesis.
As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class. Whether you’re on the main page of the blog or reading through an RSS reader, click through to see the YouTube videos of my session prep. (Walls & Lighting, Character Creator, and vanilla combat)
The organizers recommended practicing what you’ve learned by the end of the month by running a game. The second class was about selecting an adventure and finding players. Kobold Press recommended The Impregnable Fortress of Dibs as it’s short, fun, and is a great level one introductory adventure. For finding players they had a few recommendations, including the #LFG channel on their Discord server. (LFG stands for lookign for group) Finally, potential new GMs were supposed to read the introduction to the Players Guide. I’d read it before, but I re-read it to get it fresh in my mind.
January flew by and it was time to read the last two lessons before running the game as the capstone project for this class. Tuesday’s generic lesson was about gathering what you need to run the game. I didn’t really learn anything with that lesson, although I did like the acknowledgement that VTTs can offer some benefits over in-person play. The Tales of the Valiant part of the lesson included links to the character sheets as well as their ToV extra Lineages and Heritages PDFs for free (normally ~$3-$5 each).
New Gamemaster Month continued this week by building on the idea of the encounter. Tuesday’s blog post defined an encounter and the homework was to read Homework to read Encounter and Spell Casting pages from Tales of the Valiant (pp221-245). Also read ch 1 of Guide to Labyrinth. (This gave me many new ideas for my Midgard campaign). Thursday’s blog post and homework were to think about the atmospherics of the encounters.
As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class.
On Tuesday our homework was to learn the rules of Tales of the Valiant and watch the creators of Tov play the game. I learned a lot from watching the video, especially with how the GM often invited the players to contribute to their shared history rather than dictating it. I also enjoyed how the players would play along (“yes and”) if the players had their characters forget the name of their nemesis.
As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class. Whether you’re on the main page of the blog or reading through an RSS reader, click through to see the YouTube videos of my session prep. (Walls & Lighting, Character Creator, and vanilla combat)
The organizers recommended practicing what you’ve learned by the end of the month by running a game. The second class was about selecting an adventure and finding players. Kobold Press recommended The Impregnable Fortress of Dibs as it’s short, fun, and is a great level one introductory adventure. For finding players they had a few recommendations, including the #LFG channel on their Discord server. (LFG stands for lookign for group) Finally, potential new GMs were supposed to read the introduction to the Players Guide. I’d read it before, but I re-read it to get it fresh in my mind.
Whenever I get the chance, I like to watch the Kobold Press YT series Kobold Chats. Kendo, the community manager for Kobold Press, goes over various tabletop RPG topics - usually revolving around Kobold press releases or blog posts from that week. Occasionally they do interviews with Kobold Press employees or with others in the TTRPG space (like someone from Roll20). Kendo has a very fun personality on the chats and it’s hard not to find myself grinning at his antics. This last week’s video (linked earlier) mentioned something I wish I’d known about last year - New Gamemaster Month, an annual event to increase the number of game masters (also sometimes called dungeon masters) by providing a month-long tutorial on the process. Last January I would have been about 6 months into my GM journey and could definitely have made use of the month. However, that doesn’t mean all is lost for me. Whenever I teach myself a new skill - programming, photography, TTRPGs, etc - I will usually eventually seek out a class if it interests me enough. I’m not sure how unique I am, but I find that whenever I’m self-taught I end up with gaps in my knowledge compared to learning in a class. ALSO, I’ve always found that if I’m learning any skill that isn’t TOO basic, I learn it much better the second time through. (Obviously, if it’s too basic, it would just be boring the second time through) So I’ll be participating in New Gamemaster Month this month. If I’ve piqued your interest, follow the prior link. There are a bunch of game companies participating and you can use one of their games to learn how to GM. As is often the case, most of the companies are small-to-midsize (ie Wizards of the Coast is not represented). The games represented are:
January flew by and it was time to read the last two lessons before running the game as the capstone project for this class. Tuesday’s generic lesson was about gathering what you need to run the game. I didn’t really learn anything with that lesson, although I did like the acknowledgement that VTTs can offer some benefits over in-person play. The Tales of the Valiant part of the lesson included links to the character sheets as well as their ToV extra Lineages and Heritages PDFs for free (normally ~$3-$5 each).
New Gamemaster Month continued this week by building on the idea of the encounter. Tuesday’s blog post defined an encounter and the homework was to read Homework to read Encounter and Spell Casting pages from Tales of the Valiant (pp221-245). Also read ch 1 of Guide to Labyrinth. (This gave me many new ideas for my Midgard campaign). Thursday’s blog post and homework were to think about the atmospherics of the encounters.
As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class.
On Tuesday our homework was to learn the rules of Tales of the Valiant and watch the creators of Tov play the game. I learned a lot from watching the video, especially with how the GM often invited the players to contribute to their shared history rather than dictating it. I also enjoyed how the players would play along (“yes and”) if the players had their characters forget the name of their nemesis.
It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a blog post reflecting on being the family dungeon master for the past year. So I’m going to try and avoid repeating too much of what I wrote there. At the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t considering making tabletop gaming one of the topics I reflect on at the end of the year. However, it has become a pretty large part of my leisure and it may continue to grow in the amount of my free time that it takes up. I think, for this year, I will divide my post according to campaign. We’ll see what makes sense next year.
As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class. Whether you’re on the main page of the blog or reading through an RSS reader, click through to see the YouTube videos of my session prep. (Walls & Lighting, Character Creator, and vanilla combat)
The organizers recommended practicing what you’ve learned by the end of the month by running a game. The second class was about selecting an adventure and finding players. Kobold Press recommended The Impregnable Fortress of Dibs as it’s short, fun, and is a great level one introductory adventure. For finding players they had a few recommendations, including the #LFG channel on their Discord server. (LFG stands for lookign for group) Finally, potential new GMs were supposed to read the introduction to the Players Guide. I’d read it before, but I re-read it to get it fresh in my mind.
Whenever I get the chance, I like to watch the Kobold Press YT series Kobold Chats. Kendo, the community manager for Kobold Press, goes over various tabletop RPG topics - usually revolving around Kobold press releases or blog posts from that week. Occasionally they do interviews with Kobold Press employees or with others in the TTRPG space (like someone from Roll20). Kendo has a very fun personality on the chats and it’s hard not to find myself grinning at his antics. This last week’s video (linked earlier) mentioned something I wish I’d known about last year - New Gamemaster Month, an annual event to increase the number of game masters (also sometimes called dungeon masters) by providing a month-long tutorial on the process. Last January I would have been about 6 months into my GM journey and could definitely have made use of the month. However, that doesn’t mean all is lost for me. Whenever I teach myself a new skill - programming, photography, TTRPGs, etc - I will usually eventually seek out a class if it interests me enough. I’m not sure how unique I am, but I find that whenever I’m self-taught I end up with gaps in my knowledge compared to learning in a class. ALSO, I’ve always found that if I’m learning any skill that isn’t TOO basic, I learn it much better the second time through. (Obviously, if it’s too basic, it would just be boring the second time through) So I’ll be participating in New Gamemaster Month this month. If I’ve piqued your interest, follow the prior link. There are a bunch of game companies participating and you can use one of their games to learn how to GM. As is often the case, most of the companies are small-to-midsize (ie Wizards of the Coast is not represented). The games represented are:
January flew by and it was time to read the last two lessons before running the game as the capstone project for this class. Tuesday’s generic lesson was about gathering what you need to run the game. I didn’t really learn anything with that lesson, although I did like the acknowledgement that VTTs can offer some benefits over in-person play. The Tales of the Valiant part of the lesson included links to the character sheets as well as their ToV extra Lineages and Heritages PDFs for free (normally ~$3-$5 each).
The only constant in the universe is change and so of course I should come to tabletop roleplaying games right when there’s a big shift. Dungeons and Dragons 5e came out in 2014, but I didn’t know that when I picked it up about 2 years ago at the behest of my kids. And it was D&D instead of Pathfinder because that’s what my brother had introduced them to at Christmas the year before. As soon as I spend a bunch of money on the big three source books (Players Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide) they decide to revamp the game in 2024. Perhaps learning the (right? wrong?) lesson from D&D 3.5, they don’t christen this new version as 5.5e. The publisher, Wizards of the Coast, goes to great lengths to say that the game is both backwards and forwards compatible. That is, old adventures will work with new 2024 characters. New adventures (or at least recently published ones) will work with 2014 characters and monsters. Somehow in all that chaos I also found and became interested in Kobold Press’ Tales of the Valiant. Tales of the Valiant is a fork (in the free and open source sense of the word) of the 5e system. For now it remains highly compatible with D&D 2024. The forks may eventually diverge, making Tales of the Valiant the Pathfinder (which split off from D&D 3.5) of this generation. (The fork happened because of the OGL license scandal of 2023 when Wizards of the Coast attempted to change the terms of the deal. What I found interesting is that there was a certain feeling in the air - either among the players or the developers - that led to a lot of convergent evolution in both D&D 5.5e and ToV despite the ways in which they are different. (quick disclaimer to say that this isn’t a post about which is better or which you should play, just what I’ve noticed is different)
New Gamemaster Month continued this week by building on the idea of the encounter. Tuesday’s blog post defined an encounter and the homework was to read Homework to read Encounter and Spell Casting pages from Tales of the Valiant (pp221-245). Also read ch 1 of Guide to Labyrinth. (This gave me many new ideas for my Midgard campaign). Thursday’s blog post and homework were to think about the atmospherics of the encounters.
As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class.
On Tuesday our homework was to learn the rules of Tales of the Valiant and watch the creators of Tov play the game. I learned a lot from watching the video, especially with how the GM often invited the players to contribute to their shared history rather than dictating it. I also enjoyed how the players would play along (“yes and”) if the players had their characters forget the name of their nemesis.
As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class. Whether you’re on the main page of the blog or reading through an RSS reader, click through to see the YouTube videos of my session prep. (Walls & Lighting, Character Creator, and vanilla combat)
The organizers recommended practicing what you’ve learned by the end of the month by running a game. The second class was about selecting an adventure and finding players. Kobold Press recommended The Impregnable Fortress of Dibs as it’s short, fun, and is a great level one introductory adventure. For finding players they had a few recommendations, including the #LFG channel on their Discord server. (LFG stands for lookign for group) Finally, potential new GMs were supposed to read the introduction to the Players Guide. I’d read it before, but I re-read it to get it fresh in my mind.
Spend enough time on the internet, (especially /r/dnd or /r/dndbeyond) and you’ll come away feeling like TTRGPs are over, Wizards of the Coast is ruining your childhood, and a million other negative thoughts. But as I was watching the latest promotional video from Wizards of the Coast for the “2024” Monster Manual, I realized that the hobby is in the midst of a creative spurt. So I wanted to write this short post to share some joy as we start 2025.
Whenever I get the chance, I like to watch the Kobold Press YT series Kobold Chats. Kendo, the community manager for Kobold Press, goes over various tabletop RPG topics - usually revolving around Kobold press releases or blog posts from that week. Occasionally they do interviews with Kobold Press employees or with others in the TTRPG space (like someone from Roll20). Kendo has a very fun personality on the chats and it’s hard not to find myself grinning at his antics. This last week’s video (linked earlier) mentioned something I wish I’d known about last year - New Gamemaster Month, an annual event to increase the number of game masters (also sometimes called dungeon masters) by providing a month-long tutorial on the process. Last January I would have been about 6 months into my GM journey and could definitely have made use of the month. However, that doesn’t mean all is lost for me. Whenever I teach myself a new skill - programming, photography, TTRPGs, etc - I will usually eventually seek out a class if it interests me enough. I’m not sure how unique I am, but I find that whenever I’m self-taught I end up with gaps in my knowledge compared to learning in a class. ALSO, I’ve always found that if I’m learning any skill that isn’t TOO basic, I learn it much better the second time through. (Obviously, if it’s too basic, it would just be boring the second time through) So I’ll be participating in New Gamemaster Month this month. If I’ve piqued your interest, follow the prior link. There are a bunch of game companies participating and you can use one of their games to learn how to GM. As is often the case, most of the companies are small-to-midsize (ie Wizards of the Coast is not represented). The games represented are:
When I first played D&D with David maybe 3 Christmases ago, one of the most baffling things for me to understand was my character sheet. Take a looka t the first page of Sam’s Dungeon in a Box character sheet:
Ignoring how busy this page is, one of the biggest design issues I see right away is that all of the trait boxes are incorrectly prioritized. I have seen people argue for completely eliminating the scores from the sheet because you don’t ever use those scores. Instead, you use the modifiers (the +# or -#). Yet on this sheet those numbers are teeny, tiny compared to the numbers that are functionally useless. (Except during character creation) I would otherwise say there’s not too much that’s bad about this page - it gives you the information you will need most often. The second page has information you might need to refer to so that you don’t need to keep referring to the Player’s Handbook (PHB)
As I was looking back over my old blog posts, searching for things that needed fixing in this migration over to the Hugo static site platform, I saw that I used to write brief blog posts about the Kickstarter campaigns I was backing. Since 2013 I’ve backed somewhere around 70 or more kickstarter campaigns. Since I usually don’t back anything that involves hardware, so far I haven’t had any of the campaigns disappear without giving me what I backed. Recently I realized I had backed an inordinate amount of D&D campaigns (I tend to fall pretty deep into hobbies). So I thought I might resurrect my Kickstarter posts to follow along with the D&D campaigns I’ve backed.
I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).
When I first started really playing D&D with the kids, the starter kit came with a flyer advertising dndbeyond. At the time they had the encounter builder and the character creation; maps didn’t exist yet. I made use of the encounter builder (which was free at the time - and I think remains free with some limits) and character creator. Around the time that Humblewood was released for dndbeyond, maps started its alpha, available only to Master Tier subscribers. It was quite useful to set up encounters so that the players could visualize where they were relative to the enemy. Since then we’ve continued using dndbeyond (with my Master Tier subscription). Mostly I’ve made use of the maps when playing one-shots with my brother on the other side of the country and occasionally with the kids for the map. I was happy and I was constantly wishing more creators would get their content onto dndbeyond so that I could make use of all the stat blocks without having to “homebrew” anything to add it to the system. Then Brandon Sanderson launched the Cosmere RPG kickstarter. I looked around at the various virtual tabletops that would be supported. I wanted something I could pay for once and own vs a subscription. I ended up choosing FoundryVTT. This eventually led me down a decision matrix that led to the writing of this blog post.
Scarlett was inspired by my previous post and made an animatic-style drawing of some of her favorite moments from the campaign.
The top panel is the party questioning the guards. (The ninja-looking character is Sasha, the character that Scarlett plays)
The next panel is Grumpy using intimidation to question a gnoll. The middle panel is the throwing of gnolls I referenced in my previous post. The last panel on that row depicts the characters examining someone who was shot mid-exposition.
I was DMing the first third of a DnD Adventure Club campaign for my kids today. My son likes to mostly play as Grumpy Mcgrumbles, a dwarven fighter. The kids were attacked by a group of Gnolls. Normally, most of the time, the kids play pretty straightforwardly although they are starting to get more creative. My son decided that since he’s a strong dwarf, he wanted to pick up the Gnolls and throw them into the river or into each other. I wanted to encourage the creativity, so I had him do an athletics check. Between his +7 and a series of lucky rolls, he ends up almost always successfully tossing the Gnolls and the kids and I erupted into fits of laughter as the battle became more and more chaotic. It was even funnier when he finally had a bad roll and so he just picked up the Gnoll and dropped him at his feet.
Once the party was back on the ship after the events with the mermaids they let Hal know that dragonfire is needed to melt the adamantine on the star. Hal consults his charts and they head towards the Archipelago where Lux lives. The since the adventurers have the star, the Blackrift compass points towards them. Many Blackrift ships approach and they’re boarded. They fight a Far Elf Lunar Monk and 2 Link Acolytes. Before more enemies can board, Aurora arrives and incinerates the ship nearest them. They end the battle and Aurora lands on the deck of the ship.
After dealing with the lich and the leviathan, the characters find themselves alone on the ocean. They sail on in the direction the compass directs. Eventually they reach a point where the compass is going in circles like it did when the leviathan was near. Everyone looks over the edge, but only Hazel and Amelia have the prior knowledge to recognize that they are above some merfolk architecture. They sail in the direction of the merfolk architecture, but are dragged a mile back by water elementals.
This was our second non-kiddie Dungeons and Dragons 5e campaign after Humblewood. As it says on the tin, this is a very dungeon-focused adventure. I reviewed the first 3 adventures from the point of view of the Dungeon Master a while back. This is a session recap of the adventure as experienced by the players. If you’re not a DM, but someone who might play, there are spoilers below!
Note: we didn’t play in a VTT, I’m just using it to illustrate some key moments from each session.
When we got to this trilogy, we had already played every other trilogy in the DnD Adventure Club world. We’d mostly, but not entirely, gone through the adventures in order. DnD Adventure Club provides some very awesome, simplified, pre-created character sheets. Back when we played the introductory adventure (which is referenced in this trilogy) the GM guidance was to have one or more of the players be an orphan raised by Baba (I don’t remember if it’s explicitly mentioned before this trilogy that this is Baba Yaga of Russia lore, but we figured it out at some point). The kids looked at the backstories of the characters they chose, and it didn’t really fit with any of them, but they chose to have Sasha (Scarlett’s character) have spent some time in the orphanage that Baba runs at the outskirts of the Tumbledowns.
It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a blog post reflecting on being the family dungeon master for the past year. So I’m going to try and avoid repeating too much of what I wrote there. At the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t considering making tabletop gaming one of the topics I reflect on at the end of the year. However, it has become a pretty large part of my leisure and it may continue to grow in the amount of my free time that it takes up. I think, for this year, I will divide my post according to campaign. We’ll see what makes sense next year.
This weekend we finished The Wild Trilogy from DnD Adventure Club. The first challenge involved sneaking around an Owlbear. The kids asked about their options and I noted that in addition to sneaking, they could try and distract it. Sam’s dwarf, Grumpy McGrumbles, has a cooking hobby, so he took hits pots and pans and made a bunch of noise so that the Owlbear would follow him around the camp.
After that there was a mini “dungeon” crawl in the basement beneath a wizard’s tower. The girls finally started to get the hang of investigating chambers rather than blindly setting off traps.
I’ve written a lot about DnD Adventure Club, including my lasttwo posts. Today while I was looking at the Pathfinder Humble Bundle, I went to the Pathfinder website to see if they had a page listing differences (since Pathfinder started as a fork of D&D 3.5). I found this page - Adventure Paths. It looks like they’re doing the same thing as DnD Adventure Club, except in Pathfinder 2e and without a kid focus. Also, it seems like each trilogy is building to a larger story (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer with its villain of the season, but also overarching story). It makes me wish that Wizards of the Coast (the Hasbro subsidiary that runs D&D) would do something similar - or if a 3rd party creator did it that it would be tightly coupled to D&D beyond. One advantage of WotC doing the mini-adventures is that they could use them to highlight different aspects of the mechanics or classes. I love that DnD Adventure Club comes with a new character each month with some example backstories. It really helps demonstrate the different races and classes. Also, upon further examination of the Pathfinder adventures I saw that each trilogy is written by a different person (creating opportunities to showcase new writers) and that (at least the one I clicked on) is tied to a campaign setting book. This is SO smart from a marketing point of view. “If you enjoyed your little trilogy in this corner of our world, you might enjoy learning more about it…” Yeah, WoTC should DEFINITELY look into this.
I want to share this out to the world because it really helped me. When I would connect my Garmin Forerunner 945 to my phone, the sync status kept saying an update was being sent to it, but it would never actually finish the update. It was frustrating the heck out of me. After doing a bit of searching, I found a suggestion to use Garmin Express to update it because it might need to update its maps and that can’t be done over Bluetooth. I connected it today and it’s now updating TopoActive North America (which is scheduled to take an hour to do). I’m hoping after this update it will no longer pretend to get an update that never truly updates.
For the past 9 years I’ve been using a Garmin watch while swimming. Back then I had a swim-focused watch, now I have a multi-sport watch. Most days the biggest benefits are the fact that I can pre-load a workout (so that I don’t need to print one out or keep my phone nearby (while keeping it safe from water) and the fact that it counts my laps for me. As I wrote 9 years ago, by releasing my brain from keeping track of laps, I can better focus on my technique.
For my birthday, my mother got me a Garmin Swim watch. The watch uses an accelerameter and gyroscope to figure out how many laps I’m swimming and what strokes I’m swimming. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough that it was able to allow me to focus on my strokes instead of counting intervals on the first day I used it. I’m not sure what I am doing wrong with breaststroke, but it made it add 2 extra laps to my third set of 400 IM. Even with those issues, (and the fact that something I do with backstroke is so wrong, it thinks I’m doing breaststroke) I was able to confirm some things I’d supposed, but didn’t want to waste time confirming with a less feature-full stopwatch. For example, I confirmed that, on average, I swim 25 meters in 30 seconds with freestyle. I also confirmed that I do my 400s in slightly less than 10 minutes, but slower with each set as I get tired.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Some of the equipment you need to geo-tag your photos.”] [/caption]
Recently I was listening to The Command Line Podcast and the host mentioned one way to help others is to write up a tutorial on your blog whenever you learn a new skill or task. Since the information I needed for geo-tagging my photos was fragmented, I decided to write up a tutorial following my workflow. I’ll break this up into the different phases involved.
It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a blog post reflecting on being the family dungeon master for the past year. So I’m going to try and avoid repeating too much of what I wrote there. At the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t considering making tabletop gaming one of the topics I reflect on at the end of the year. However, it has become a pretty large part of my leisure and it may continue to grow in the amount of my free time that it takes up. I think, for this year, I will divide my post according to campaign. We’ll see what makes sense next year.
Unlike last year I didn’t play any of my narrative games, despite my best intentions. Unlike with my end of the year music post I don’t usually make graphs for my end of the year video game posts, but if I did you would see that games 1-3 were played WAY more than any other other games I played this year. It was truly the year of Against the Storm, Cities: Skylines II, and Balatro. I don’t know too much about what 2025 will bring, but I am sure it’ll at least have a bit more of each of those three games. I would like to actually make a bigger effort to get through my narrative games this year, but I’m not sure how much that desire is worth when I consider that I didn’t play any at all in 2024. As usual, you can enjoy the YouTube video below that will have highlights of the games I played this year along with narration that matches the text below. After that are the images of my Steam Year in Review and, finally, my Top 20 overall games since 2011.
Overall, this year I listened to tons of Chillhop while at work. Since 99% of Chillhop doesn’t have lyrics, this would allow me to have some background music that wasn’t distracting. As each new Chillhop album was released for the current season, I would listen to it on loop for a while. I also made playlists of all the albums per season that I would listen to as well. Every once in a while I would listen to all my music on random (as I usually do), but this was a year in which I was more focused on listening to newly acquired albums when I wasn’t listening to Chillhop.
At the end of 2023 I had 3283 ebooks and magazines (a change of 234 - a similar gain to last year’s 256). Of those, 2636 were unread (an increase of about 200). I continued to get free issues of The MagPi (Raspberry Pi official magazine) and Hackspace Magazine. Tor.com pulled back on their free ebooks this year. However, Scarlett bought lots of books and I keep all the family’s books together in the same library. At the end of 2024 I had 222 audiobooks (an increase of 25 from last year).
In my 2022 year-end blog post, I thought I was going to focus more on finishing up the narrative video games I started in the prior years. I definitely made some good progress on Disco Elysium, but not nearly as much as I wanted. I didn’t finish any of the narrative games. In January, I didn’t play any video games as I worked on my end of the year blog posts. In February I got re-obsessed with Monster Train and spent a good chunk of my free time trying to unlock all the boss characters. In March and April I tried to get a little more consistent about my gaming and also started trying to take advantage of all the extra buttons in the gaming mouse that Dan got me for Christmas. In June we took a bunch of family vacations and so I got back into Gwent, which I could play on my phone and my non-gaming laptop. In July I was back to Monster Train. In August, as the advertising hype started picking up on Cities: Skylines II, I started spending a lot of time playing the original game. Once the game came out in October, I spent nearly all of the next two months playing it. Then, out of nowhere, I heard just enough about Against the Storm to buy it and it was all I could do, almost to the exclusion of all else.
By the end of 2023 I had 3049 ebooks and magazines (a change of 256 - pretty even with last year). Of those, 2434 were unread. Some chunk of those - maybe as much as ¼ were giveaways like Raspberry Pi Magazine, HackSpace Magazine, and Tor.com book club freebies. I stopped getting the monthly free Prime books since I no longer have a way to liberate them. I ended the year with 197 audiobooks (a change of 53). A lot of those were for Danielle - more on that later.
Since I didn’t cover running last year, I’m going to cover both years in this post.
2021
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I caught the running bug during the Red Hat Summit in 2019. My original goal was to do an official race that would allow me to qualify for a good spot at a Run Disney race. Then COVID-19 hit and killed in-person racing.
It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a blog post reflecting on being the family dungeon master for the past year. So I’m going to try and avoid repeating too much of what I wrote there. At the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t considering making tabletop gaming one of the topics I reflect on at the end of the year. However, it has become a pretty large part of my leisure and it may continue to grow in the amount of my free time that it takes up. I think, for this year, I will divide my post according to campaign. We’ll see what makes sense next year.
As I was looking back over my old blog posts, searching for things that needed fixing in this migration over to the Hugo static site platform, I saw that I used to write brief blog posts about the Kickstarter campaigns I was backing. Since 2013 I’ve backed somewhere around 70 or more kickstarter campaigns. Since I usually don’t back anything that involves hardware, so far I haven’t had any of the campaigns disappear without giving me what I backed. Recently I realized I had backed an inordinate amount of D&D campaigns (I tend to fall pretty deep into hobbies). So I thought I might resurrect my Kickstarter posts to follow along with the D&D campaigns I’ve backed.
This year I have sponsored a lot of Kickstarter creative work, including lots of music. One that I was very excited to support was The PDX Broadsides’ latest album, Relatable Content. They started off as a pirate shanty band and have evolved into a nerd filk band whose songs range from silly to profound. I really enjoyed their last album, Trust Issues, which had some pretty timely songs like Noncompliant (superficially about the Bitch Planet comic, but actually about the Me Too era) and We Want Rey (about representation in nerd toydom). It also had some fun songs (both feature Christian as the lead) like Tiny Little Octopus and Robot vs Boy (which I want to see made into a mini-musical). Their last Kickstarter also had a dirty album called Lust Issues that continued their trend of Shakespeare music with the great Dirtbag Romeo and their dirtier songs from their pirate shanty days with It’s Just Sex.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): They were awesome at Warped Tour - I can’t wait until they go on the Projecet Atma tour. Manufacturing delays at the vinyl plant meant that the album was delayed. Still don’t have it - should be in my hands in December.
Jonathan Coulton, Greg Pak, and others – Code Monkey Save World (music and comics): Still missing the new music and The Princess Who Saved Herself. To be fair, the latter wasn’t promised until early 2015.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): Things are on track with IFD. They are posting awesome videos of the recording process. It’s already March so as long as there aren’t any more delays, the album will be here in a few short months! Also, they’ll be on the Van’s Warped Tour, so I’ll be attending Warped Tour for the first time to go see them (and quite a few other bands I really like)
It’s December and I should have gotten all of my Kickstarter products by now. But that’s not exactly what happened. Every single one of my Kickstarters was late except the one I had the least faith and relationship with - Random Encounter’s Let Me Tell You a Story.
I’m writing this in late August - by the time this post appears I should have received all of my Kickstarter goods or they should be in the mail. Interestingly, even though the Kickstarter backer cycles were spread over about a three month period, they’re all supposed to be delivering the product at around the same time - 4th quarter of this year. As of the time of this writing, this is the status of my Kickstarters:
Those of you who have been reading this blog long enough know that I often write my blog posts during my lunch break at work and set it to post at some point in the future. I’m writing this post almost 1 month before it is to appear on the blog. So in the middle of July I find myself in what many who have backed projects probably experience as the Kickstarter Lull. I backed a project by I Fight Dragons and interviewed them about it here and I backed a comic project by Greg Pak and Jonathan Coulton. During the backing period as a way to drum up support there was a constant stream of both updates and digital goodies. IFD, in particular, gave backers 2 albums (live concert recording and a conceptual album) and a concert film. A little while after the backing period was over, the projects contacted us for the info they needed to fulfill our backer rewards. Since then I haven’t heard from either of them. On the rational side, I’m glad they’re focusing on creating what we paid them to create. But after the constant communications it just feels odd to have “radio” silence. Now we just wait for the products to be created. In the case of these two projects, the members involved are all veterans: IFD put out records before having a record company contract and Greg Pak has already done about a half dozen Kickstarters. So, outside of catastrophe, I don’t fear for my money. I could see where this silence might be more disturbing with an unproven team.
A little over a month ago I came across an article on Boing Boing about the movie Zach Braff was trying to get funded via Kickstarter. It was interesting time as I had just contributed to two Kickstarter projects for the first time - I Fight Dragons’ Project Atma and the Code Monkey comic by Jonathan Coulton and Greg Pak. The Boing Boing piece linked to an article by Ken Levine saying why he wouldn’t support Zach Braff’s Kickstarter. His premise was essentially that Braff has money and should finance it himself or use his Hollywood connections. Save Kickstarter for the indie film producer/director. He mentioned that he didn’t want Kickstarter to get all corporate like Sundance. He had a response blog post in which he showed that his lamentations had come true - Melissa Joan Hart was asking for money on Kickstarter and was only offering to follow her backers on Twitter. Ten days later he posted his final response (at the time I’m writing this) in which he pointed out that Braff’s Kickstarter was pointless because he got “gap funding” anyway. Although I’m sure most of the air will be out of the tire by the time this post appears on my blog, I’d like to take the chance to refute and elaborate on some of what Ken Levine said. (Also, this isn’t the Ken Levine of Bioshock, just so you know)
Back on 4 May I backed a Kickstarter project for the first time ever - I Fight Dragon’s Project Atma. Anyone who’s been following my last.fm posts knows that I really like the Chicago-based band. I first discovered I Fight Dragons when listening to a web comics podcast that featured “No One Likes Superman Anymore” from 2009’s Cool is Just a Number EP as the closing song. I have no idea if they had permission from I Fight Dragons, but it was quite fortuitous for the band as it led to me buying Welcome to the Breakdown and Kaboom! (and participating in this Kickstarter) As I’ve said before, the band is the inverse of Anamanaguchi. They are a rock band that uses Nintendos and Gameboys to create extra background instruments (whereas Anamanaguchi tends to have the instruments take the background to the chiptunes). Here’s one of the songs of their new album, Kaboom!
It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a blog post reflecting on being the family dungeon master for the past year. So I’m going to try and avoid repeating too much of what I wrote there. At the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t considering making tabletop gaming one of the topics I reflect on at the end of the year. However, it has become a pretty large part of my leisure and it may continue to grow in the amount of my free time that it takes up. I think, for this year, I will divide my post according to campaign. We’ll see what makes sense next year.
It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a blog post reflecting on being the family dungeon master for the past year. So I’m going to try and avoid repeating too much of what I wrote there. At the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t considering making tabletop gaming one of the topics I reflect on at the end of the year. However, it has become a pretty large part of my leisure and it may continue to grow in the amount of my free time that it takes up. I think, for this year, I will divide my post according to campaign. We’ll see what makes sense next year.
Spend enough time on the internet, (especially /r/dnd or /r/dndbeyond) and you’ll come away feeling like TTRGPs are over, Wizards of the Coast is ruining your childhood, and a million other negative thoughts. But as I was watching the latest promotional video from Wizards of the Coast for the “2024” Monster Manual, I realized that the hobby is in the midst of a creative spurt. So I wanted to write this short post to share some joy as we start 2025.
The Men Who Change the World (Christopher East) - this story gives me serious “Severance” vibes, but it was written before that show came out. I think there was something in the air they were both tapping into.
All Together, Now (Jason Hough and Ramez Naam) - even though we know where the story is headed, it still managed to surprise me in the final paragraph. Because humanity doesn’t change, this remains so relevant today as so many civilians die to try and kill a small enemy
Just to get my one issue out of the way - this trilogy is really just one giant book broken in 3. This book doesn’t really have a resolution at the end. In a strict technical sense, at least one of the storylines finishes up.
I really enjoyed this return to the world of Powder Mages, Privileged, and Knacked. We have the return of one of my favorite characters, Olem, as well as Vlora. Since the last series they’ve gone mercenary and for their storyline we follow as they have to deal with the missions they’re hired for. Just like the previous series we also have a couple more storylines that will eventually link up. One of them involves Michel, a member of the Blackhats - a gestapo-style police/intelligence force in Fatrasta. The other storyline is about Ben Styke. I don’t remember if we saw him in the previous series since people later bring up that he worked with Taniel Two-Shot.
Murderbot continues to be awesome. As with most mysteries, there isn’t too much to say that won’t end up being a spoiler. Muderbot continues to grow as a character while also not losing that which makes Murderbot such a delight to read. It’s similar to the way I feel about the alien character in Resident Alien.
I could potentially see a long life for the TV show as a mystery-of-the-week show that leaves the novels and novellas in the series behind after the first season.
I stayed up way too late last night reading. Today I took advantage of the fact that it was raining all day long to sit on the couch with a few cups of tea to finish the book. As I finished I recognized that this was both Seanan McGuire’s masterpiece and probably the book most likely to divide her readers. I doubt there’s anyone who feels “meh” about this book. I think it’s one where you love or hate it.
Our favorite Cuban spaceship captain is back and I enjoyed it even more than the first book. Now that Eva is her new self and knows there isn’t any more lying to her crew, they can move on to more fun adventures. This book is essentially one long quest to find a specific person and Eva and crew’s attempts to figure out where that person is.
I would probably more accurately rate this book as 4.5, but I decided to round up.
Yang does a perfect job in this novella creating just enough history for the world that we feel as though it’s gone on forever. It’s mostly focused on the two main characters, Mokoyo and Akeha, and yet there is so much happening in the background that we learn just enough about. I see it almost as a template for what the time between Sanderson’s Mistborn Era 2 and Era 3 might be like. In this story the world, which seems like a second-world Indonesia (lots of Chinese and Indian infuence), runs on magic-based devices. Only the government Tensors can create these devices and from there comes some of the government’s source of power - the monopoly on technology. In this novella (which spans 35 or so years) a faction grows that begins to invent science-based machines. All of this is fascinating, yet in so many ways it has nothing to do with plot propelling our story.
The word irreverent is tossed around way too flippantly these days, however, if there’s one site that deserves it, it’s ZeroPunctuation. ZeroPunctuation is a site where a British guy living in Australia reviews video games within a video format weekly. He often makes fun of games and the genres they belong in. The animation is extremely simple, yet remarkably effective. It’s slightly more than xkcd, but not much more than stick figures. The way he does this is brilliant and it must be seen in order to explain it correctly. Just one warning, if you get queasy over profanity, do NOT visit his site.
Unlike last year I didn’t play any of my narrative games, despite my best intentions. Unlike with my end of the year music post I don’t usually make graphs for my end of the year video game posts, but if I did you would see that games 1-3 were played WAY more than any other other games I played this year. It was truly the year of Against the Storm, Cities: Skylines II, and Balatro. I don’t know too much about what 2025 will bring, but I am sure it’ll at least have a bit more of each of those three games. I would like to actually make a bigger effort to get through my narrative games this year, but I’m not sure how much that desire is worth when I consider that I didn’t play any at all in 2024. As usual, you can enjoy the YouTube video below that will have highlights of the games I played this year along with narration that matches the text below. After that are the images of my Steam Year in Review and, finally, my Top 20 overall games since 2011.
Overall, this year I listened to tons of Chillhop while at work. Since 99% of Chillhop doesn’t have lyrics, this would allow me to have some background music that wasn’t distracting. As each new Chillhop album was released for the current season, I would listen to it on loop for a while. I also made playlists of all the albums per season that I would listen to as well. Every once in a while I would listen to all my music on random (as I usually do), but this was a year in which I was more focused on listening to newly acquired albums when I wasn’t listening to Chillhop.
This year was a bit light on programming. I was focused a lot on gaming, cooking, and Tabletop Gaming. (No surprise if you’ve been reading my December blog posts) I constantly found myself desiring to code and I definitely had a few ideas - like a utility to extract EXIF data out of my images for use in Hugo. But when I would sit down at my computer I often found myself preferring to play Cities: Skylines II or Against the Storm. (More on that when I post my EOY video game post) As per usual, let’s go month-by-month (after the first quarter that is)
last.fm has had a facelift! It looks quite a bit more sleek! The biggest change seems to be adding artist and album pictures near all of the stats. Check out my last.fm page.
Thanks to Danny, I am now a member of the yet another addictive internet site. Last.fm, which works with the Linux music player amaroK will collect all the songs you listen to. It will then display it on a webpage such as this one. If this was all it did, it would be mildly fun, but it combines the best of the social web phenomenon involved in web 2.0. Clicking on a song will tell you how many users listened to that song from that artist. It also has a “neighbors” feature where it lists other users that have the same musical taste as you. This should be interesting given the variety of music I listen to. Also, I have added a plugin to the sidebar here so that you can see the latest songs I’ve listend to on my Linux computer. These are the invasions of privacy I don’t mind since I’m volunteering this information. It’s when programs, websites, and ISPs take this information without asking me that I get annoyed.
Overall, this year I listened to tons of Chillhop while at work. Since 99% of Chillhop doesn’t have lyrics, this would allow me to have some background music that wasn’t distracting. As each new Chillhop album was released for the current season, I would listen to it on loop for a while. I also made playlists of all the albums per season that I would listen to as well. Every once in a while I would listen to all my music on random (as I usually do), but this was a year in which I was more focused on listening to newly acquired albums when I wasn’t listening to Chillhop.
Another year, another look at my music trends for the year. It was another year of music acquisition (supporting the artists, ftw! - I knew Spotify wasn’t paying artists well, but Corey Doctorow’s book, Chokepoint Capitalism really brought home how much they’re screwing over artists), although I think things may slow down in 2023. Here are the albums I purchased in 2023:
The Protomen - Presents: A Night of Queen
Encantó soundtrack
Moderator - The World Within
Kognitif - Soul Food
MxPx - Horns, Plans within Plans, Let’s Rock, Left Coast Punk EP, The Rennaisance EP
Packy Lundholm - Track Sabbath Vol 1
Lana Del Rey - Blue Banisters
Catbite - Nice One
Macroblank - entire discography - 14 albums
Vicente Garcia - Lomas de Cayenas
Girl Ultra - Nuevos Aires
The Shape of Ska Punk to Come
Me Like Bees - Songs from The Realm
Kill Lincoln - Can’t Complain
Jokabi - Chilltendo Deluxe
Turning Red Soundtrack
We Are the Union - Ordinary Life
Chillhop Music - Essentials Spring 2022, Essentials Summer 2022, Essentials Fall 2022
This year I was able to attend the Paul and Storm / JoCo concert that COVID stole from me last year. While there I bought the entire Paul and Storm discography, but I think because I listened to it so much on Spotify in the past, I didn’t listen to it as much as I thought I would.
This was not one of those years where I came out ahead by not paying for Spotify. I bought a lot of albums, including starting on my quest to get the entire MxPx back catalog from the time I stopped listening in high school until now. (This is reflected in this year’s numbers)
Technology continues to complicate the media landscape. The other day I learned on the Fedora Planet how to send Pulse Audio over the net - allowing one computer to listen to music (or other audio) from another. But, in the context of music, who cares? I have all my music on Google Music. I can just plug my phone into the sound system and listen to music (or any other speakers). This also eliminates my need to use DLNA / uPNP servers/clients to play my music. (They never worked all that well anyway)
At the end of 2023 I had 3283 ebooks and magazines (a change of 234 - a similar gain to last year’s 256). Of those, 2636 were unread (an increase of about 200). I continued to get free issues of The MagPi (Raspberry Pi official magazine) and Hackspace Magazine. Tor.com pulled back on their free ebooks this year. However, Scarlett bought lots of books and I keep all the family’s books together in the same library. At the end of 2024 I had 222 audiobooks (an increase of 25 from last year).
Just like the Dresden Files (which it my nearest comparison point to this genre), this series does not seem to be read as a series of standalone mysteries a la Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew (or the adult equivalent). This book is full of details that are building on the details from the last two books. This is a series that happens to have an investigator as the protagonist.
As I was looking back over my old blog posts, searching for things that needed fixing in this migration over to the Hugo static site platform, I saw that I used to write brief blog posts about the Kickstarter campaigns I was backing. Since 2013 I’ve backed somewhere around 70 or more kickstarter campaigns. Since I usually don’t back anything that involves hardware, so far I haven’t had any of the campaigns disappear without giving me what I backed. Recently I realized I had backed an inordinate amount of D&D campaigns (I tend to fall pretty deep into hobbies). So I thought I might resurrect my Kickstarter posts to follow along with the D&D campaigns I’ve backed.
Just like the Dresden Files (which it my nearest comparison point to this genre), this series does not seem to be read as a series of standalone mysteries a la Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew (or the adult equivalent). This book is full of details that are building on the details from the last two books. This is a series that happens to have an investigator as the protagonist.
Last week I finished the Discworld Series. I started with a few books early in 2008. From the first book, The Color of Magic, I fell in love with the series. Although I have found British television and movies to be hit or miss, I have loved all of the geek genre British books. So I read the first four or five books here and there. Then in November Borders had a “buy two get the third one free” and my wife bought me the remaining 20-something books for my birthday and Christmas. She also let me start reading in November. I started reading them during my lunch breaks at work, on business trips and - when things were getting really interesting - at home.
Just like the Dresden Files (which it my nearest comparison point to this genre), this series does not seem to be read as a series of standalone mysteries a la Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew (or the adult equivalent). This book is full of details that are building on the details from the last two books. This is a series that happens to have an investigator as the protagonist.
It’s been a while since I posted a book review on here and rather than have a whole bunch of book review posts, I thought I’d collect the most recent ones into this post.
I listened to the audiobook, so, in all likelihood, I’m going to mispell everyone’s names
As I said with the first entry in this series, Yarros does a great job writing a compelling fantasy story. The romance is there, but it’s not what brings me into the story. We’ll get back to that momentarily. The best thing I could say about novel is that when I got to the end, I was upset that I have to wait until some time next year to continue the story. Yarros gives us a complete story (well, 2 of them - more on that as well) and does leave us with quite a compelling reason to come back, but even without the events of the last chapter, I would be there for the aftermath of the macro events of this book. If you need another reason to get into this book before I get to the details - there were multiple moments where Yarros had me reacting strongly to events in the book - like the precursor feeling to crying. Usually this involved Violet’s squad mates, but the penultimate chapter (not including Xaden’s epilogue) with the Sorengale family - I almost had to pull off the road for a moment.
Just like the Dresden Files (which it my nearest comparison point to this genre), this series does not seem to be read as a series of standalone mysteries a la Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew (or the adult equivalent). This book is full of details that are building on the details from the last two books. This is a series that happens to have an investigator as the protagonist.
It’s been a while since I posted a book review on here and rather than have a whole bunch of book review posts, I thought I’d collect the most recent ones into this post.
I listened to the audiobook, so, in all likelihood, I’m going to mispell everyone’s names
As I said with the first entry in this series, Yarros does a great job writing a compelling fantasy story. The romance is there, but it’s not what brings me into the story. We’ll get back to that momentarily. The best thing I could say about novel is that when I got to the end, I was upset that I have to wait until some time next year to continue the story. Yarros gives us a complete story (well, 2 of them - more on that as well) and does leave us with quite a compelling reason to come back, but even without the events of the last chapter, I would be there for the aftermath of the macro events of this book. If you need another reason to get into this book before I get to the details - there were multiple moments where Yarros had me reacting strongly to events in the book - like the precursor feeling to crying. Usually this involved Violet’s squad mates, but the penultimate chapter (not including Xaden’s epilogue) with the Sorengale family - I almost had to pull off the road for a moment.
This year was a bit light on programming. I was focused a lot on gaming, cooking, and Tabletop Gaming. (No surprise if you’ve been reading my December blog posts) I constantly found myself desiring to code and I definitely had a few ideas - like a utility to extract EXIF data out of my images for use in Hugo. But when I would sit down at my computer I often found myself preferring to play Cities: Skylines II or Against the Storm. (More on that when I post my EOY video game post) As per usual, let’s go month-by-month (after the first quarter that is)
I started off the year mostly working on Python projects. For January and February I finally started making some great progress with understanding modern web frameworks and use of CSS frameworks rather than rolling my own. This not only helped with the Prophecy Practicum project, but would form the backbone to a lot of coding this year. I also wrote a utility to tally up my videos for my end of year video game roundup, saving me literal hours of time. As you can read from following the link above, I also worked on my long-running Extra Life Donation Tracker code.
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).
I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.
As I did last year, I’d like to take a look at how well my predictions matched up to what ended up happening:
Working on my Extra Life Donation Tracker: Yes! I made a bunch of releases last year to fix various bugs for my users. I also finally broke out the Donor Drive Code into its own project so that my code could be used as the basis of non-Extra Life Projects
Moving Prophecy Practicum to Django: Yes! I did this and my colleague has been using it for about 6 months now. I have some quality of life issues to fix that will help me get better at Django and maybe CSS.
Redoing flickr views project: Nope. Completely forgot about this.
Progress on my Unity Game - Eric’s Comet Cleaners - None.
Learning new programming languages: Yes! Haskell and Go, through Advent of Code problem solving. Also got better at Ruby and Perl.
Electronics: Some Adaboxes, but no work on my BBQ ThermostatKids: A little more Scratch with the twins. No “real” programming languages with Scarlett.
Compared to last year I had 10 more commits to Github. Pretty consistent!
I didn’t do much coding in July, so I decided to combine the July and August wrap-ups.
Python
Dreamhost Dynamic DNS
I decided to clean up and update some code that uses the Dreamhost API to allow for Dynamic DNS. I cleaned up the logging output so that I could figure out why it was sometimes deleting one of my domains rather than just updating the IP. The original programmer had it printing out to the terminal. I used the logging package to send logs out to a file. While I was improving the logging, I also decided to use f-strings to make it more obvious what was going into the output string.
I started off the month thinking it was going to be Python heavy and ended up doing a lot more micro-controller programming. To be fair, I was mostly programming in CircuitPython, but it definitely came out of nowhere.
Python
Civilization VI Webhook in FastAPI
Last month I created a webhook program in Flask to generate notifications when it was someone’s turn in our multiplayer Civilization games. When I posted about it on reddit, someone suggested that I would be better off using FastAPI instead of Flask. I’d been hearing about FastAPI for months on Talk Python to Me and Python Bytes, but I always got the impression that it would only be useful if I was writing my website to be async.
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
Because I’ve been busy with programming and other tasks (including getting re-addicted to Cities: Skylines), I’ve got a roundup from about the last week or so in programming.
Python
Python Morsels
I got the mid-tier of the Pycharm Humble Bundle which came with a bit of a subscription to Python Morsels. Every week Trey Hunner, a Python trainer, sends subscribers a problem to solve along with a few bonus questions to deepen the learning. Here’s what I’ve loved so far:
This year was a bit light on programming. I was focused a lot on gaming, cooking, and Tabletop Gaming. (No surprise if you’ve been reading my December blog posts) I constantly found myself desiring to code and I definitely had a few ideas - like a utility to extract EXIF data out of my images for use in Hugo. But when I would sit down at my computer I often found myself preferring to play Cities: Skylines II or Against the Storm. (More on that when I post my EOY video game post) As per usual, let’s go month-by-month (after the first quarter that is)
Michael Kennedy from the podcasts Python Bytes and Talk Python has recently written a couple blog posts that I wanted to highlight here. First up is his post about rewriting the Talk Python site in Quart (aka async Flask). Three and a half years ago I wrote about realizing that it’s not about Django vs Flask vs FastAPI, but actually about finding the right framework for your workload. I didn’t completely state my current thought process in that blog post, but I was pretty close to the advice I currently give. If you want a Python-based site that needs CMS features and you don’t want to have to reinvent the world, Django is your framework. If you are making websites where you want to be in control of every puzzle piece, then you want flask. You only bring in what you need. And if you’re writing REST API based site (controversy about whether REST truly is REST aside), you want FastAPI. Well, I respect Michael Kennedy’s opinion on this matter for a few reasons:
As October came around, it was time to get ready for Hacktoberfest. I’ve been participating for the past few years and I love the fact that DigitalOcean supports this project which gets more people to contribute to free and open source software.
In the past, I’ve often contributed to my Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since the program is pretty mature at this point, most of the issues I have would have taken me too long, especially with how busy I’ve been with non-programming projects lately. So I dedicated my efforts to helping with some quality of life issues for the Prophecy Practicum (Django Version) that I’ve coded up for my friend.
I started off the year not expecting to do much programming. Compared to some months in 2021, I barely programmed, but I did end up programming much more than I expected. Let’s take a look at what I worked on in the first sixth of the year.
Python Programs
End of Year Video Games Helper
Coming off of last year in which I finally used Python to pull my last.fm data and create graphs, I decided to do the same for my End of Year Video Games blog post. I haven’t posted the code to Github, but here it is:
Over the 16 years that this blog spans I must have, at some point, mentioned that I believe sometimes we get knowledge when we’re not ready to receive it.This isn’t some spiritual or new age thing (although you’ll hear Chopra and/or Tony Robbins talk about the phenomenon). It’s simply my lived experience. Sometimes you come across some knowledge, but there’s some underpinning knowledge missing or maybe some life experience you don’t yet have to put your new knowledge into context. So sometimes this leads to a difficulty in learning the concept and other times you just don’t get the point of it and file it away or throw it away - no need to waste neurons on this!
I started off the month thinking it was going to be Python heavy and ended up doing a lot more micro-controller programming. To be fair, I was mostly programming in CircuitPython, but it definitely came out of nowhere.
Python
Civilization VI Webhook in FastAPI
Last month I created a webhook program in Flask to generate notifications when it was someone’s turn in our multiplayer Civilization games. When I posted about it on reddit, someone suggested that I would be better off using FastAPI instead of Flask. I’d been hearing about FastAPI for months on Talk Python to Me and Python Bytes, but I always got the impression that it would only be useful if I was writing my website to be async.
This year was a bit light on programming. I was focused a lot on gaming, cooking, and Tabletop Gaming. (No surprise if you’ve been reading my December blog posts) I constantly found myself desiring to code and I definitely had a few ideas - like a utility to extract EXIF data out of my images for use in Hugo. But when I would sit down at my computer I often found myself preferring to play Cities: Skylines II or Against the Storm. (More on that when I post my EOY video game post) As per usual, let’s go month-by-month (after the first quarter that is)
This year was a bit light on programming. I was focused a lot on gaming, cooking, and Tabletop Gaming. (No surprise if you’ve been reading my December blog posts) I constantly found myself desiring to code and I definitely had a few ideas - like a utility to extract EXIF data out of my images for use in Hugo. But when I would sit down at my computer I often found myself preferring to play Cities: Skylines II or Against the Storm. (More on that when I post my EOY video game post) As per usual, let’s go month-by-month (after the first quarter that is)
Michael Kennedy from the podcasts Python Bytes and Talk Python has recently written a couple blog posts that I wanted to highlight here. First up is his post about rewriting the Talk Python site in Quart (aka async Flask). Three and a half years ago I wrote about realizing that it’s not about Django vs Flask vs FastAPI, but actually about finding the right framework for your workload. I didn’t completely state my current thought process in that blog post, but I was pretty close to the advice I currently give. If you want a Python-based site that needs CMS features and you don’t want to have to reinvent the world, Django is your framework. If you are making websites where you want to be in control of every puzzle piece, then you want flask. You only bring in what you need. And if you’re writing REST API based site (controversy about whether REST truly is REST aside), you want FastAPI. Well, I respect Michael Kennedy’s opinion on this matter for a few reasons:
This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects - some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll start in February.
February and March
Over these two months I worked on my replacement for web access to my Taskwarrior TODO list because Inthe.am had shut down. In February I got the podman containers set up - one to run the taskd server and one to run the website I’d coded up in Flask. In March I had to write some rudimentary Javascript to get the website to highlight the selected tab (Overdue, Today, This Month, etc). The rest of the interactivity on the site works using HTMX, letting me focus on Python instead of Javascript, but I just wasn’t able to get that part of the site to work without a tiny bit of Javascript. I also added some fixes because the date/time widget assumes UTC. Of course, now that I have it all working correctly and get lots of use for it (especially when I’m at work and I want to quickly get something out of my brain’s short-term buffer), Taskwarrior went to 3.0 which completely changes the way the program works, the API, and the way syncing works. I think in the end it’ll be for the best, but it’s annoying that I need to figure this out. That may involve finally learning how to use PyO3 to interact with Rust or re-writing part of my backend in Rust. We’ll have to see where that goes.
While a book about web technologies is undoubtablely going to get out of date (especially when Javascript is involved), I would definitely recommend this book if you want to do some data visualization either as part of your job or for an undergrad, grad, or PhD project. While I would probably use FastAPI rather than Flask, I heard recently that the Javascript library the author uses, D3, is still one of the best in class libraries for this kind of work.
I’ve read lots of books covering web frameworks or GUI programming (both involve UI design and a different workflow where you’re often waiting for user input), but this one is one of the best I’ve ever read. While it’s traditional for a book to culminate in a blog or social media app (and this one does it too) there’s something about the way Grinberg writes that makes it so much more approachable. Also, something only more modern books can do, he has a github repo with all the code with commits that match different sections of the book.
As October came around, it was time to get ready for Hacktoberfest. I’ve been participating for the past few years and I love the fact that DigitalOcean supports this project which gets more people to contribute to free and open source software.
In the past, I’ve often contributed to my Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since the program is pretty mature at this point, most of the issues I have would have taken me too long, especially with how busy I’ve been with non-programming projects lately. So I dedicated my efforts to helping with some quality of life issues for the Prophecy Practicum (Django Version) that I’ve coded up for my friend.
As I did last year, I’d like to take a look at how well my predictions matched up to what ended up happening:
Working on my Extra Life Donation Tracker: Yes! I made a bunch of releases last year to fix various bugs for my users. I also finally broke out the Donor Drive Code into its own project so that my code could be used as the basis of non-Extra Life Projects
Moving Prophecy Practicum to Django: Yes! I did this and my colleague has been using it for about 6 months now. I have some quality of life issues to fix that will help me get better at Django and maybe CSS.
Redoing flickr views project: Nope. Completely forgot about this.
Progress on my Unity Game - Eric’s Comet Cleaners - None.
Learning new programming languages: Yes! Haskell and Go, through Advent of Code problem solving. Also got better at Ruby and Perl.
Electronics: Some Adaboxes, but no work on my BBQ ThermostatKids: A little more Scratch with the twins. No “real” programming languages with Scarlett.
Compared to last year I had 10 more commits to Github. Pretty consistent!
Over the 16 years that this blog spans I must have, at some point, mentioned that I believe sometimes we get knowledge when we’re not ready to receive it.This isn’t some spiritual or new age thing (although you’ll hear Chopra and/or Tony Robbins talk about the phenomenon). It’s simply my lived experience. Sometimes you come across some knowledge, but there’s some underpinning knowledge missing or maybe some life experience you don’t yet have to put your new knowledge into context. So sometimes this leads to a difficulty in learning the concept and other times you just don’t get the point of it and file it away or throw it away - no need to waste neurons on this!
This year was a bit light on programming. I was focused a lot on gaming, cooking, and Tabletop Gaming. (No surprise if you’ve been reading my December blog posts) I constantly found myself desiring to code and I definitely had a few ideas - like a utility to extract EXIF data out of my images for use in Hugo. But when I would sit down at my computer I often found myself preferring to play Cities: Skylines II or Against the Storm. (More on that when I post my EOY video game post) As per usual, let’s go month-by-month (after the first quarter that is)
Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
December has finally arrived and with it my favorite activity of the month - Advent of Code! I also wanted to give myself a fun little present this year, so I bought the Dice Envy Advent Calendar. Every day I’ll get a fun new die (or dice!). Scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
Advent of Code
Let’s start off with Advent of Code. This year I haven’t done any of the Advent of Code problems ahead of December so I was a bit rusty. One is not often using the same algorithms or libraries for Advent of Code as one does for everyday programming. I started off with Python since that’s my most comfortable language. First you can head over to today’s page to see the prompt. If you’re not solving the problems yourself, you won’t be able to see the prompt for part 2, so in summary:
This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects - some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll start in February.
February and March
Over these two months I worked on my replacement for web access to my Taskwarrior TODO list because Inthe.am had shut down. In February I got the podman containers set up - one to run the taskd server and one to run the website I’d coded up in Flask. In March I had to write some rudimentary Javascript to get the website to highlight the selected tab (Overdue, Today, This Month, etc). The rest of the interactivity on the site works using HTMX, letting me focus on Python instead of Javascript, but I just wasn’t able to get that part of the site to work without a tiny bit of Javascript. I also added some fixes because the date/time widget assumes UTC. Of course, now that I have it all working correctly and get lots of use for it (especially when I’m at work and I want to quickly get something out of my brain’s short-term buffer), Taskwarrior went to 3.0 which completely changes the way the program works, the API, and the way syncing works. I think in the end it’ll be for the best, but it’s annoying that I need to figure this out. That may involve finally learning how to use PyO3 to interact with Rust or re-writing part of my backend in Rust. We’ll have to see where that goes.
Just a few thoughts on programming languages that have been rattling around in my head this week, but which don’t each merit a full blog post. The main theme is that the culture behind each programming language leads to some interesting choices, as is the case with spoken languages.
This week I started learning how to program in Rust. Even though I’m using the project-based Command-Line Rust to learn, the author still went with the traditional “Hello, world!” project for the first intro to the language. I was also working on a Go project last week and so it immediately stood out to me that (at least as taught by this author) Rust has the print! macro that allows you to succinctly print to the command line. By contrast, Go requires importing fmt before you can print. This was the first topic that was swirling around in my head this week. What makes language designers choose whether printing output (one of the most basic things a program can do) is built-in or requires an import. I even remember back when I was learning Java in undergrad (I think it was Java 1.8, but I don’t remember) we had to use the savitch library just to get program input (another very basic computer program concept). As I thought about it, I wondered if it has to do with thoughts around compilation and whether the language designers think you’re mostly making user-interactive programs or libraries? It makes sense to me that scripting languages like Python, Ruby, and Perl would have print built-in since you always have to have the interpreter along with you, so all the basics should be there. (The original Batteries Included Python promise, for example) But perhaps the Go developers thought you wouldn’t always be printing to the command line so a more efficient binary could be compiled by forcing you to import the functionality? I’m not entirely sure.
In 2023 I just didn’t have the urge to do as much programming as in years past. I felt more of a tug towards video games, reading, and baking/cooking. So this recap will be quite a bit shorter than usual. A couple upfront themes and ideas: The programming was essentially Go and Python. I started reading a book about Julia, but didn’t do any new programming in Julia. I mostly worked on new code vs maintaining older code.
In March I continued to work on my programming projects as well as a little more Advent of Code.
Things started off with me finishing up my dreamhostapi and Dreamhost_DNS_Go projects in Golang. I got the API working under all the conditions that I need and I worked on both the output of the program and the logging. It now functions quite well for me to keep my dynamic DNS URLs up to date. My next step is something I’m going to do in a few of my cron scripts - have a separate JSON log that could be interpreted so that I could either have a daily email to let me know that the scripts all ran correctly or so that I can load them into Prometheus/Grafana to see on a dashboard how all my scripts are doing.
I recently used Mastodon to ask for recommendations for Go podcasts and one of the suggestions was Go Time. One of the recent episodes in the feed was a rerun of an older episode about " How Go helped saved HealthCare.Gov". This was extra interesting to me since I wrote my Master’s Special Project on Healthcare.gov. (I haven’t read it in nearly a decade, so I don’t know if it’s cringe-worthy at this point). The episode had on one of the programmers who helped get things back on track for the site. It was incredibly informative about the problems that led to the site not being responsive enough and how they were able to help fix it without scrapping the entire site. No matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on or if you’re even an American, the episode is fascinating for understanding how things can go wrong even when everyone has the best intentions and how to fix a large, complex code base.
January was a relatively light programming month for me. I was focused on finishing up end of year blog posts and other tasks. Since Lastfmeoystats is used to generate the stats I need for my end of year music post, I worked on it a little to make some fixes. The biggest fix was to change the chart titles not to be hardcoded. I didn’t realize it until I was reviewing my blog post, but I had hard-coded the year when I first wrote the code a couple years ago. I also changed the limits on some of the data I was collecting so that I could do more expansive trending for my overall stats.
December was wholly dedicated to solving the Advent of Code 2022 problem set. Our job was to help the elves trek through the jungle to get magical starfruit. It was a lot of fun to do it live once again! This year I also had experience from the previous years (both live and on my own pace) that gave me the skills to solve some of the puzzles, including some puzzles that were variations on themes I’d seen before. In the end, I collected 36 stars, near my average for number of stars collected during AoC. Between work, family commitments, my programming and problem solving skill levels, that’s about the most I can usually do during the live period in December.
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
This month I wanted to practice Go outside of Advent of Code puzzles. So I decided I would port over my Dreamhost DNS updating script from Python to Go. This would have the advantage of being a compiled program. Every time I update Python on my system, the virtual environment points to the wrong Python version and my program breaks. But, boy is parsing JSON in Go (at least with the built-in JSON tools) a real pain in the butt. I have to make a struct to hold and parse the data, but it comes back from Dreamhost as a 1-key dictionary holding an array of dictionaries. After a few hours of trying to figure out how to get Go to parse the JSON I was still unable to get the struct right. I may do a little debugging to see if I can figure it out before searching for any simpler JSON libraries.
I started off the year not expecting to do much programming. Compared to some months in 2021, I barely programmed, but I did end up programming much more than I expected. Let’s take a look at what I worked on in the first sixth of the year.
Python Programs
End of Year Video Games Helper
Coming off of last year in which I finally used Python to pull my last.fm data and create graphs, I decided to do the same for my End of Year Video Games blog post. I haven’t posted the code to Github, but here it is:
In these last two months of the year I only worked on Advent of Code.
November
In November I worked through part of the 2016 problem set. I didn’t get too far because of how many languages I was doing at this point. Eventually I decided to allow myself to get a bit further in Python and then catch up with the other languages. Whenever I’d get stuck I’d go back to the other languages. Overall, once I’d figured out Python - Ruby, Perl, and Golang would be pretty easy. Haskell would still be hard, but I started getting the hang of it near the end of the month.
This year was a bit light on programming. I was focused a lot on gaming, cooking, and Tabletop Gaming. (No surprise if you’ve been reading my December blog posts) I constantly found myself desiring to code and I definitely had a few ideas - like a utility to extract EXIF data out of my images for use in Hugo. But when I would sit down at my computer I often found myself preferring to play Cities: Skylines II or Against the Storm. (More on that when I post my EOY video game post) As per usual, let’s go month-by-month (after the first quarter that is)
This year was a bit light on programming. I was focused a lot on gaming, cooking, and Tabletop Gaming. (No surprise if you’ve been reading my December blog posts) I constantly found myself desiring to code and I definitely had a few ideas - like a utility to extract EXIF data out of my images for use in Hugo. But when I would sit down at my computer I often found myself preferring to play Cities: Skylines II or Against the Storm. (More on that when I post my EOY video game post) As per usual, let’s go month-by-month (after the first quarter that is)
This year was a bit light on programming. I was focused a lot on gaming, cooking, and Tabletop Gaming. (No surprise if you’ve been reading my December blog posts) I constantly found myself desiring to code and I definitely had a few ideas - like a utility to extract EXIF data out of my images for use in Hugo. But when I would sit down at my computer I often found myself preferring to play Cities: Skylines II or Against the Storm. (More on that when I post my EOY video game post) As per usual, let’s go month-by-month (after the first quarter that is)
Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
Advent of Code
As the years have piled on, Eric Wasl has thrown in references to past years’ problems. However, as of day 3 we now have 2 references (perhaps that’s what the historian story line is about). Day 02 had you visit the location of 2015 Day 19 and today visited the location of 2020 Day 2 (my first year doing Advent of Code!) The only thing I’m slightly worried about is if this signals that this year will be a grand finale for the annual event.
Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
Michael Kennedy from the podcasts Python Bytes and Talk Python has recently written a couple blog posts that I wanted to highlight here. First up is his post about rewriting the Talk Python site in Quart (aka async Flask). Three and a half years ago I wrote about realizing that it’s not about Django vs Flask vs FastAPI, but actually about finding the right framework for your workload. I didn’t completely state my current thought process in that blog post, but I was pretty close to the advice I currently give. If you want a Python-based site that needs CMS features and you don’t want to have to reinvent the world, Django is your framework. If you are making websites where you want to be in control of every puzzle piece, then you want flask. You only bring in what you need. And if you’re writing REST API based site (controversy about whether REST truly is REST aside), you want FastAPI. Well, I respect Michael Kennedy’s opinion on this matter for a few reasons:
December has finally arrived and with it my favorite activity of the month - Advent of Code! I also wanted to give myself a fun little present this year, so I bought the Dice Envy Advent Calendar. Every day I’ll get a fun new die (or dice!). Scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
Advent of Code
Let’s start off with Advent of Code. This year I haven’t done any of the Advent of Code problems ahead of December so I was a bit rusty. One is not often using the same algorithms or libraries for Advent of Code as one does for everyday programming. I started off with Python since that’s my most comfortable language. First you can head over to today’s page to see the prompt. If you’re not solving the problems yourself, you won’t be able to see the prompt for part 2, so in summary:
As there are many people who are currently looking for alternatives to Wordpress in light of a little…. instability… I decided I would document my migration process. I figure my case is one of the more extreme cases, as I ran a self-hosted Wordpress instance for the past 19 years (since Feb 2005) and have ~4000 posts that needed to be migrated. I also have lots of photos, videos, and other media. Finally, I have made heavy use of many Wordpress features.
This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects - some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll start in February.
February and March
Over these two months I worked on my replacement for web access to my Taskwarrior TODO list because Inthe.am had shut down. In February I got the podman containers set up - one to run the taskd server and one to run the website I’d coded up in Flask. In March I had to write some rudimentary Javascript to get the website to highlight the selected tab (Overdue, Today, This Month, etc). The rest of the interactivity on the site works using HTMX, letting me focus on Python instead of Javascript, but I just wasn’t able to get that part of the site to work without a tiny bit of Javascript. I also added some fixes because the date/time widget assumes UTC. Of course, now that I have it all working correctly and get lots of use for it (especially when I’m at work and I want to quickly get something out of my brain’s short-term buffer), Taskwarrior went to 3.0 which completely changes the way the program works, the API, and the way syncing works. I think in the end it’ll be for the best, but it’s annoying that I need to figure this out. That may involve finally learning how to use PyO3 to interact with Rust or re-writing part of my backend in Rust. We’ll have to see where that goes.
Just a few thoughts on programming languages that have been rattling around in my head this week, but which don’t each merit a full blog post. The main theme is that the culture behind each programming language leads to some interesting choices, as is the case with spoken languages.
This week I started learning how to program in Rust. Even though I’m using the project-based Command-Line Rust to learn, the author still went with the traditional “Hello, world!” project for the first intro to the language. I was also working on a Go project last week and so it immediately stood out to me that (at least as taught by this author) Rust has the print! macro that allows you to succinctly print to the command line. By contrast, Go requires importing fmt before you can print. This was the first topic that was swirling around in my head this week. What makes language designers choose whether printing output (one of the most basic things a program can do) is built-in or requires an import. I even remember back when I was learning Java in undergrad (I think it was Java 1.8, but I don’t remember) we had to use the savitch library just to get program input (another very basic computer program concept). As I thought about it, I wondered if it has to do with thoughts around compilation and whether the language designers think you’re mostly making user-interactive programs or libraries? It makes sense to me that scripting languages like Python, Ruby, and Perl would have print built-in since you always have to have the interpreter along with you, so all the basics should be there. (The original Batteries Included Python promise, for example) But perhaps the Go developers thought you wouldn’t always be printing to the command line so a more efficient binary could be compiled by forcing you to import the functionality? I’m not entirely sure.
In 2023 I just didn’t have the urge to do as much programming as in years past. I felt more of a tug towards video games, reading, and baking/cooking. So this recap will be quite a bit shorter than usual. A couple upfront themes and ideas: The programming was essentially Go and Python. I started reading a book about Julia, but didn’t do any new programming in Julia. I mostly worked on new code vs maintaining older code.
In March I continued to work on my programming projects as well as a little more Advent of Code.
Things started off with me finishing up my dreamhostapi and Dreamhost_DNS_Go projects in Golang. I got the API working under all the conditions that I need and I worked on both the output of the program and the logging. It now functions quite well for me to keep my dynamic DNS URLs up to date. My next step is something I’m going to do in a few of my cron scripts - have a separate JSON log that could be interpreted so that I could either have a daily email to let me know that the scripts all ran correctly or so that I can load them into Prometheus/Grafana to see on a dashboard how all my scripts are doing.
January was a relatively light programming month for me. I was focused on finishing up end of year blog posts and other tasks. Since Lastfmeoystats is used to generate the stats I need for my end of year music post, I worked on it a little to make some fixes. The biggest fix was to change the chart titles not to be hardcoded. I didn’t realize it until I was reviewing my blog post, but I had hard-coded the year when I first wrote the code a couple years ago. I also changed the limits on some of the data I was collecting so that I could do more expansive trending for my overall stats.
I started off the year mostly working on Python projects. For January and February I finally started making some great progress with understanding modern web frameworks and use of CSS frameworks rather than rolling my own. This not only helped with the Prophecy Practicum project, but would form the backbone to a lot of coding this year. I also wrote a utility to tally up my videos for my end of year video game roundup, saving me literal hours of time. As you can read from following the link above, I also worked on my long-running Extra Life Donation Tracker code.
December was wholly dedicated to solving the Advent of Code 2022 problem set. Our job was to help the elves trek through the jungle to get magical starfruit. It was a lot of fun to do it live once again! This year I also had experience from the previous years (both live and on my own pace) that gave me the skills to solve some of the puzzles, including some puzzles that were variations on themes I’d seen before. In the end, I collected 36 stars, near my average for number of stars collected during AoC. Between work, family commitments, my programming and problem solving skill levels, that’s about the most I can usually do during the live period in December.
November was not a huge programming month for me. On the weekends I was a little more focused with family stuff and videogames. But I did manage work on a couple projects.
While a book about web technologies is undoubtablely going to get out of date (especially when Javascript is involved), I would definitely recommend this book if you want to do some data visualization either as part of your job or for an undergrad, grad, or PhD project. While I would probably use FastAPI rather than Flask, I heard recently that the Javascript library the author uses, D3, is still one of the best in class libraries for this kind of work.
As October came around, it was time to get ready for Hacktoberfest. I’ve been participating for the past few years and I love the fact that DigitalOcean supports this project which gets more people to contribute to free and open source software.
In the past, I’ve often contributed to my Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since the program is pretty mature at this point, most of the issues I have would have taken me too long, especially with how busy I’ve been with non-programming projects lately. So I dedicated my efforts to helping with some quality of life issues for the Prophecy Practicum (Django Version) that I’ve coded up for my friend.
August was a programming-filled month for me. It focused entirely on Python and I mostly continued working on established projects. Let’s jump in!
Amortization
I wanted to re-calculate the amortization table for my home loan for the first time in about a year. As a refresher, I created this program (vs using Excel or an online form) because we are not consistent in the amount of extra principal payments we make. For example, if I get a bonus at work, I might throw all of that bonus into the loan payment. So this program takes variable extra payments into account when creating the amortization table.
In March I went back to Advent of Code 2016. In an effort not to get stuck, I decided to go as far as I can in Python before going back around and working on the other languages. So I did days 6 and 7 in Python. Overall, relatively easy Regex problems.
And that’s it. It was not a big month for programming. I mostly focused on playing with the kids and cooking. May/June are looking like they’re going to contain quite a bit more programming, at least relatively speaking. I’m hoping to both get back to work on some of my projects and also get back to Advent of Code.
I started off the year not expecting to do much programming. Compared to some months in 2021, I barely programmed, but I did end up programming much more than I expected. Let’s take a look at what I worked on in the first sixth of the year.
Python Programs
End of Year Video Games Helper
Coming off of last year in which I finally used Python to pull my last.fm data and create graphs, I decided to do the same for my End of Year Video Games blog post. I haven’t posted the code to Github, but here it is:
As I did last year, I’d like to take a look at how well my predictions matched up to what ended up happening:
Working on my Extra Life Donation Tracker: Yes! I made a bunch of releases last year to fix various bugs for my users. I also finally broke out the Donor Drive Code into its own project so that my code could be used as the basis of non-Extra Life Projects
Moving Prophecy Practicum to Django: Yes! I did this and my colleague has been using it for about 6 months now. I have some quality of life issues to fix that will help me get better at Django and maybe CSS.
Redoing flickr views project: Nope. Completely forgot about this.
Progress on my Unity Game - Eric’s Comet Cleaners - None.
Learning new programming languages: Yes! Haskell and Go, through Advent of Code problem solving. Also got better at Ruby and Perl.
Electronics: Some Adaboxes, but no work on my BBQ ThermostatKids: A little more Scratch with the twins. No “real” programming languages with Scarlett.
Compared to last year I had 10 more commits to Github. Pretty consistent!
In these last two months of the year I only worked on Advent of Code.
November
In November I worked through part of the 2016 problem set. I didn’t get too far because of how many languages I was doing at this point. Eventually I decided to allow myself to get a bit further in Python and then catch up with the other languages. Whenever I’d get stuck I’d go back to the other languages. Overall, once I’d figured out Python - Ruby, Perl, and Golang would be pretty easy. Haskell would still be hard, but I started getting the hang of it near the end of the month.
Across both September and October I got a decent amount of programming done. I just about finished the Learn You Haskell for Great Good book (got up to just before Monads) and started Head First Go. Once I had enough Go language to get started on AoC, I knew I’d be ready for the 2016 problem set. Let’s get into the nitty gritty!
Python (not Advent of Code)
Impractical Python
I finished chapter 11 which contained my old friend the Monty Hall Paradox. I’ve had a version up on my site for a very long time based on a PHP tutorial in Linux Format Magazine. This time I was able to code it in Python as well as creating a GUI version. Chapter 11 also touched upon The Birthday Paradox.
Throughout the spring and summer of 2021 a few of the times that I mentioned on the Advent of Code subreddit that I was doing the 2015 problem set in all 3 languages, some folks said they’d be interested in a writeup on the experience. Now that I’ve finally finished 2015 (my first set of 50 stars!) it’s time for that writeup. Before I continue, I’d like to thank everyone on the subreddit who has helped me. I have a README.md for each day’s problem and you’ll find my thanks to those who helped me within those READMEs here in my repo.
June was mostly Python, although I did do chapter 1 of Scratch 3 Games for Kids with Sam. He really, really enjoyed it and I anticipate doing the challenge problems and maybe chapter 2 in July or August.
Books
I read the intro and first couple chapters of both Flask Web Development, 2nd Edition and Data Visualization with Python and Javascript, both from a recent Humble Bundle. The Flask book may be useful for learning more about creating a non-Django site and, even if I mostly stick with FastAPI, it should provide some concepts that are applicable across both frameworks. With the data visualization book, I would love to use that to better visualize my annual Last.fm stats.
I had a lot less variety in my programming month, but still had a lot of fun doing it. In fact, Programming consumed most of my leisure thoughts. More about why I was doing it below, but I’ve been reading Programming Perl as well as skimming through Introducing Go and Learn You A Haskell for Great Good!. Ever since some folks used Haskell during last year’s Advent of Code and this guy’s videos that I mentioned in an early 2021 blog post, I’ve been very curious about the language. In fact, at this point I’ve decided that Go and Haskell will be the next two languages I learn.
I started off the month thinking it was going to be Python heavy and ended up doing a lot more micro-controller programming. To be fair, I was mostly programming in CircuitPython, but it definitely came out of nowhere.
Python
Civilization VI Webhook in FastAPI
Last month I created a webhook program in Flask to generate notifications when it was someone’s turn in our multiplayer Civilization games. When I posted about it on reddit, someone suggested that I would be better off using FastAPI instead of Flask. I’d been hearing about FastAPI for months on Talk Python to Me and Python Bytes, but I always got the impression that it would only be useful if I was writing my website to be async.
This is my seventh year raising money for Johns Hopkins Children’s Center via the Extra Life gaming charity. When I started back then I was brand new to streaming or recording video game play. In fact, just a few years before that I hadn’t even understood the point. I found out that you could somehow display your progress towards fundraising on your screen while you played. I had no idea how to do that and, at the time, I’d only done commandline programs. So I found bfinleyui’s web-based program. I set up XSplit (which I was using at the time) to capture the web pages and was able to have a great first year. The following year he created an app with Adobe Air that was even better. The GUI for this app would become the inspiration for ElDonationTracker; what I aspired to eventually build. My first commit to the repo for ElDonationTracker was that year. I was exploring how to get the API data via the commandline, but I wasn’t too hurried because I had the Adobe Air app. Unfortunately, the following year Adobe killed Adobe Air. So it was now time for me to try and make my own app. Unfortunately, I’d never done GUI programming before and my experiment with the TKinter GUI framework didn’t quite work.
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
I just found out today that PyGame 2.0 was released yesterday, on the 20th anniversary of the software. One of the first steps I took with Python was a series of games I made from tutorials in Linux Format Magazine. On Github I’ve got my shifter game and my Space Invaders clone. The shifter game is a little wonky since I haven’t touched the code in over a decade. But I was able to make the one shift needed to make the Space Invaders clone work on Python 3. So you can enjoy those and celebrate that PyGame development has picked up steam again.
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!
Spent the last few days finalizing the 5.0 release of my Extra Life Donation Tracker and then pushed ahead to get version 5.1 out. Here’s the PyPi page if you want to use it for your Extra Life live streams.
Arduino
I got back to my BBQ Themostat project and did some minor programming while trying to figure out how to run a computer case fan. So far I’m still working on the wiring aspect of this part of the project, but some folks on reddit did point out that part of my problem was getting a pair of my BJT connections mixed up.
Somewhere around 15 years ago, I started learning Python because I’d gotten deep into genealogy and started using the free and open source project Gramps. As I was also pretty deep into free software (somewhere around that time I became a supporting member of the FSF for a few years - and I think my smile.amazon.com still donates to them) I got interested in the idea of helping projects by contributing code. Python seemed like it wasn’t too hard to learn (compared to C++), so I started learning. I never did end up contributing to Gramps as I found GUI programming incredibly hard. In fact, it was something like 6 years ago before I created some useful GUIs (that weren’t copied out of tutorials) and only last year that I started making good, competent GUIs using the QT toolkit.
For my btrfs snapshot program, snapintime, I have reached version 1.1.1. About six years after starting this project, it now covers all the cases I wanted to back when I started. I’m very happy with where it’s now at.
For my Extra Life Donation Tracker ( PyPi page here), I’ve reached my v4.2.0 release. This release fixes some of my oldest issues (#s 13 and 14 - while the current highest issue is #95), and allows users maximum flexibility in the way they want to set up their tracker window. They can change the font face and color of the text that displays the latest donation and they can change the background color if chromakey green doesn’t work for their use case.
11 years ago (HOLY MOLEY WHERE DOES THE TIME GO?!?) I wrote about Jeffrey Friedl’s LR Stats plugin. As you know if you’ve been around my blog for a while, I love stats! It’s the biggest reason I do my end of year posts with my music, reading, and video game stats. Well, I haven’t used Lightroom for a few years now, and for some reason I was inspired this past weekend to recreate this ability. So I started on photostats, which will present a lot of the same stats that his Lightroom plugin does. On the plus side, my Python program is app-agnostic!
Back in September I wrote about moving to KDevelop for my larger Python projects and also staying with Kate for my smaller projects. I’ve REALLY been enjoying all the features as I work on more and more complex packages involving lots of files. But for a few episodes of Python Bytes now (and/or maybe Talk Python to Me - they share a host) they’ve been talking about how awesome it is to use an IDE that has a Python debugger built in. It may be that KDevelop has that ability (I’m pretty sure it does for C++), but I’m not sure. I am nearly certain that Pycharm does have a debugger built-in. A while ago I’d set up the Pycharm COPR repo on my laptop. I tried playing with it a little at the time, but I was coding on a very small project without a venv, so things didn’t work out well. (Pycharm is pretty opinionated about the way a Python project should work)
I was reading Serious Python by Julien Danjou as well as looking through other Python repos when I realized that my Extra Life Donation Tracker repo was a mess. (It’ll be different by the time you read this, but here’s how it looked at the time) After learning about how things should be structured and reading Mr. Danjou’s book about how I could use Sphinx to auto-document my code, I decided to undertake the challenge. However, there was a lot to learn and this code is used by many others for their Extra Life campaigns. I wanted to start off with much simpler code, so I started off by packetizing my lastfm-twitter code. It was a fun journey over the last week or so as I learned how to restructure my code and auto-document. (I also learned a lot about how to use Drone CI, which I’m using for my home projects that aren’t on GitHub) As the final lesson, I taught myself how to create a package for PyPi via Drone CI and so, I now have a PyPi package that anyone can import with pip!
This was a VERY busy year for my coding. This year I had over 769 commits to GitHub; my previous best was 58 in 2014. The commits were very unevenly distributed. If you look at the graph of my commits, outside of a busy week in January and another in May, I didn’t really start coding until August.
GitHub activity graph
But perhaps commits to GithHub isn’t the best metric. If you look at what I accomplished in the second half of 2019, I worked on an incredible number of projects.
I’m getting really close to finally getting this program to where I wanted it to be 4 years ago. My most recent release adds in the Team info to the GUI (and the previous release, which I didn’t blog about added team info in general). I’m getting feature requests and bug reports and all those kinds of encouraging things that make people want to provide programs for others. Also new as of a couple releases ago is the fact that I’m using Github’s CI (called Github Actions) to produce binaries for me that I can attach to releases to make it easier for folks to use the software.
When I first started programming it was just at the prompt of my Tandy computer. Then it was in the QBasic text editor on the IBM computers at school. But when I started programming again with “real” languages, I ended up going with Emacs. Although I was first annoyed at the way commands like save were prefixed, it became my favorite editor. I think that was partially because of diving headfirst into the free software movement and partially because I didn’t like vi’s different modes and how annoying that made things if you didn’t realize you weren’t in the text entry mode. Eventually, I moved on to Kate because I love KDE (been running it as my main desktop for over 10 years now) and I loved the features it enabled. Also, since vi (or vim) is found EVERYWHERE while Emacs usually requires installation, I ended up switching to vi whenever I’m ssh’d into a computer. If you add plugins like powerline, it can be pretty awesome to use. Even on my desktop if I’m editing /etc/fstab I’m more likely to pull up vi than the weight of KDE (not that it takes up THAT much RAM).
After a bit more work since my 21 July post, I’ve finally reached what I can consider to be beta status for the GUI. Things have matured to the point where it works well on both Linux and Windows and I’m now using it every time I game. I created a bunch of issues on Github to track new features I want to add in order to get to what I think will be a 1.0 release. I’m excited at the progress I’ve made and that the software continues to have interest. As always, the code is available on Github. Here are videos on how to use the GUI:
If you follow the blog, you remember I’ve been working on a GUI for the donation tracker. Part of making that work involved changing the code to be object oriented. Also, it required moving the user-defined configs to be moved out of the main code. I’ve done that and finally tested that it works (I had a silly bug involving a typo that I had to correct) and merged the code into master over on the github repo. The new code required a change in the directions, so I made new instructional videos to go along with those changes:
Hard drives are relatively cheap, especially nowadays. But I still want to stay within my budget as I setup my backups and system redundancies. So, ideally, for my backup RAID I’d take advantage of btrs’ ability to change RAID types on the fly and start off with one drive. Then I’d add another and go to RAID1. Then another and RAID5. Finally, the fourth drive and RAID6. At that point I’d have to be under some sort of Job-like God/Devil curse if all my drives failed at once, negating the point of the RAID. The best thinking right now is that you want to have backups, but want to try not to have to use them because of both offline time and the fact that a restore is never as clean as you hope it’ll be.
So, back when I started this project, I laid out that one of the reasons I wanted to use btrfs on my home directory (don’t think it’s ready for / just yet) is that with RAID1, btrfs is self-healing. Obviously, magic can’t be done, but a checksum is stored as part of the data’s metadata and if the file doesn’t match the checksum on one disk, but does on the other, the file can be fixed. This can help protect against bitrot, which is the biggest thing that’s going to keep our children’s digital photos from lasting as long as the ones printed on archival paper. So, like I did the first time, I’ll first be trying it out in a Fedora VM that mostly matches my version, kernel, and btrfs-progs version. So, I went and added another virtual hard drive of the same size to my VM.
Back in August I finally had some time to do some things I’d been wanting to do with my Snap-in-Time btrfs program for a while now. First of all, I finally added the weekly code. So now my snapshots are cleaned up every three days and then every other week. Next on the docket is quarterly cleanups followed up yearly cleanups. Second, the big thing I’d wanted to do for a while now: come up with unit tests! Much more robust than my debug code and testing scripts, it helped me find corner cases. If you look at my git logs you can see that it helped me little-by-little figure out just what I needed to do as well as when my “fixes” broke other things. Yay! My first personal project with regression testing!
# btrfs sub list /home
ID 275 gen 3201 top level 5 path home
ID 1021 gen 3193 top level 275 path .snapshots
ID 1023 gen 1653 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2146
ID 1024 gen 1697 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2210
ID 1025 gen 1775 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2300
ID 1027 gen 1876 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0000
ID 1028 gen 1961 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0100
ID 1029 gen 2032 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0200
ID 1030 gen 2105 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0300
ID 1031 gen 2211 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0400
ID 1032 gen 2284 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0500
ID 1033 gen 2357 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0600
ID 1035 gen 2430 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0700
ID 1036 gen 2506 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0800
ID 1037 gen 2587 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0900
ID 1038 gen 2667 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-1700
ID 1039 gen 2774 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-1800
ID 1040 gen 2879 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-1900
ID 1041 gen 2982 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-2000
ID 1042 gen 3088 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-2100
ID 1043 gen 3193 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-2200
I got my new hard drive that would replace my old, aging /home hard drive. As you read in part 1, I wanted to put btrfs on it. This is my journey to get it up and running. Plugged it into my hard drive toaster and ran gparted.
[caption id=“attachment_7889” align=“aligncenter” width=“421”] Gparted for new drive[/caption]
[caption id=“attachment_7890” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] Gparted for new drive1[/caption]
A while ago I wrote about my first ever useful GUI program. And in one of the series of posts that followed I explained that the reason I hadn’t made a useful GUI program before now is because all the typical stuff has already been made over and over. We don’t need any more tetris clones, word processors, or music programs. Recently I had reason to create my second program. A while ago I created a an amortization calculator in python which you can find here.
I figured it’d be neat to show you how my plasmoid works so you could use it when developing your own plasmoids. Here’s the main.py of my data engine. The indentation is off, in case you try to copy and past this in.
Here are the imports:
from PyQt4.QtCore import *
from PyKDE4.kdecore import *
from PyKDE4 import plasmascript
#for flickr
import views
Those are pretty standard. The last one is the part of my engine that interacts with flickr. Right now I have some work to do to get that presentable, but all you need to know is that it outputs XML to this main part of the data engine.
What I love about programming is the instant feedback. In most programming languages, after you set up a framework for the barest bones of a program you can then run it at every step of the way to confirm that you are moving towards your goal. What I love second-most about programming is the fact that I am using my computer to solve a problem and free myself from tedium.
The plot twist at the end is awesome, but so is the programmer’s debate going on, especially since we were talking about this at work this week. Another great xkcd from Randall Monroe:
Over the last two days, between playing Portal and Age of Empires III (both of which are…awesome!), I’ve been doing a little more flickr hacking. This is very closely related to my previous Flickr program where I checked if my pictures were ready to be moved into the next views groups.
This time I wanted to see which of my photos were not in any groups. So in the case that I’ve missed putting a photo into the 25 views groups because it’s a few pages back and I really don’t have time to go back through all of my photos to find the pictures to put into the groups. I tried that once and it was excrutiatingly slow - even slower than figuring out if it was time to graduate my pictures out of the views groups. So here’s the output of my current program:
So, thanks to a problem I had with rigging up Nick in " Sugar", I’ve temporarily lost interest in animation. This happens to me all the time, and I think I’ve mentioned it before in previous blog posts that I’m too lazy to look up before that I tend to gain and lose interest in my hobbies. For example, I haven’t touched the Wii since I beat Mario Galaxy during Christmas and until this recent problem with “Sugar” happened, I hadn’t done any programming in about a year. Even my interest in photography has ebbed so much that I let my subscription to Digital Camera Magazine lapse.
You can find it here or on the right-hand side under “My pages”. This is a program that’s been in my head for about four days and which I spent most of yesterday working on until I realized I was going down the wrong path. Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself. This program is my attempt to bridge the borders which artifically divide us in the blog world, while also providing myself with a convinience. The page, if you haven’t visited it yet, displays blogs from my blogroll all on one page. Live Journal, a blogging site, allows you to do this, but only with other LJ users. Similarly, Tripod blogs allow you to do it only with other Tripod users. However, they failed to appreciate the power of hacker bloggers, such as myself.
It took me the better part of about 2 hours to figure out how to get everything to work correctly, but I am finally done with my program, GNaughtyNice. It figures out how naughty or nice a word is by using the Google search API and searching once with the porn filter on and once with it off. You can access this great feat of programming at http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/GNaughtyNice.html
I think it’ll probably make a pretty god party game. You also need a Google search API key because I only get 1000 searches which could get used up quite quickly if this were to become popular enough.
This year was a bit light on programming. I was focused a lot on gaming, cooking, and Tabletop Gaming. (No surprise if you’ve been reading my December blog posts) I constantly found myself desiring to code and I definitely had a few ideas - like a utility to extract EXIF data out of my images for use in Hugo. But when I would sit down at my computer I often found myself preferring to play Cities: Skylines II or Against the Storm. (More on that when I post my EOY video game post) As per usual, let’s go month-by-month (after the first quarter that is)
Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects - some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll start in February.
February and March
Over these two months I worked on my replacement for web access to my Taskwarrior TODO list because Inthe.am had shut down. In February I got the podman containers set up - one to run the taskd server and one to run the website I’d coded up in Flask. In March I had to write some rudimentary Javascript to get the website to highlight the selected tab (Overdue, Today, This Month, etc). The rest of the interactivity on the site works using HTMX, letting me focus on Python instead of Javascript, but I just wasn’t able to get that part of the site to work without a tiny bit of Javascript. I also added some fixes because the date/time widget assumes UTC. Of course, now that I have it all working correctly and get lots of use for it (especially when I’m at work and I want to quickly get something out of my brain’s short-term buffer), Taskwarrior went to 3.0 which completely changes the way the program works, the API, and the way syncing works. I think in the end it’ll be for the best, but it’s annoying that I need to figure this out. That may involve finally learning how to use PyO3 to interact with Rust or re-writing part of my backend in Rust. We’ll have to see where that goes.
Just a few thoughts on programming languages that have been rattling around in my head this week, but which don’t each merit a full blog post. The main theme is that the culture behind each programming language leads to some interesting choices, as is the case with spoken languages.
This week I started learning how to program in Rust. Even though I’m using the project-based Command-Line Rust to learn, the author still went with the traditional “Hello, world!” project for the first intro to the language. I was also working on a Go project last week and so it immediately stood out to me that (at least as taught by this author) Rust has the print! macro that allows you to succinctly print to the command line. By contrast, Go requires importing fmt before you can print. This was the first topic that was swirling around in my head this week. What makes language designers choose whether printing output (one of the most basic things a program can do) is built-in or requires an import. I even remember back when I was learning Java in undergrad (I think it was Java 1.8, but I don’t remember) we had to use the savitch library just to get program input (another very basic computer program concept). As I thought about it, I wondered if it has to do with thoughts around compilation and whether the language designers think you’re mostly making user-interactive programs or libraries? It makes sense to me that scripting languages like Python, Ruby, and Perl would have print built-in since you always have to have the interpreter along with you, so all the basics should be there. (The original Batteries Included Python promise, for example) But perhaps the Go developers thought you wouldn’t always be printing to the command line so a more efficient binary could be compiled by forcing you to import the functionality? I’m not entirely sure.
A few days ago I read this article over at Tech Republic about how, Mozilla’s greatest achievement is not Firefox, but the Rust programming language. They point to Firefox’s declining numbers in the face of Chrome and Chromium-based browsers and I’m inclined to agree with the author. There is, of course, a kind of poetry to this. Although Netscape was one of the first dot-com companies and beat Microsoft to the punch at creating the first mainstream web browser, it’s not Netscape Navigator which is its greatest legacy. Instead it’s spinning off into Mozilla and, the most poetic part, the creation of the Javascript programming language. (Javascript was written in just a week and a half and this episode of Red Hat’s Commandline Heroes podcast does an excellent job documenting it)
What is it that intrigues us about rusty cars? On flickr there are hundreds, if not thousands, of such photos. I also see them in books. I think it’s partly because of the colours, partly because it reminds us of our own mortality, and perhaps partly leftover cultural hatred of machines.
This year was a bit light on programming. I was focused a lot on gaming, cooking, and Tabletop Gaming. (No surprise if you’ve been reading my December blog posts) I constantly found myself desiring to code and I definitely had a few ideas - like a utility to extract EXIF data out of my images for use in Hugo. But when I would sit down at my computer I often found myself preferring to play Cities: Skylines II or Against the Storm. (More on that when I post my EOY video game post) As per usual, let’s go month-by-month (after the first quarter that is)
This year was a bit light on programming. I was focused a lot on gaming, cooking, and Tabletop Gaming. (No surprise if you’ve been reading my December blog posts) I constantly found myself desiring to code and I definitely had a few ideas - like a utility to extract EXIF data out of my images for use in Hugo. But when I would sit down at my computer I often found myself preferring to play Cities: Skylines II or Against the Storm. (More on that when I post my EOY video game post) As per usual, let’s go month-by-month (after the first quarter that is)
When DMing for my kids I used to always pick one of my dice sets for my DM rolls. Sometimes when we would play on dndbeyond we would take advantage of the ability to roll any amount of any dice. (or the fact that it would automatically roll extra dice if needed for an attack or spell) Then I read the 2024 version of the Wizards of the Coast Dungeon Master Guide…
Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.
This batch of dice contains my favorite die, topping the candle die from day 12. It also confirmed that I’ll be getting 2 full Dice Envy sets. A Dice Envy Set has the usual 7 plus a chonky d20, an oversized d6 with the Dice Envy logo and an infinity d4 (those pill-shaped d4s that I already got 2 of).
Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.
I thought that by not having to worry about solving the advent of code problems to write a post along with the dice I would be able to keep up with writing a post each day. Twas not to be as I’ve been incredibly busy at work recently.
Although the main sets are definitely the Elsa-blue and the glittery set, we had another of their neat pill d4s during this time period.
Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.
There isn’t too much to say today that I haven’t already said while going through this dice Advent Calendar. It looks like the two main sets are the Elsa-blue and the yellow-which-photographs-green-glitter. (Hmm…need a better name). Today it’s a d4 for the former and a d6 for the latter.
Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.
I got extremely busy with both work and my personal life, so I fell behind a bit. I also decided to drop Advent of Code from these posts (and from my life) as I can’t fit it in with the other things I’m busy with this month.
Today I did not attempt the advent of code problem. It involved solving a word search in which there could be overlapping words as well as, if I read it correctly, multiple words starting from the same place. I’m guessing it’s to be done with a depth-first or breadth-first search in which you kill off searches if you can’t continue. I know these sorts of problems present themselves every year, but I never have time to learn during the AoC period (with work, life, and Christmas in the way) and I never make it a priority to relearn (I was taught this back in undergrad). So rather than waste my time on something I know that I won’t know how to do, I’ll save it for another time - maybe when I’m taking time off closer to Christmas/New Years Day.
Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
Advent of Code
As the years have piled on, Eric Wasl has thrown in references to past years’ problems. However, as of day 3 we now have 2 references (perhaps that’s what the historian story line is about). Day 02 had you visit the location of 2015 Day 19 and today visited the location of 2020 Day 2 (my first year doing Advent of Code!) The only thing I’m slightly worried about is if this signals that this year will be a grand finale for the annual event.
Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
December has finally arrived and with it my favorite activity of the month - Advent of Code! I also wanted to give myself a fun little present this year, so I bought the Dice Envy Advent Calendar. Every day I’ll get a fun new die (or dice!). Scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
Advent of Code
Let’s start off with Advent of Code. This year I haven’t done any of the Advent of Code problems ahead of December so I was a bit rusty. One is not often using the same algorithms or libraries for Advent of Code as one does for everyday programming. I started off with Python since that’s my most comfortable language. First you can head over to today’s page to see the prompt. If you’re not solving the problems yourself, you won’t be able to see the prompt for part 2, so in summary:
Today I did not attempt the advent of code problem. It involved solving a word search in which there could be overlapping words as well as, if I read it correctly, multiple words starting from the same place. I’m guessing it’s to be done with a depth-first or breadth-first search in which you kill off searches if you can’t continue. I know these sorts of problems present themselves every year, but I never have time to learn during the AoC period (with work, life, and Christmas in the way) and I never make it a priority to relearn (I was taught this back in undergrad). So rather than waste my time on something I know that I won’t know how to do, I’ll save it for another time - maybe when I’m taking time off closer to Christmas/New Years Day.
Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
Advent of Code
As the years have piled on, Eric Wasl has thrown in references to past years’ problems. However, as of day 3 we now have 2 references (perhaps that’s what the historian story line is about). Day 02 had you visit the location of 2015 Day 19 and today visited the location of 2020 Day 2 (my first year doing Advent of Code!) The only thing I’m slightly worried about is if this signals that this year will be a grand finale for the annual event.
Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
December has finally arrived and with it my favorite activity of the month - Advent of Code! I also wanted to give myself a fun little present this year, so I bought the Dice Envy Advent Calendar. Every day I’ll get a fun new die (or dice!). Scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
Advent of Code
Let’s start off with Advent of Code. This year I haven’t done any of the Advent of Code problems ahead of December so I was a bit rusty. One is not often using the same algorithms or libraries for Advent of Code as one does for everyday programming. I started off with Python since that’s my most comfortable language. First you can head over to today’s page to see the prompt. If you’re not solving the problems yourself, you won’t be able to see the prompt for part 2, so in summary:
In March I continued to work on my programming projects as well as a little more Advent of Code.
Things started off with me finishing up my dreamhostapi and Dreamhost_DNS_Go projects in Golang. I got the API working under all the conditions that I need and I worked on both the output of the program and the logging. It now functions quite well for me to keep my dynamic DNS URLs up to date. My next step is something I’m going to do in a few of my cron scripts - have a separate JSON log that could be interpreted so that I could either have a daily email to let me know that the scripts all ran correctly or so that I can load them into Prometheus/Grafana to see on a dashboard how all my scripts are doing.
I started off the year mostly working on Python projects. For January and February I finally started making some great progress with understanding modern web frameworks and use of CSS frameworks rather than rolling my own. This not only helped with the Prophecy Practicum project, but would form the backbone to a lot of coding this year. I also wrote a utility to tally up my videos for my end of year video game roundup, saving me literal hours of time. As you can read from following the link above, I also worked on my long-running Extra Life Donation Tracker code.
As October came around, it was time to get ready for Hacktoberfest. I’ve been participating for the past few years and I love the fact that DigitalOcean supports this project which gets more people to contribute to free and open source software.
In the past, I’ve often contributed to my Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since the program is pretty mature at this point, most of the issues I have would have taken me too long, especially with how busy I’ve been with non-programming projects lately. So I dedicated my efforts to helping with some quality of life issues for the Prophecy Practicum (Django Version) that I’ve coded up for my friend.
August was a programming-filled month for me. It focused entirely on Python and I mostly continued working on established projects. Let’s jump in!
Amortization
I wanted to re-calculate the amortization table for my home loan for the first time in about a year. As a refresher, I created this program (vs using Excel or an online form) because we are not consistent in the amount of extra principal payments we make. For example, if I get a bonus at work, I might throw all of that bonus into the loan payment. So this program takes variable extra payments into account when creating the amortization table.
I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).
I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.
In March I went back to Advent of Code 2016. In an effort not to get stuck, I decided to go as far as I can in Python before going back around and working on the other languages. So I did days 6 and 7 in Python. Overall, relatively easy Regex problems.
And that’s it. It was not a big month for programming. I mostly focused on playing with the kids and cooking. May/June are looking like they’re going to contain quite a bit more programming, at least relatively speaking. I’m hoping to both get back to work on some of my projects and also get back to Advent of Code.
I started off the year not expecting to do much programming. Compared to some months in 2021, I barely programmed, but I did end up programming much more than I expected. Let’s take a look at what I worked on in the first sixth of the year.
Python Programs
End of Year Video Games Helper
Coming off of last year in which I finally used Python to pull my last.fm data and create graphs, I decided to do the same for my End of Year Video Games blog post. I haven’t posted the code to Github, but here it is:
As I did last year, I’d like to take a look at how well my predictions matched up to what ended up happening:
Working on my Extra Life Donation Tracker: Yes! I made a bunch of releases last year to fix various bugs for my users. I also finally broke out the Donor Drive Code into its own project so that my code could be used as the basis of non-Extra Life Projects
Moving Prophecy Practicum to Django: Yes! I did this and my colleague has been using it for about 6 months now. I have some quality of life issues to fix that will help me get better at Django and maybe CSS.
Redoing flickr views project: Nope. Completely forgot about this.
Progress on my Unity Game - Eric’s Comet Cleaners - None.
Learning new programming languages: Yes! Haskell and Go, through Advent of Code problem solving. Also got better at Ruby and Perl.
Electronics: Some Adaboxes, but no work on my BBQ ThermostatKids: A little more Scratch with the twins. No “real” programming languages with Scarlett.
Compared to last year I had 10 more commits to Github. Pretty consistent!
In these last two months of the year I only worked on Advent of Code.
November
In November I worked through part of the 2016 problem set. I didn’t get too far because of how many languages I was doing at this point. Eventually I decided to allow myself to get a bit further in Python and then catch up with the other languages. Whenever I’d get stuck I’d go back to the other languages. Overall, once I’d figured out Python - Ruby, Perl, and Golang would be pretty easy. Haskell would still be hard, but I started getting the hang of it near the end of the month.
Across both September and October I got a decent amount of programming done. I just about finished the Learn You Haskell for Great Good book (got up to just before Monads) and started Head First Go. Once I had enough Go language to get started on AoC, I knew I’d be ready for the 2016 problem set. Let’s get into the nitty gritty!
Python (not Advent of Code)
Impractical Python
I finished chapter 11 which contained my old friend the Monty Hall Paradox. I’ve had a version up on my site for a very long time based on a PHP tutorial in Linux Format Magazine. This time I was able to code it in Python as well as creating a GUI version. Chapter 11 also touched upon The Birthday Paradox.
Throughout the spring and summer of 2021 a few of the times that I mentioned on the Advent of Code subreddit that I was doing the 2015 problem set in all 3 languages, some folks said they’d be interested in a writeup on the experience. Now that I’ve finally finished 2015 (my first set of 50 stars!) it’s time for that writeup. Before I continue, I’d like to thank everyone on the subreddit who has helped me. I have a README.md for each day’s problem and you’ll find my thanks to those who helped me within those READMEs here in my repo.
June was mostly Python, although I did do chapter 1 of Scratch 3 Games for Kids with Sam. He really, really enjoyed it and I anticipate doing the challenge problems and maybe chapter 2 in July or August.
Books
I read the intro and first couple chapters of both Flask Web Development, 2nd Edition and Data Visualization with Python and Javascript, both from a recent Humble Bundle. The Flask book may be useful for learning more about creating a non-Django site and, even if I mostly stick with FastAPI, it should provide some concepts that are applicable across both frameworks. With the data visualization book, I would love to use that to better visualize my annual Last.fm stats.
I had a lot less variety in my programming month, but still had a lot of fun doing it. In fact, Programming consumed most of my leisure thoughts. More about why I was doing it below, but I’ve been reading Programming Perl as well as skimming through Introducing Go and Learn You A Haskell for Great Good!. Ever since some folks used Haskell during last year’s Advent of Code and this guy’s videos that I mentioned in an early 2021 blog post, I’ve been very curious about the language. In fact, at this point I’ve decided that Go and Haskell will be the next two languages I learn.
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
Back when I was doing GameDev.Tv’s Unity 2D class, I really wanted to know how to do multiplayer games (I also wanted some better support on using Xbox/PS3 remotes in games). Well, this year they released their Multiplayer class. So, naturally, I bought it up. I started working on it, resulting in two Github Repos. In the first section we were learned the basics of the Mirror add-on. I’m currently working through the second section, where we will create a basic RTS. I haven’t reached a real differentiation point from the GameDev folks. That may come later after we get past the basics.
Today I did not attempt the advent of code problem. It involved solving a word search in which there could be overlapping words as well as, if I read it correctly, multiple words starting from the same place. I’m guessing it’s to be done with a depth-first or breadth-first search in which you kill off searches if you can’t continue. I know these sorts of problems present themselves every year, but I never have time to learn during the AoC period (with work, life, and Christmas in the way) and I never make it a priority to relearn (I was taught this back in undergrad). So rather than waste my time on something I know that I won’t know how to do, I’ll save it for another time - maybe when I’m taking time off closer to Christmas/New Years Day.
Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
Advent of Code
As the years have piled on, Eric Wasl has thrown in references to past years’ problems. However, as of day 3 we now have 2 references (perhaps that’s what the historian story line is about). Day 02 had you visit the location of 2015 Day 19 and today visited the location of 2020 Day 2 (my first year doing Advent of Code!) The only thing I’m slightly worried about is if this signals that this year will be a grand finale for the annual event.
Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
December has finally arrived and with it my favorite activity of the month - Advent of Code! I also wanted to give myself a fun little present this year, so I bought the Dice Envy Advent Calendar. Every day I’ll get a fun new die (or dice!). Scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.
Advent of Code
Let’s start off with Advent of Code. This year I haven’t done any of the Advent of Code problems ahead of December so I was a bit rusty. One is not often using the same algorithms or libraries for Advent of Code as one does for everyday programming. I started off with Python since that’s my most comfortable language. First you can head over to today’s page to see the prompt. If you’re not solving the problems yourself, you won’t be able to see the prompt for part 2, so in summary:
Michael Kennedy from the podcasts Python Bytes and Talk Python has recently written a couple blog posts that I wanted to highlight here. First up is his post about rewriting the Talk Python site in Quart (aka async Flask). Three and a half years ago I wrote about realizing that it’s not about Django vs Flask vs FastAPI, but actually about finding the right framework for your workload. I didn’t completely state my current thought process in that blog post, but I was pretty close to the advice I currently give. If you want a Python-based site that needs CMS features and you don’t want to have to reinvent the world, Django is your framework. If you are making websites where you want to be in control of every puzzle piece, then you want flask. You only bring in what you need. And if you’re writing REST API based site (controversy about whether REST truly is REST aside), you want FastAPI. Well, I respect Michael Kennedy’s opinion on this matter for a few reasons:
Michael Kennedy from the podcasts Python Bytes and Talk Python has recently written a couple blog posts that I wanted to highlight here. First up is his post about rewriting the Talk Python site in Quart (aka async Flask). Three and a half years ago I wrote about realizing that it’s not about Django vs Flask vs FastAPI, but actually about finding the right framework for your workload. I didn’t completely state my current thought process in that blog post, but I was pretty close to the advice I currently give. If you want a Python-based site that needs CMS features and you don’t want to have to reinvent the world, Django is your framework. If you are making websites where you want to be in control of every puzzle piece, then you want flask. You only bring in what you need. And if you’re writing REST API based site (controversy about whether REST truly is REST aside), you want FastAPI. Well, I respect Michael Kennedy’s opinion on this matter for a few reasons:
January was a relatively light programming month for me. I was focused on finishing up end of year blog posts and other tasks. Since Lastfmeoystats is used to generate the stats I need for my end of year music post, I worked on it a little to make some fixes. The biggest fix was to change the chart titles not to be hardcoded. I didn’t realize it until I was reviewing my blog post, but I had hard-coded the year when I first wrote the code a couple years ago. I also changed the limits on some of the data I was collecting so that I could do more expansive trending for my overall stats.
I started off the year mostly working on Python projects. For January and February I finally started making some great progress with understanding modern web frameworks and use of CSS frameworks rather than rolling my own. This not only helped with the Prophecy Practicum project, but would form the backbone to a lot of coding this year. I also wrote a utility to tally up my videos for my end of year video game roundup, saving me literal hours of time. As you can read from following the link above, I also worked on my long-running Extra Life Donation Tracker code.
August was a programming-filled month for me. It focused entirely on Python and I mostly continued working on established projects. Let’s jump in!
Amortization
I wanted to re-calculate the amortization table for my home loan for the first time in about a year. As a refresher, I created this program (vs using Excel or an online form) because we are not consistent in the amount of extra principal payments we make. For example, if I get a bonus at work, I might throw all of that bonus into the loan payment. So this program takes variable extra payments into account when creating the amortization table.
I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).
I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.
As I did last year, I’d like to take a look at how well my predictions matched up to what ended up happening:
Working on my Extra Life Donation Tracker: Yes! I made a bunch of releases last year to fix various bugs for my users. I also finally broke out the Donor Drive Code into its own project so that my code could be used as the basis of non-Extra Life Projects
Moving Prophecy Practicum to Django: Yes! I did this and my colleague has been using it for about 6 months now. I have some quality of life issues to fix that will help me get better at Django and maybe CSS.
Redoing flickr views project: Nope. Completely forgot about this.
Progress on my Unity Game - Eric’s Comet Cleaners - None.
Learning new programming languages: Yes! Haskell and Go, through Advent of Code problem solving. Also got better at Ruby and Perl.
Electronics: Some Adaboxes, but no work on my BBQ ThermostatKids: A little more Scratch with the twins. No “real” programming languages with Scarlett.
Compared to last year I had 10 more commits to Github. Pretty consistent!
Across both September and October I got a decent amount of programming done. I just about finished the Learn You Haskell for Great Good book (got up to just before Monads) and started Head First Go. Once I had enough Go language to get started on AoC, I knew I’d be ready for the 2016 problem set. Let’s get into the nitty gritty!
Python (not Advent of Code)
Impractical Python
I finished chapter 11 which contained my old friend the Monty Hall Paradox. I’ve had a version up on my site for a very long time based on a PHP tutorial in Linux Format Magazine. This time I was able to code it in Python as well as creating a GUI version. Chapter 11 also touched upon The Birthday Paradox.
Over the 16 years that this blog spans I must have, at some point, mentioned that I believe sometimes we get knowledge when we’re not ready to receive it.This isn’t some spiritual or new age thing (although you’ll hear Chopra and/or Tony Robbins talk about the phenomenon). It’s simply my lived experience. Sometimes you come across some knowledge, but there’s some underpinning knowledge missing or maybe some life experience you don’t yet have to put your new knowledge into context. So sometimes this leads to a difficulty in learning the concept and other times you just don’t get the point of it and file it away or throw it away - no need to waste neurons on this!
I started off the month thinking it was going to be Python heavy and ended up doing a lot more micro-controller programming. To be fair, I was mostly programming in CircuitPython, but it definitely came out of nowhere.
Python
Civilization VI Webhook in FastAPI
Last month I created a webhook program in Flask to generate notifications when it was someone’s turn in our multiplayer Civilization games. When I posted about it on reddit, someone suggested that I would be better off using FastAPI instead of Flask. I’d been hearing about FastAPI for months on Talk Python to Me and Python Bytes, but I always got the impression that it would only be useful if I was writing my website to be async.
Michael Kennedy from the podcasts Python Bytes and Talk Python has recently written a couple blog posts that I wanted to highlight here. First up is his post about rewriting the Talk Python site in Quart (aka async Flask). Three and a half years ago I wrote about realizing that it’s not about Django vs Flask vs FastAPI, but actually about finding the right framework for your workload. I didn’t completely state my current thought process in that blog post, but I was pretty close to the advice I currently give. If you want a Python-based site that needs CMS features and you don’t want to have to reinvent the world, Django is your framework. If you are making websites where you want to be in control of every puzzle piece, then you want flask. You only bring in what you need. And if you’re writing REST API based site (controversy about whether REST truly is REST aside), you want FastAPI. Well, I respect Michael Kennedy’s opinion on this matter for a few reasons:
Michael Kennedy from the podcasts Python Bytes and Talk Python has recently written a couple blog posts that I wanted to highlight here. First up is his post about rewriting the Talk Python site in Quart (aka async Flask). Three and a half years ago I wrote about realizing that it’s not about Django vs Flask vs FastAPI, but actually about finding the right framework for your workload. I didn’t completely state my current thought process in that blog post, but I was pretty close to the advice I currently give. If you want a Python-based site that needs CMS features and you don’t want to have to reinvent the world, Django is your framework. If you are making websites where you want to be in control of every puzzle piece, then you want flask. You only bring in what you need. And if you’re writing REST API based site (controversy about whether REST truly is REST aside), you want FastAPI. Well, I respect Michael Kennedy’s opinion on this matter for a few reasons:
Michael Kennedy from the podcasts Python Bytes and Talk Python has recently written a couple blog posts that I wanted to highlight here. First up is his post about rewriting the Talk Python site in Quart (aka async Flask). Three and a half years ago I wrote about realizing that it’s not about Django vs Flask vs FastAPI, but actually about finding the right framework for your workload. I didn’t completely state my current thought process in that blog post, but I was pretty close to the advice I currently give. If you want a Python-based site that needs CMS features and you don’t want to have to reinvent the world, Django is your framework. If you are making websites where you want to be in control of every puzzle piece, then you want flask. You only bring in what you need. And if you’re writing REST API based site (controversy about whether REST truly is REST aside), you want FastAPI. Well, I respect Michael Kennedy’s opinion on this matter for a few reasons:
I’ve been working on Milford County for quite some time - nearly a year at this point. I was inspired by the way that City Planner Plays designs his “cities” in Cities: Skylines and Cities: Skylines II; he makes regions that eventually become a megalopolis rather than simply designing one city. While I did orignally start out trying to think of things in story terms as he does, I am not quite disciplined enough to do that. However, I do think that building regionally is one way to end up with more natural looking cities rather than just having a gridded city. Milford County is starting to reach the level of development where I will start merging areas, so I wanted to do a small tour of the region as-is. First off, here is the region from above. I couldn’t figure out how to get the camera to zoom out far enough, so this is from the normal game view with the tools cropped out. (In hindsight I think I could have probably played with the camera settings to zoom out)
I’ve been working on Milford County for quite some time - nearly a year at this point. I was inspired by the way that City Planner Plays designs his “cities” in Cities: Skylines and Cities: Skylines II; he makes regions that eventually become a megalopolis rather than simply designing one city. While I did orignally start out trying to think of things in story terms as he does, I am not quite disciplined enough to do that. However, I do think that building regionally is one way to end up with more natural looking cities rather than just having a gridded city. Milford County is starting to reach the level of development where I will start merging areas, so I wanted to do a small tour of the region as-is. First off, here is the region from above. I couldn’t figure out how to get the camera to zoom out far enough, so this is from the normal game view with the tools cropped out. (In hindsight I think I could have probably played with the camera settings to zoom out)
As I told someone the day after attending the concert, there’s a reason that humans eventually came upon the format for a church service that we currently have. There is something powerful about a room full of people all singing the same song, in one room, with one purpose. You can get a similar feeling at an arena (whether for sports or a concert), but there’s extra special connection when you’re shoulder to shoulder and jumping around together. (Not to mention the inherent trust in your fellow concert-goers when crowd surfing) This particular November has been a little hard for me. I can’t quite pinpoint the source of the general malaise, but I spent a good chunk of the month in a real funk. I was just starting to recover when I went to the concert and it just super-charged me. I think it really helps that ska, in general, is a positive force in the world. Many ska bands tend to support important causes, including participating in collaborative albums/concerts like Ska Against Racism. As I mentioned in my review of Kill Lincoln’s No Normal, the band grew on me and I enjoyed last year’s concert for their This is New Tone documentary so I definitely wanted to attend their release show.
Noticed the Catbite sticker on the wall with the others
As I mentioned during my 2022 Music Wrap-Up, I got back into modern ska via Bad Time Records. So when Bad Time Records announced their Bad Time Records Tour 2023 featuring We Are the Union, Kill Lincoln, and Catbite - it was a no-brainer to buy the tickets. As a bonus, they’re also filming a concert film/documentary during the tour called This is New Tone. The show was at Union Stage in Washington, DC. It was my first timewer seeing any of these bands live, my first concert of 2023, and my first time at Union Stage.
As I told someone the day after attending the concert, there’s a reason that humans eventually came upon the format for a church service that we currently have. There is something powerful about a room full of people all singing the same song, in one room, with one purpose. You can get a similar feeling at an arena (whether for sports or a concert), but there’s extra special connection when you’re shoulder to shoulder and jumping around together. (Not to mention the inherent trust in your fellow concert-goers when crowd surfing) This particular November has been a little hard for me. I can’t quite pinpoint the source of the general malaise, but I spent a good chunk of the month in a real funk. I was just starting to recover when I went to the concert and it just super-charged me. I think it really helps that ska, in general, is a positive force in the world. Many ska bands tend to support important causes, including participating in collaborative albums/concerts like Ska Against Racism. As I mentioned in my review of Kill Lincoln’s No Normal, the band grew on me and I enjoyed last year’s concert for their This is New Tone documentary so I definitely wanted to attend their release show.
Noticed the Catbite sticker on the wall with the others
As I mentioned during my 2022 Music Wrap-Up, I got back into modern ska via Bad Time Records. So when Bad Time Records announced their Bad Time Records Tour 2023 featuring We Are the Union, Kill Lincoln, and Catbite - it was a no-brainer to buy the tickets. As a bonus, they’re also filming a concert film/documentary during the tour called This is New Tone. The show was at Union Stage in Washington, DC. It was my first timewer seeing any of these bands live, my first concert of 2023, and my first time at Union Stage.
As I told someone the day after attending the concert, there’s a reason that humans eventually came upon the format for a church service that we currently have. There is something powerful about a room full of people all singing the same song, in one room, with one purpose. You can get a similar feeling at an arena (whether for sports or a concert), but there’s extra special connection when you’re shoulder to shoulder and jumping around together. (Not to mention the inherent trust in your fellow concert-goers when crowd surfing) This particular November has been a little hard for me. I can’t quite pinpoint the source of the general malaise, but I spent a good chunk of the month in a real funk. I was just starting to recover when I went to the concert and it just super-charged me. I think it really helps that ska, in general, is a positive force in the world. Many ska bands tend to support important causes, including participating in collaborative albums/concerts like Ska Against Racism. As I mentioned in my review of Kill Lincoln’s No Normal, the band grew on me and I enjoyed last year’s concert for their This is New Tone documentary so I definitely wanted to attend their release show.
I first heard MxPx 28 or 29 years ago. At the time my family was still a church-going family. This was my first experience with the idea of a youth group that played rock song versions of the praise music. So I was jazzed to go to church every Wednesday and Sunday. The middle school youth group also had a CD lending library. Thus was I introduced to DC Talk, Newsboys, Audio Adrenaline, and MxPx via their album Teenage Politics. At the time, although my household wasn’t one of those that was against dance, alcohol, or whatever books religious folks paniced about (since Harry Potter wasn’t out yet), we weren’t allowed to listen to current secular music because it was a bad influence. We mostly didn’t really know what we were missing. We didn’t have to listen to the religious station because, again, my parents weren’t fanatical about secularism, they just didn’t think rap and modern rock was something we should listen to. So we would listen to the oldies station. To this day, I know just about any pop song from the 50s or 60s. All this is to say that I had no reference point for punk rock. Compared to the other Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) artists out there, this was fast and hard and loud. I was fascinated. Also, unusually for CCM artists at the time, the music was more about being a teenager than it was about God. That’s not to say that God and religion aren’t mentioned on MxPx albums, but they weren’t the majority of what the songs were about.
I like listening to NPR’s It’s Been a Minute and today’s episode was a real doozy. Here’s the descriptive paragraph from the NPR page for the episode:
Every couple of weeks there’s a new story of a fan at a concert misbehaving. One fan threw ashes at Pink, another hit Drake with a cellphone, Miranda Lambert stopped her show when fans took selfies with flash photography. Extreme instances have landed performers in the hospital, but more often attendees have noticed the audience has gotten louder and more distracting than ever. Where is all of this coming from?
Noticed the Catbite sticker on the wall with the others
As I mentioned during my 2022 Music Wrap-Up, I got back into modern ska via Bad Time Records. So when Bad Time Records announced their Bad Time Records Tour 2023 featuring We Are the Union, Kill Lincoln, and Catbite - it was a no-brainer to buy the tickets. As a bonus, they’re also filming a concert film/documentary during the tour called This is New Tone. The show was at Union Stage in Washington, DC. It was my first timewer seeing any of these bands live, my first concert of 2023, and my first time at Union Stage.
I would have backed The PDX Broadsides’ Kickstarter for Relatable Content no matter what because I loved Trust Issues and I enjoy nearly all of their older songs. But the thing that made me spread the word everyone and try to get more backers was that they had a goal to do an East Coast tour. When they came to the New Deal Cafe in Greenbelt, MD I was finally able to see them live for the first time. It was also my second time seeing The Misbehavin’ Maidens, who opened for The Doubleclicks earlier in the year.
My fourth concert of 2019 was also the first one in which I had someone else go with me as Danielle went to her first concert of 2019. It was fun to have someone to share the experience with, especially her. Anberlin was the first band I introduced her to that she also came to like. Many of their albums were bonding moments for us from dating through our married life.
My second concert of 2019 was almost the exact opposite of the first one. The first one was a big outdoor concert venue (it was in Boston, but was configured like Pier VI in Baltimore) while this one was in the basement of a pizza place called Joe Squared. The first one featured pop artists that everyone has heard while this one featured niche bands that mostly nerds have heard. The first one featured full bands while the Misbehavin’ Maidens performed acapella and The Doubleclicks used an electric cello and other stringed instruments.
At the end of Red Hat Summit 2019 (post coming about that soon) there was a double-header concert with Neon Trees and Fitz & the Tantrums. Neon Trees started things off for the night. I didn’t look them up ahead of the concert, because Fitz was a huge band so I thought Neon Trees was just a local band opening for Fitz. Their section of the concert was a lot of fun even though I didn’t know any of the songs. The lead singer had lots of fun banter and seemed to really be enjoying himself.
I hadn’t seen I Fight Dragons on tour since Warped Tour three or four years ago (I missed an opportunity to see them at MagFest a couple years ago), but I really enjoyed that set and I’ve been enjoying their work on their new album. They’ve been sharing the progress of songs from acoustic roughs to rhythm roughs, and so on. It’s been a lot of fun to see how the songs evolve. Tickets were only $15 and it was at the Metro Gallery in Baltimore, so I figured I’d go check it out.
Concerts are certainly a funny bit of entertainment. When you go see a movie, you are going because you like the director or the actors or the idea sounded interesting. You see that movie and that’s the end of it. The same holds true for Broadway shows or Operas. But when you attended a concert, you have a few opening acts you probably don’t know. This is somewhat alleviated nowadays for the well prepared by a quick trip to Spotify or Youtube. After finally seeing The Protomen during last year’s Warped Tour, I was excited about seeing them in concert. My ticket informed me that I’d also be seeing Cowabunga Pizza Time and Lionize. Of course, the difference between concerts and other forms of entertainment is no accident. Opening bands are limpets on the bodies of larger acts, hoping to gain exposure to the fans of the main act. This works best when the organizer has paired up bands that work well together thematically. But, this is the obvious reason why you never know the time the main act is going on stage.
I’ve been a fan of Weird Al for about 17 years. I used to have the Disney special Weird Al Going Home, but unfortunately, I lent it to someone and never got it back. Yet, in all the time, I’d never seen a Weird Al concert live. Finally, Weird Al came to Baltimore as part of his Mandatory Fun Tour and I was able to experience an Al Tour. It was a pretty neat experience. It’s only something like the fourth arena concert I’ve been to (even thought it wasn’t technically in an arena). The last arena concert I went to was Rihanna. Interestingly, Weird Al had WAY more costume changes than she did. He had just about one outfit per song with few exceptions. While he was changing, clips played from nearly every video Weird Al has ever been involved in.
Originally my first concert of 2015 was going to be a little later in the year, but with Danielle away for the weekend, the email letting me know about a concert in just a few days seemed quite fortuitous. I’d had a couple chances to see Anamanaguchi in concert, but the timing was never right. This time it was perfect - weekend and wife out of town. So I decided to go.
On 6 Nov I went to my 2013 concert. Because of time and money concerns, Danielle and I typically go to a maximum of two concerts a year, and usually just one concert. I was completely unable to resist seeing Five Iron Frenzy in their first tour since breaking up nearly a decade ago. I didn’t really care for Reel Big Fish and I hoped that Five Iron Frenzy would go first as Co-headliner so I could leave early. In fact, although being a fan of ska, the only Reel Big Fish song I’d ever heard was “Everbody’s Doin’ the Fish” because it was the Florida Marlins’ theme song for a season or two. A large part of that comes from the fact that when I got into ska, in the 1990s, I was only into Christian music to the exclusion of secular music - as was encouraged by my middle school church. (My high school church actually shied away from Christian music, which I thought was weird, considering how good it had gotten by the early 2000s) So I listed to Five Iron Frenzy, The OC Supertones, and The Skadaddles. This was going to be my first Five Iron Frenzy concert in nearly 15 years when I saw them at a festival in Florida (and actually filmed a pretty decent video bootleg)
If you’re taking concert photos professionally, you will get access to the pit area and will be able to photograph there for the first three songs. Put your camera into manual mode and, depending on the lighting, manual focus and try to get original and heartfelt shots. This blog post is for the rest of us.
First of all, unfortunately, you probably (MOST LIKELY) won’t be able to take your SLR and the lenses you’d need to properly photograph the event. The reason the photographers get to take photos for only the first three songs is to make sure they don’t disturb the people behind them so they aren’t going to take kindly to an amateur ruining things for others. At best you can bring in a premium point and shoot like the Canon S110 or G15. At worst you’ll be using your cell phone. The most important thing to know is that you need to turn off your flash and pump up your ISO. Anyone more than a couple rows back does not have a flash powerful enough to reach the stage and all you’ll be doing is lighting up the heads of the people in front of you.
This was during a trip Danielle and I took to Philidelphia to see an Anberlin concert. We decided to also go ahead and see the sights. We saw the Liberty Bell in its new home, tried a real Philly Cheese Steak, and just enjoyed being somewhere else.
This photo is just a reminder that people won’t always say ‘no’ when you ask to take their photo. In his case, it’s because I really liked his uniform.
Monday night, as I walked to the Ram’s Head Live concert venue, I had no idea what to expect. Earlier in the year Daniel had retweeted some strange, witty tweets from some dude named Childish Gambino. Based on the name I thought it was some weird Italian joke tweet account. Then, a few months later, I joined tumblr after seeing Dan’s tumblr posts on his blog’s sidebar and determining there was some neat stuff going on there. That’s when I came across the site Hipster Childish Gambino and saw posts like these:
As I told someone the day after attending the concert, there’s a reason that humans eventually came upon the format for a church service that we currently have. There is something powerful about a room full of people all singing the same song, in one room, with one purpose. You can get a similar feeling at an arena (whether for sports or a concert), but there’s extra special connection when you’re shoulder to shoulder and jumping around together. (Not to mention the inherent trust in your fellow concert-goers when crowd surfing) This particular November has been a little hard for me. I can’t quite pinpoint the source of the general malaise, but I spent a good chunk of the month in a real funk. I was just starting to recover when I went to the concert and it just super-charged me. I think it really helps that ska, in general, is a positive force in the world. Many ska bands tend to support important causes, including participating in collaborative albums/concerts like Ska Against Racism. As I mentioned in my review of Kill Lincoln’s No Normal, the band grew on me and I enjoyed last year’s concert for their This is New Tone documentary so I definitely wanted to attend their release show.
This year I continued to get new ska music from Bad Time Records, including this album by Kill Lincoln whose frontman is the head of Bad Time Records. Modern ska has gone off in many directions. Some bands, like Calamatrix, have gone back to their reggae roots. Half Past Two, who has an album I’ll be writing about soon, has a third wave ska 1990s sound. Kill Lincoln is squarely in the ska-punk realm. It’s fast, it’s hard, and it’s loud. It took me a while to get into the sound, having discovered ska via the 1990s Christian ska bands The Orange County Supertones and Five Iron Frenzy and the secular band No Doubt. (Interestingly, FIF have gone the rock with horns route while No Doubt has gone a more reggae route)
Noticed the Catbite sticker on the wall with the others
As I mentioned during my 2022 Music Wrap-Up, I got back into modern ska via Bad Time Records. So when Bad Time Records announced their Bad Time Records Tour 2023 featuring We Are the Union, Kill Lincoln, and Catbite - it was a no-brainer to buy the tickets. As a bonus, they’re also filming a concert film/documentary during the tour called This is New Tone. The show was at Union Stage in Washington, DC. It was my first timewer seeing any of these bands live, my first concert of 2023, and my first time at Union Stage.
As I told someone the day after attending the concert, there’s a reason that humans eventually came upon the format for a church service that we currently have. There is something powerful about a room full of people all singing the same song, in one room, with one purpose. You can get a similar feeling at an arena (whether for sports or a concert), but there’s extra special connection when you’re shoulder to shoulder and jumping around together. (Not to mention the inherent trust in your fellow concert-goers when crowd surfing) This particular November has been a little hard for me. I can’t quite pinpoint the source of the general malaise, but I spent a good chunk of the month in a real funk. I was just starting to recover when I went to the concert and it just super-charged me. I think it really helps that ska, in general, is a positive force in the world. Many ska bands tend to support important causes, including participating in collaborative albums/concerts like Ska Against Racism. As I mentioned in my review of Kill Lincoln’s No Normal, the band grew on me and I enjoyed last year’s concert for their This is New Tone documentary so I definitely wanted to attend their release show.
This year I wanted to take the twins’ portraits outside. I’d been wanting to do it at the park for a few years now, but this year the timing actually worked out well. Unlike in years past, Sam wasn’t as keen on having his photo taken so he went full anime on this one:
Even throwing Stella into the mix didn’t get him peeking:
This year I wanted to take the twins’ portraits outside. I’d been wanting to do it at the park for a few years now, but this year the timing actually worked out well. Unlike in years past, Sam wasn’t as keen on having his photo taken so he went full anime on this one:
Even throwing Stella into the mix didn’t get him peeking:
I made some portraits of Scarlett. I used the same setup as when I did Sam and Stella’s November portraits, except with the octobox on the left this time.
Somewhat without intention, I’ve ended up alternating portraits for the twins between outdoor portraits and indoor portraits. This year was time for indoor portraits. (Although, to be fair, if it hadn’t been freezing, I might have ended up breaking the tradition) Here’s the setup I used:
It’s a variant on a setup that has been very successful for me with portraits of the kids. I went back to a white background for the first time in a few years. The last time I used it with Scarlett I had an uneven white that looked horrendous to my eye and was a real pain in the butt to try and correct in Photoshop (or was it GIMP?). I never got it quite right and ended up sticking to the black background for a while. But I wanted to do something different. So this time I grabbed my two studio strobes (I believe they’re 100W strobes that someone got me as a present some 8 or so years ago) and threw them into umbrellas to make sure the light would hit the background evenly. With these lights I had to go to somewhere around 80% power in order to get a pure white background according to the spectrograph in camera. Then I posed the twins in front of those lights, so they needed a light for themselves. I used my old Canon 580EX inside of my gigantic octagon (I think it’s somewhere around 3 feet or more in diameter). I wanted to shoot at F8 to try and get the best chance of ensuring the twins would be in focus, so I had to push the 580EX to full power. After this session, I ended up buying a bracket so that next time I can throw my 430EX in there, too.
Sparklers were an ever-present feature of my childhood 4th of July celebrations. This year we introduced the twins to sparklers (I’m pretty sure Scarlett has used them at least once before). They kids had a lot of fun and there were a couple burn-scares, but I think it was worth the slight parental anxiety. (Did our parents care? They seemed a lot more laize-faire about us with sparklers, but maybe they were just good at hiding their fears?) Took out the DSLR and introduced the kids to light painting. Scarlett had the winning light-painting photo that made it past the multiple discard passes.
There was something about this image that reminded me of older snapshots. I think it’s the fact that it’s a candid moment, not perfectly sharp as Scarlett moved out of the focal plane; but it’s not out of focus - you can see that from the shirts. So when I was processing the shot, I went for an older look. I think I ended up applying a Kodachrome effect.
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:
A few days ago, I had the opportunity to ask the twins what they did that day while they were isolated from each other.
Stella: “We played LEGO and built a lot of cool things.”
Sam: “We went to Costco and then came right back home.”
Mind you, they both had the exact same day and did the exact same things. If I had to guess at why they focused on the things they did, I’d say that Sam’s answer was based on the fact that he likes to go out, especially to the park. So he was upset they’d left the house and hadn’t done anything he found fun. I’m not sure why Stella only focused on the LEGOs, but she is still playing with them a few days later, so maybe she was really happy to have new things to play with.
Over the years I’ve taken many, many photos of my kids at Coney Island. Lots of them have come out great. But I think this batch of photos is among the best photos I’ve taken of the kids at Coney Island thus far.
In some cases, it’s the expressions on the twins’ faces.
I’m on a motorcycle!
I see you!
Yeah, I know how to use this
Other times, I succeeded in getting the perfect action shot.
Since becoming a parent it’s been a common theme of the blog that I find it fascinating experiencing the kids getting older and, therefore, more able to process the world around them. This winter was the first time the twins could be out in the snow for more than just a few minutes. Not only were they more able to weather the cold, but they were also strong enough to move around in the snow without too much frustration. They were also finally able to have a snowball fight. Although, watch Sam’s face closely from beginning to end in the following video, it’s priceless:
If there’s one pleasure I was denied by growing up in Florida, it was getting to play with the fall leaves. (Of course, I was spared having to rake them - something that takes me a good afternoon here if I do it well). But my kids get to enjoy it.
Sam in the leaves
Sam’s expression notwithstanding, I wonder what it is that kids enjoy about it. Is it making a mess of a pile? Is it the crunch of the leaves? The novelty of it all? Scarlett’s been doing it for a while and she still enjoys it. Whatever it is - I’m glad I get to be there to see it and enjoy their enjoyment.
Just as with the farm portraits, this year both kids were enthusiastic about the portraits. I was bracing for Sam to once again hate the idea of portraits, but his urge to do what his sisters were doing was stronger - or maybe he’s just over whatever he hated about it last year. I’m really happy with how the portraits came out this year - particularly for Sam. It helps that the little guy is ALWAYS smiling (unless he’s been told he can’t do something). Here’s my favorite Sam portrait:
Another year and the kids grow older. Last year was a disaster - the twins did NOT want their photos taken. We didn’t get any good portraits. This time everyone was game and we got good portraits - at least the first time around. When we reconvened a little later, the kids were over the idea of pumpkin photos, or at least Scarlett was.
Funny thing about this is that I could say this reflects their moods, but really only Stella is being genuinely Stella. Usually you can’t catch Sam without a smile on his face (although he *is* going through the whiny 2 year old phase), and Scarlett’s the most neutral.
Danielle and I went to Mount Vernon back when we first moved here and were exploring new things to do in our free time that were unique to the area.
We’d thought of bringing our parents to see Washington’s house and property, but the timing never quite worked out - you really want to visit in the Spring or Fall, not during the Summer or Winter. So it remained a place we’d only been to once even as we made multiple trips to the same couple Smithsonian museums and zoos.
This Easter we went to the farm so they kids could hunt for eggs there and then enjoy the farm. Unlike my childhood, Easter’s pretty cold up here as you can see.
It’s pretty ridiculous to me, considering almost my entire childhood consisted of going to the local park.
Stella’s been enjoying horseback riding for a bit now, but this was the first time she was old enough to do it on her own without me holding onto her the entire time.
Back in November we took the twins on their first trip to Disney. This time around Scarlett wasn’t as interested in the parades as she was last time, but the twins were REALLY into them. Surprisingly, both twins ended up warming up to the characters. Sam’s reluctance with Mickey on the first day made me think he was going to try and avoid them the entire trip. But as you can see in the video, he eventually got into interacting with the characters.
I took Sam and Stella to the park on Columbus Day (Scarlett was in school) and they were finally old enough that I could step back to take photos while they worked their way through the jungle gym.
Jumping forward (I’m still generally working on photos from August because I’ve fallen behind with other responsibilities and playing some video games for Extra Life), we get to Halloween photos. Once again these awesome costumes were sewn by my mother-in-law.
My 1.5 year old daughter doesn’t understand entropy yet so she doesn’t understand why she can’t just put it back after she rips a flower off a house plant.
I can’t believe how much they’ve grown. Summer 2016 we were pushing them around in this car, now they’re pushing it around. (Youtube vids which may not carry over to FB - you may need to click through to the blog)
(if you usually see my blog posts on FB, I am pretty sure they don’t carry over Youtube embeds, so come to the blog to see the videos)
If you’re an only child, you don’t know what it’s like to have to live with your kiddie tormentor. Growing up, the three of us each alternated as the aggressor and the aggrieved. As Stella proves here, you don’t have to the the oldest to be the one causing issues.
We’ll see what happens spring 2017, but I was surprised they were a little more patient than Scarlett and so didn’t fall on account of running on the steep (for their little legs) incline.
We did it, we got through a year with twins. We had a lot of help - mostly from my mother in law, but also from my parents and with a little help from our friends. With Stella it was extra tough because we didn’t know for the first couple months that she was lactose intolerant. Once we figured that out, she was less miserable and life was good.
[caption id=“attachment_12341” align=“aligncenter” width=“840”] Sam’s First Carousel Ride[/caption]
Why do kids enjoy carousel rides so much? Shoot, why do we have so much nostalgia for them as adults? I have no idea. I could probably put together some BS about a cultural memory of horseback riding, but frankly I think it’s just the first amusement park ride a kid is able to go on. This is Disney before your tiny brain can even comprehend the existence of such a place. And, unlike a car, I think it’s pretty evident even to the kids that there is no utilitarian function here - you end up roughly where you started.
I figured this might be the only year I can pick their costume, so I *had* to go with The Wonder Twins from the old Super Friends cartoon. My mother-in-law sewed up the awesome costumes.
That near-year flew by! I can’t believe a year ago we were nervously attending Dina’s wedding, unsure if the kids were going to want to pop out early and steal the show.
Every year since Scarlett was born we’re been going to Clark’s Eliok Farm to get a pumpkin to decorate the house (and in later years for Scarlett to carve). This time was the first year for Sam and Stella. Overall they did extraordinarily well for 11 month olds who’d never been to a pumpkin patch before. Only Stella cried and that was only after it had gone on for a while.
Thanks to having Scarlett be the first photo with a color checker that has a white balance section, I was able to get the lighting and white balance perfect in that photo and then copy those settings to the other photos. After that, just a few tweaks to get each photo perfect. Allowed me to make the most of my limited time. Enjoy the photos!
While I think that part of what really makes this image work is the way I converted it to black and white, I do really envy my wife for having a good eye and good timing to capture the photo.
Stella loves anything she can climb on. Scarlett hasn’t developed a love for climbing trees, but Stella might. Put anything in front of her that’s a bit off the ground and she’ll try to get on top of it. Not sure if she’s trying to reach what the adults and her big sister can or if she’s just climbing it for the same reason people climb Everest: Because It’s There.
Scarlett’s first time at the beach was much younger - five or six months - but with the twins it was just a lot harder to go on vacation. There are two of them to deal with, to pack formula for, etc. Also, for a long time Stella would spontaneously throw up. We’d dealt with that with Scarlett when we went on the trip to her first Christmas - where she kept throwing up in the car. It’s not fun.
Well, everyone’s growing up. Dan’s the last to get married (the youngest three siblings don’t count because there’s too big a gap). Here are some photos from his engagement party.
Stella and her great-grandparents at Dan's Engagement Party
Eric and Dan at Dan's Engagement Party
Eric, Dan, and Katie at Dan and Katy's Engagement Party
Double Rainbows!
Double Rainbows!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Somewhere over the rainbow!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Scarlett and the Rainbow
Scarlett and Abuelo Roman at Dan's Engagement Party (and a rainb
Scarlett and Abuela Carmen at Dan's Engagement Party
Scarlett and Abuela Carmen at Dan's Engagement Party
We’re hardly ever dressed up so nicely. So when we all got dressed up for Dan’s engagement party, I wanted to get a quick family portrait before we left. The pose wasn’t perfect due to the rush, and I’ll be elaborating a bit more on that in a future blog post, but I do like it as a bit of record keeping. Slightly more than a snapshot, but not how I’d have done it if we weren’t in a hurry.
After we were done doing our multi-generational photos, my mom put Stella on the grass to take some portraits. If you follow her on Facebook, you already know how those turned out. I took a few. These two were my favorites:
Ever since Sam was born, I’ve been looking forward to a 4 generation male portrait. I’d done a female line portrait with Scarlett up to her great-grandmother. It was finally time to do the same for me. While we were out there and dressed up, we took a few other configurations of family photos. All the males are wearing guayaberas, a traditional shirt worn in the Caribbean, especially in Cuba.
It’s a time-honored tradition for us to photograph babies in the purple bucket. We did it for Nam, Lan, and Scarlett. Now it was time for the twins to do it.
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--004-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--021-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--032-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--034-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--046-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--047-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--055-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--060-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--063-1
Scarlett wanted to do it again, so now we have this comparison. Baby Scarlett:
I meant to write about the lighting setup in the blog post in which I uploaded the photos from the 7 Month photo shoot, but with twin 7 month olds, there’s never enough time for anything - even with my mother-in-law in town helping us out. Oh well, at least I don’t have to pay per post.
First of all, I’d like to discuss the concept I wanted to go for. For the Five Month photos, I went with the balloon theme I posted about here. For month six, I didn’t do anything special. Danielle did her usual couch portraits. But this time around I had a bit more time for the photos and I started thinking about it a week or two in advance. Unlike 2 months ago, both children were able to sit on their own now for extended periods of time. As of when I took the 7 month photos, the only thing that made them tip over was when they got over-excited and tipped back. It’d been a while since I had done portraits with the black background and I wanted to switch it up a bit. Because I don’t have any formal photography training, I like to browse the work of other photographers to get ideas I can take and make my own. Gavin Hooey, who has a great series of videos on Youtube through the photography store Adorama, has a dark grey background at his studio. He likes to have a highlight behind the model rather than just a plain dark background. If you look at his photos, he does it more often than he doesn’t. I figured it might help with the look of the photos. If you don’t do it, then you really do need to use a light as a hair light in order to keep dark-haired subjects from merging into a black background.
Danielle mentioned that it looked like I’d messed around with the image because the strings on Sam’s photo looked fake. Actually, that’s how it was captured in the camera. The strings were reflective and, as I’m about to get into, there was a lot of light in this shoot. There are only two things I did to edit these photos. For both of them, the balloons ended up floating higher than the backdrop. So I had to extend the backdrop digitally. Luckily for other reasons that I’ll get into in the lessons learned section, I’d been trying to blow out the background and make it pure white. In computer terms, I wanted it represented by (255,255,255) or pure white. So it was less of a pain to extend the background to make it look real - I didn’t need to use a clone or healing brush. It was already white so I just painted in white (I actually did something a little more complex, but this is fine for the analogy). For Sam’s photo, the balloons and strings caused a bit of a shadow behind the strings so it’s not pure white there. The strings are so skinny that it wasn’t worth trying to paint over this with white. I tried a couple times and then gave up and reverted it.
When Scarlett was born, I went a little crazy. Sure, it’s natural for first time parents, especially someone with my personality. But I think I also deserve some slack because it was a difficult, complicated pregnancy and then Scarlett needed surgery in her first week of life in order to live.
So when I saw myself starting to act crazy again (after another crazy pregnancy with premie babies), my solution was to withdraw. If I didn’t get too attached, I wouldn’t have such visceral reactions to my underweight daughter not eating. So I threw myself into my books and video games. It was made easier by the fact that my mother in law was here, so I had more opportunities to run off. But then, a week ago (and I’m writing this post about a month before this will appear on my blog), I realized that I had been letting their infancy slide past me without enjoying it. And so I put myself back into their lives. This was made easier by nearly five months of the doctor weighing Stella and finally being OK with her weight. Also, we’d found out she was lactose intolerant and switching her away from mother’s milk and cow-based formula caused her to transform into a happy baby. But now I’m really enjoying the heck out of the twins and it’s a joy to see them each day.
You never know what’s going to happen when you try to take portraits of babies. Throw in the extra unpredictability of kids of any age and it’s a crapshoot whether a photo shoot is going to turn out to be fun with rewarding photos or a series of photos of your children crying.
One thing we have on our side with the studio being in the basement is that we can take photos when the kids are ready, not on a hope and prayer that they’ll be ready when we get to Sears, Target, or wherever people are getting portraits done nowadays. So we started off with easy portraits in the morning on the “Baby Portrait Couch”. Hey, it’s a tradition started with Scarlett!
Just in case the captions for the photos don’t appear on your RSS reader or on Facebook, here’s what I wrote as the caption to the photos:
“Inspired by title I chose for my photo for the twins’ four month photo which didn’t come out quite the way I wanted it to, I decided to do this image. I love how it came out.”
I also usually don’t post more than one version of a photo - I have a definitive version and just go with that, but this time Scarlett came up while I was trying to to figure out which one I preferred and she insisted on a different one than I would have chosen, so I decided to share them all.
I could have gone for something more elaborate, but at this age, it’s a lot just to get them awake enough for portraits. There are plenty of months for crazier shots.
This year I continued to get new ska music from Bad Time Records, including this album by Kill Lincoln whose frontman is the head of Bad Time Records. Modern ska has gone off in many directions. Some bands, like Calamatrix, have gone back to their reggae roots. Half Past Two, who has an album I’ll be writing about soon, has a third wave ska 1990s sound. Kill Lincoln is squarely in the ska-punk realm. It’s fast, it’s hard, and it’s loud. It took me a while to get into the sound, having discovered ska via the 1990s Christian ska bands The Orange County Supertones and Five Iron Frenzy and the secular band No Doubt. (Interestingly, FIF have gone the rock with horns route while No Doubt has gone a more reggae route)
Noticed the Catbite sticker on the wall with the others
As I mentioned during my 2022 Music Wrap-Up, I got back into modern ska via Bad Time Records. So when Bad Time Records announced their Bad Time Records Tour 2023 featuring We Are the Union, Kill Lincoln, and Catbite - it was a no-brainer to buy the tickets. As a bonus, they’re also filming a concert film/documentary during the tour called This is New Tone. The show was at Union Stage in Washington, DC. It was my first timewer seeing any of these bands live, my first concert of 2023, and my first time at Union Stage.
This year I continued to get new ska music from Bad Time Records, including this album by Kill Lincoln whose frontman is the head of Bad Time Records. Modern ska has gone off in many directions. Some bands, like Calamatrix, have gone back to their reggae roots. Half Past Two, who has an album I’ll be writing about soon, has a third wave ska 1990s sound. Kill Lincoln is squarely in the ska-punk realm. It’s fast, it’s hard, and it’s loud. It took me a while to get into the sound, having discovered ska via the 1990s Christian ska bands The Orange County Supertones and Five Iron Frenzy and the secular band No Doubt. (Interestingly, FIF have gone the rock with horns route while No Doubt has gone a more reggae route)
I wanted to take a look at my music listening habits quarterly to see how each quarter’s stats stack up against the final numbers at the end of the year. I started off the year listening to some of the new artists I’d bought, then just switched to random listens for the rest of the quarter.
1. Girl Talk (294 plays) - I discovered Girl Talk at the end of 2010. I really enjoyed the latest album. Quickly acquired the rest of his albums. I enjoy all of them other than the first one. Listened to each of the albums a few times. Then when I put my playlist on random, of course a few of them kept coming up because of how many tracks there were.
2. Doctor Octoroc (279 plays) - I got into chip tunes at the end of 2010/beginning 2011 via I Fight Dragons. That caused me to check out Anamanaguchi, who Dan had been recommending for a while. Then I came across Doctor Octoroc. Got his chiptunes version of the Dr Horrible soundtrack and his chiptunes album “After These Messages”. Enjoyed it for a while. Quickly tired of it. I don’t think I’ve listened to it once since the initial push.
3. The Beatles (132 plays) - I went through my Beatles rush in 2010 when I first got all the songs. The Beatles are in third place solely on the basis of having SO MANY songs that they’re bound to come up often why I’m listening to my entire collection on random.
4. I Fight Dragons (109 plays) - I have all three of their EPs. One was available for joining the mailing list - the other two I bought. I really enjoy this group. They’re a regular rock band that embellishes their sound with chiptunes. The topics are not as nerdy as you’d expect from a chiptunes band. They have a good sound, the singer has a good voice, and the songs are good. I wouldn’t say they’re awesome, but they’re enjoyable enough that I always get happy when their CDs come up in my rotation of CD-Rs are work.
5. Anberlin (89 plays) - I own all their CDs so I’m surprised they didn’t come up more often. I like all their albums to varying degrees. I’m partial to their earlier work, although their latest CD had me falling for them again.
6. Relient K (54 plays) - I also own all of their CDs. Although the first two CDs are awful compared to their later albums, there are still a few songs I enjoy on the first two. I’m not a big fan of their absolute latest album, it forays a bit more into a country type of sound. I’ll probably have to listen to previews of their next CD rather than blindly buying it.
7. “Weird Al” Yankovic (49 plays) - I have a ton of his songs, but I often had to skip them to keep from annoying Danielle. Perhaps now that I’m mostly listening with headphones there’ll be more listens.
8. Billy Joel (43 plays) - nearly all of these plays come from a greatest hits album of his that I bought. Around this time, I stopped listening at random in order to listen to my newly bought music.
9. Five Iron Frenzy (40 plays) - I’m a huge fan of Five Iron Frenzy, but they’ve fallen to the wayside as I’ve explored other non-ska music recently
10. MxPx (33 plays) - I hadn’t heard any MxPx music in a long time. They were one of my favorite bands from middle school through high school. But I hadn’t listened to any of the three of four albums I own in a long time. Listening to my collection on random brought them back into my radar.
11. GRITS (33 plays) - all their plays came from listening to my collection on random. After their second album, I only like selected songs from their further albums.
12. The Hangovers (29 plays) - all from their latest album Three Sails to the Wind. I really enjoy this album a lot.
13. Anamanaguchi (28 plays) - I really enjoy listening to this group. It’s weird having groups producing music without vocals nowadays. But I wonder if this is the future evolution of symphonic music.
14. Tom Lehrer (27 plays) - A great musician who rivals “Weird Al” for making me laugh.
14. ???? (Nobuo Uematsu) (27 plays) - I don’t have any of his solo work. All these are from Final Fantasy soundtracks. He is a great composer. I think some of his songs rival movie soundtracks.
When I first played D&D with David maybe 3 Christmases ago, one of the most baffling things for me to understand was my character sheet. Take a looka t the first page of Sam’s Dungeon in a Box character sheet:
Ignoring how busy this page is, one of the biggest design issues I see right away is that all of the trait boxes are incorrectly prioritized. I have seen people argue for completely eliminating the scores from the sheet because you don’t ever use those scores. Instead, you use the modifiers (the +# or -#). Yet on this sheet those numbers are teeny, tiny compared to the numbers that are functionally useless. (Except during character creation) I would otherwise say there’s not too much that’s bad about this page - it gives you the information you will need most often. The second page has information you might need to refer to so that you don’t need to keep referring to the Player’s Handbook (PHB)
It’s been a while since I posted a book review on here and rather than have a whole bunch of book review posts, I thought I’d collect the most recent ones into this post.
I listened to the audiobook, so, in all likelihood, I’m going to mispell everyone’s names
As I said with the first entry in this series, Yarros does a great job writing a compelling fantasy story. The romance is there, but it’s not what brings me into the story. We’ll get back to that momentarily. The best thing I could say about novel is that when I got to the end, I was upset that I have to wait until some time next year to continue the story. Yarros gives us a complete story (well, 2 of them - more on that as well) and does leave us with quite a compelling reason to come back, but even without the events of the last chapter, I would be there for the aftermath of the macro events of this book. If you need another reason to get into this book before I get to the details - there were multiple moments where Yarros had me reacting strongly to events in the book - like the precursor feeling to crying. Usually this involved Violet’s squad mates, but the penultimate chapter (not including Xaden’s epilogue) with the Sorengale family - I almost had to pull off the road for a moment.
It’s been a while since I posted a book review on here and rather than have a whole bunch of book review posts, I thought I’d collect the most recent ones into this post.
I listened to the audiobook, so, in all likelihood, I’m going to mispell everyone’s names
As I said with the first entry in this series, Yarros does a great job writing a compelling fantasy story. The romance is there, but it’s not what brings me into the story. We’ll get back to that momentarily. The best thing I could say about novel is that when I got to the end, I was upset that I have to wait until some time next year to continue the story. Yarros gives us a complete story (well, 2 of them - more on that as well) and does leave us with quite a compelling reason to come back, but even without the events of the last chapter, I would be there for the aftermath of the macro events of this book. If you need another reason to get into this book before I get to the details - there were multiple moments where Yarros had me reacting strongly to events in the book - like the precursor feeling to crying. Usually this involved Violet’s squad mates, but the penultimate chapter (not including Xaden’s epilogue) with the Sorengale family - I almost had to pull off the road for a moment.
It’s been a while since I posted a book review on here and rather than have a whole bunch of book review posts, I thought I’d collect the most recent ones into this post.
I listened to the audiobook, so, in all likelihood, I’m going to mispell everyone’s names
As I said with the first entry in this series, Yarros does a great job writing a compelling fantasy story. The romance is there, but it’s not what brings me into the story. We’ll get back to that momentarily. The best thing I could say about novel is that when I got to the end, I was upset that I have to wait until some time next year to continue the story. Yarros gives us a complete story (well, 2 of them - more on that as well) and does leave us with quite a compelling reason to come back, but even without the events of the last chapter, I would be there for the aftermath of the macro events of this book. If you need another reason to get into this book before I get to the details - there were multiple moments where Yarros had me reacting strongly to events in the book - like the precursor feeling to crying. Usually this involved Violet’s squad mates, but the penultimate chapter (not including Xaden’s epilogue) with the Sorengale family - I almost had to pull off the road for a moment.
It’s been a while since I posted a book review on here and rather than have a whole bunch of book review posts, I thought I’d collect the most recent ones into this post.
I listened to the audiobook, so, in all likelihood, I’m going to mispell everyone’s names
As I said with the first entry in this series, Yarros does a great job writing a compelling fantasy story. The romance is there, but it’s not what brings me into the story. We’ll get back to that momentarily. The best thing I could say about novel is that when I got to the end, I was upset that I have to wait until some time next year to continue the story. Yarros gives us a complete story (well, 2 of them - more on that as well) and does leave us with quite a compelling reason to come back, but even without the events of the last chapter, I would be there for the aftermath of the macro events of this book. If you need another reason to get into this book before I get to the details - there were multiple moments where Yarros had me reacting strongly to events in the book - like the precursor feeling to crying. Usually this involved Violet’s squad mates, but the penultimate chapter (not including Xaden’s epilogue) with the Sorengale family - I almost had to pull off the road for a moment.
It’s been a while since I posted a book review on here and rather than have a whole bunch of book review posts, I thought I’d collect the most recent ones into this post.
I listened to the audiobook, so, in all likelihood, I’m going to mispell everyone’s names
As I said with the first entry in this series, Yarros does a great job writing a compelling fantasy story. The romance is there, but it’s not what brings me into the story. We’ll get back to that momentarily. The best thing I could say about novel is that when I got to the end, I was upset that I have to wait until some time next year to continue the story. Yarros gives us a complete story (well, 2 of them - more on that as well) and does leave us with quite a compelling reason to come back, but even without the events of the last chapter, I would be there for the aftermath of the macro events of this book. If you need another reason to get into this book before I get to the details - there were multiple moments where Yarros had me reacting strongly to events in the book - like the precursor feeling to crying. Usually this involved Violet’s squad mates, but the penultimate chapter (not including Xaden’s epilogue) with the Sorengale family - I almost had to pull off the road for a moment.
For a while I was collecting a few links to document what was happening with the fight between Wordpress and WP Engine. But as time passed I just didn’t feel like writing the post and figured I’d just move on to other things I care about rather than continuing to watch what was going on with a piece of software I had abandoned. But yesterday I saw a news story on Tech Crunch about how Automattic had created a website to track how many customers had left WP Engine. It just reinforced my perception that this whole thing is being driven by ego rather than the usual company desires for money. I just had to shake my head at the pettiness of it all.
As there are many people who are currently looking for alternatives to Wordpress in light of a little…. instability… I decided I would document my migration process. I figure my case is one of the more extreme cases, as I ran a self-hosted Wordpress instance for the past 19 years (since Feb 2005) and have ~4000 posts that needed to be migrated. I also have lots of photos, videos, and other media. Finally, I have made heavy use of many Wordpress features.
So far, with the help of a few scripts (both bash and Python) I’ve been able to get most of the site back up to the way I want it to be. Most of the images should be working now. I still have to create and run another script for the way that this theme wants cover images to be references. I think that does bring to light one of the annoyances with Hugo vice Wordpress. When it comes to themes, each one expects things to be organized differently. It is much more chaotic than WP. Perhaps the type of person who runs Hugo is more likely to roll their own theme? Or will pick one and not change until they abandon their blog?
I’d been thinking about moving to a static site generator like Hugo, Jekyll, or Pelican for a while now. I probably would have used them from the beginning vs a fully-fledged CMS like Wordpess had they existed back then. But the recent shennanigans with Matt Mullenweg and Wordpress were the catalyist I needed to make the move. I’m going to try it out for a while and if I don’t like it, I can always go back to Wordpress. (I haven’t deleted my content.) For now most of the images on the site will be broken until I update them to exist on Hugo.
Happy 10 years of the software that allowed me to free myself of the shackles of other corporations and take blogging into my own hands. I started this blog almost around the same time as Wordpress (WP was only 1.5 years old) Here’s to another ten years! And, here’s my version of what Dougal suggested:
When I first started using Wordpress in 2005:
I was in my 20s
I was in college
I was running the blog on Fedora Core
I was engaged
I was using Facebook heavily as it was still highly focused on college students
I’d never been to any country outside the USA other than Canada
[caption id=“attachment_6153” align=“aligncenter” width=“450”] Firefox (aka Red Panda) busy Not Spying on You[/caption]
A 1 May Ars article and 30 April Wired article mention that a UK company known as Gamma International is selling spyware that pretends to be Mozilla Firefox. Both articles mention that repressive governments have used it to spy on dissidents, but it’s unclear from the article whether the company purposely sells to evil governments or whether it sells this to anybody, including foreign governments. The Wired article mentions that Gamma markets it to governments in general and so, if pressed, would probably say that it’s not meant to be used by evil governments - just people like the FBI trying to catch criminals. Either way, Mozilla has sued for trademark infringement. I applaud them for doing so. Governments may have both legitimate and illegitimate reasons for spying on computer communications, but I don’t think they should be abusing the good will of other companies to do it. Imagine if Gamma was selling Ford cars that were bugged. No one would want to buy a Ford car for fear it might be a bugged version. Come on, guys! Figure out a solution that doesn’t screw over the folks at Mozilla.
One day last week I was a little bored at lunchtime so I started clicking on the Wordpress Dashboard links to different developer blogs. Turns out Wordpress 3.6 is coming out soon and it’s going to focus on bringing post formats to the fore and creating a consistent way of handling them within the database. I had no idea this was introduced back in Wordpress 3.1. I don’t know if I missed the notification or if it didn’t mean anything to me because I hadn’t used Tumblr yet. Here are two great explanations: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/post-formats/ and http://wpdaily.co/future-post-formats/ . If you don’t feel like reading those, basically think of how when you make a post on Tumblr it asks you if it’s an image, post, link, etc. That determines the interface it gives you and, depending on your Tumblr theme, determines how to present the information you put into it. Given that one of the post formats is Annotation (meant to be a short post) and given that I quickly grew tired of Tumblr and how it doesn’t have a proper commenting system, I’m probably going to use that for shorter, less fleshed out posts rather than having a Tumblr blog.
Last weekend I started seeing a lot of people I follow either posting or boosting posts about Bitwarden no longer being open source. I did a bit of Googling and, at the time, the only news story I could find was this story from Phoronix about Bitwarden. It wasn’t quite clear exactly what was going on. I waited all week for Ars Technica to cover the issue, but unless I missed it, they never covered it. So I was confused - was this a real issue or people panicking on social media? Then I saw this video by Brodie Robertson:
Last weekend I started seeing a lot of people I follow either posting or boosting posts about Bitwarden no longer being open source. I did a bit of Googling and, at the time, the only news story I could find was this story from Phoronix about Bitwarden. It wasn’t quite clear exactly what was going on. I waited all week for Ars Technica to cover the issue, but unless I missed it, they never covered it. So I was confused - was this a real issue or people panicking on social media? Then I saw this video by Brodie Robertson:
I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).
Just a little under five years ago, I started looking at the possibility of Ebooks again. Two months later I bought a Barnes and Noble Nook. For a long time I was very casual with my Ebook reading. I had the Cory Doctorow books and several months worth of free Nook books which more than made up for the cost of the hardware. Really, the best part of fully digital distribution of books (and games) is revolutionary in the way it can allow the purchase of giveaway of media which would be cost-prohibitive if the company had to pay for the physical object or shipping fees. I installed Calibre for the free EPUBs, but it didn’t touch my Barnes and Noble purchases.
Until now I’ve been quite against ebooks. Back when I was in college I had an iPaq and I downloaded the Microsoft reader to it. I bought about 3 - 5 books for it and, at first, I thought it was great. It would allow you to annotate the book and highlight passages. And it was electronic so I could carry a bunch of books in the space of my PDA. But it was one of the first times I was bitten by digital restrictions management (DRM). I had to reset my PDA because it got into a locked state. After that, I couldn’t read my books until I reauthenticated the PDA. After all, everyone out there is out to destroy authors and steal digital books, so they need to make sure I’m the one who paid for it. This worked the first time around, but the second time I needed to authenticate, the server refused to authenticate the device and I could no longer read the books. So I was out around $20. Imagine buying a regular physical book and then having it no longer work because it wasn’t sure if you were the person who bought it. Yeah, it’s pretty ridiculous.
I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).
I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).
I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).
I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).
I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).
I’ve written a lot about DnD Adventure Club, including my lasttwo posts. Today while I was looking at the Pathfinder Humble Bundle, I went to the Pathfinder website to see if they had a page listing differences (since Pathfinder started as a fork of D&D 3.5). I found this page - Adventure Paths. It looks like they’re doing the same thing as DnD Adventure Club, except in Pathfinder 2e and without a kid focus. Also, it seems like each trilogy is building to a larger story (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer with its villain of the season, but also overarching story). It makes me wish that Wizards of the Coast (the Hasbro subsidiary that runs D&D) would do something similar - or if a 3rd party creator did it that it would be tightly coupled to D&D beyond. One advantage of WotC doing the mini-adventures is that they could use them to highlight different aspects of the mechanics or classes. I love that DnD Adventure Club comes with a new character each month with some example backstories. It really helps demonstrate the different races and classes. Also, upon further examination of the Pathfinder adventures I saw that each trilogy is written by a different person (creating opportunities to showcase new writers) and that (at least the one I clicked on) is tied to a campaign setting book. This is SO smart from a marketing point of view. “If you enjoyed your little trilogy in this corner of our world, you might enjoy learning more about it…” Yeah, WoTC should DEFINITELY look into this.
As there are many people who are currently looking for alternatives to Wordpress in light of a little…. instability… I decided I would document my migration process. I figure my case is one of the more extreme cases, as I ran a self-hosted Wordpress instance for the past 19 years (since Feb 2005) and have ~4000 posts that needed to be migrated. I also have lots of photos, videos, and other media. Finally, I have made heavy use of many Wordpress features.
I’ve moved from Wordpress over to using Hugo to power my blog. If you’re still using RSS to follow this blog you’ll need to update your feed reader to the following URL: https://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/index.xml
So far, with the help of a few scripts (both bash and Python) I’ve been able to get most of the site back up to the way I want it to be. Most of the images should be working now. I still have to create and run another script for the way that this theme wants cover images to be references. I think that does bring to light one of the annoyances with Hugo vice Wordpress. When it comes to themes, each one expects things to be organized differently. It is much more chaotic than WP. Perhaps the type of person who runs Hugo is more likely to roll their own theme? Or will pick one and not change until they abandon their blog?
I’d been thinking about moving to a static site generator like Hugo, Jekyll, or Pelican for a while now. I probably would have used them from the beginning vs a fully-fledged CMS like Wordpess had they existed back then. But the recent shennanigans with Matt Mullenweg and Wordpress were the catalyist I needed to make the move. I’m going to try it out for a while and if I don’t like it, I can always go back to Wordpress. (I haven’t deleted my content.) For now most of the images on the site will be broken until I update them to exist on Hugo.
As there are many people who are currently looking for alternatives to Wordpress in light of a little…. instability… I decided I would document my migration process. I figure my case is one of the more extreme cases, as I ran a self-hosted Wordpress instance for the past 19 years (since Feb 2005) and have ~4000 posts that needed to be migrated. I also have lots of photos, videos, and other media. Finally, I have made heavy use of many Wordpress features.
As I’ve been exploring the move from Wordpress over to Hugo, I’ve learned that Hugo has pipelines that can run when it “compiles” the site. One such set of pipelines can automatically convert images to different formats or change the resolution of the image. They give the example of WebP and how it can potentially be smaller than a JPEG image without a perceptible loss of quality. I remember when there was a big controversy with Wordpress because after not having support for WebP for so long, they decided they were going to convert everyone’s image to WebP after upload. For image-heavy sites this could result in a large hard disk usage, so I think the conversion was left as opt-in. As I started researching, I found out that WebP is SOOO 14 years ago! The new format supported by all the browsers is AVIF. This is supposed to be every better for photographic images than WebP. But even THAT is not the newest (and supposed) best format as that would be JPEG XL. However, Google took it out of Chromium due to a “lack of desire” and since every browser but Firefox is Chromium, that’s as good as a ban on the format.
As I’ve been exploring the move from Wordpress over to Hugo, I’ve learned that Hugo has pipelines that can run when it “compiles” the site. One such set of pipelines can automatically convert images to different formats or change the resolution of the image. They give the example of WebP and how it can potentially be smaller than a JPEG image without a perceptible loss of quality. I remember when there was a big controversy with Wordpress because after not having support for WebP for so long, they decided they were going to convert everyone’s image to WebP after upload. For image-heavy sites this could result in a large hard disk usage, so I think the conversion was left as opt-in. As I started researching, I found out that WebP is SOOO 14 years ago! The new format supported by all the browsers is AVIF. This is supposed to be every better for photographic images than WebP. But even THAT is not the newest (and supposed) best format as that would be JPEG XL. However, Google took it out of Chromium due to a “lack of desire” and since every browser but Firefox is Chromium, that’s as good as a ban on the format.
As I’ve been exploring the move from Wordpress over to Hugo, I’ve learned that Hugo has pipelines that can run when it “compiles” the site. One such set of pipelines can automatically convert images to different formats or change the resolution of the image. They give the example of WebP and how it can potentially be smaller than a JPEG image without a perceptible loss of quality. I remember when there was a big controversy with Wordpress because after not having support for WebP for so long, they decided they were going to convert everyone’s image to WebP after upload. For image-heavy sites this could result in a large hard disk usage, so I think the conversion was left as opt-in. As I started researching, I found out that WebP is SOOO 14 years ago! The new format supported by all the browsers is AVIF. This is supposed to be every better for photographic images than WebP. But even THAT is not the newest (and supposed) best format as that would be JPEG XL. However, Google took it out of Chromium due to a “lack of desire” and since every browser but Firefox is Chromium, that’s as good as a ban on the format.
As I’ve been exploring the move from Wordpress over to Hugo, I’ve learned that Hugo has pipelines that can run when it “compiles” the site. One such set of pipelines can automatically convert images to different formats or change the resolution of the image. They give the example of WebP and how it can potentially be smaller than a JPEG image without a perceptible loss of quality. I remember when there was a big controversy with Wordpress because after not having support for WebP for so long, they decided they were going to convert everyone’s image to WebP after upload. For image-heavy sites this could result in a large hard disk usage, so I think the conversion was left as opt-in. As I started researching, I found out that WebP is SOOO 14 years ago! The new format supported by all the browsers is AVIF. This is supposed to be every better for photographic images than WebP. But even THAT is not the newest (and supposed) best format as that would be JPEG XL. However, Google took it out of Chromium due to a “lack of desire” and since every browser but Firefox is Chromium, that’s as good as a ban on the format.
As I’ve been exploring the move from Wordpress over to Hugo, I’ve learned that Hugo has pipelines that can run when it “compiles” the site. One such set of pipelines can automatically convert images to different formats or change the resolution of the image. They give the example of WebP and how it can potentially be smaller than a JPEG image without a perceptible loss of quality. I remember when there was a big controversy with Wordpress because after not having support for WebP for so long, they decided they were going to convert everyone’s image to WebP after upload. For image-heavy sites this could result in a large hard disk usage, so I think the conversion was left as opt-in. As I started researching, I found out that WebP is SOOO 14 years ago! The new format supported by all the browsers is AVIF. This is supposed to be every better for photographic images than WebP. But even THAT is not the newest (and supposed) best format as that would be JPEG XL. However, Google took it out of Chromium due to a “lack of desire” and since every browser but Firefox is Chromium, that’s as good as a ban on the format.
I’ve moved from Wordpress over to using Hugo to power my blog. If you’re still using RSS to follow this blog you’ll need to update your feed reader to the following URL: https://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/index.xml
First of all, I was wrong about needing to trigger it to update. The default configuration is to update the feeds every hour, 10 at a time. This is configurable, but I think that arrangement works fine to me. Having been using it on my phone for a few days now, I’m really liking the formatting and how nice it looks. If there’s one negative thing, it’s that the links can be a bit tiny for my fingers to click on. Otherwise, it’s looking like I’m going to stick with Miniflux.
For the past six years, since Google Reader closed in 2013, I’ve been self-hosting my RSS feeds via Tiny Tiny RSS. Overall it’s been OK, except for a few years I missed that the update method had been changed and I hadn’t updated. Then I learned the new method was to clone the git repo. I did it and kept up with it. There was something I didn’t set up way back when with my MySQL so it’s got a weird miscount between the app and the tab header. But otherwise it was working just fine enough.
What’s RSS? It is a syndication protocal allowing you to get people’s blogs and news websites’ headlines delivered to your email or web browser client so that you don’t need to surf to each and every one of them to read them. You can also save them onto your computer for future reading!
Wow, that sounds great! How do I get It’s A Binary World 2.0 Syndications?
It’s very easy, especially if you are using Mozilla’s Thunderbird. In Thunderbird, simply click on “manage subscriptions” under “news and blogs” and then click add. You want to have the url:
I’m not sure how many people have visited this blog site yet or how many are coming here independently through other sites. I know of one person who has confirming coming here and subscriping to the RSS feed. Anyway, you may have noticed I made some cosmetic changes to the site. I’m not 100% sure if it’s going to stay this way. I generally like to leave things the way they are. Since, however, I don’t know how many people are coming here right now and I intend to relaunch the site in a few months anyway, I figure it’s still ok. I put the calender above the links because as the links list grew it would have pushed the calendar way too far down the page. I also moved the categories above the links. I’m not sure if I will emulate the original It’s A Binary World on my tripod page and put the links over on the left side or if I will keep it all as one column here. The center may end up a bit too squished if I go for that, but stay tuned.
This morning I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Decoder Ring. The most recent episode had a very interesting title: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie…Will he want a Welfare check? I don’t remember this book from my childhood, but I do remember reading this one (and others in the series) to my kids. The podcast explores the fact that, starting around 2015, this book started to become known by conservatives as an allegory against the welfare state. While this podcast episode eventually interviews the author and confirms this was not her intention, I can certainly understand how the book could be read that way. It’s a great example of how art (literature, movies, images, music) becomes “property” of the culture once the creator releases it into the world. In many ways it doesn’t matter what the creator wanted (although I always find that fascinating), but what the culture does with it.
This morning I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Decoder Ring. The most recent episode had a very interesting title: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie…Will he want a Welfare check? I don’t remember this book from my childhood, but I do remember reading this one (and others in the series) to my kids. The podcast explores the fact that, starting around 2015, this book started to become known by conservatives as an allegory against the welfare state. While this podcast episode eventually interviews the author and confirms this was not her intention, I can certainly understand how the book could be read that way. It’s a great example of how art (literature, movies, images, music) becomes “property” of the culture once the creator releases it into the world. In many ways it doesn’t matter what the creator wanted (although I always find that fascinating), but what the culture does with it.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
First off, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy listening to the science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod. Today I listened to episode 949, A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls. Large Language Models (LLMs), what we have colloquially called AI for the past few years, have been a giant source of wonder and consternation in the world. AI in general has long been a topic for science fiction, but this short story tackles the current LLM version of AIs. I found it to be a very fun episode that is a master class in providing a huge amount of backstory without an exposition dump. I don’t want to spoil anything about this story, but they naturally drop all these background details about the world that make me want more stories in this universe. It also has a fun, light tone to it. I highly recommend you either listen or read (the full text is available at the episode link above)
In short succession 2 podcasts I listen to covered the movie adaptation of The Pelican Brief. If you watched it back in the 1990s you probably didn’t realize how bananas the plot of this movie was. It sounds OK in short summary - some evil corporations kill 2 US Supreme Court judges to prevent a certain ruling. But once the podcasts go into the details of the movie - it makes next to 0 sense.
Ever since a class during my undergrad which mentioned technology that can help make sure the real world is accessible to all folks no matter what their physical limits may be, I’ve been very interested in the topic. It’s led to my interest on web accessibility (although I’m not always perfect when it comes to this blog) as well as in other realms. One of my favorite series from the Game Maker’s Toolkit Youtube channel is his yearly wrap-up on how accessible games were that year. Here is his 2020 video:
It took me a while to get the hang of the many, many options within Podcast Republic so that I could get it to work the way I wanted - automatically downloading episodes on WiFi. Unlike Doggcatcher, but more like other modern pod catchers, you can stream a podcast instead of always having to download it. The option is nice, but it does introduce complexity. As usual, it was annoying at first to have the pod catcher think it needed to download every single episode from the podcasts you subscribed to.
I’ve been using Doggcatcher for YEARS - ever since I first got a smartphone something like 8 or so years ago. I started using Doggcatcher on Dan’s recommendation. One of the best features it’s had is the ability to speed up podcasts without chipmunking the voice. (I think that came a year or so after I started using it). Recently I’ve been a bit annoyed at Doggcatcher, particularly with podcasts from the EarWolf network (although there may be other networks with the same behavior). Every time Doggcatcher checks for updates, all the episodes from EarWolf will disappear and redownload. Until it is done, I can’t listen to the episode.
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s podcast is also annoying in that if a new episode comes out before I’ve finished the previous one, it’ll overwrite it so that I now have two copies of the same file. This makes it more stressful than it needs to be when I’m trying to choose the next podcast to listen to. So I started asking folks for recommendations. Dan recommended Podcast Republic to me. I don’t know if it’ll fix things for me because Dan was using it because Doggcatcher wasn’t working well for him for authenticated feeds, but I’m hopeful.
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)
I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Ever since I started using Doggcatcher on my cellphone I’ve been able to listen to more podcasts because, even without the pitch distortion my sandisk had, it plays the content a lot faster. 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.
Video Games
Giant Bombcast – This is a HILARIOUS podcast that is mostly about video games. I say it’s mostly about video games because these guys often will go off on random tangents about what energy drinks they have, what they ate, what they did between video gaming, and other topics. However, they always get back to video games and provide a really fun podcast. Segments include What You’ve Been Playing, News of the World, and EMAILS! My favorite parts are “What You’ve Been Playing” and “Emails”. It can be a bit geeky in the same way that some of the tech podcasts I listen to are geeky. First Ryan passed away and then Vinnie went to New York. With the podcast being so personality driven, the changes almost drove me away, but I’ve stayed and the new talent is pretty good. (Approx 2.5 hours long)
I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Ever since I started using Doggcatcher on my cellphone I’ve been able to listen to more podcasts because, even without the pitch distortion my sandisk had, it plays the content a lot faster. 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.
Video Games
Giant Bombcast – This is a HILARIOUS podcast that is mostly about video games. I say it’s mostly about video games because these guys often will go off on random tangents about what energy drinks they have, what they ate, what they did between video gaming, and other topics. However, they always get back to video games and provide a really fun podcast. Segments include What You’ve Been Playing, News of the World, and EMAILS! My favorite parts are “What You’ve Been Playing” and “Emails”. It can be a bit geeky in the same way that some of the tech podcasts I listen to are geeky. I miss Ryan since his untimely death last year - the guys do well enough without him, but he brought something very special to the podcast that isn’t there anymore. I felt like I actually knew him after about 200 weekly episodes where I spent almost 3 hours with him each time. (Approx 2.5 hours long)
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
Last time I was in Florida my mom took me to a specialty BBQ store, Just Grillin, off of Dale Mabry in Carrollwood. I didn’t know such places existed. I thought everyone just bought their grills at a hardware store, Amazon, or direct from the company. It was a pretty great to be able to see and touch Yoders, Weber Summits, and other high-end BBQs. They also came by with some chicken they’d cooked in the back using a variety of rubs they sell. Oh yeah, the entire wall behind the register was full to the brim with rubs and sauces - most (if not all) of them local or competition group rubs. Any rub you wanted to try would be poured into a tasting cup. Sure, it’s not the same as having the rub on some food, but it’s certainly better than the blind buying we have to do with supermarket rubs. As a gift, mom said she’d get me any rub I wanted to try, so I picked up Thunderbird Chicken Scratch. Then a bunch of travel meant I had to keep waiting impatiently until I could finally try it. Last night I finally got my chance.
Continuing my summer of learning to cook new dishes, I decided to tackle steakhouse burgers. I’d already mastered diner burgers, so I wanted to work on these. I didn’t follow Meathead’s directions 100% in that I didn’t create ground beef out of a nice cut of meat. But I did follow his recipe for using 2 zone cooking to make good-tasting, thick burgers.
Now, it’s possible that it’s because I crowded my burgers (18" kettle, not much of a choice), but it took WAY too long to come up to temp. After 20 minutes it was not anywhere near 155. Since it was getting late, I just moved them to the sear side to speed up the cooking.
Part of the fun of being into BBQ has been trying new things. As I’ve mentioned before, when I was growing up “BBQ” was what we called grilling and it MOSTLY consisted of burgers and hot dogs. Very occasionally it would be something else. Lots of lighter fluid and mediocre results. But now I know about low and slow and smoking and 2-zone grilling. And once I mastered ribs, chicken, and brisket it was time to experiment. So I tried Meathead’s recipe for Alabama Birds with White Sauce.
In the past few years I’ve been moving away from seeing pizza as junk food towards seeing it as another food that is sometimes made with care, skill, and love and sometimes make in a hurry for a buck. I can’t remember the exact timeline and can’t be bothered to search for photo evidence, but the two restaurants that changed my mind on pizza were Two Amys in Maryland and Grimaldi’s in Brooklyn. Two very different styles of pizza, but Grimaldi’s cooked in a fire-based pizza oven and authentic Neopolitan at Two Amys. So now there was a new measurement against which to measure all pizzas: the wood-fired pizza.
Breaded steak was probably my favorite Cuban food growing up. More than pork shoulder sandwiches and other things my mother made. I often helped her prepare it at home, but never got a chance to cook it as a kid. I’ve tried it a few times since growing up, but it’s hard to get the right thickness. Butchers here don’t know what it is, so they have a hard time helping me. But this time I got through to a butcher at Wegmans - who let me in on the secret - using a mallet to squish the meat skinnier than it can be cut on a steak slicer. The only thing that sucks is that my example of thinness was some Korean meat so he thought I wanted it cut into little strips. Still, I finally was successful at making a very tasty breaded steak:
I have found myself frustrated with Michael Pollan lately. In the course of promoting his new book about cooking, he’s taken to spouting some opinions that I’ll frankly call claptrap. He’s mocked women who felt trapped by the kitchen drudgery that they got stuck with simply because they owned a vagina. He’s implied that it’s easy (if you’re not lazy) for everyone to make every meal an ideologically sound slow-food meal. In general, he’s disparaged the very idea that some people don’t like to cook.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
Although I enjoyed Bill Bryson’s other book A Short History of Nearly Everything, I actually didn’t know that when I picked this book up. I had heard the other book as an audio book so I didn’t remember the author’s name. Also, it was nearly 10 years ago. My interest in Bryson’s book came from the media blitz he did to promote it - including NPR’s Fresh Air and, if I’m not mistaken, The Colbert Report. I put it on my TO READ list here on GoodReads and waited for a chance to read the book. That chance came when I flew to Florida for a family visit. However, now that I know it was written by him, it explains the style of the book.
I had something of an obsession with preserving history. It’s why I am constantly using photography to document my life. (And was doing so back when we had to use expensive film) A few months ago I wrote about how emulation can help us preserve our culture when it comes to video games. We’re in a weird place right now in our culture - everything is digital. If there were to be some sort of catastrophic apocalypse, any aliens that came to Earth would think we stopped inventing stuff in the Industrial Revolution. (Only a slight exaggeration) Even if we just look at humanity - if something were to wipe out technology (see many sci-fi stories including the manga/anime Nausicaa and Trigun) all the information we know - all the petabytes on the net would be inaccessible and lost forever. But if we dial it back a bit and forget about those doomsday scenarios - it’s important to see that culture is informed by what came before it. (Super heroes are just modern day greek gods, and so on) It’s why the Library of Congress collects important works of culture for preservation.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
my wife and I like to collect Disney movies from our youth. These movies are most likely to be watched by kids and kids are likely to damage DVDs. I’ve heard lots of anecdotes on the net from parents who are on their fourth purchase of the same movie. That’s just silly! Also, Disney’s always putting their movies “back in the vault” so if your kid messes up one of THOSE movies, you could be SOL for up to a decade
Let me tell you a story of how ridiculous things have gotten in my house thanks to Netflix Instant. My wife owns all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD. However, she does not watch these DVDs. She watches it on Netflix Instant. Why? Because it’s easier for her to go on Netflix and find the episode she wants than to try and remember what season has what episode and go get that, take it out of its case, and put it in the DVD player.
If I can go off on a quick tangent - the movie studios might read #2 wrongfully conclude (as I’ve seen WB do before) that this means they should keep their stuff off of Netflix instant. No, what it means is that people want the convenience of Netflix Instant with the movies they buy. We would NEVER go look for a CD to play music anymore. It’s all on our computers in Amarok or iTunes or Rhythmbox and we can easily search for an artist or a song and not have to worry about what CD it’s on. This is what people want in their homes! Yet the movie studios have killed every company that’s tried to do it. Well, no wonder people are using Netflix vs buying movies nowadays! Sheesh! OK, rant over.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
Once again I used a script to pull out the official descriptions of the podcasts as well as the URL where I access the feed. After the official description you’ll see my commentary about the podcast.
Politics
5-4 Pod - Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
In short succession 2 podcasts I listen to covered the movie adaptation of The Pelican Brief. If you watched it back in the 1990s you probably didn’t realize how bananas the plot of this movie was. It sounds OK in short summary - some evil corporations kill 2 US Supreme Court judges to prevent a certain ruling. But once the podcasts go into the details of the movie - it makes next to 0 sense.
This time around I’ve written a Python script to take the OPML file from Podcast Republic and generate the list along with URLs and official descriptions for all the podcasts. If I have additional thoughts I’ll add them after the official description.
The World Around Us
99% Invisible - Official Description: Design is everywhere in our lives, perhaps most importantly in the places where we’ve just stopped noticing. 99% Invisible is a weekly exploration of the process and power of design and architecture.
It took me a while to get the hang of the many, many options within Podcast Republic so that I could get it to work the way I wanted - automatically downloading episodes on WiFi. Unlike Doggcatcher, but more like other modern pod catchers, you can stream a podcast instead of always having to download it. The option is nice, but it does introduce complexity. As usual, it was annoying at first to have the pod catcher think it needed to download every single episode from the podcasts you subscribed to.
I’ve been using Doggcatcher for YEARS - ever since I first got a smartphone something like 8 or so years ago. I started using Doggcatcher on Dan’s recommendation. One of the best features it’s had is the ability to speed up podcasts without chipmunking the voice. (I think that came a year or so after I started using it). Recently I’ve been a bit annoyed at Doggcatcher, particularly with podcasts from the EarWolf network (although there may be other networks with the same behavior). Every time Doggcatcher checks for updates, all the episodes from EarWolf will disappear and redownload. Until it is done, I can’t listen to the episode.
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s podcast is also annoying in that if a new episode comes out before I’ve finished the previous one, it’ll overwrite it so that I now have two copies of the same file. This makes it more stressful than it needs to be when I’m trying to choose the next podcast to listen to. So I started asking folks for recommendations. Dan recommended Podcast Republic to me. I don’t know if it’ll fix things for me because Dan was using it because Doggcatcher wasn’t working well for him for authenticated feeds, but I’m hopeful.
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.
Video Games
Giant Beastcast – The East Coast Giant Bomb crew. This podcast is more about video game culture and news stories. It spends a lot less time on the “what you’ve been playing” section. I’ve actually grown to enjoy this one way more than the Bombcast because of the focus on the cultural and news aspects.
I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Ever since I started using Doggcatcher on my cellphone I’ve been able to listen to more podcasts because, even without the pitch distortion my sandisk had, it plays the content a lot faster. 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.
Video Games
Giant Bombcast – This is a HILARIOUS podcast that is mostly about video games. I say it’s mostly about video games because these guys often will go off on random tangents about what energy drinks they have, what they ate, what they did between video gaming, and other topics. However, they always get back to video games and provide a really fun podcast. Segments include What You’ve Been Playing, News of the World, and EMAILS! My favorite parts are “What You’ve Been Playing” and “Emails”. It can be a bit geeky in the same way that some of the tech podcasts I listen to are geeky. First Ryan passed away and then Vinnie went to New York. With the podcast being so personality driven, the changes almost drove me away, but I’ve stayed and the new talent is pretty good. (Approx 2.5 hours long)
I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Ever since I started using Doggcatcher on my cellphone I’ve been able to listen to more podcasts because, even without the pitch distortion my sandisk had, it plays the content a lot faster. 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.
Video Games
Giant Bombcast – This is a HILARIOUS podcast that is mostly about video games. I say it’s mostly about video games because these guys often will go off on random tangents about what energy drinks they have, what they ate, what they did between video gaming, and other topics. However, they always get back to video games and provide a really fun podcast. Segments include What You’ve Been Playing, News of the World, and EMAILS! My favorite parts are “What You’ve Been Playing” and “Emails”. It can be a bit geeky in the same way that some of the tech podcasts I listen to are geeky. First Ryan passed away and then Vinnie went to New York. With the podcast being so personality driven, the changes almost drove me away, but I’ve stayed and the new talent is pretty good. (Approx 2.5 hours long)
I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Ever since I started using Doggcatcher on my cellphone I’ve been able to listen to more podcasts because, even without the pitch distortion my sandisk had, it plays the content a lot faster. 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.
Video Games
Giant Bombcast – This is a HILARIOUS podcast that is mostly about video games. I say it’s mostly about video games because these guys often will go off on random tangents about what energy drinks they have, what they ate, what they did between video gaming, and other topics. However, they always get back to video games and provide a really fun podcast. Segments include What You’ve Been Playing, News of the World, and EMAILS! My favorite parts are “What You’ve Been Playing” and “Emails”. It can be a bit geeky in the same way that some of the tech podcasts I listen to are geeky. I miss Ryan since his untimely death last year - the guys do well enough without him, but he brought something very special to the podcast that isn’t there anymore. I felt like I actually knew him after about 200 weekly episodes where I spent almost 3 hours with him each time. (Approx 2.5 hours long)
[caption id=“attachment_6442” align=“aligncenter” width=“200”] Sandisk Sansa Clip Zip in Packaging[/caption]
I’ve been using MP3 players since they first existed. I can’t remember the name of the device, but I got it with my Audible subscription. Then, I used my PDA for a while - remember those? Then I used an iPod Shuffle, but it didn’t work well with my Linux computer. The database kept getting corrupted since Apple can’t play nicely with others so it has to be reverse-engineered. So I told myself I’d never get another Apple music playing device. About three years ago, I went with a Sandisk Sansa Fuze. Since then I’ve gone through three of them, approximately one per year. What keeps happening is that the headphone jack gets looser and looser until the slightest nudge makes it so that I can’t hear one of the audio channels. Since I use it work out, this quickly gets VERY annoying. But I really, really like Sandisk’s GUI for their devices - it has a specific podcast section that resumes the podcast where I left off, even if I go back and forth between different podcasts. I don’t do that too often, but I do it often enough that it’s important. So I got a Sandisk Sansa Clip Zip because the Fuze+ has horrible reviews (for the way they changed the buttons) and since I’m using it to work out, I could use a smaller, lighter device.
I’ve cut back a lot because I have less time to listen to podcasts. Here are the ones I have now:
Video Games
Giant Bombcast – This is a HILARIOUS podcast that is mostly about video games. I say it’s mostly about video games because these guys often will go off on random tangents about what energy drinks they have, what they ate, what they did between video gaming, and other topics. However, they always get back to video games and provide a really fun podcast. Segments include What You’ve Been Playing, News of the World, New Releases and EMAILS! My favorite parts are “What You’ve Been Playing” and “Emails”. It can be a bit geeky in the same way that some of the tech podcasts I listen to are geeky, (Approx 2.5 hours long)
It’s been a little over a year, so I wanted to make a new, updated list of the podcasts I’m currently listening to. For shows I covered before, I’m just going to copy the description over, verbatim.
Science
The Naked Scientists - This has nothing to do with nudity. It’s a British thing, like The Naked Chef. This great British radio show covers science topics equivalent to what you’d read in Discover Magazine in the USA. It’s informative while being entertaining, and I learn a lot every week. (Approx 1 hour long)
I’ve been listening to podcasts for about two years now. I got into it because I love listening to some NPR programs, but they are always on when I’m at work or asleep on the weekends. Eventually, I heard on NPR that they have podcasts of various shows. I checked it out right away because in Maryland NPR is on 88.1 which is always being interfered with by SiriusXM radio receivers. At first I only listened to a few podcasts because I didn’t own an iPod and I so I burned the podcasts to a CD-R every few days. That got expensive, so I got an iPod shuffle. Since podcasts don’t take up too much space, I started getting into more and more podcasts. Some I discovered in magazines and others were recommendations from Dan. So, I thought I would share the podcasts I listen to so that those following this blog could perhaps discover some new podcasts they didn’t know about. Dan, for example, recently got into This American Life. (I think after I kept telling him about it - but he may have discovered it independently) I’m going to put links to the actual podcast URL, so just copy that into your podcather or iTunes.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Thanks to podcasts, NPR maybe be obsolete”] [/caption]
I am a huge listener of public radio programming, but I no longer listen to my local NPR station. Most of the time I just listen to podcasts of the shows that would otherwise be broadcast on NPR. The basic force behind this is the same as the reason why I loved my MythTV when I had cable TV. I don’t want to have to do appointment radio listening any more than I want to do appointment television. In many cases this is because the shows I enjoy listening to come on the air while I’m at work, in the gym, or sleeping. The shows I listen to are produced by NPR, Public Radio International (PRI), and American Public Media (APM). That includes Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation, On the Media, Media Matters, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Away with Words and On the Money with Christ Disimio. Together with other non-radio programs and some BBC programs, these provide for all of my radio-listening needs. This started out (and a big reason I got into podcasts a few years after most techies had) because, in Baltimore, the local NPR station at 88.1 is interrupted by XM (or Sirius) FM transmitters. So I got pissed that whenever I happened to be available when a show I liked was on, every time someone with satelite radio passed by I couldn’t listen to my program. This is why I donated to the Washington DC NPR station - that one isn’t subject to interference so I’d rather pay for a station I can hear.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.
Politics
5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
When I saw that this book topped the lists for most checked out book in 2023 in multiple library systems my curiosity was piqued. But it was this episode of Our Opinions are Correct that pushed me over the edge into getting this book. Boy am I glad I did!
How to describe this book? One of my thoughts was Ender’s game meets Harry Potter, but with college kids. But then I cam up with a better comparison: RF Kuang’s Poppy War Trilogy (first book: The Poppy WarThe Poppy War, but with Western settings. Is it dark academia? I’m not sure. I was a kickstarter funder for a few dark academia anthologies, but haven’t read them yet. No matter how it’s classified, it does (eventually) have some really graphic sex. Like, the beginning of the book has a warning about all the violence and how graphic the sex is. I think if you’ve read a romance book before, it’s probably nothing you haven’t heard before. But if you’re used to the usual sex scenes in SFF, this is quite a bit more.
When I saw that this book topped the lists for most checked out book in 2023 in multiple library systems my curiosity was piqued. But it was this episode of Our Opinions are Correct that pushed me over the edge into getting this book. Boy am I glad I did!
How to describe this book? One of my thoughts was Ender’s game meets Harry Potter, but with college kids. But then I cam up with a better comparison: RF Kuang’s Poppy War Trilogy (first book: The Poppy WarThe Poppy War, but with Western settings. Is it dark academia? I’m not sure. I was a kickstarter funder for a few dark academia anthologies, but haven’t read them yet. No matter how it’s classified, it does (eventually) have some really graphic sex. Like, the beginning of the book has a warning about all the violence and how graphic the sex is. I think if you’ve read a romance book before, it’s probably nothing you haven’t heard before. But if you’re used to the usual sex scenes in SFF, this is quite a bit more.
When I saw that this book topped the lists for most checked out book in 2023 in multiple library systems my curiosity was piqued. But it was this episode of Our Opinions are Correct that pushed me over the edge into getting this book. Boy am I glad I did!
How to describe this book? One of my thoughts was Ender’s game meets Harry Potter, but with college kids. But then I cam up with a better comparison: RF Kuang’s Poppy War Trilogy (first book: The Poppy WarThe Poppy War, but with Western settings. Is it dark academia? I’m not sure. I was a kickstarter funder for a few dark academia anthologies, but haven’t read them yet. No matter how it’s classified, it does (eventually) have some really graphic sex. Like, the beginning of the book has a warning about all the violence and how graphic the sex is. I think if you’ve read a romance book before, it’s probably nothing you haven’t heard before. But if you’re used to the usual sex scenes in SFF, this is quite a bit more.
When I saw that this book topped the lists for most checked out book in 2023 in multiple library systems my curiosity was piqued. But it was this episode of Our Opinions are Correct that pushed me over the edge into getting this book. Boy am I glad I did!
How to describe this book? One of my thoughts was Ender’s game meets Harry Potter, but with college kids. But then I cam up with a better comparison: RF Kuang’s Poppy War Trilogy (first book: The Poppy WarThe Poppy War, but with Western settings. Is it dark academia? I’m not sure. I was a kickstarter funder for a few dark academia anthologies, but haven’t read them yet. No matter how it’s classified, it does (eventually) have some really graphic sex. Like, the beginning of the book has a warning about all the violence and how graphic the sex is. I think if you’ve read a romance book before, it’s probably nothing you haven’t heard before. But if you’re used to the usual sex scenes in SFF, this is quite a bit more.
When I saw that this book topped the lists for most checked out book in 2023 in multiple library systems my curiosity was piqued. But it was this episode of Our Opinions are Correct that pushed me over the edge into getting this book. Boy am I glad I did!
How to describe this book? One of my thoughts was Ender’s game meets Harry Potter, but with college kids. But then I cam up with a better comparison: RF Kuang’s Poppy War Trilogy (first book: The Poppy WarThe Poppy War, but with Western settings. Is it dark academia? I’m not sure. I was a kickstarter funder for a few dark academia anthologies, but haven’t read them yet. No matter how it’s classified, it does (eventually) have some really graphic sex. Like, the beginning of the book has a warning about all the violence and how graphic the sex is. I think if you’ve read a romance book before, it’s probably nothing you haven’t heard before. But if you’re used to the usual sex scenes in SFF, this is quite a bit more.
This book is the definition of a niche product. The only people I think would enjoy this are the intersection in the Venn diagram of D&D fans and Rick and Morty fans. I know I’ve been watching Rick and Morty since the first season and I can’t imagine that I would find this collection if my kids hadn’t gotten me into D&D a year or so ago. Almost all of the humor comes from D&D jokes and Easter Eggs.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): They were awesome at Warped Tour - I can’t wait until they go on the Projecet Atma tour. Manufacturing delays at the vinyl plant meant that the album was delayed. Still don’t have it - should be in my hands in December.
Jonathan Coulton, Greg Pak, and others – Code Monkey Save World (music and comics): Still missing the new music and The Princess Who Saved Herself. To be fair, the latter wasn’t promised until early 2015.
Parodies are hard to do well. The worst parodies are unbearable, the best deconstruct the tropes. I was afraid The Mocking Dead would be the former, but since I got it as part of a huge Humble Bundle, it was nearly free for me to check out. Luckily it turned out to be less Scary Movie and more like something Mel Brooks would put together.
This book is a commentary on the sad state our country has been in since the 70s and 80s when it comes to computer crime. Although there should always be consequences for skirting the law we have often taken it a bit too far. This graphic novel was sad to read in the wake of Aaron Schwartz’ suicide when threatened by law enforcement.
Disclosure: I received this book as part of the Goodreads.com First Reads program in which the winner recieves a copy of the book in exchange for a review. (It’s slightly more complicated than that, see the Goodreads First Reads terms for all the details)
I love reading these types of histories about culture. I have read similar books about photography and animation published by Taschen. This isn’t my first time reading about the history of comics, I also read 10 Cent Scare and Grant Morrison’s Supergods. Anyone who’s been reading my reviews for a while knows that I love comics and actually run a comics analysis site, www.comicpow.com.
This’ll be a semi-recurring blog post highlighting some of my work on other websites. (Most often, but not necessarily, other sites I own/run)
Race Flipping in Comic Movies over at Comic POW! in which I discuss Johnny Storm being cast with an African American actor in the new film.
Autobiographies: Swimming Part 1 over at I’m not Mad in which I take a stab at autobiographical comics. It’ll be a little bit until Part 2 - probably around May when this semester ends.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): Things are on track with IFD. They are posting awesome videos of the recording process. It’s already March so as long as there aren’t any more delays, the album will be here in a few short months! Also, they’ll be on the Van’s Warped Tour, so I’ll be attending Warped Tour for the first time to go see them (and quite a few other bands I really like)
It’s December and I should have gotten all of my Kickstarter products by now. But that’s not exactly what happened. Every single one of my Kickstarters was late except the one I had the least faith and relationship with - Random Encounter’s Let Me Tell You a Story.
I’m writing this in late August - by the time this post appears I should have received all of my Kickstarter goods or they should be in the mail. Interestingly, even though the Kickstarter backer cycles were spread over about a three month period, they’re all supposed to be delivering the product at around the same time - 4th quarter of this year. As of the time of this writing, this is the status of my Kickstarters:
Those of you who have been reading this blog long enough know that I often write my blog posts during my lunch break at work and set it to post at some point in the future. I’m writing this post almost 1 month before it is to appear on the blog. So in the middle of July I find myself in what many who have backed projects probably experience as the Kickstarter Lull. I backed a project by I Fight Dragons and interviewed them about it here and I backed a comic project by Greg Pak and Jonathan Coulton. During the backing period as a way to drum up support there was a constant stream of both updates and digital goodies. IFD, in particular, gave backers 2 albums (live concert recording and a conceptual album) and a concert film. A little while after the backing period was over, the projects contacted us for the info they needed to fulfill our backer rewards. Since then I haven’t heard from either of them. On the rational side, I’m glad they’re focusing on creating what we paid them to create. But after the constant communications it just feels odd to have “radio” silence. Now we just wait for the products to be created. In the case of these two projects, the members involved are all veterans: IFD put out records before having a record company contract and Greg Pak has already done about a half dozen Kickstarters. So, outside of catastrophe, I don’t fear for my money. I could see where this silence might be more disturbing with an unproven team.
I had no intention of seeing Man of Steel in the movie theater; I was voting for Monsters University. I’ve grown quite tired with the constant universe rebooting. We all know where Superman (or Batman or Spider-Man etc) came from. Can we not waste another 2+ hours and $millions to retell that. Why can’t we just tell new stories? These characters have such rich histories and such iconic villains that it just seems so pointless to keep hitting the same notes. Additionally, while I liked Snyder’s Watchmen, I was NOT a fan of Suckerpunch. But my parents wanted to treat Danielle and I to a nice dinner for our wedding anniversary and Man of Steel was the movie that would get us out of the theater in time to make out reservations.
The thing I like the most about Twitter is the ability to interact with creatives in real time. In the past you had to write a letter to a writer, artist, musician, etc and hope that, maybe, they’d actually read it and that, maybe, they’d feel compelled to reply with something more than boilerplate. I started following Paolo Rivera after meeting him at Baltimore Comic-Con. (Related topic: meeting a bunch of creators in person at Baltimore Comic-Con helped make them more “real” to me. I’m not a jerky person, but it really does give me pause when I post a criticism to someone on twitter. Unlike these guys.) So when Paolo tweeted something from his blog that I wanted to comment on, I kept failing the captcha he had on the comments. I tweeted and (to my surprise) was retweeted by Paolo:
One always wonders if and when those classes you take in high school will be important. For me, as an engineer, most of my high school classes were laying the foundation for the classes I’d take in college. I’ve used plenty of those classes in my work and personal life. One of the classes that has served me well all these years was Speech and Debate. You don’t realize how long a minute is until you have to talk for a minute in front of class. It has helped me with college presentation and work presentations. Most recently, the following two video reviews were completely ad-libbed. I didn’t even have any notes to go off of. (In the AvX video I did take the comic with me to remember the name of the penciller)
Start here before FF
Fantastic Four By Jonathan Hickman # 1 - Volume 1
I’ve always been a Fantastic Four fan, but it’d been a long time since I last read F4 when I picked up FF. Being as this was a #1 of a new title, I was very confused about what in the world was going on with the Future Foundation. I knew what’d happened to ellicit the name change, but that’s about it. Well, if you read this book, it will all make sense. Right from the beginning you meet one of the future members of the FF. And later on you meet almost all of the rest of them. This TP also introduces the Reed Council which is the whole reason for the the first FF story arc. Hickman is like Marvel’s Grant Morrison. If you really want to understand FF, you are really going to need to AT LEAST read his run on F4. By the end of this TP, almost EVERYTHING from FF had been setup. I’d say, about 15-20% has yet to occur.
Not Feelin’ It
Astonishing X-Men # 36 - Monstrous, Part 1
The only story arc in Astonishing I haven’t read yet is Exogenic. I am really not liking this one. I know this is the first issue, but I’ve also read the third one due to when I got into Astonishing. I really, really hate this art style. It just looks weird and almost like a super deformed (in the manga sense) version of the X-Men and I don’t think it fits with the previous art style or tone of the book.
It was OK
Uncanny X-Men # 539 - Losing Hope
I was hoping this was linked to what happened in Generation Hope #8, but sadly it does not appear to be. We do get to see how M-Day has affected some former mutants, and that’s neat. We also get to see why Wolverine acts so strange around her. (Although an astute reader probably already guessed why) This issue felt like a very fast read and I wasn’t left as satisfied as I’ve been with recent Gillen works. Oh well. You win some, you lose some.
Injecting some fresh blood into the X-Men
Generation Hope: The Future is a Four-Letter Word # 1 - TPB
We live in a world where the big comic companies are in financial trouble. We’ve got so many things to occupy our attention and many of them are free. So we’re drowning in reboots and revamps and retellings. Ghost Rider is a woman now. Captain America is back for the umpteenth time. So it’s quite refreshing to see Marvel going in a different direction with the X-Men. Rather than doing a reboot so we can see the X-Men when they first became X-Men, they are introducing new, young mutants.
Good Focus on the New Guy
Batman, Incorporated # 7 - Medicine Soldiers
I like this Batman, Inc issue because it mostly focused on the new guy with Batman playing a very small part. The dynamic between Man-of-Bats and Raven is played very well. There’s a lot of history here and you can feel it. The only bad thing with this issue is the same as all the other issues, it feels like these books need to be a bit longer. I feel like too much story is getting compressed into too few pages and the story’s suffering a bit for it. I think it’d be best if these were all two-parters like the series-opening Japanese story.
Glad I Waited
Uncanny X-Men # 535 - Breaking Point, Part One
I just got back into comics in May after a 10-12 year hiatus. boy have I missed a lot! So I’ve been working my way through the trade paperbacks and hard covers to get caught up on just what happened to one of my favorite Marvel teams. I was going to read this issue when I saw in issue 534.1 that it involves the Breakworld which was mentioned as returning for the first time since Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men. So I put this issue aside and finished reading my Morrison New X-Men so I could read Astonishing X-Men. All of this is a very roundabout way of saying - it’s perfect for me! It’s as though things are picking up where that story left off. We have Kitty still intangible and even Danger (the embodiment of The Danger Room) still around. The only thing different is that Beast is gone because he is now with the Secret Avengers. (And Armor was left behind on purpose) And so this storyline is awesome for me, but what about the regulars?
A Fitting Followup to Morrison’s Run
Astonishing X-Men Omnibus # 1 - Astonishing X-Men Omnibus
I came into this right on the heels of Morrison’s run in the Ultimate 3 Volume collection. I know there’s an Uncanny Volume that takes place between the two, but it doesn’t look like it contained anything that kept me from understanding what was going on in this story. (Plus this Omnibus version has an intro to the X-Men that explains where Professor X is)
Things Really get Real
New X-Men Ultimate Collection # 2 - Book 2
At first the book continues directly from the previous one. We learn that Prof X can walk because Xorn healed his spine (although I thought it was that his legs were crushed? Perhaps that was retconned at some point). Prof X is working on a Cerebra upgrade to telepathically remote-control mutants to help them get out of dangerous situations? No possible way that could go wrong! Sometimes Xavier really does carry the idiot ball. (Although it ends up not being a plot point so far)
Morrison at his BEST!
New X-Men Ultimate Collection # 1 - Book 1
Holy cow! That’s not strong enough, that volume requires some high level “Whoa!” and “DID YOUO SEE THAT?” and all kinds of profanity (if you happen to condone such tings) to describe what a ride it was to read Morrison’s take on the X-Men. When you read the description on the back of the book which happens to, at the time of this review, match the description here on Comic Vine, it sounds like marketing BS. Every new writer is claimed to “have turned the (franchise name) on its (body part)” and “You’ve never seen (franchise name) like this!” This time it’s real. Like Frank Miller and Alan Moore, Morrison has brought grit to the X-Men universe. And it appears to have stuck, as I read today’s issues in the multitude of X-Books Marvel has seen fit to produce. Because this is a collection of issues and because it was originally released 10 years ago, I’m going to have some light spoilers here and there. I know there’s a spoiler button here on CV and I’ve used it on previous reviews. But that’s like using the spoiler button for Citizen Kane. If you don’t wish to see any of them, you can stop reading after the next sentence. If you like the X-Men and if you want to know where to jump on to get caught up with the current continuity, I can’t think of a better place to start.
And it’s over….
X-Men: Complete Onslaught Epic # 4 - Volume 4
So, here we are. The end of of a huge Marvel crossover that led directly into Heroes Reborn. (And maybe even was created solely for that purpose?) This thing went back a few years if you count all the hints they were dropping - even if they hadn’t figured out the entire plot yet back then.
Fantastic Four #416 - Franklin’s attempts to get help manifest as bad guys because Onslaught mucks about with them. This issue has no progress on fighting Onslaught… Awesome personal growth for Ben Grimm. Dr Doom is so awesomely bad ass! I love the way he talks and the way he speaks. It’s so awesome whenever he’s there. And this plus FF signals at least twice that they’ve had to join forces. Slightly pointless other than to gather all the heroes at FF Tower as more and more super heroes keep dropping in.
Pause the Action. Survey the World
X-Men: Complete Onslaught Epic # 2 - Volume 2
For the most part Volume 2 of Onslaught: the Complete Epic is just filler. The first issue or two deal with the X-Men on their mission to deal with Onslaught. Reveals that Xavier is like Batman: crazy prepared! He has files on how to kill each of the X-Men. That was neat to see. The issue where Wovlerine talks to this Aboriginal mutant was pretty awesome. Esp the fact that such a guy exists. But the rest of the book just seemed like filler that could have been safely ignored.
Back to the Action
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight: Time of Your Life # 1 - Time of your Life
After the last trade paperback, which was mostly laughs, we jump right back into the fray. (No pun intended) Buffy ends up sucked into the Future of Whedon’s Fray comic. Like the licensed and fan fiction that was written between the release of the Star Wars IV and Star Wars V, it can often be a mess to figure out continuity when you don’t know where you’re going to go creatively. Buffy ended in 2003 and Fray was mostly written in 2001. So when they started this future world, they didn’t know how the end of Buffy (the TV show) was going to end up with tons of girls activated as Slayers. So I think this book was Whedon rectifying the future and present of Buffy. Although you’re left wondering whether that future is still canon.
Is X-Men: Legacy always this confusing?
X-Men: Legacy # 250 - Lost Legions, Part 1; Flashback; Into the Abyss
This is only my second issue of X-Men: Legacy, but it seems to jump around more than the other Marvel books I’m reading. When #249 ended, we saw Rogue and Magneto maybe about to get it on. This issue - no mention of it at all. Really, after how big a deal it was in the previous issue you’d think there’d at least be some more movement on whether rogue was going to stay with Magneto. Instead, all of a sudden we’re looking for Legion’s personalities. Where the heck did that come from? In 249 he was just cycling through his personalities while connected to some machine. Still, it was a fun fight and the personality they have to catch in this issue has a neat power. Makes it really hard to fight him legitimately.
Holy Freakin’ Wow!
Detective Comics # 875 - Lost Boys
I loved this issue from cover to cover! First time I can say that in 2011! Wow! I loved Bullock’s section even though it didn’t really have anything to do with the story. I loved how it was drawn and coloured and how his narration squares were drawn. And Gordon’s story was insane. I loved how slow and methodical it was - perfect for a book called Detective Comics! I also loved the backstory into his life. And the shock ending! Man! I can’t wait to get to the next one. Snyder really hit the ball out of the park on this one!
Like a fun Sci-Fi Movie
Astonishing X-Men # 38 - “Meanwhile” Part One
This issue reads like a fun sci-fi movie. It’s great - it’s almost like a cross-over comic I read a decade ago where Superman ends up on the planet with the Aliens from Alien. In fact, the X-Men go to investigate a space station and the plot more or less becoems the plot to Alien. However, it’s quite compressed and ends up with a crazy ending. The character designs are a lot of fun - love the new Beast look. (New for me, at least) I don’t care that this book doesn’t fit into the timeline with the rest of the X-Men books, it’s a ton of fun to read. Another book for my ever-increasing pull list.
Falls off so quickly
The Batman Chronicles # 7 -
The first story is pretty neat - you get to see differences in how Batman and Superman interpret the law and due process as they fight to save a woman who may have been falsely put to the death penalty. And Batman and Supes even disagree on what circumstances would mean she was there falsely. I liked it a lot.
Another Good Arc Intro
Batman and Robin # 23 - The Streets Run Red, Part 1 of 3: Ins and Outs
And, I should mention, another cover that lies. (Been seeing a lot of those on the 2011 FF book) Anyway, I’m not sure how much of this sticks with the DCU Reboot/Refresh, but it looks like most of the current continuity does. (With changes like Barb being out of a wheelchair) But this arc definitely has time to end before September. It is low on action at first, but I think it sets up the characters’ motivations and actions quite well. As someone who knows the story of The Red Hood, but never read any of those books, it’s a great quick intro in why he is the way he is. I didn’t feel too bored and there were scenes where I was quite glad that there are now comics that are rated Teen so they could get into the rougher stuff. The news about the new DCU is that he’s going to have his own book and if he retains most of the characterization he has in this book, I’ll DEFINITELY have it on my pull list. In a way, he’s like the Batman of the Flashpoint universe - able to kill the bad guys rather than wait for the justice system. And so this sets him up for an interesting dynamic vs the bad guys, Nightwing, Batman, the other Robins, and Batgirl. I can’t wait.
I wanted to share my comic book reviews with my blog-reading audience without forcing them to go to Comic Vine to find them.
Leaves you Wanting More
Gotham City Sirens # 23 - Friends, Part 1
I am just returning to reading comics after a 12 year hiatus. Additionally, I was never that big into DC Comics. Most of my Batman exposure comes from Batman: The Animated Series. (And the Arkham video game) But I jumped into Gotham City Sirens because I’ve always loved the villianesses of Batman’s Rogue Gallery.
note: this was written on 1 June then put into my blog queue
I don’t remember exactly what made me decide to check out some new comics, but I think it was a mix of inventorying my comics and clicking over to the Whiskey Media site, Comic Vine. In the reviews for May’s comics, two books sounded interesting: FF and Gotham City Sirens. I went to my local comic book shop, Comics to Astonish, and also ended up picking up a bunch of issues from the old Harley Quinn book. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I was always into Marvel so I surprisingly chose to read Gotham City Sirens (GCS) as my first super hero comic since 1997.
Last weekend Danielle and I went to Borders so Danielle could check out the Buffy graphic novels and I could pick up Watchmen. While in the graphic novel section I started looking around to see what new books were out in this space and I came across Beyond Wonderland and Return to Wonderland, two comics in Zenoscope’s Grimm Fairy Tales line. From the busty cover on Beyond Wonderland, I thought it might be like Clamp’s Miyuki-chan in Wonderland.
This book is the definition of a niche product. The only people I think would enjoy this are the intersection in the Venn diagram of D&D fans and Rick and Morty fans. I know I’ve been watching Rick and Morty since the first season and I can’t imagine that I would find this collection if my kids hadn’t gotten me into D&D a year or so ago. Almost all of the humor comes from D&D jokes and Easter Eggs.
Last weekend Danielle and I went to Borders so Danielle could check out the Buffy graphic novels and I could pick up Watchmen. While in the graphic novel section I started looking around to see what new books were out in this space and I came across Beyond Wonderland and Return to Wonderland, two comics in Zenoscope’s Grimm Fairy Tales line. From the busty cover on Beyond Wonderland, I thought it might be like Clamp’s Miyuki-chan in Wonderland.
This book is the definition of a niche product. The only people I think would enjoy this are the intersection in the Venn diagram of D&D fans and Rick and Morty fans. I know I’ve been watching Rick and Morty since the first season and I can’t imagine that I would find this collection if my kids hadn’t gotten me into D&D a year or so ago. Almost all of the humor comes from D&D jokes and Easter Eggs.
Science Fiction
———————
The Concubine’s Heart (Matthew Bright) - I could not even Begin to predict the turn the story would take. It was quite a fascinating story. I wonder at the culture (a sort of sci-fi Chinese culture) that would lead to the events in the story. Very well done.
Her Appetite, His Heart (Dominica Phetteplace) - a continuation of the world we first saw in “One Thousand Beetles in a Jumpsuit” back in Lightspeed #111. Interestingly, most of the story is a character study and it’s not until the end of the story where we see the consequences of the events of the previous story.
First off, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy listening to the science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod. Today I listened to episode 949, A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls. Large Language Models (LLMs), what we have colloquially called AI for the past few years, have been a giant source of wonder and consternation in the world. AI in general has long been a topic for science fiction, but this short story tackles the current LLM version of AIs. I found it to be a very fun episode that is a master class in providing a huge amount of backstory without an exposition dump. I don’t want to spoil anything about this story, but they naturally drop all these background details about the world that make me want more stories in this universe. It also has a fun, light tone to it. I highly recommend you either listen or read (the full text is available at the episode link above)
First off, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy listening to the science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod. Today I listened to episode 949, A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls. Large Language Models (LLMs), what we have colloquially called AI for the past few years, have been a giant source of wonder and consternation in the world. AI in general has long been a topic for science fiction, but this short story tackles the current LLM version of AIs. I found it to be a very fun episode that is a master class in providing a huge amount of backstory without an exposition dump. I don’t want to spoil anything about this story, but they naturally drop all these background details about the world that make me want more stories in this universe. It also has a fun, light tone to it. I highly recommend you either listen or read (the full text is available at the episode link above)
First off, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy listening to the science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod. Today I listened to episode 949, A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls. Large Language Models (LLMs), what we have colloquially called AI for the past few years, have been a giant source of wonder and consternation in the world. AI in general has long been a topic for science fiction, but this short story tackles the current LLM version of AIs. I found it to be a very fun episode that is a master class in providing a huge amount of backstory without an exposition dump. I don’t want to spoil anything about this story, but they naturally drop all these background details about the world that make me want more stories in this universe. It also has a fun, light tone to it. I highly recommend you either listen or read (the full text is available at the episode link above)
First off, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy listening to the science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod. Today I listened to episode 949, A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls. Large Language Models (LLMs), what we have colloquially called AI for the past few years, have been a giant source of wonder and consternation in the world. AI in general has long been a topic for science fiction, but this short story tackles the current LLM version of AIs. I found it to be a very fun episode that is a master class in providing a huge amount of backstory without an exposition dump. I don’t want to spoil anything about this story, but they naturally drop all these background details about the world that make me want more stories in this universe. It also has a fun, light tone to it. I highly recommend you either listen or read (the full text is available at the episode link above)
When we went to my graduate degree graduation, it was also Alex’s birthday so we went to see Aladdin on Broadway. It was really good. Danielle and I enjoy Broadway shows, but have not really enjoyed the Disney Broadway shows. Mary Poppins in particular was quite a disappointment. Aladdin, on the other hand, hews a lot closer to the story that movie audiences remember. The only changes they make have to do with the fact that it’s harder on broadway to have animal characters. So instead of Abu, Aladdin gains a few friends (and a fun song about them in which they are busking. Iago becomes a man who seems to be doing a mix between Sam Kinison and Gilbert Godfrey. While we’re talking about impressions, one of Aladdin’s buddies appears to be doing an impression of Horshach from Welcome Back Kotter. Of course, the star of the show is Genie who plays on our stereotypes of overweight people to impress as he does the most impressive feats of broadway of the entire cast.
Questlove said his most recent stop was conducted at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge a few weeks ago following an appearance at the hip venue Brooklyn Bowl. Officers pulled over his driver, shined flashlights into the car and asked him why he was sitting in the back “like a don,” Questlove said. After showing the officers a copy of his new memoir, Mo’ Meta Blues, Questlove said he was let go.
Back in 2009 I went to Manhattan at night with my Rebel XTi and my 50mm f/1.8 to do some night time photography at Times Square. The 50mm was key because its wide aperture allowed me to keep the ISO low and get nice, clear photos. (Although there’s something to be said for the aesthetics of grainy night shots of busy cities) Of course, it also helped that Times Square is quite well lit. Cities like Toykyo and New York City are well-served by color photography when you’re trying to document the crazy, colored buildings, but I think when doing street photography, it helps to have the output be black and white so that to focus is on the people rather than the colors. Here are my best shots from that night:
To New York City at Christmas time for today’s Top 200 Photos.
photo #145 is:
In 2006 I went, for the first time ever, to go see the Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center. It was crazy to see so many people there given how cold it was. My takeaway was that the tree always looks bigger in photos and on TV than it does in person. I had a great time during that trip seeing NYC all decorated for Christmas.
Since I have family (in-laws) in NYC, I’ve tried, on occasion, to take my brothers to experience parts of NYC that we never got to see in the brief time my family rolled through before. On this trip, Dave got to ride a NYC subway for the first time.
Back to NYC in this installment of the Top 200 Photos.
photo #183 is:
In March 2002 I went to NYC for the second time in my life. It was exciting for so many reasons. I was meeting my girlfriend’s parents for the first time and I was going to one of the biggest cities in the world. I’d been to NYC once before as part of a college trip up the east coast, but we only got to spend one day there.
Last time I mentioned my Franka Solida III, I had just had my first roll in my Yashica developed. I mentioned being a bit worried about the fact that I couldn’t tell what was in focus by looking through the viewfinder. Turns out that my fear was founded as I originally thought the units on the lens were ft when they were in fact meters. The results show:
On my Father’s Day Weekend visit to NYC I finally got to see some MoMA exhibits I’d wanted to see for months. First off was a Picasso exhibit called “Variations”. Ever since my parents took me to the Dali Museum in St Petersburg, FL six years ago, I’ve been very interested in painters – especially artists from the 1930s-1950s and the surrealist and associated movements. Also, as a person of Spanish heritage, I’ve had a special interest in artists from the region. So I was very excited to see this Picasso exhibit.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Luna Park, the new section of Coney Island”] [/caption]
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I went to NYC over Father’s Day weekend to see the Mermaid Parade. Well, as if that wasn’t crazy enough, I went BACK to Coney Island that night to photograph the new Luna Park. I have been documenting the changes to Coney Islan d and so I wanted to document the aftermath. I took both of the digital cameras I had used that afternoon and proceeded to take some low light photos. I would have preferred to have gone a little earlier in the evening to take the photos, but we thought it might have been a little crowded. By the time we went, it wasn’t too crowded, but there were still plenty of people still in their mermaid costumes hanging around.
In reading the New York Daily Photo Blog, I happened to come across a post about the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. I mentioned to my wife that I wanted to try and attend next time it happened. Being the awesome wife that she is, she kept her eye out for the date and let me know it would coincide with Father’s Day weekend this year. So we decided to get a two-for-one deal and go to NYC to see the parade.
I’m not often annoyed enough with mainstream news organizations to make a big deal out of it. Plenty of stuff they do annoys me, but I rarely get so charged up that I blog about it. Recently they stoked my fire when discussing the attempted terrorism on Times Square. Take, for example the following excerpt from a newspaper article: “The vehicle identification number was defaced, but detectives found it stamped on the engine block and axle to get a lead on the current owner.” (Alison Gendar - New York Daily News)
The Brooklyn Bridge. It was completed in 1883 and it links Brooklyn to Manhattan. It’s also possible to take the Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn, but it’s far less picturesque. I’ve been to the Brooklyn Bridge a few times to take pictures with the first time being when I bought my Fujifilm Finepix S7000. This was the first time I took photos from Brooklyn Bridge Park; every other time had been from on the bridge itself.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“All of us in our costumes, ready to head out to The Village”] [/caption]
Last year after Dina and Brian went to The Village for Halloween, I did some research on this tradition and decided we would go whenever things worked out. Well, this year was that year so we decided to spend Halloween night in Greenwich Village in NYC’s Manhattan. But, first, we rewind once again to last year. Danielle’s mother made an awesome Chun-Li costume for Dina that rivals anything you can find in a US costume store. Brian was Ryu and both got lots of accolades for their costumes. Fast forward to this summer. We decided to also have Danielle’s mom make our costumes this year.
[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“160” caption=“Katy Ho, a fellow Cornellian from C/O 2005 on the same bus in Brooklyn that I happened to be on.”] [/caption]
One in 1,600,000. That’s odds of randomly meeting someone I know in NYC excluding my wife’s family. And yet, due to construction on the Q line, Danielle and I found ourselves on the bus with Katy Ho, who we hadn’t seen since graduation.
First off, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy listening to the science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod. Today I listened to episode 949, A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls. Large Language Models (LLMs), what we have colloquially called AI for the past few years, have been a giant source of wonder and consternation in the world. AI in general has long been a topic for science fiction, but this short story tackles the current LLM version of AIs. I found it to be a very fun episode that is a master class in providing a huge amount of backstory without an exposition dump. I don’t want to spoil anything about this story, but they naturally drop all these background details about the world that make me want more stories in this universe. It also has a fun, light tone to it. I highly recommend you either listen or read (the full text is available at the episode link above)
First off, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy listening to the science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod. Today I listened to episode 949, A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls. Large Language Models (LLMs), what we have colloquially called AI for the past few years, have been a giant source of wonder and consternation in the world. AI in general has long been a topic for science fiction, but this short story tackles the current LLM version of AIs. I found it to be a very fun episode that is a master class in providing a huge amount of backstory without an exposition dump. I don’t want to spoil anything about this story, but they naturally drop all these background details about the world that make me want more stories in this universe. It also has a fun, light tone to it. I highly recommend you either listen or read (the full text is available at the episode link above)
I sometimes forget that most of social media is governed by an attention span algorithm instead of a reverse chronological algorithm. There are at least a couple times, however, when I’m reminded of that fact:
I Google a new topic or interact with a new creator on a platform and suddenly my feed is all about that topic or creator. As an example, my current Youtube main page is D&D and Cities: Skylines II. Just one week ago it was retro gaming single board computers, programming, and Cities: Skylines II. The stark difference in the recommendations on a page that I load at least once daily can sometimes be jarring.
Semi-related to the first point, my phone’s alerts for Youtube and Twitter tend to narrow to the last 1-2 creators I interacted with. Right now I’m only seeing YT alerts from the official D&D YT account and City Planner Plays. On Twitter I’m only seeing alerts from my local county and this person who posts about 1990s-2000s Contemporary Christian Music. And this has the weird effect of making it seem that no one else that I follow is creating new content. Then I go to my follower page on either app and realize that, no, there is a TON of new content by all the people I follow. I recognize that if the phone were to alert me for every person I follow, I might never be able to use my phone for all the alerts, but I do wish it were slightly more balanced. Maybe more of a power law or something. At one point I was only getting Twitter alerts for an author I follow and I’m sure it seemed odd that I was always commenting, but that also made the algorithm see more engagement so it kept giving me more of her Tweets.
I was on Identi.ca back when it first launched and I joined Mastodon a few years ago. Identi.ca had a decent number of FLOSS devs at the time, but by the time of Mastodon, Twitter was ascendant. So “no one” was on Mastodon. Even a few of the FLOSS developers I followed on Mastodon never posted on there. Network effects - it’s the reason almost everyone who threatens to leave Facebook never does; social media is only useful if you can be social (ie your friends/acquaintances are on it).
Steganography is the process of hiding a message within another message. The difference between steganography and encryption is that encryption seems to make a message indistinguishable from noise. Encryption will turn “my cat is black” into “df cok eropz” while steganography could involve you sending a picture of a car and the receiver would run that image through some software to get the message “my cat is black”. Why use steganography over encryption? Because it’s less interesting to those who want to know what you’re saying. Imagine we’re in the world of Game of Thrones during Seaons 2 of the HBO show and Rob Stark needs to send a message about troop movements. He has to assume that the man carrying his message might be captured or bribed to give up the messages. If it looks encrypted, then King Joffrey will put his best minds on trying to figure out the encryption. If the message looks like a condolences to a lord for his son’s death, then they might let the message pass.
The thing I like the most about Twitter is the ability to interact with creatives in real time. In the past you had to write a letter to a writer, artist, musician, etc and hope that, maybe, they’d actually read it and that, maybe, they’d feel compelled to reply with something more than boilerplate. I started following Paolo Rivera after meeting him at Baltimore Comic-Con. (Related topic: meeting a bunch of creators in person at Baltimore Comic-Con helped make them more “real” to me. I’m not a jerky person, but it really does give me pause when I post a criticism to someone on twitter. Unlike these guys.) So when Paolo tweeted something from his blog that I wanted to comment on, I kept failing the captcha he had on the comments. I tweeted and (to my surprise) was retweeted by Paolo:
A little past the end of February I started having problems with my internet connected devices. In the basement we have a Roku box that the wife uses to watch Netflix. She reported that it was no longer connecting to Netflix. We’d had issues before with it needing to be re-registered with Netflix, but that did not seem to be the case. I’d click on the Netflix channel and it would say “retrieving movies” for a while and then pop back to the main menu. At first I thought something was wrong with the Roku box, so I tried the Amazon channel, but that worked and I was able to watch my content. I figured it’d resolve itself. So she just popped in the latest DVD from Netflix into our DVD player. Later that night she was in the bedroom and learned that our Samsung BluRay player was no longer connecting to Netflix. I thought that was weird, but figured maybe it was a Netflix problem. I checked on my computer and I couldn’t log into the Netflix site. Neither could Danielle on her computer. These were Linux boxes (Fedora and Ubuntu respectively) so I tried on my Windows computer. Strangely, that one could log in. That’s weird. I tried on both Firefox and Chrome with no difference. So then I tried the guest computer - that computer hadn’t been used since December and I knew it was working for Netflix back then. That would help me eliminate the possibility that I’d installed a distro update that had killed it for me. (I knew that didn’t totally make sense because of the BluRay Player and Roku) That one could reach it either. What was going on here? Was Netflix blocking Linux? Well, I figured it might go away so I waited until the next day.
After all these years, there’s finally a Humble Bundle that redeems keys to GOG! I don’t have anything against Steam, per se, but I always hated the lack of diversity of locations to redeem your keys. I’m hoping this eventually means that games sold on Humble Bundle through their store (ie not part of a Bundle) will be redeemable on the user’s preferred store.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that all the digital stores would move in this direction, but I was surprised to see that GOG has come out with their version of Greenlight: Games in Development.
At least I can get Greenlight-quality games with DRM-free and if it completely sucks, I can get a refund.
I still love the innovation coming out of Valve (like their VR and controller work), but today I listened to the Beastcast Episode 2 and saw that Steam is implementing game refunds. This is something GOG has offered for quite some time now. It appears that GOG is starting to eat Valve’s lunch as it’s getting more Triple A games DRM-Free! I have no issues with Valve and I don’t consider them evil or anything hyperbolic, but here’s how healthy competition helps. Now Valve has to match GOG for refunds just as GOG has had to create GOG Galaxy to match the Steam client. I hope they continue to challenge each other in the market and create a good environment for us that is pro-consumer since digital has been anti-consumer for so long. (DRM, games/books/movies/etc being pulled without notice)
Yesterday I put in for the GOG Galaxy Beta and today I got my invite. I couldn’t wait to get home to see it in action. I did not bury the lead, it was exactly as I state in the title, A Good First Start. The settings are so minimal at this point that it doesn’t have any tabs:
GOG Galaxy - Settings
As you can see, many of the most exciting features are marked as coming soon. Still, it’s exactly as I hoped they’d do it. I meant to remark in my last blog post that I hoped they’d make the game pages just like their webpages. I find their webpages very, very useful. It’s less cluttered than Steam and brings the reviews to the fore. Let’s take a quick screenshot tour of the client. (I was going to do a screen capture video, but the client is so simple at this point that a few screenshots will do it justice)
If I mentioned it on this site, I wasn’t able to find it in a search because of the generic word, but I was very annoyed and pretty upset about EA’s Origin store and platform. Part of what I enjoy so much about playing PC games is that the only limitations on what you can run are based on OS and the power of your hardware. In the console world there are games exclusive to Playstation or Xbox and for the non-exclusive games I have to figure out (if I’m planning to game socially) which platform my friends and family are going to buy the game on. For PC games that’s not an issue. All games run on Windows and a greater and greater number run on Linux and OSX. Usually, no matter the OS, everyone can play together online.
After all these years, there’s finally a Humble Bundle that redeems keys to GOG! I don’t have anything against Steam, per se, but I always hated the lack of diversity of locations to redeem your keys. I’m hoping this eventually means that games sold on Humble Bundle through their store (ie not part of a Bundle) will be redeemable on the user’s preferred store.
I’ve written a lot about DnD Adventure Club, including my lasttwo posts. Today while I was looking at the Pathfinder Humble Bundle, I went to the Pathfinder website to see if they had a page listing differences (since Pathfinder started as a fork of D&D 3.5). I found this page - Adventure Paths. It looks like they’re doing the same thing as DnD Adventure Club, except in Pathfinder 2e and without a kid focus. Also, it seems like each trilogy is building to a larger story (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer with its villain of the season, but also overarching story). It makes me wish that Wizards of the Coast (the Hasbro subsidiary that runs D&D) would do something similar - or if a 3rd party creator did it that it would be tightly coupled to D&D beyond. One advantage of WotC doing the mini-adventures is that they could use them to highlight different aspects of the mechanics or classes. I love that DnD Adventure Club comes with a new character each month with some example backstories. It really helps demonstrate the different races and classes. Also, upon further examination of the Pathfinder adventures I saw that each trilogy is written by a different person (creating opportunities to showcase new writers) and that (at least the one I clicked on) is tied to a campaign setting book. This is SO smart from a marketing point of view. “If you enjoyed your little trilogy in this corner of our world, you might enjoy learning more about it…” Yeah, WoTC should DEFINITELY look into this.
Scarlett was inspired by my previous post and made an animatic-style drawing of some of her favorite moments from the campaign.
The top panel is the party questioning the guards. (The ninja-looking character is Sasha, the character that Scarlett plays)
The next panel is Grumpy using intimidation to question a gnoll. The middle panel is the throwing of gnolls I referenced in my previous post. The last panel on that row depicts the characters examining someone who was shot mid-exposition.
I was DMing the first third of a DnD Adventure Club campaign for my kids today. My son likes to mostly play as Grumpy Mcgrumbles, a dwarven fighter. The kids were attacked by a group of Gnolls. Normally, most of the time, the kids play pretty straightforwardly although they are starting to get more creative. My son decided that since he’s a strong dwarf, he wanted to pick up the Gnolls and throw them into the river or into each other. I wanted to encourage the creativity, so I had him do an athletics check. Between his +7 and a series of lucky rolls, he ends up almost always successfully tossing the Gnolls and the kids and I erupted into fits of laughter as the battle became more and more chaotic. It was even funnier when he finally had a bad roll and so he just picked up the Gnoll and dropped him at his feet.
I’ve been backing a few different D&D 5e adventures on kickstarter, but the one I’m most excited about getting fulfillment on is Obojima: Tales from the Tall Grass. It’s so freakin’ beautiful that I had to hold myself back from getting the package that came with everything. But I’m not the only one excited bout it, I also read this article about it in Wired today. One of the points they make in the article is about how gamers and readers are moving away from Grimdark because there’s already enough of this in the world:
Scarlett was inspired by my previous post and made an animatic-style drawing of some of her favorite moments from the campaign.
The top panel is the party questioning the guards. (The ninja-looking character is Sasha, the character that Scarlett plays)
The next panel is Grumpy using intimidation to question a gnoll. The middle panel is the throwing of gnolls I referenced in my previous post. The last panel on that row depicts the characters examining someone who was shot mid-exposition.
Sometimes Scarlett asks me to draw with her. So I drew this scene:
Of course, what we “see” is dependent upon our state of mind. Having been watching lots of fairy tale cartoons, her first guess was that I’d drawn a dragon and a dinosaur. Her second guess, of course, was correct that it was a giraffe and rhino. She then added a bird and some apples for the giraffe.
Almost exactly a year ago my wife and I took our second trip to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. We’d last visited 12 years earlier in October, and so had missed the opportunity to see puffins. I’d meant to make a series travelogue posts about my trip, but I got busy with programming, work, video games, and playing D&D with the kids so I fell uncharacteristically behind on tagging and editing my photos. I finally got around to editing the photos from the trip. First up, a selection of photos taken by my wife.
For the past couple years (ever since my mom got back into photography), I’ve been trying to get her to come in the winter to go photograph American Bald Eagles at Conowingo Dam. They tend to be there from around November to about early January and I usually go in December. This year at the semi-last moment she decided to visit and I suggested we go try and photograph some eagles. So she brought her long lens and we took off. Of course, the one day we had available to do this also happened to be the coldest day of the 2017-2018 winter so we were physically being tortured. I had told her ahead of time to make sure to get long johns, so we didn’t get hypothermia.
Almost exactly a year ago my wife and I took our second trip to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. We’d last visited 12 years earlier in October, and so had missed the opportunity to see puffins. I’d meant to make a series travelogue posts about my trip, but I got busy with programming, work, video games, and playing D&D with the kids so I fell uncharacteristically behind on tagging and editing my photos. I finally got around to editing the photos from the trip. First up, a selection of photos taken by my wife.
Almost exactly a year ago my wife and I took our second trip to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. We’d last visited 12 years earlier in October, and so had missed the opportunity to see puffins. I’d meant to make a series travelogue posts about my trip, but I got busy with programming, work, video games, and playing D&D with the kids so I fell uncharacteristically behind on tagging and editing my photos. I finally got around to editing the photos from the trip. First up, a selection of photos taken by my wife.
Almost exactly a year ago my wife and I took our second trip to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. We’d last visited 12 years earlier in October, and so had missed the opportunity to see puffins. I’d meant to make a series travelogue posts about my trip, but I got busy with programming, work, video games, and playing D&D with the kids so I fell uncharacteristically behind on tagging and editing my photos. I finally got around to editing the photos from the trip. First up, a selection of photos taken by my wife.
Almost exactly a year ago my wife and I took our second trip to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. We’d last visited 12 years earlier in October, and so had missed the opportunity to see puffins. I’d meant to make a series travelogue posts about my trip, but I got busy with programming, work, video games, and playing D&D with the kids so I fell uncharacteristically behind on tagging and editing my photos. I finally got around to editing the photos from the trip. First up, a selection of photos taken by my wife.
Almost exactly a year ago my wife and I took our second trip to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. We’d last visited 12 years earlier in October, and so had missed the opportunity to see puffins. I’d meant to make a series travelogue posts about my trip, but I got busy with programming, work, video games, and playing D&D with the kids so I fell uncharacteristically behind on tagging and editing my photos. I finally got around to editing the photos from the trip. First up, a selection of photos taken by my wife.
Three years ago I was discussing photography with a fellow photographer, pictured below. We were discussing places for good photography in the DC-Baltimore vicinity and he mentioned Shenandoah Valley. He also showed me some photos of deer he had gotten there. He was pretty impressed with how close he got to the deer (although - spoiler - I eventually got closer). I was impressed with the deer photos and his description of Shenandoah Valley. I resolved to visit it.
During inaugural week I was in Hawaii. Given how cold it was in the Balitmore/DC area that week, I can’t say I wasn’t happy to be there. I stayed at the Embassy Suites Beach Walk in Waikiki and I cannot say enough good things about the hotel. When we first checked in we were offered some tropical drinks both alcoholic and non-alcoholic. The rooms were suite style and very well kept. Every morning they had a whole bunch of complimentary breakfast food - including omlets made to order. They also had a happy hour every night with free drinks and cheap snacks.
Of course, I took my Canon 400D and Fujifilm A 345. Overall I did pretty well. Out of 800+ pictures only 63 were out of focus. Also, for sake of mentioning it, 61 were of my wife. That’s a new thing for me as we usually don’t take the usual tourist-y pictures. Our first day were were still on Eastern Time so we got up at 0400 and went to watch the sun rise.
I’m not going to waste time looking it up, but I believe this was SMBC’s first collection. So Weinersmith (or whoever didn’t the formatting) hadn’t figured out the formatting. In order to save space, the comics are all over the place instead of one per page. This isn’t horrible, but it does mean there’s a little extra time to think about each page and see whether this is one large comic (as is sometimes the case) or a bunch of smaller ones.
I’m not going to waste time looking it up, but I believe this was SMBC’s first collection. So Weinersmith (or whoever didn’t the formatting) hadn’t figured out the formatting. In order to save space, the comics are all over the place instead of one per page. This isn’t horrible, but it does mean there’s a little extra time to think about each page and see whether this is one large comic (as is sometimes the case) or a bunch of smaller ones.
About 4 years ago I decided to start exploring various web browsers. Eventually I settled on Vivaldi as my main browser both on Windows and Linux. When I first installed Vivaldi, I mentioned that vertical tabs are very helpful on a wide screen monitor. I also really like the ability to tile my tabs and to name my tab stacks (because other browsers like Chrome have also added tab stacks) While at PyConUS I posted to Mastodon:
It’s been seven months since I last wrote about testing out new browsers on my computers. In addition to talking about what I’m doing, I wanted to muse about whether Mozilla really missed the mark with Firefox.
I’m going to start with the second point first. I forgot what brought them to my attention, but it turns out that while there are less browsers based on Firefox than there used to be (most of them are based on Chromium nowadays), there are at least two browsers based on Firefox that are still being developed: Waterfox and Palemoon. Waterfox is privacy-focused. They make a big deal about that on their site and FAQ. Palemoon is focused on being efficient and (it seems to me) still uses the old Firefox extensions. Why does this mean that Mozilla messed up? Well, first of all, I believe that Mozila sees Firefox as a privacy-focused browser. They may or may not have the same protections as Waterfox, but if they do, they have done a very bad job of marketing it. When it comes to Palemoon, I remember (at least according to commenters on Ars Technica) that when Firefox changed their extension format and caused all the old extensions to be deprecated, a lot of folks left for Chrome. At the time there wasn’t really much distinguishing the browsers, but getting rid of all the extensions, which are heavily used by power users, seemed like a really bad way to keep market share.
Quite a bit has changed since I first started this series about 18 months ago. Back then I was sure I would only be trying Microsoft Edge on Windows and that I would be sticking with Firefox on Linux. Yet Microsoft Edge is now available for Linux, Mac, and Android. On my laptops I continue to prefer non-Firefox browsers. Things continue to be interesting in this realm.
Brave didn’t last very long for me on Windows. I just don’t do enough on there to make use of their ad blocking and ad replacing tech. On the other hand, I’ve been using more and more of Vivaldi’s features. I just started using their Web panels - this allows you to have a web page on the left that loads up in a small section - great for pages that you would like to reference here and there without cluttering up your tabs. I’m using it on my Windows computer to keep some Web panels with notes on what I’d like to do in some games - like Civ VI, Darkest Dungeon, and Cities Skylines.
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.
I’ve been using Vivaldi as my default browser for about a week now. As I said in the penultimate paragraph of the post where I mentioned exploring various browsers, I don’t really use my browser on Windows for much more than uploading YouTube videos. And I mentioned last time that it wasn’t the best setup when squished to a half 1080p Window while trying to upload YouTube videos with the tabs on the right. I also had to close the bar on the left. Here’s what that looks like:
This is the first post continuing my exploration of web browsers outside of Firefox and Google Chrome. You can read the introduction here.
Running Vivaldi for the first time.
For the first browser I wanted to check out on Windows, I decided to check out Vivaldi. My thought process is that I’m most likely to end up with Brave, so better to save that one for last. But as I went through the first-run process in Vivaldi and saw the nice polish the browser seems to have, it really started tugging on me, saying, “Are you sure you wouldn’t want to just stay with Vivaldi?” For this first post, I’d like to cover the first-run process and then a little video poking around the interface. This’ll be followed up in a while with any impressions I’ve come away from my usage of Vivaldi on Windows.
Well, on Linux I bounced back and forth between Firefox and Chrome, depending on which one was getting better performance. At this point, for what I do, Firefox is the winner for me. I use it on my laptop and desktop and it gets things done without getting in my way. I don’t necessarily have the most modern GUI setup because it tends to keep your GUI settings as you upgrade. This is what it looks like:
About 4 years ago I decided to start exploring various web browsers. Eventually I settled on Vivaldi as my main browser both on Windows and Linux. When I first installed Vivaldi, I mentioned that vertical tabs are very helpful on a wide screen monitor. I also really like the ability to tile my tabs and to name my tab stacks (because other browsers like Chrome have also added tab stacks) While at PyConUS I posted to Mastodon:
I’ve been using Vivaldi on Windows for about four months now. As I keep saying, my browser needs on Windows aren’t too huge. Mostly I access youtube, the Stardew Valley Farm uploaded, and Google Docs. But I want to keep checking out new browsers on Windows first precisely since they are so important on my Linux computer. I don’t want to mess up a good thing there.
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.
This is the first post continuing my exploration of web browsers outside of Firefox and Google Chrome. You can read the introduction here.
Running Vivaldi for the first time.
For the first browser I wanted to check out on Windows, I decided to check out Vivaldi. My thought process is that I’m most likely to end up with Brave, so better to save that one for last. But as I went through the first-run process in Vivaldi and saw the nice polish the browser seems to have, it really started tugging on me, saying, “Are you sure you wouldn’t want to just stay with Vivaldi?” For this first post, I’d like to cover the first-run process and then a little video poking around the interface. This’ll be followed up in a while with any impressions I’ve come away from my usage of Vivaldi on Windows.
(just so you know, you should be able to click on most of the screenshots to see them more clearly)
Earlier this year, I took a look at flock. It didn’t impress me. In fact, I found it so useless to my browsing habits that I didn’t even bother to review it. I neglected to mention last time that Flock is built upon the same Gecko backend as Firefox. This is, as I have mentioned before, one of the best things about free and open source licenses. Firefox is a great technology, but it’s meant to be the every-man’s browser. This is expressed by Firefox’s own team and it’s why they have the plugin architecture. They feel that the Mozilla Suite became extremely bloated as it had a web browser, IRC client, email, and (I think) calendar built into it. It was a bit intimidating for first time users and took up quite a bit of RAM. Also, from a programmer’s perspective, it’s a lot harder to maintain something so complex. So, for Firefox they went for just developing a solid browser. Anything missing could be implemented via plugins.
I’m writing this from flock, a new web browser which comes with a lot of built-in utitlities for the most popular web technologies including flickr and blogging. I’m writing this post from within flock’s blog utility. I’m not sure yet if this is a worthy feature or just a gimmick. I intend to try flock out for a few days and see.
It’s just like the old days of Netscape vs Internet Explorer when more and more technologies kept emerging. After IE won the battle things were stagnant until Firefox came around with their tabbed browsing and so forth. We’ll see how this turns out!
XZ Utils is a really awesome compression format. (In fact, earlier this month I got some Linux image files to run off an SD card that were compressed in xz
SSH uses XZ Utils
Only one guy was effectively maintaining it
Someone or some group pretending to be one person social engineered the maintainer to giving them commit access
they used that to put some backdoors
Because it’s in SSH it would have made every computer on the net vulnerable
LUCKILY it was found (by accident - see the Ars Technica story) before it made it out of most (all?) Linux distro test repositories
I was incredibly surprised to hear about it today on Planet Money’s episode: The hack that almost broke the Internet. It’s a really great episode to share with your non-techie friends who want to understand what you were stressed about and which it matters to everyone, not just techies. Of all the Linux distros, they start off interviewing someone from Red Hat! (My favorite Linux distro family) The episode then goes back to the 1980s to explain the origins of open source (not FLOSS, there’s no rms here - it’s Bruce Perens they interview) before bringing it back to the present and explaining the how the social engineering attack happened and what it affected. (Also a quick moment that explained how MS went from hating OSS to supporting it) I thought it was an incredibly well-produced episode that brings everything into context for those who aren’t neck-deep in Linux and/or open source. Give it a listen and pass it along!
A little less than a month ago Ars had a story about Skype’s text messages being insecure. This is pretty devastating considering how many political activists are using Skype to stay secure from governments like China and Russia. The article doesn’t mention anything about the voice communications, but I would be a little cautious if your life actually depends on it. It turns out that Microsoft is scanning messages between users to make sure they aren’t spam or other bad messages. The problem is that your system is either 100% secure or it’s insecure. If Microsoft can see the messages then anyone else can by hijacking Microsoft’s servers. (And countries like China and Russia definitely have the skills to do that) This is a good reminder that you should make sure to read EULAs because this information has been there since Microsoft bought Skype. I wonder what technology political activists could use to stay safe in light of this revelation.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“The old file/print server”] [/caption]
A few years ago I heard about the Fit-PC. It was a computer that was the size of a stack of two or three CD jewel cases running Ubuntu. This was pretty cool, but, most importantly, it only used 15 watts of electricity when under highest load. At first I entertained using it to replace Danielle’s computer to save space in the crowded office we had in the apartment. But the fact that the computer couldn’t easily be upgraded put the kabosh on that. Eventually I turned my attention to replacing our file and print server with one of these. There was just one problem, they cost somewhere in the $300 range so they don’t really pay themselves off quickly enough in electricity saved.
If this story is accurate, then Micro$oft has withdrawn their offer to buy Yahoo! This is great news because I love the guys at Yahoo and the programs they run, such as Flickr and delicious and I love the fact that they use FreeBSD for their servers. You can bet that Microsoft wouldn’t have been having any of that and would have made them switch to the inferior Microsoft IIS. Plus, they probably would have wrecked my Flickr!
XZ Utils is a really awesome compression format. (In fact, earlier this month I got some Linux image files to run off an SD card that were compressed in xz
SSH uses XZ Utils
Only one guy was effectively maintaining it
Someone or some group pretending to be one person social engineered the maintainer to giving them commit access
they used that to put some backdoors
Because it’s in SSH it would have made every computer on the net vulnerable
LUCKILY it was found (by accident - see the Ars Technica story) before it made it out of most (all?) Linux distro test repositories
I was incredibly surprised to hear about it today on Planet Money’s episode: The hack that almost broke the Internet. It’s a really great episode to share with your non-techie friends who want to understand what you were stressed about and which it matters to everyone, not just techies. Of all the Linux distros, they start off interviewing someone from Red Hat! (My favorite Linux distro family) The episode then goes back to the 1980s to explain the origins of open source (not FLOSS, there’s no rms here - it’s Bruce Perens they interview) before bringing it back to the present and explaining the how the social engineering attack happened and what it affected. (Also a quick moment that explained how MS went from hating OSS to supporting it) I thought it was an incredibly well-produced episode that brings everything into context for those who aren’t neck-deep in Linux and/or open source. Give it a listen and pass it along!
XZ Utils is a really awesome compression format. (In fact, earlier this month I got some Linux image files to run off an SD card that were compressed in xz
SSH uses XZ Utils
Only one guy was effectively maintaining it
Someone or some group pretending to be one person social engineered the maintainer to giving them commit access
they used that to put some backdoors
Because it’s in SSH it would have made every computer on the net vulnerable
LUCKILY it was found (by accident - see the Ars Technica story) before it made it out of most (all?) Linux distro test repositories
I was incredibly surprised to hear about it today on Planet Money’s episode: The hack that almost broke the Internet. It’s a really great episode to share with your non-techie friends who want to understand what you were stressed about and which it matters to everyone, not just techies. Of all the Linux distros, they start off interviewing someone from Red Hat! (My favorite Linux distro family) The episode then goes back to the 1980s to explain the origins of open source (not FLOSS, there’s no rms here - it’s Bruce Perens they interview) before bringing it back to the present and explaining the how the social engineering attack happened and what it affected. (Also a quick moment that explained how MS went from hating OSS to supporting it) I thought it was an incredibly well-produced episode that brings everything into context for those who aren’t neck-deep in Linux and/or open source. Give it a listen and pass it along!
I remember back before CentOS became CentOS Stream there would always be a long lag time from RHEL releases until CentOS. That’s why I was so surprised to learn that Alma Linux 9.4 is also available today. What I found neatest about Alma is the way they’re distinguishing their distro. Why just go for another RHEL clone? Well, in this case Alma Linux is decided to support hardware that had been deprecated by Red Hat. So now they get to position their disto as a useful alternative, not just a free offering - more important now that you can have up to 16 free RHEL licenses.
I’ve been using Virtualbox for a long time to run virtual machines when I want to check out other distros before I install them on one of my computers or to review them. It’s MOSTLY open source, although some of the key parts like USB 2.0 are free to use, but not open source. So now that Red Hat’s Virtual Machine Manager is starting to look pretty useful I figured I should check it out. That way I could be using a FLOSS virtual machine program - assuming the features were good enough to match Oracle’s offerings. Also, Virtualbox requires a kernel module that has to be recompiled every time a new kernel is installed and that’s annoying. I figured I’d test out both programs by installed a VM of Centos.
This is the first time in nearly 10 years that I’m moving to a new version of WIndows. I pop the CD in and boot up. I see a text screen as Windows “loads files”.
Nothing here different from a Linux distro. Then the Windows logo pops up.
Well, the latest craze to hit the Linux bloggers is talking about Empathy. Everyone is talking about it. It’s apparently going to be in the next version of Gnome and Ubuntu is considering replacing Pidgin with Empathy for the next release. First of all, depending on how much work is done on Empathy between now and then, I think this may be a bad idea. Ubuntu is the distro we give our Linux n00b friends to play with. Pidgin can do (more or less) everything Trillian can do (and definitely everything AIM can do - except voice/vid). Do we want them thinking that Linux is crap because they are using the feature incomplete Empathy?
In an interesting game of Russian dolls Techalign released Pioneer Linux, based on Ubuntu, which in turn is based upon the venerable Debian Linux. Technically, they’ve based it off of Kubuntu which is a KDE spinoff of Ubuntu; they aren’t even using Ubuntu proper. So when they send patches upstream, are they sending them to Ubuntu or Debian? Check out their free version, live CD, or pay version.
Red Hat is moving from the Nasdaq to the New York Stock Exchange. Great for the bean counters, probably won’t mean much for us.
XZ Utils is a really awesome compression format. (In fact, earlier this month I got some Linux image files to run off an SD card that were compressed in xz
SSH uses XZ Utils
Only one guy was effectively maintaining it
Someone or some group pretending to be one person social engineered the maintainer to giving them commit access
they used that to put some backdoors
Because it’s in SSH it would have made every computer on the net vulnerable
LUCKILY it was found (by accident - see the Ars Technica story) before it made it out of most (all?) Linux distro test repositories
I was incredibly surprised to hear about it today on Planet Money’s episode: The hack that almost broke the Internet. It’s a really great episode to share with your non-techie friends who want to understand what you were stressed about and which it matters to everyone, not just techies. Of all the Linux distros, they start off interviewing someone from Red Hat! (My favorite Linux distro family) The episode then goes back to the 1980s to explain the origins of open source (not FLOSS, there’s no rms here - it’s Bruce Perens they interview) before bringing it back to the present and explaining the how the social engineering attack happened and what it affected. (Also a quick moment that explained how MS went from hating OSS to supporting it) I thought it was an incredibly well-produced episode that brings everything into context for those who aren’t neck-deep in Linux and/or open source. Give it a listen and pass it along!
I have not yet tried out Gnome Shell or Ubuntu Unity, but the biggest complaint most people level against them is that our desktops are being tablet-ified. Sure, there need to be new, innovative interfaces for tablets and phones, but that’s no reason to abandon the desktop. Sure, perhaps the average Joe (or Jane) will be using tablets more and more, but some of us have real work to get done. We need to do photo editing, programming, video editing, 3D modeling, and other tasks that require something more than a glorified smart phone. This is where KDE excels.
A few years ago I started hearing about ppas everywhere. More and more, I see developers telling people that if they want the latest of program X, they should load the developer’s ppa. A ppa is a repository of software that is neither maintained by Canonical nor the Ubuntu community. In some cases the software available via ppa is also available in the official repositories, just at a much slower pace since distros usually only provide major software version upgrades when they do a full system upgrade. In between they tend to just provide security updates and bug fixes. As usage of ppas grows, the user starts to have a system that is more like a rolling release than a snapshot of Debian’s testing branch. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, after all, a user’s system should do whatever the user wants it to do. I just wonder if the ever increasing usage of ppas will lead the Ubuntu community to switch to a rolling release style distro. Arch Linux users do enjoy having such a system, but they do admit that it can potentially lead to some instability if you upgrade right away when a new update comes through.
I first migrated to CrunchBang Linux because they kept talking about it on Linux Outlaws. Specifically they mentioned how fast it was and, if I recall correctly, Fab was using it on his netbook. My laptop battery life was quickly dwindling so, if I wanted to be able to use it on a plane, I needed a fast-booting distro. I enjoyed Crunchbang and the neat way it was setup. I loved just hitting Win-W to launch Firefox. Conky was really neat Terminator was the best term program I’d ever used. But it was getting a little long in the tooth. The most recent stable version was at least a year old if not 18 months old. It wasn’t keeping up with the Ubuntu releases. I was stuck using Firefox 3.0 (or some other such old version) Then came the announcement they were switching to a Debian base. Even if I stuck with CrunchBang, I’d be forced to reinstall anyway. So I decided to give Lubuntu a shot. I knew Ubuntu was too resource-heavy for my crappy battery life. I looked around and Lubuntu seemed to be the lightest - even lighter than Xubuntu. Could it match CrunchBang? CrunchBang took ten seconds from login to usable desktop and about 30 seconds until wifi was up.
This is the first time in nearly 10 years that I’m moving to a new version of WIndows. I pop the CD in and boot up. I see a text screen as Windows “loads files”.
Nothing here different from a Linux distro. Then the Windows logo pops up.
This is going to be the first time I look at a fresh install of Ubuntu in a long while. I first installed Ubuntu quite a while ago and then I just kept distro upgrading from there on. Then I installed Crunch Bang Linux on my laptop. So now I will be testing the installation. This may end up being a pretty short review because not much has changed from the previous Ubuntu, or so I hear. The biggest new change is the notification system. I’ll be sure to check that out.
A few days ago it was announced that the Ubuntu release after Jaunty Jackalope will be known as Karmic Koala. The funny thing is that a few months ago my friends and I were racking our brains for a K adjective and all we could come up with was Keen. I was sure it would be Keen Koala or Keen Kangaroo. The most interesting thing about Karmic Koala is that they will supposedly be considering getting away from brown. Then again, they’ve been going on and on about a new art style for a few releases now. We’ll see what they actually do. I’m mostly excited for the new notification style in Jaunty and to see if/how this will be implemented in Crunch Bang Linux.
This picture appeared in a blog that claims to be a hot girl in a wet ubuntu tshirt because she loves Ubuntu. I say that it claims because the tshirt was photoshopped to have the logo. However, my favorite part are the comments on digg.com. Here are some of my favorites: (reads like a bunch of nerdy pickup lines)
I’d open her source.
Soooo…. If I pretend I’m Ubuntu… can I penetrate that market?
System76, which sells customized Ubuntu laptops allows you to write in an get a free set of “Powered by Ubuntu” stickers. Thanks for offering this service! It was annoying me that my computer said it was perfect for Windows Vista Basic, when it’s running Ubuntu! So, I now have my Ubuntu stickers.
As a general rule, Linux users are not terribly prone to loyalty to any particular Linux distribution. This is due to the fact that open standards allow it to be generally pretty easy to move one’s settings from one distro to another. Thus there have been several darlings of the Linux movement. In the beginning, Slackware was introducted to server rooms and was the most popular. Then Red Hat Linux became the new distro to use with its easy to use GUIs. Mandrake (now Mandriva) became the best distro when Red Hat began to slow down their pace, leaving Mandrake as the most bleeding edge and easiest for new users. It was known for “just working” even if being on the bleeding edge also meant it was chronically unstable. Now the distro to be running is Ubuntu. It works flawlessly with most hardware, is easy to install, has a liveCD, and the great apt-get system to resolve package dependencies.
As you may have heard recently, Debian has a problem with Firefox due to the fact that the artwork is not released under a free license. This is an extension of problems they’ve had with GNU’s documentation and the clause that allows some parts to remain uneditable. So Debian has forked Firefox into IceWeasel. The engine and core program are the same, only the artwork is different.
This has caused a lot of name-calling back and forth between the two camps. Mark Shuttleworth, who’s Ubuntu is based in Debian, posted a reconcilatory post today whereby he called on both sides to respectfully disagree.
Here’s an example of when a rich person does something for the good of humanity. Sure, he mentions in the article that he wouldn’t mind making money, but he is genuinely doing good for the planet.
Ubuntu Linux encourages sharing and copying
10 May 2005
Free operating system Ubuntu Linux has been heralded as one of the most exciting software projects ever created, writes Michael Herman.
Ask software billionaire Mark Shuttleworth why he has dedicated so much of his time and money to open-source projects since selling his business in 1999, and he is likely to tell you he wants to make the world a better place.
XZ Utils is a really awesome compression format. (In fact, earlier this month I got some Linux image files to run off an SD card that were compressed in xz
SSH uses XZ Utils
Only one guy was effectively maintaining it
Someone or some group pretending to be one person social engineered the maintainer to giving them commit access
they used that to put some backdoors
Because it’s in SSH it would have made every computer on the net vulnerable
LUCKILY it was found (by accident - see the Ars Technica story) before it made it out of most (all?) Linux distro test repositories
I was incredibly surprised to hear about it today on Planet Money’s episode: The hack that almost broke the Internet. It’s a really great episode to share with your non-techie friends who want to understand what you were stressed about and which it matters to everyone, not just techies. Of all the Linux distros, they start off interviewing someone from Red Hat! (My favorite Linux distro family) The episode then goes back to the 1980s to explain the origins of open source (not FLOSS, there’s no rms here - it’s Bruce Perens they interview) before bringing it back to the present and explaining the how the social engineering attack happened and what it affected. (Also a quick moment that explained how MS went from hating OSS to supporting it) I thought it was an incredibly well-produced episode that brings everything into context for those who aren’t neck-deep in Linux and/or open source. Give it a listen and pass it along!
I remember back before CentOS became CentOS Stream there would always be a long lag time from RHEL releases until CentOS. That’s why I was so surprised to learn that Alma Linux 9.4 is also available today. What I found neatest about Alma is the way they’re distinguishing their distro. Why just go for another RHEL clone? Well, in this case Alma Linux is decided to support hardware that had been deprecated by Red Hat. So now they get to position their disto as a useful alternative, not just a free offering - more important now that you can have up to 16 free RHEL licenses.
Now that we’ve had a few months to consider Red Hat’s new course code policy, I wanted to share my thoughts since I’ve been a user of Red Hat’s Fedora since it started back in 2003. I’ve also made heavy use of CentOS and am currently running a server using one of the free RHEL licences that came about from the CentOS Stream controversy. I want to start off with my thoughts and then how I think we may end up in a better place anyway.
I remember back before CentOS became CentOS Stream there would always be a long lag time from RHEL releases until CentOS. That’s why I was so surprised to learn that Alma Linux 9.4 is also available today. What I found neatest about Alma is the way they’re distinguishing their distro. Why just go for another RHEL clone? Well, in this case Alma Linux is decided to support hardware that had been deprecated by Red Hat. So now they get to position their disto as a useful alternative, not just a free offering - more important now that you can have up to 16 free RHEL licenses.
Well, the latest craze to hit the Linux bloggers is talking about Empathy. Everyone is talking about it. It’s apparently going to be in the next version of Gnome and Ubuntu is considering replacing Pidgin with Empathy for the next release. First of all, depending on how much work is done on Empathy between now and then, I think this may be a bad idea. Ubuntu is the distro we give our Linux n00b friends to play with. Pidgin can do (more or less) everything Trillian can do (and definitely everything AIM can do - except voice/vid). Do we want them thinking that Linux is crap because they are using the feature incomplete Empathy?
I remember back before CentOS became CentOS Stream there would always be a long lag time from RHEL releases until CentOS. That’s why I was so surprised to learn that Alma Linux 9.4 is also available today. What I found neatest about Alma is the way they’re distinguishing their distro. Why just go for another RHEL clone? Well, in this case Alma Linux is decided to support hardware that had been deprecated by Red Hat. So now they get to position their disto as a useful alternative, not just a free offering - more important now that you can have up to 16 free RHEL licenses.
Now that we’ve had a few months to consider Red Hat’s new course code policy, I wanted to share my thoughts since I’ve been a user of Red Hat’s Fedora since it started back in 2003. I’ve also made heavy use of CentOS and am currently running a server using one of the free RHEL licences that came about from the CentOS Stream controversy. I want to start off with my thoughts and then how I think we may end up in a better place anyway.
On 8 Dec I saw the announcement that Red Hat (which had made CentOS an in-house distro a year or two ago) was changing CentOS from being a free clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to focusing solely on CentOS Stream. ( The CentOS press release; The Red Hat press release) This would make the progression of features and elements: Fedora -> CentOS Stream -> RHEL. At first, like many others, I felt hurt by this change. It will take place at the end of next year. Usually CentOS follows a support widow similar to that of RHEL, so I was expecting a decade or so for the servers I converted from CentOS 7 to CentOS 8. While I generally run Fedora on many of my computers, I prefer not to have to upgrade every 6 months for my servers. That’s a level of disruption I could do without. That said, after I read this blog post, I had a slightly more nuanced view of things. I still think it should have taken effect with CentOS 9, which I think is due in the next year or so (RH is accelerating releases of new RHELs). But it certainly makes a clearer upstream to downstream path for Red Hat.
This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects - some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll start in February.
February and March
Over these two months I worked on my replacement for web access to my Taskwarrior TODO list because Inthe.am had shut down. In February I got the podman containers set up - one to run the taskd server and one to run the website I’d coded up in Flask. In March I had to write some rudimentary Javascript to get the website to highlight the selected tab (Overdue, Today, This Month, etc). The rest of the interactivity on the site works using HTMX, letting me focus on Python instead of Javascript, but I just wasn’t able to get that part of the site to work without a tiny bit of Javascript. I also added some fixes because the date/time widget assumes UTC. Of course, now that I have it all working correctly and get lots of use for it (especially when I’m at work and I want to quickly get something out of my brain’s short-term buffer), Taskwarrior went to 3.0 which completely changes the way the program works, the API, and the way syncing works. I think in the end it’ll be for the best, but it’s annoying that I need to figure this out. That may involve finally learning how to use PyO3 to interact with Rust or re-writing part of my backend in Rust. We’ll have to see where that goes.
August was a programming-filled month for me. It focused entirely on Python and I mostly continued working on established projects. Let’s jump in!
Amortization
I wanted to re-calculate the amortization table for my home loan for the first time in about a year. As a refresher, I created this program (vs using Excel or an online form) because we are not consistent in the amount of extra principal payments we make. For example, if I get a bonus at work, I might throw all of that bonus into the loan payment. So this program takes variable extra payments into account when creating the amortization table.
A while ago I wrote about my first ever useful GUI program. And in one of the series of posts that followed I explained that the reason I hadn’t made a useful GUI program before now is because all the typical stuff has already been made over and over. We don’t need any more tetris clones, word processors, or music programs. Recently I had reason to create my second program. A while ago I created a an amortization calculator in python which you can find here.
What I love about programming is the instant feedback. In most programming languages, after you set up a framework for the barest bones of a program you can then run it at every step of the way to confirm that you are moving towards your goal. What I love second-most about programming is the fact that I am using my computer to solve a problem and free myself from tedium.
This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects - some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll start in February.
February and March
Over these two months I worked on my replacement for web access to my Taskwarrior TODO list because Inthe.am had shut down. In February I got the podman containers set up - one to run the taskd server and one to run the website I’d coded up in Flask. In March I had to write some rudimentary Javascript to get the website to highlight the selected tab (Overdue, Today, This Month, etc). The rest of the interactivity on the site works using HTMX, letting me focus on Python instead of Javascript, but I just wasn’t able to get that part of the site to work without a tiny bit of Javascript. I also added some fixes because the date/time widget assumes UTC. Of course, now that I have it all working correctly and get lots of use for it (especially when I’m at work and I want to quickly get something out of my brain’s short-term buffer), Taskwarrior went to 3.0 which completely changes the way the program works, the API, and the way syncing works. I think in the end it’ll be for the best, but it’s annoying that I need to figure this out. That may involve finally learning how to use PyO3 to interact with Rust or re-writing part of my backend in Rust. We’ll have to see where that goes.
August was a programming-filled month for me. It focused entirely on Python and I mostly continued working on established projects. Let’s jump in!
Amortization
I wanted to re-calculate the amortization table for my home loan for the first time in about a year. As a refresher, I created this program (vs using Excel or an online form) because we are not consistent in the amount of extra principal payments we make. For example, if I get a bonus at work, I might throw all of that bonus into the loan payment. So this program takes variable extra payments into account when creating the amortization table.
I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).
I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.
I didn’t do much coding in July, so I decided to combine the July and August wrap-ups.
Python
Dreamhost Dynamic DNS
I decided to clean up and update some code that uses the Dreamhost API to allow for Dynamic DNS. I cleaned up the logging output so that I could figure out why it was sometimes deleting one of my domains rather than just updating the IP. The original programmer had it printing out to the terminal. I used the logging package to send logs out to a file. While I was improving the logging, I also decided to use f-strings to make it more obvious what was going into the output string.
June was mostly Python, although I did do chapter 1 of Scratch 3 Games for Kids with Sam. He really, really enjoyed it and I anticipate doing the challenge problems and maybe chapter 2 in July or August.
Books
I read the intro and first couple chapters of both Flask Web Development, 2nd Edition and Data Visualization with Python and Javascript, both from a recent Humble Bundle. The Flask book may be useful for learning more about creating a non-Django site and, even if I mostly stick with FastAPI, it should provide some concepts that are applicable across both frameworks. With the data visualization book, I would love to use that to better visualize my annual Last.fm stats.
This is my seventh year raising money for Johns Hopkins Children’s Center via the Extra Life gaming charity. When I started back then I was brand new to streaming or recording video game play. In fact, just a few years before that I hadn’t even understood the point. I found out that you could somehow display your progress towards fundraising on your screen while you played. I had no idea how to do that and, at the time, I’d only done commandline programs. So I found bfinleyui’s web-based program. I set up XSplit (which I was using at the time) to capture the web pages and was able to have a great first year. The following year he created an app with Adobe Air that was even better. The GUI for this app would become the inspiration for ElDonationTracker; what I aspired to eventually build. My first commit to the repo for ElDonationTracker was that year. I was exploring how to get the API data via the commandline, but I wasn’t too hurried because I had the Adobe Air app. Unfortunately, the following year Adobe killed Adobe Air. So it was now time for me to try and make my own app. Unfortunately, I’d never done GUI programming before and my experiment with the TKinter GUI framework didn’t quite work.
Been quite busy with Python, keeping me away from other pursuits, like video games. (Although the kids have been requesting Spelunky 2 whenever it’s time to hang out with them)
Extra Life Donation Tracker (eldonationtracker)
For my Extra Life Donation Tracker I pushed out a new release, v5.2.2. A user of my program (man, I never get tired of how awesome that is!!) had wholly anonymous donors which was causing an issue I thought I’d handled. But it turns out that the folks that run the Donor Drive API are a little inconsistent in how they handle that in the donor endpoint vs the donations endpoint. So I pushed that fix out and now things should be dandy for game day (about 2 weeks away!!)
This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects - some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll start in February.
February and March
Over these two months I worked on my replacement for web access to my Taskwarrior TODO list because Inthe.am had shut down. In February I got the podman containers set up - one to run the taskd server and one to run the website I’d coded up in Flask. In March I had to write some rudimentary Javascript to get the website to highlight the selected tab (Overdue, Today, This Month, etc). The rest of the interactivity on the site works using HTMX, letting me focus on Python instead of Javascript, but I just wasn’t able to get that part of the site to work without a tiny bit of Javascript. I also added some fixes because the date/time widget assumes UTC. Of course, now that I have it all working correctly and get lots of use for it (especially when I’m at work and I want to quickly get something out of my brain’s short-term buffer), Taskwarrior went to 3.0 which completely changes the way the program works, the API, and the way syncing works. I think in the end it’ll be for the best, but it’s annoying that I need to figure this out. That may involve finally learning how to use PyO3 to interact with Rust or re-writing part of my backend in Rust. We’ll have to see where that goes.
I didn’t do much coding in July, so I decided to combine the July and August wrap-ups.
Python
Dreamhost Dynamic DNS
I decided to clean up and update some code that uses the Dreamhost API to allow for Dynamic DNS. I cleaned up the logging output so that I could figure out why it was sometimes deleting one of my domains rather than just updating the IP. The original programmer had it printing out to the terminal. I used the logging package to send logs out to a file. While I was improving the logging, I also decided to use f-strings to make it more obvious what was going into the output string.
This is my seventh year raising money for Johns Hopkins Children’s Center via the Extra Life gaming charity. When I started back then I was brand new to streaming or recording video game play. In fact, just a few years before that I hadn’t even understood the point. I found out that you could somehow display your progress towards fundraising on your screen while you played. I had no idea how to do that and, at the time, I’d only done commandline programs. So I found bfinleyui’s web-based program. I set up XSplit (which I was using at the time) to capture the web pages and was able to have a great first year. The following year he created an app with Adobe Air that was even better. The GUI for this app would become the inspiration for ElDonationTracker; what I aspired to eventually build. My first commit to the repo for ElDonationTracker was that year. I was exploring how to get the API data via the commandline, but I wasn’t too hurried because I had the Adobe Air app. Unfortunately, the following year Adobe killed Adobe Air. So it was now time for me to try and make my own app. Unfortunately, I’d never done GUI programming before and my experiment with the TKinter GUI framework didn’t quite work.
Been quite busy with Python, keeping me away from other pursuits, like video games. (Although the kids have been requesting Spelunky 2 whenever it’s time to hang out with them)
Extra Life Donation Tracker (eldonationtracker)
For my Extra Life Donation Tracker I pushed out a new release, v5.2.2. A user of my program (man, I never get tired of how awesome that is!!) had wholly anonymous donors which was causing an issue I thought I’d handled. But it turns out that the folks that run the Donor Drive API are a little inconsistent in how they handle that in the donor endpoint vs the donations endpoint. So I pushed that fix out and now things should be dandy for game day (about 2 weeks away!!)
I’ve mostly been working on version 5.0 of my Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since I adopted the Semantic Versioning principle for the project, an API change means a major version change. I’ve been taking everything I’ve learned about Python programming from 2019 and 2020 and tried to make my code both more Pythonic and more sophisticated. I’m also trying to move towards 100% code coverage. That is to say, I’m looking to try and make sure every line of code is covered by a test. While 100% test coverage doesn’t guarantee perfect code (after all, the test itself could be flawed or I might not be considering corner cases), striving for it usually has a few benefits:
I’m getting really close to finally getting this program to where I wanted it to be 4 years ago. My most recent release adds in the Team info to the GUI (and the previous release, which I didn’t blog about added team info in general). I’m getting feature requests and bug reports and all those kinds of encouraging things that make people want to provide programs for others. Also new as of a couple releases ago is the fact that I’m using Github’s CI (called Github Actions) to produce binaries for me that I can attach to releases to make it easier for folks to use the software.
After a bit more work since my 21 July post, I’ve finally reached what I can consider to be beta status for the GUI. Things have matured to the point where it works well on both Linux and Windows and I’m now using it every time I game. I created a bunch of issues on Github to track new features I want to add in order to get to what I think will be a 1.0 release. I’m excited at the progress I’ve made and that the software continues to have interest. As always, the code is available on Github. Here are videos on how to use the GUI:
If you follow the blog, you remember I’ve been working on a GUI for the donation tracker. Part of making that work involved changing the code to be object oriented. Also, it required moving the user-defined configs to be moved out of the main code. I’ve done that and finally tested that it works (I had a silly bug involving a typo that I had to correct) and merged the code into master over on the github repo. The new code required a change in the directions, so I made new instructional videos to go along with those changes:
Three years ago I created ELDonationTracker to use the Extra Life API to provide donation alerts on my screen while I’m streaming or recording games. About a year and a half ago, I actually had to start using it because the previous donation tracker I’d been using stopped being maintained. Since then I’ve been steadily improving it, but there’s still a bit of functionality for the alerts when someone donates that I was missing by running a commandline utility. A year ago I tried creating a GUI with Tkinter, but I just found it too hard to figure out. What I really wanted anyway was to do it in QT or QML. A few months ago I saw that it appeared the company being QT was going to finally take Python seriously. While looking up some tutorials on PyQT I found out that I could use QT Designer to do a WYSIWYG design and then a simple utility to convert it to Python code. Since designing GUIs is a real drag and takes away time from doing the coding to make the GUI work, I was jazzed. So I threw this together over a couple days, copying the interface from the program that was no longer maintained:
I’ve been hearing about the members of the Giant Bombcast talk about participating in the Extra Life video game marathon for a few years now. For some reason, when the 2014 event happened, I decided to look into it to see if I could participate this year. When I started looking into it around a month ago, I realized I wouldn’t be able to participate in the big 24 hour day because that’s when someone’s getting married. But, then I found out that the organizers are OK with creativity in the marathon was run. There are others, like me, who raise money and play games throughout the year.
This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects - some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll start in February.
February and March
Over these two months I worked on my replacement for web access to my Taskwarrior TODO list because Inthe.am had shut down. In February I got the podman containers set up - one to run the taskd server and one to run the website I’d coded up in Flask. In March I had to write some rudimentary Javascript to get the website to highlight the selected tab (Overdue, Today, This Month, etc). The rest of the interactivity on the site works using HTMX, letting me focus on Python instead of Javascript, but I just wasn’t able to get that part of the site to work without a tiny bit of Javascript. I also added some fixes because the date/time widget assumes UTC. Of course, now that I have it all working correctly and get lots of use for it (especially when I’m at work and I want to quickly get something out of my brain’s short-term buffer), Taskwarrior went to 3.0 which completely changes the way the program works, the API, and the way syncing works. I think in the end it’ll be for the best, but it’s annoying that I need to figure this out. That may involve finally learning how to use PyO3 to interact with Rust or re-writing part of my backend in Rust. We’ll have to see where that goes.
Just a few thoughts on programming languages that have been rattling around in my head this week, but which don’t each merit a full blog post. The main theme is that the culture behind each programming language leads to some interesting choices, as is the case with spoken languages.
This week I started learning how to program in Rust. Even though I’m using the project-based Command-Line Rust to learn, the author still went with the traditional “Hello, world!” project for the first intro to the language. I was also working on a Go project last week and so it immediately stood out to me that (at least as taught by this author) Rust has the print! macro that allows you to succinctly print to the command line. By contrast, Go requires importing fmt before you can print. This was the first topic that was swirling around in my head this week. What makes language designers choose whether printing output (one of the most basic things a program can do) is built-in or requires an import. I even remember back when I was learning Java in undergrad (I think it was Java 1.8, but I don’t remember) we had to use the savitch library just to get program input (another very basic computer program concept). As I thought about it, I wondered if it has to do with thoughts around compilation and whether the language designers think you’re mostly making user-interactive programs or libraries? It makes sense to me that scripting languages like Python, Ruby, and Perl would have print built-in since you always have to have the interpreter along with you, so all the basics should be there. (The original Batteries Included Python promise, for example) But perhaps the Go developers thought you wouldn’t always be printing to the command line so a more efficient binary could be compiled by forcing you to import the functionality? I’m not entirely sure.
In March I continued to work on my programming projects as well as a little more Advent of Code.
Things started off with me finishing up my dreamhostapi and Dreamhost_DNS_Go projects in Golang. I got the API working under all the conditions that I need and I worked on both the output of the program and the logging. It now functions quite well for me to keep my dynamic DNS URLs up to date. My next step is something I’m going to do in a few of my cron scripts - have a separate JSON log that could be interpreted so that I could either have a daily email to let me know that the scripts all ran correctly or so that I can load them into Prometheus/Grafana to see on a dashboard how all my scripts are doing.
I recently used Mastodon to ask for recommendations for Go podcasts and one of the suggestions was Go Time. One of the recent episodes in the feed was a rerun of an older episode about " How Go helped saved HealthCare.Gov". This was extra interesting to me since I wrote my Master’s Special Project on Healthcare.gov. (I haven’t read it in nearly a decade, so I don’t know if it’s cringe-worthy at this point). The episode had on one of the programmers who helped get things back on track for the site. It was incredibly informative about the problems that led to the site not being responsive enough and how they were able to help fix it without scrapping the entire site. No matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on or if you’re even an American, the episode is fascinating for understanding how things can go wrong even when everyone has the best intentions and how to fix a large, complex code base.
January was a relatively light programming month for me. I was focused on finishing up end of year blog posts and other tasks. Since Lastfmeoystats is used to generate the stats I need for my end of year music post, I worked on it a little to make some fixes. The biggest fix was to change the chart titles not to be hardcoded. I didn’t realize it until I was reviewing my blog post, but I had hard-coded the year when I first wrote the code a couple years ago. I also changed the limits on some of the data I was collecting so that I could do more expansive trending for my overall stats.
December was wholly dedicated to solving the Advent of Code 2022 problem set. Our job was to help the elves trek through the jungle to get magical starfruit. It was a lot of fun to do it live once again! This year I also had experience from the previous years (both live and on my own pace) that gave me the skills to solve some of the puzzles, including some puzzles that were variations on themes I’d seen before. In the end, I collected 36 stars, near my average for number of stars collected during AoC. Between work, family commitments, my programming and problem solving skill levels, that’s about the most I can usually do during the live period in December.
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
This month I wanted to practice Go outside of Advent of Code puzzles. So I decided I would port over my Dreamhost DNS updating script from Python to Go. This would have the advantage of being a compiled program. Every time I update Python on my system, the virtual environment points to the wrong Python version and my program breaks. But, boy is parsing JSON in Go (at least with the built-in JSON tools) a real pain in the butt. I have to make a struct to hold and parse the data, but it comes back from Dreamhost as a 1-key dictionary holding an array of dictionaries. After a few hours of trying to figure out how to get Go to parse the JSON I was still unable to get the struct right. I may do a little debugging to see if I can figure it out before searching for any simpler JSON libraries.
Across both September and October I got a decent amount of programming done. I just about finished the Learn You Haskell for Great Good book (got up to just before Monads) and started Head First Go. Once I had enough Go language to get started on AoC, I knew I’d be ready for the 2016 problem set. Let’s get into the nitty gritty!
Python (not Advent of Code)
Impractical Python
I finished chapter 11 which contained my old friend the Monty Hall Paradox. I’ve had a version up on my site for a very long time based on a PHP tutorial in Linux Format Magazine. This time I was able to code it in Python as well as creating a GUI version. Chapter 11 also touched upon The Birthday Paradox.
When most people think of the GPL, if they think of it at all, they tend to think of Linux and perhaps other operating systems. However, there are many benefits to using the GPL for programs on a smaller level. For example there is a Go Application in Facebook. This programmer could have gone through the near impossible headache of creating an implementation of Go.
However, as Wikipedia mentions, it is very tough to create sofware to play go, “While the strongest computer chess software has defeated top players ( Deep Blue beat the world champion in 1997), the best Go programs only manage to reach an average amateur level.” This has to do with the high complexity level of the game’s strategy.
This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects - some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll start in February.
February and March
Over these two months I worked on my replacement for web access to my Taskwarrior TODO list because Inthe.am had shut down. In February I got the podman containers set up - one to run the taskd server and one to run the website I’d coded up in Flask. In March I had to write some rudimentary Javascript to get the website to highlight the selected tab (Overdue, Today, This Month, etc). The rest of the interactivity on the site works using HTMX, letting me focus on Python instead of Javascript, but I just wasn’t able to get that part of the site to work without a tiny bit of Javascript. I also added some fixes because the date/time widget assumes UTC. Of course, now that I have it all working correctly and get lots of use for it (especially when I’m at work and I want to quickly get something out of my brain’s short-term buffer), Taskwarrior went to 3.0 which completely changes the way the program works, the API, and the way syncing works. I think in the end it’ll be for the best, but it’s annoying that I need to figure this out. That may involve finally learning how to use PyO3 to interact with Rust or re-writing part of my backend in Rust. We’ll have to see where that goes.
I started off the year mostly working on Python projects. For January and February I finally started making some great progress with understanding modern web frameworks and use of CSS frameworks rather than rolling my own. This not only helped with the Prophecy Practicum project, but would form the backbone to a lot of coding this year. I also wrote a utility to tally up my videos for my end of year video game roundup, saving me literal hours of time. As you can read from following the link above, I also worked on my long-running Extra Life Donation Tracker code.
I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).
I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.
This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects - some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll start in February.
February and March
Over these two months I worked on my replacement for web access to my Taskwarrior TODO list because Inthe.am had shut down. In February I got the podman containers set up - one to run the taskd server and one to run the website I’d coded up in Flask. In March I had to write some rudimentary Javascript to get the website to highlight the selected tab (Overdue, Today, This Month, etc). The rest of the interactivity on the site works using HTMX, letting me focus on Python instead of Javascript, but I just wasn’t able to get that part of the site to work without a tiny bit of Javascript. I also added some fixes because the date/time widget assumes UTC. Of course, now that I have it all working correctly and get lots of use for it (especially when I’m at work and I want to quickly get something out of my brain’s short-term buffer), Taskwarrior went to 3.0 which completely changes the way the program works, the API, and the way syncing works. I think in the end it’ll be for the best, but it’s annoying that I need to figure this out. That may involve finally learning how to use PyO3 to interact with Rust or re-writing part of my backend in Rust. We’ll have to see where that goes.
While a book about web technologies is undoubtablely going to get out of date (especially when Javascript is involved), I would definitely recommend this book if you want to do some data visualization either as part of your job or for an undergrad, grad, or PhD project. While I would probably use FastAPI rather than Flask, I heard recently that the Javascript library the author uses, D3, is still one of the best in class libraries for this kind of work.
This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects - some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll start in February.
February and March
Over these two months I worked on my replacement for web access to my Taskwarrior TODO list because Inthe.am had shut down. In February I got the podman containers set up - one to run the taskd server and one to run the website I’d coded up in Flask. In March I had to write some rudimentary Javascript to get the website to highlight the selected tab (Overdue, Today, This Month, etc). The rest of the interactivity on the site works using HTMX, letting me focus on Python instead of Javascript, but I just wasn’t able to get that part of the site to work without a tiny bit of Javascript. I also added some fixes because the date/time widget assumes UTC. Of course, now that I have it all working correctly and get lots of use for it (especially when I’m at work and I want to quickly get something out of my brain’s short-term buffer), Taskwarrior went to 3.0 which completely changes the way the program works, the API, and the way syncing works. I think in the end it’ll be for the best, but it’s annoying that I need to figure this out. That may involve finally learning how to use PyO3 to interact with Rust or re-writing part of my backend in Rust. We’ll have to see where that goes.
I started off the year mostly working on Python projects. For January and February I finally started making some great progress with understanding modern web frameworks and use of CSS frameworks rather than rolling my own. This not only helped with the Prophecy Practicum project, but would form the backbone to a lot of coding this year. I also wrote a utility to tally up my videos for my end of year video game roundup, saving me literal hours of time. As you can read from following the link above, I also worked on my long-running Extra Life Donation Tracker code.
Another year, another look at my music trends for the year. It was another year of music acquisition (supporting the artists, ftw! - I knew Spotify wasn’t paying artists well, but Corey Doctorow’s book, Chokepoint Capitalism really brought home how much they’re screwing over artists), although I think things may slow down in 2023. Here are the albums I purchased in 2023:
The Protomen - Presents: A Night of Queen
Encantó soundtrack
Moderator - The World Within
Kognitif - Soul Food
MxPx - Horns, Plans within Plans, Let’s Rock, Left Coast Punk EP, The Rennaisance EP
Packy Lundholm - Track Sabbath Vol 1
Lana Del Rey - Blue Banisters
Catbite - Nice One
Macroblank - entire discography - 14 albums
Vicente Garcia - Lomas de Cayenas
Girl Ultra - Nuevos Aires
The Shape of Ska Punk to Come
Me Like Bees - Songs from The Realm
Kill Lincoln - Can’t Complain
Jokabi - Chilltendo Deluxe
Turning Red Soundtrack
We Are the Union - Ordinary Life
Chillhop Music - Essentials Spring 2022, Essentials Summer 2022, Essentials Fall 2022
This year I was able to attend the Paul and Storm / JoCo concert that COVID stole from me last year. While there I bought the entire Paul and Storm discography, but I think because I listened to it so much on Spotify in the past, I didn’t listen to it as much as I thought I would.
This was not one of those years where I came out ahead by not paying for Spotify. I bought a lot of albums, including starting on my quest to get the entire MxPx back catalog from the time I stopped listening in high school until now. (This is reflected in this year’s numbers)
Thanks to COVID I missed out on the concert where I was going to see Paul and Storm and Jonathan Coulton. Compared to last year, I also barely bought any music.
This year I switched from using Ampache to listen to my music at work, to using Funkwhale. The more responsive interface has led to me playing a lot more albums as well as doing “artist radio” mode which plays all of an artists’ songs at random. This may have concentrated the scrobbles rather than having them be as random as in the past. That said, I did make good use of Funkwhale’s “Less Listened” radio to keep things fresh. At home I’ve been using Cantata’s “similar artists” dynamic playlists a lot which may also have contributed to a concentration of artists this year.
In 2019 I went to 5 concerts, starting with Neon Trees and Fitz & The Tantrums in May. Then I saw a bunch of my favorite smaller bands like The MiSbehavin’ Maidens, The Doubleclicks, Lionize, and The PDX Broadsides. Anberlin came out of retirement and so it was great to go see them in concert again for the first time in years.
I also got a LOT of albums in 2019. Some were Kickstarted and others were freely available. Others still were purchased for family members. Here is a mostly complete list of all the albums I added to my collection in 2019:
This year my music listening is under-counted because of a few factors. 1) Spotify scrobbling stopped working at work, 2) I listened to a lot of bandcamp at work (not scrobbled), and 3) for K-Pop I mostly just watch it on Youtube (not scrobbled). That said, I have been listening to music slightly more often. I’ve spent the last couple months listening to music that I’ve never listened to on my computer (as far as Amarok knows), so while that’s contributed to scrobbles, it’s going to mean that the scrobbles are going to be long-tail, ie they won’t make dents in the counts of top artists, songs, etc.
For now, my music listening continues to be in decline relative to earlier in my life. Because the babies are often napping, I don’t have music playing throughout the day. And if I’m playing video games I’m usually not listening to music so I can stream. That said, when I do listen to Spotify at work, it usually Scrobbles and that has increased the number a bit higher than it would have otherwise been.
Lots of artists made their spot because I attended a concert or discovered them this year and got very enthusiastic about listening to this new artist. There are also lots of Spotify scrobbles, but not as many as there would be if work’s firewall didn’t keep scrobbles from being counted.
Artists
Anberlin (427 listens)
Fall Out boy (239 listens)
Jim Guthrie (221 listens)
I Fight Dragons (214 listens)
Paul and Storm (190 listens) - A nerdy folksy group that I really like. Their irreverence is my kind of fun.
The Beatles (136 listens)
Anamanaguchi (130 listens)
Lionize (130 listens)
Five Iron Frenzy (128 listens)
Louis Jordan (113 listens)
The Protomen (104 listens)
Beebs and Her Money Makers (104 listens)
Willy Chirino (93 listens)
Katy Perry (93 listens)
Ignacio Cervantes (92 listens)
Songs
Interestingly, only two new songs made the list this year - Talking Body and Know Yourself. Because I don’t listen to the radio, I discovered these via Spotify. The rest are all older songs that I happened to listen to a lot. And Chandelier came from Danielle getting the album and asking me to play it in the car.
This was not a big quarter for listening to music for me. That’s mostly because Sam and Stella were born and so I didn’t have much ability to listen to music as I needed to be able to hear if they were crying or if someone needed help with them. According to last.fm I went from 1,104 scrobbles in Oct to 288 in November.
Beebs and Her Money Makers (94 listens) - one of the songs came up randomly in Amarok which led me to listen through the albums a few times.
The Beatles (55 listens)
Kenny Clarke (44 listens) - A Fresh Air review of a new collection got me interested in him so I added it to my Spotify tracks. Really fun music.
Anberlin (34 listens)
DJ Cutman (33 listens) - I don’t know why, but I ended up with a lot of DJ Cutman music on my new phone and since I don’t like to use bandwidth while I’m driving, I’ve listened to it a lot in the car.
Ignacio Cervantes (32 listens)
Fall Out Boy (29 listens)
Danny Elfman (28 listens)
Katy Perry (26 listens) - all from Scarlett requests
Relent K (25 listens)
Five Iron Frenzy (24 listens)
Jonathan Geer (19 listens)
Vampire Weekend (18 listens) - heard a song so I wanted to re-explore the band. Some of the songs still hit me hard and others have faded.
Sergei Prokofiev (17 listens)
Anamanaguchi 16 listens)
Stats:Total Songs (in my collection): 16985 (Up from 16088 ) – Mostly from buying CDs with 100 tracks of various classical artists.
After getting to MGMT alphabetically, I tired of going through the list alphabetically. While I have rediscovered some music, I wanted to go back to my auto-playlists which would give me my favorites. I could always get back to going through things alphabetically in the future. One way to accomplish what I wanted was to see which songs don’t have a score - another would be to create a low score playlist I could run every once in a while to see if anything that had scored lowly was now something I wanted to hear.
1. Anberlin (171) - Almost the same number of listens as my top artist last quarter (179 for I Fight Dragons). As usual, I continue to enjoy their music and have grown to appreciate some of the ones I didn’t like before. And some of the older stuff seems trite in comparison.
2. Jim Guthrie (168) - As I’ve mentioned before, his folk song compositions are mostly really enjoyable and I like his work on video games and soundtracks.
3. Paul & Storm (138) - I discovered these guys via John Scalzi. I was hesitant to back the Kickstarter for Ball Pit, but I’ve been enjoying the heck out of it on Spotify.
4. Fall Out Boy (101) - A lot of this is from a few recent road trips in which I didn’t want to use data and happened to have Fall Out Boy already on my phone. Doesn’t mean I don’t like the music.
5. Jonathan Coulton (61) - I’ve said so much about how much I enjoy this over the years. Recently Scarlett’s been asking me to play The Princess Who Saved Herself because I got her the book from Greg Pak’s kickstarter.
6. Louis Jorda n (58) - I like to kick it to Louis Jordan on the weekends when I want something classic.
7. Anamanaguchi (56) - Some of this was from the high of seeing them live. Some of it was just from really enjoying the music no matter what, especially Endless Fantasy.
8. Jack White (54) - Another artist I’ve been listening to a lot of because of Spotify. His album Lazaretto does not do well on 30 second preview on Amazon. But because of Spotify, I want to buy the album.
9. Kanye West (42) - Most of this came from listening to my music alphabetically.
10. Lostprophets (41) - I may hate what the singer was accused of doing, but these songs still mostly rock.
10. Lana Del Rey (41) - Something I can throw on that both my wife and I like
12. Willy Chirino (34) - Most of the listens came from a greatest hits album on Spotify.
13. Buddy Rich (33) - Another album I wasn’t sure I wanted until I listened to it on Spotify. It reminds me a lot of the music in Cowboy Bebop
13. Five Iron Frenzy (33) - Perennial Favorite
15. Thelonious Monk (31) - something else I like to throw on Sunday mornings.
1. I Fight Dragons (179 plays) - Over this quarter I have continued to really enjoy the B Side to The Near Future and listened to them a lot after work. Scarlett likes quite a few of those songs as well.
2. Anberlin (74 plays) - For the concert last year I put all their albums on my phone. So when I listen to my music already on the phone, Anberlin comes up a lot.
Once again Scarlett had a hand in determining the year’s winners. However, sometime around June she stopped requesting Disney music all the time, allowing others a chance at the spotlight. Still, while other artists were able to take the top artist spots, I didn’t listen to any one song often enough to undermine the Disney songs taking the top spots there.
Artists
1. Alan Menken (450 listens) - THE Disney songwriter
2. Mandy Moore (332 listens) - 100% all of these are from the Tangled soundtrack
2. Five Iron Frenzy (332 listens) - I just enjoyed the heck out of FIF music this year.
4. The Beatles (329 listens) - As usual, this is a mix of me picking something different when the family’s together and just enjoying listening to it myself.
5. Anberlin (247 listens) - I had Google Music load all the albums to my phone in preparation for the concert. This means when I listen to music in the car, Anberlin is very likely to come up.
6 .I Fight Dragons (207 listens) - As I mentioned in the Q4 post, most of this is due to the new album coming out this year.
7. Donna Murphy (139 listens) - A great performance on the Tangled soundtrack.
8. Chance the Rapper (116 listens) - Many of these are from early in the year. I still really enjoy Acid Rap, but am also ready for something new.
9. “Weird Al” Yankovic (115 listens) - A new album produced most of these scrobbles. It’d be slightly higher if the Android app didn’t have a problem with the quotation marks in the artist name.
10. Childish Gambino (113 listens) - I went through as part of listening to my music in alphabetical order. It reinforced that I probably am done with him for now. Lyrically my wife can’t stand it and I shouldn’t listen to it in front of the toddler.
11. Celia Cruz (100 listens) - The Queen of Salsa.
12. Brad Kane (97 listens) - From the Aladdin soundtrack.
13. The Beach Boys (96 listens) - I continue to love Pet Sounds.
14. Billie Holiday (93 listens) - She’s so great it’s too bad she isn’t really played on many radio stations anymore.
15. Jonathan Coulton (92 listens) - Wow, didn’t realize I listened to so much JoCo.
1. Five Iron Frenzy (147 listens) - Many of these came from me continuing to go through my collection in alphabetical order.
2. I Fight Dragons (102 listens) - IFD’s Kickstarter album finally came out. I really like it a lot. I’ve been listening to the B side more than the song cycle, but that’s mostly because those are more easily listened to here and there while the song cycle is best heard all at once.
3. Anberlin (98 listens) - Tried to listen to a bunch of Anberlin to get ready for their farewell concert.
4. Fantastic Plastic Machine (71 listens) - Also from the alphabetical listen.
5. Fall Out Boy (63 listens) - Partly from the alphabetical listen and partly from Scrobbles from Spotify of their new singles.
6. Final Fantasy (Soundtracks) (50 listens) - from the alphabetical listens.
7. Edith Piaf (44 listens) - from the alphabetical listens. I’d completely forgotten we had a bunch of her music. We used to listen to it more often.
7. Doctor Octoroc (44 listens) - from the alphabetical listens. I really don’t like the albums anymore.
9. Willy Chirino (43 listens) - Mostly from listening to his great Christmas album. The only Spanish-language Christmas album I have.
10. Relient K (41 listens) - I felt nostalgic for some Relient K. Still love the earlier stuff.
11. DC Talk (40 listens) - While I still like some of the songs, others have not aged well.
12. Dj CUTMAN (39 listens) - I just love these remixes.
13. Celia Cruz (38 listens) - Put on some Celia because Scarlett really likes to dance to salsa.
14. Elvis Presley (35 listens) - Going through my collection of #1s.
15. Taylor Swift (32 listens) - Danielle got the new album and, unsurprisingly for Ms Swift, it’s quite catchy.
This quarter was a mix of new music, continuing to listen to my music in alphabetical order (by artist), and whatever I happened to listen to on my phone. And that resulted in a little something like this (a lot more ties than usual):
1. The Beatles (243 listens) - For the first time in a long time the Fab Four are back on top. I continue to love their later stuff although their older stuff is played out having spent my childhood listening to oldies.
I started 2014 with a bunch of music I’d acquired in 2013, but which I still hadn’t listened to. So I created a playlist with a high weight on unplayed music from Q4 2013 to Q1 2014. I changed my Amarok settings so that instead of populating the next 11 items, it would populate the next 3. That way if I was getting bored with the new music (a lot of which is music I got for free so sometimes it’s awesome (to my tastes) and sometimes it’s just OK) I could switch to another dynamic playlist for a while and I’d just be three songs away from hearing some music I know I like. I also bought an album with 100 of the best Beethoven compositions. However, since I’m scrobbling the orchestra that played it (not the composer), I’m not sure if any of them will end up dominating the list. (They didn’t)
This year I bought LOTS of albums. I don’t know if it’s the most albums I’ve purchased in one year since writing these blog posts or even since keeping track of Scrobbles. I do know that while I listened to my music randomly, in general, I did also listen to entire albums whenever I purchased one. Sometimes I’d listen to the album a few times and other times I’d take the album purchase as an opportunity to review the artist’s previous work. I know that was the case with Five Iron Frenzy (although that was also concert prep as I mentioned a few days ago), Relient K, I Fight Dragons, and Fall Out Boy. It was a very fun year for me, musically. Kacey Musgraves, for example, was a reminder that country music doesn’t have to suck. Disclosure made me realize that I could still like loop-heavy electronic music. I hope that I can continue to explore new sounds in 2014.
This quarter I mostly listened to my music on pure random with a few variations which’ll be accounted for below. This finally allowed The Beatles to place in 2013. In the last few weeks I just listened to music that I added in this quarter to make sure I had a chance to get to know some of the newer songs.
This quarter was a mix of listening to the music I had at work and listening on pure random. Once again Amarok lost the first played and last played stats. Of all the stats to lose, these are the least detrimental, but it makes the “don’t play songs I’ve heard in the last x days” playlists not work. So I just went on pure random and rediscovered some music I’d forgotten about. Once again no Beatles on the top 15. We’ll see if they can rectify that next quarter. (Note: I have added Amazon affiliate links this time around. If you use them to buy the music, it helps support this site)
For the second quarter in a row The Beatles have NOT made the list! But that’s easily explained: I have been listening to a lot of new music and a lot of playlists that don’t include The Beatles. But as you’ll see, they kinda snuck in sideways. This quarter I spent a lot of time listening to Jonathan Coulton and I Fight Dragons because of their Kickstarters, which I backed. I Fight Dragons released two albums as Kickstarter bonuses - a live recording of their most recent concert and a remix album of sorts in which the band members sung different arrangements of the songs. There was also the new Fall Out Boy album, Save Rock and Roll. I really enjoyed the album but it was overtaken in my mind by the previously mentioned IFD and JoCo music and I quickly forgot they had a new album out. Again, that’s a shame since I did enjoy it and while I was in Florida last week I quickly tired of “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark”. Incidentally, I was reminded of why I stopped listening to live radio - it’s far too repetitive. I think the true problem is that it’s too formulaic in its repetition. I didn’t mind hearing “The Princess Who Saved Herself” every day for a week because the songs surrounding it were always different. On a separate note, I got some music for Father’s Day and I’ll mention that below.
For this quarter I’ve gone back and forth between picking albums to listen to and having dynamic playlists determine what I listen to. For most of March I was listening to a bunch of free South by Southwest samplers with some pretty GREAT music. Not a lot of repeat among the artists there so none of them appear on this list. Some of those songs could potentially end up in the most listened song list at the end of the year.
In 2012 I accelerated my trend of listening to new music. More than ever, I experienced new music via various outlets that provided free music like Jamendo, Rolling Stone, and others. I discovered some great music that I really, really enjoyed. Since it mostly consisted of singles, a lot of the new artists I discovered aren’t really represented in the lists here, but it does contribute to lower numbers for the usual artists.
Throughout the month of October I alternated between listening to newly acquired music (of which I had quite a bit) and a dynamic playlist that was weighted so that most of the music had auto-ratings above 90, less music above 75, and even less above 50. Any song that I listened to only once would fit in the third category. After that, if I skipped it just once it would fall out of the group. So it gave me a nice mix of music including forgotten favorites. Now that I’ve listened to a good chunk of my library since the last time the Amarok database was corrupted I may modify the playlist to include the caveat that it couldn’t have been played in the last x days. I’m not sure if I want to make the date large enough that I only hear songs once per quarter or my standard two week waiting period. Given how little time I have to listen to music nowadays I might go for the 90 days. I also spent some chunks of time listening to my music on random on Google Music. That’s completely random so I end up hearing some songs I didn’t even remember ever acquiring. A lot of my new music came from Jamendo when I got an email with the month’s most popular songs and I decided to do a search for ska. Although I really enjoy ska, I got into it rather late so I don’t have very much ska music. (Mostly just Five Iron Frenzy, Save Ferris, No Doubt, and the Orange County Supertones - who are an OK ska band - I mostly like their least ska songs)
For the first time since I started keeping track The Beatles did NOT make the list! That’s mostly because I have been acquiring TONS of new music (over one thousand tracks) in this quarter and haven’t really been listening on random as much. Although my #1 artist doesn’t have as many listens as some other quarters, I think this is the first (or second, at most) time where my #15 artist has more than 20 listens. There are some great new artists making their debuts on my list and hopefully you can discover some new music to listen to!
I started off this quarter using a smart playlist that only played songs I hadn’t heard in the last quarter in an attempt to listen to even more great music, but Amarok lost my library which clears out the last played field and so I ended up with lots of repeats again. Oh well! It’s all great music!
1. Five Iron Frenzy (65 plays) - I continued to listen to some great music from my high school years
This quarter my listens were a bit lower than they would otherwise have been because a lot of time I would have spent in front of the computer was spent with my new daughter. But, as she grew and now spends time in her “baby gym”, I sometimes put on music for her both so that she can hear complex music and for my sanity. There are only so many times I can listen to “itsy bitsy spider”.
So here’s my top listened artists for 2011. Some of these entries are a surprise and others are expected. I can’t wait to see how many of these artists are on this list next year. Well, let’s take a look.
1. The Beatles (492) - No surprises here; the ancestors of nearly all pop and rock in America has been on top every quarter. So of course they’d top this list.
For the last fourth of the year I continued to listen to my music on random via Amarok’s dynamic playlist. I set it to only play songs that I liked, but other than that left it up to chance. For the most part, the only exceptions were when I had exams to take and wanted some non-vocal music or to listen to new songs I’d downloaded from Rolling Stone’s website. Here’s how the artists fared.
For this Quarter I continued listening to my music in order as I attempted to go through my entire catalog so that Amarok could auto-rate the songs I liked and I could switch to a dynamic, random playlist. I actually finished going through all my music A-Z (and Japanese characters) - except for songs that didn’t have the Album Artist set.
Through a quirk of the way Amarok is programmed and the sorting I’ve selected, a bunch of artists who had the Album Artist blank did not appear along with the artist. In other words, if a Kanye West track had an album artist of either Kanye or Various, it would appear under Kanye. But if that field was blank, it appeared under “various artist” at the top. It’s a strange quirk and as I go through this final category in Q4, I’m trying to remember to fix as many of those as possible.
I started off this quarter ending my random listening. I wanted to listen to certain artists I really enjoyed. I figured I could go back to random once I got bored of choosing the artists I was listening to. Additionally, in between picking certain artists if I wanted to hear a certain song, I started going through my library alphabetically by artist. Let’s see how these trends panned out over the quarter.
I wanted to take a look at my music listening habits quarterly to see how each quarter’s stats stack up against the final numbers at the end of the year. I started off the year listening to some of the new artists I’d bought, then just switched to random listens for the rest of the quarter.
1. Girl Talk (294 plays) - I discovered Girl Talk at the end of 2010. I really enjoyed the latest album. Quickly acquired the rest of his albums. I enjoy all of them other than the first one. Listened to each of the albums a few times. Then when I put my playlist on random, of course a few of them kept coming up because of how many tracks there were.
2. Doctor Octoroc (279 plays) - I got into chip tunes at the end of 2010/beginning 2011 via I Fight Dragons. That caused me to check out Anamanaguchi, who Dan had been recommending for a while. Then I came across Doctor Octoroc. Got his chiptunes version of the Dr Horrible soundtrack and his chiptunes album “After These Messages”. Enjoyed it for a while. Quickly tired of it. I don’t think I’ve listened to it once since the initial push.
3. The Beatles (132 plays) - I went through my Beatles rush in 2010 when I first got all the songs. The Beatles are in third place solely on the basis of having SO MANY songs that they’re bound to come up often why I’m listening to my entire collection on random.
4. I Fight Dragons (109 plays) - I have all three of their EPs. One was available for joining the mailing list - the other two I bought. I really enjoy this group. They’re a regular rock band that embellishes their sound with chiptunes. The topics are not as nerdy as you’d expect from a chiptunes band. They have a good sound, the singer has a good voice, and the songs are good. I wouldn’t say they’re awesome, but they’re enjoyable enough that I always get happy when their CDs come up in my rotation of CD-Rs are work.
5. Anberlin (89 plays) - I own all their CDs so I’m surprised they didn’t come up more often. I like all their albums to varying degrees. I’m partial to their earlier work, although their latest CD had me falling for them again.
6. Relient K (54 plays) - I also own all of their CDs. Although the first two CDs are awful compared to their later albums, there are still a few songs I enjoy on the first two. I’m not a big fan of their absolute latest album, it forays a bit more into a country type of sound. I’ll probably have to listen to previews of their next CD rather than blindly buying it.
7. “Weird Al” Yankovic (49 plays) - I have a ton of his songs, but I often had to skip them to keep from annoying Danielle. Perhaps now that I’m mostly listening with headphones there’ll be more listens.
8. Billy Joel (43 plays) - nearly all of these plays come from a greatest hits album of his that I bought. Around this time, I stopped listening at random in order to listen to my newly bought music.
9. Five Iron Frenzy (40 plays) - I’m a huge fan of Five Iron Frenzy, but they’ve fallen to the wayside as I’ve explored other non-ska music recently
10. MxPx (33 plays) - I hadn’t heard any MxPx music in a long time. They were one of my favorite bands from middle school through high school. But I hadn’t listened to any of the three of four albums I own in a long time. Listening to my collection on random brought them back into my radar.
11. GRITS (33 plays) - all their plays came from listening to my collection on random. After their second album, I only like selected songs from their further albums.
12. The Hangovers (29 plays) - all from their latest album Three Sails to the Wind. I really enjoy this album a lot.
13. Anamanaguchi (28 plays) - I really enjoy listening to this group. It’s weird having groups producing music without vocals nowadays. But I wonder if this is the future evolution of symphonic music.
14. Tom Lehrer (27 plays) - A great musician who rivals “Weird Al” for making me laugh.
14. ???? (Nobuo Uematsu) (27 plays) - I don’t have any of his solo work. All these are from Final Fantasy soundtracks. He is a great composer. I think some of his songs rival movie soundtracks.
I wrote this code a while back because a website that does the same thing seemed to miss my posts every other week. So I figured I’d write my own in python to do the same thing to me. Then I just put it into a cron job to automatically run it every Sunday. I’m going to be posting the code on my GPL code page. Here it is for you to see and for Google to index. Just fill in the appropriate variables with the secret keys you get from each site’s API.
I came to a disturbing realization the other day - I’ve come to feel that whatever isn’t online isn’t real. This came about thanks to the Wii’s insanely stupid online policy. Everything about playing online with the Wii is an exercise in frustrating the user. Rather than always be connected to the net when the console is on (like modern computers, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3), the Wii attempts to connect to the game servers at the time you wish to play the game. This leads to the very frustrated experience of wanting to play online, loading up into the game you want to play and then realizing that the system is having problems connecting to the Internet. So you have to back out to the Wii menu and trouble-shoot the problem. This wouldn’t be so vexing if it didn’t take the Wii ages to load games, including the “don’t throw your effing Wiimote around” warning every time! Even in games where it doesn’t make sense! (Like Rock Band)
Last.fm is getting close to relaunching their site and I was invited to participate in the beta program. I think the new design has some great new features and I wanted to share it with you so you could get excited about it too.
Here’s the main page as it appears now:
The most important thing to notice is how cluttered it is. Look at the proposed layout under beta:
This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects - some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll start in February.
February and March
Over these two months I worked on my replacement for web access to my Taskwarrior TODO list because Inthe.am had shut down. In February I got the podman containers set up - one to run the taskd server and one to run the website I’d coded up in Flask. In March I had to write some rudimentary Javascript to get the website to highlight the selected tab (Overdue, Today, This Month, etc). The rest of the interactivity on the site works using HTMX, letting me focus on Python instead of Javascript, but I just wasn’t able to get that part of the site to work without a tiny bit of Javascript. I also added some fixes because the date/time widget assumes UTC. Of course, now that I have it all working correctly and get lots of use for it (especially when I’m at work and I want to quickly get something out of my brain’s short-term buffer), Taskwarrior went to 3.0 which completely changes the way the program works, the API, and the way syncing works. I think in the end it’ll be for the best, but it’s annoying that I need to figure this out. That may involve finally learning how to use PyO3 to interact with Rust or re-writing part of my backend in Rust. We’ll have to see where that goes.
This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects - some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll start in February.
February and March
Over these two months I worked on my replacement for web access to my Taskwarrior TODO list because Inthe.am had shut down. In February I got the podman containers set up - one to run the taskd server and one to run the website I’d coded up in Flask. In March I had to write some rudimentary Javascript to get the website to highlight the selected tab (Overdue, Today, This Month, etc). The rest of the interactivity on the site works using HTMX, letting me focus on Python instead of Javascript, but I just wasn’t able to get that part of the site to work without a tiny bit of Javascript. I also added some fixes because the date/time widget assumes UTC. Of course, now that I have it all working correctly and get lots of use for it (especially when I’m at work and I want to quickly get something out of my brain’s short-term buffer), Taskwarrior went to 3.0 which completely changes the way the program works, the API, and the way syncing works. I think in the end it’ll be for the best, but it’s annoying that I need to figure this out. That may involve finally learning how to use PyO3 to interact with Rust or re-writing part of my backend in Rust. We’ll have to see where that goes.
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
The podman saga continues. The podman equivalent of a docker-compose.yml can be created from a pod with the following command:
podman generate kube (name of pod) > (filename).yaml
So I did that with the pod that I’d created with an SELinux context. Now it was time to try it on another Fedora 31 VM to see if it would work. To be on the safe side, I started off creating the phpIPAM folder, chowning it to nobody and chmoding it to 777.
Last time I messed around with Podman, I finally got things working and had what I think was a pretty good understanding of how to go forward. But in order to get things working, I’d had to turn off SELinux. Now it was time to see what I had to do to make Podman work with SELinux. I’ve got some ideas based on some Googling and might also need to try a program called udica to create the right contexts.
Turns out that on my Fedora 30 VM something got screwed up with the CNI networking (the networking that Podman uses) and instead of pointing to the address that Podman is using according to Cockpit:
10.88.0.1
It’s pointing somewhere else. I found that via iptables -L. Not sure how to fix it, though. When I tried, it complained:
“`87-podman-bridge.conflist’ not found”
But changing the hostname environment variable turned out to be the solution as I tested on my Fedora 31 VM:
Adding the –name mysql - it wasn’t enough to get the PHPIpam apache container to find the mysql container. They’re in the same pod, but something’s not quite right. So I decided to see if I could modify the config.php by mounting the container and modifying that.
# podman mount beautiful_gauss
/var/lib/containers/storage/overlay/5a33decc2cfad7e9bda5f9048d94a814267d954e97d5dd7befb057a84367f27a/merged
While this allowed me to see the config files and open them in vi (not included in the container) I could not modify the contents. I think the key is passing “phpIPAM5” (or whatever the pod is called) into the MYSQL_ENV_MYSQL_HOST environment variable. So let’s try that. First, I had to stop phpIPAM5. I’ve been using
Like these random container names that podman generated:
# podman ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
b83a26bb2c5d docker.io/library/mysql:5.6 mysqld 2 minutes ago Up 2 minutes ago 0.0.0.0:8081->80/tcp hungry_wilson
f35ec64d3b3c docker.io/pierrecdn/phpipam:latest apache2-foregroun… 2 minutes ago Up 2 minutes ago 0.0.0.0:8081->80/tcp nice_johnson
Makes me think perhaps there should be a list of adjectives and names that shouldn’t go together?
I’ve been hearing about Podman for a while now - at Red Hat Summit and at various local Red Hat presentations. I’ve seen the slides where the RHEL presenter (it’s always the same guy, but I’m terrible with names - after a bit of research, I think it’s Dan Walsh) asks you to pledge to call them container images, not Docker images, etc. But up until now, even though I’m a huge Red Hat fan, I’ve continued to use Docker as my container engine because I am just running a few containers for myself. I don’t even use a one-machine Docker Swarm. I use docker-compose. And that’s just not something that Podman is ever going to officially support. This makes sense because Red Hat is thinking enterprise. And in the enterprise there are two scenarios: 1) Orchestration - vanilla Kubernetes, OpenShift, etc - and 2) are devs running docker run (or podman run) to test the images before putting them into the orchestrator. I’m an anti-pattern, even if I’m not the only one doing things this way.
This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects - some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll start in February.
February and March
Over these two months I worked on my replacement for web access to my Taskwarrior TODO list because Inthe.am had shut down. In February I got the podman containers set up - one to run the taskd server and one to run the website I’d coded up in Flask. In March I had to write some rudimentary Javascript to get the website to highlight the selected tab (Overdue, Today, This Month, etc). The rest of the interactivity on the site works using HTMX, letting me focus on Python instead of Javascript, but I just wasn’t able to get that part of the site to work without a tiny bit of Javascript. I also added some fixes because the date/time widget assumes UTC. Of course, now that I have it all working correctly and get lots of use for it (especially when I’m at work and I want to quickly get something out of my brain’s short-term buffer), Taskwarrior went to 3.0 which completely changes the way the program works, the API, and the way syncing works. I think in the end it’ll be for the best, but it’s annoying that I need to figure this out. That may involve finally learning how to use PyO3 to interact with Rust or re-writing part of my backend in Rust. We’ll have to see where that goes.
After a bit more work since my 21 July post, I’ve finally reached what I can consider to be beta status for the GUI. Things have matured to the point where it works well on both Linux and Windows and I’m now using it every time I game. I created a bunch of issues on Github to track new features I want to add in order to get to what I think will be a 1.0 release. I’m excited at the progress I’ve made and that the software continues to have interest. As always, the code is available on Github. Here are videos on how to use the GUI:
If you follow the blog, you remember I’ve been working on a GUI for the donation tracker. Part of making that work involved changing the code to be object oriented. Also, it required moving the user-defined configs to be moved out of the main code. I’ve done that and finally tested that it works (I had a silly bug involving a typo that I had to correct) and merged the code into master over on the github repo. The new code required a change in the directions, so I made new instructional videos to go along with those changes:
Three years ago I created ELDonationTracker to use the Extra Life API to provide donation alerts on my screen while I’m streaming or recording games. About a year and a half ago, I actually had to start using it because the previous donation tracker I’d been using stopped being maintained. Since then I’ve been steadily improving it, but there’s still a bit of functionality for the alerts when someone donates that I was missing by running a commandline utility. A year ago I tried creating a GUI with Tkinter, but I just found it too hard to figure out. What I really wanted anyway was to do it in QT or QML. A few months ago I saw that it appeared the company being QT was going to finally take Python seriously. While looking up some tutorials on PyQT I found out that I could use QT Designer to do a WYSIWYG design and then a simple utility to convert it to Python code. Since designing GUIs is a real drag and takes away time from doing the coding to make the GUI work, I was jazzed. So I threw this together over a couple days, copying the interface from the program that was no longer maintained:
This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects - some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll start in February.
February and March
Over these two months I worked on my replacement for web access to my Taskwarrior TODO list because Inthe.am had shut down. In February I got the podman containers set up - one to run the taskd server and one to run the website I’d coded up in Flask. In March I had to write some rudimentary Javascript to get the website to highlight the selected tab (Overdue, Today, This Month, etc). The rest of the interactivity on the site works using HTMX, letting me focus on Python instead of Javascript, but I just wasn’t able to get that part of the site to work without a tiny bit of Javascript. I also added some fixes because the date/time widget assumes UTC. Of course, now that I have it all working correctly and get lots of use for it (especially when I’m at work and I want to quickly get something out of my brain’s short-term buffer), Taskwarrior went to 3.0 which completely changes the way the program works, the API, and the way syncing works. I think in the end it’ll be for the best, but it’s annoying that I need to figure this out. That may involve finally learning how to use PyO3 to interact with Rust or re-writing part of my backend in Rust. We’ll have to see where that goes.
I have three main hobbies: photography, my webcomic and programming. After spending a year working on my 365 Project, I’ve been taking a lot less photos as that part of my brain takes a break. After working with Dan to get the story for INM worked out through May of this year and working on strips that will appear this March, I wanted to take a bit of a break from that. The one bit of code I wrote for myself that I use on a daily basis is my flickr views code.
This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects - some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll start in February.
February and March
Over these two months I worked on my replacement for web access to my Taskwarrior TODO list because Inthe.am had shut down. In February I got the podman containers set up - one to run the taskd server and one to run the website I’d coded up in Flask. In March I had to write some rudimentary Javascript to get the website to highlight the selected tab (Overdue, Today, This Month, etc). The rest of the interactivity on the site works using HTMX, letting me focus on Python instead of Javascript, but I just wasn’t able to get that part of the site to work without a tiny bit of Javascript. I also added some fixes because the date/time widget assumes UTC. Of course, now that I have it all working correctly and get lots of use for it (especially when I’m at work and I want to quickly get something out of my brain’s short-term buffer), Taskwarrior went to 3.0 which completely changes the way the program works, the API, and the way syncing works. I think in the end it’ll be for the best, but it’s annoying that I need to figure this out. That may involve finally learning how to use PyO3 to interact with Rust or re-writing part of my backend in Rust. We’ll have to see where that goes.
Last night I woke up in the middle of the night from a dream where I was at a programmer convention. A bunch of devs were arguing and they came to me to be the deciding factor for the future of the KDE Plasma 6 project. Each was very passionate about the direction they wanted to go. I woke up really stressed and glad it was a dream.
If you’ve been following my blog long enough, you know that the KDE 3 -> KDE 4 transition was a mess, but somewhere around Oct 2010 (2-3 years after the 4.0 release), it really started to get stable and become my daily runner. By Feb 2011, I was loving the fact that KDE Plasma 4 had implemented the idea of activities. After user experience disaster, the KDE developers were a lot more careful with the transition to Plasma 5. Recently I read the blog post Plasma 6: Better defaults and I’m excited that the KDE developers are taking so much time to think about sane user defaults.
Just a few thoughts on programming languages that have been rattling around in my head this week, but which don’t each merit a full blog post. The main theme is that the culture behind each programming language leads to some interesting choices, as is the case with spoken languages.
This week I started learning how to program in Rust. Even though I’m using the project-based Command-Line Rust to learn, the author still went with the traditional “Hello, world!” project for the first intro to the language. I was also working on a Go project last week and so it immediately stood out to me that (at least as taught by this author) Rust has the print! macro that allows you to succinctly print to the command line. By contrast, Go requires importing fmt before you can print. This was the first topic that was swirling around in my head this week. What makes language designers choose whether printing output (one of the most basic things a program can do) is built-in or requires an import. I even remember back when I was learning Java in undergrad (I think it was Java 1.8, but I don’t remember) we had to use the savitch library just to get program input (another very basic computer program concept). As I thought about it, I wondered if it has to do with thoughts around compilation and whether the language designers think you’re mostly making user-interactive programs or libraries? It makes sense to me that scripting languages like Python, Ruby, and Perl would have print built-in since you always have to have the interpreter along with you, so all the basics should be there. (The original Batteries Included Python promise, for example) But perhaps the Go developers thought you wouldn’t always be printing to the command line so a more efficient binary could be compiled by forcing you to import the functionality? I’m not entirely sure.
In these last two months of the year I only worked on Advent of Code.
November
In November I worked through part of the 2016 problem set. I didn’t get too far because of how many languages I was doing at this point. Eventually I decided to allow myself to get a bit further in Python and then catch up with the other languages. Whenever I’d get stuck I’d go back to the other languages. Overall, once I’d figured out Python - Ruby, Perl, and Golang would be pretty easy. Haskell would still be hard, but I started getting the hang of it near the end of the month.
Across both September and October I got a decent amount of programming done. I just about finished the Learn You Haskell for Great Good book (got up to just before Monads) and started Head First Go. Once I had enough Go language to get started on AoC, I knew I’d be ready for the 2016 problem set. Let’s get into the nitty gritty!
Python (not Advent of Code)
Impractical Python
I finished chapter 11 which contained my old friend the Monty Hall Paradox. I’ve had a version up on my site for a very long time based on a PHP tutorial in Linux Format Magazine. This time I was able to code it in Python as well as creating a GUI version. Chapter 11 also touched upon The Birthday Paradox.
Throughout the spring and summer of 2021 a few of the times that I mentioned on the Advent of Code subreddit that I was doing the 2015 problem set in all 3 languages, some folks said they’d be interested in a writeup on the experience. Now that I’ve finally finished 2015 (my first set of 50 stars!) it’s time for that writeup. Before I continue, I’d like to thank everyone on the subreddit who has helped me. I have a README.md for each day’s problem and you’ll find my thanks to those who helped me within those READMEs here in my repo.
I didn’t do much coding in July, so I decided to combine the July and August wrap-ups.
Python
Dreamhost Dynamic DNS
I decided to clean up and update some code that uses the Dreamhost API to allow for Dynamic DNS. I cleaned up the logging output so that I could figure out why it was sometimes deleting one of my domains rather than just updating the IP. The original programmer had it printing out to the terminal. I used the logging package to send logs out to a file. While I was improving the logging, I also decided to use f-strings to make it more obvious what was going into the output string.
I had a lot less variety in my programming month, but still had a lot of fun doing it. In fact, Programming consumed most of my leisure thoughts. More about why I was doing it below, but I’ve been reading Programming Perl as well as skimming through Introducing Go and Learn You A Haskell for Great Good!. Ever since some folks used Haskell during last year’s Advent of Code and this guy’s videos that I mentioned in an early 2021 blog post, I’ve been very curious about the language. In fact, at this point I’ve decided that Go and Haskell will be the next two languages I learn.
Last night I had a dream that combined Games of Thrones and Perl programming. Like it was in the GoT world, but we had to do some Perl programming to defeat the Lannisters.
I think that nearly everyone who has ever learned about the Fibonacci Sequence is fascinated by how quickly it grows. I wanted to illustrate that, so I created this collage with some modifications to J im’s makeCollage.pl script. The rules were that each picture takes the place of a number on the Fibonacci Sequence and is displayed that many times. Of course, I skipped Fibonacci number 1, which is 0. No point in having a picture show up 0 times. So the first picture is shown once, as is the second. Then two times, then three, then…..
That collage was created by a program. I certainly don’t have the patience to arrange all of those photos one-by-one!I told the program to download all of my pictures tagged with Eric Danny David and Danielle and create this collage.
But does that make this any less of a work of art? I think the answer is no. The artwork was just created procedurally instead of visually. To argue that this is less artful is to say that the The Lion King isn’t art because the wildebeast scene was created procedurally. Of course, in this situation I don’t see myself as the artist, but the guy who wrote the program is the collage artist. It’s his procedures which created the art. His name is Jim Bumgardner and he’s a really nice guy who helped me fix up the script. I copied it from his book, Flickr Hacks, but unfortunately, as the code he relied on has changed, it didn’t work as posted. In fact, here is the fix you need in his program, makeCollage.pl :
Just a few thoughts on programming languages that have been rattling around in my head this week, but which don’t each merit a full blog post. The main theme is that the culture behind each programming language leads to some interesting choices, as is the case with spoken languages.
This week I started learning how to program in Rust. Even though I’m using the project-based Command-Line Rust to learn, the author still went with the traditional “Hello, world!” project for the first intro to the language. I was also working on a Go project last week and so it immediately stood out to me that (at least as taught by this author) Rust has the print! macro that allows you to succinctly print to the command line. By contrast, Go requires importing fmt before you can print. This was the first topic that was swirling around in my head this week. What makes language designers choose whether printing output (one of the most basic things a program can do) is built-in or requires an import. I even remember back when I was learning Java in undergrad (I think it was Java 1.8, but I don’t remember) we had to use the savitch library just to get program input (another very basic computer program concept). As I thought about it, I wondered if it has to do with thoughts around compilation and whether the language designers think you’re mostly making user-interactive programs or libraries? It makes sense to me that scripting languages like Python, Ruby, and Perl would have print built-in since you always have to have the interpreter along with you, so all the basics should be there. (The original Batteries Included Python promise, for example) But perhaps the Go developers thought you wouldn’t always be printing to the command line so a more efficient binary could be compiled by forcing you to import the functionality? I’m not entirely sure.
December was wholly dedicated to solving the Advent of Code 2022 problem set. Our job was to help the elves trek through the jungle to get magical starfruit. It was a lot of fun to do it live once again! This year I also had experience from the previous years (both live and on my own pace) that gave me the skills to solve some of the puzzles, including some puzzles that were variations on themes I’d seen before. In the end, I collected 36 stars, near my average for number of stars collected during AoC. Between work, family commitments, my programming and problem solving skill levels, that’s about the most I can usually do during the live period in December.
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
In these last two months of the year I only worked on Advent of Code.
November
In November I worked through part of the 2016 problem set. I didn’t get too far because of how many languages I was doing at this point. Eventually I decided to allow myself to get a bit further in Python and then catch up with the other languages. Whenever I’d get stuck I’d go back to the other languages. Overall, once I’d figured out Python - Ruby, Perl, and Golang would be pretty easy. Haskell would still be hard, but I started getting the hang of it near the end of the month.
Across both September and October I got a decent amount of programming done. I just about finished the Learn You Haskell for Great Good book (got up to just before Monads) and started Head First Go. Once I had enough Go language to get started on AoC, I knew I’d be ready for the 2016 problem set. Let’s get into the nitty gritty!
Python (not Advent of Code)
Impractical Python
I finished chapter 11 which contained my old friend the Monty Hall Paradox. I’ve had a version up on my site for a very long time based on a PHP tutorial in Linux Format Magazine. This time I was able to code it in Python as well as creating a GUI version. Chapter 11 also touched upon The Birthday Paradox.
Throughout the spring and summer of 2021 a few of the times that I mentioned on the Advent of Code subreddit that I was doing the 2015 problem set in all 3 languages, some folks said they’d be interested in a writeup on the experience. Now that I’ve finally finished 2015 (my first set of 50 stars!) it’s time for that writeup. Before I continue, I’d like to thank everyone on the subreddit who has helped me. I have a README.md for each day’s problem and you’ll find my thanks to those who helped me within those READMEs here in my repo.
I didn’t do much coding in July, so I decided to combine the July and August wrap-ups.
Python
Dreamhost Dynamic DNS
I decided to clean up and update some code that uses the Dreamhost API to allow for Dynamic DNS. I cleaned up the logging output so that I could figure out why it was sometimes deleting one of my domains rather than just updating the IP. The original programmer had it printing out to the terminal. I used the logging package to send logs out to a file. While I was improving the logging, I also decided to use f-strings to make it more obvious what was going into the output string.
June was mostly Python, although I did do chapter 1 of Scratch 3 Games for Kids with Sam. He really, really enjoyed it and I anticipate doing the challenge problems and maybe chapter 2 in July or August.
Books
I read the intro and first couple chapters of both Flask Web Development, 2nd Edition and Data Visualization with Python and Javascript, both from a recent Humble Bundle. The Flask book may be useful for learning more about creating a non-Django site and, even if I mostly stick with FastAPI, it should provide some concepts that are applicable across both frameworks. With the data visualization book, I would love to use that to better visualize my annual Last.fm stats.
There’s a lot to be said for doing the Advent of Code in December along with a few thousand other programmers. It’s fun to be part of something with others and you get to all the neat and wacky solutions that others come up with.
On the other hand, going at my own page with the 2015 problem set allows for interesting little coincidences to form. What I did one day (when I was at about Day 7) was to go through all the remaining days and write some first impression ideas at solutions. This got my brain thinking about what I needed for each day. One day, before getting to the Day 10 problems, I was idly flipping through the book Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! As I was trying to decide if it would be one of the languages I’d add for 2016. I ended up coming across a built-in library that would have made solving Day 10 a real breeze. Day 10 is the Look and Say sequence. I’m sure by paying close attention to that Wiki entry I could have figured out an algorithm. But, basically I just needed to group together each repeated number and then I could take the length of that list/array to find out how many numbers. That becomes part of the new number. Unfortunately, as far as I could see, that functionality was not built into Python. So my Python code looked like this:
I had a lot less variety in my programming month, but still had a lot of fun doing it. In fact, Programming consumed most of my leisure thoughts. More about why I was doing it below, but I’ve been reading Programming Perl as well as skimming through Introducing Go and Learn You A Haskell for Great Good!. Ever since some folks used Haskell during last year’s Advent of Code and this guy’s videos that I mentioned in an early 2021 blog post, I’ve been very curious about the language. In fact, at this point I’ve decided that Go and Haskell will be the next two languages I learn.
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
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!
I don’t know how long I intend to keep doing this, but I decided I wanted to document my programming as I went along. So yesterday I worked on Scratch and here’s today’s entry.
Ruby
A while ago I got a bunch of kids’ programming books in a Humble Bundle. I tried showing Ruby to my oldest, but I did it one year too soon (she wasn’t yet reading as well as she is today and couldn’t type as well as she can today) so for now she’s not into programming. But I was curious to see how it was presented since the book uses a story to present it (quite different from the Python book in the same bundle). Went through chapter 2 today and, so far, it seems that Ruby is pretty readable like Python is. That said, I’m not sure puts makes more sense than print, but maybe if I delve into the history of Ruby, I’ll understand why it’s puts? The author of this book uses snake case for variable names. I wonder if that’s because it’s the Ruby standard to use snake case instead of camel case or just to make it easier for the kids following along. I *did* really like the built in next and pred methods on numbers. Definitely more readable than a var++ or var = var + 1. Or rather, if you don’t have decades of programming experience (as I do), I think it’s just a faster bit of cognition to see var.next and understand it vs the older ways of doing the same thing.
I had to change my wordpress username as it contained characters that were fine back when I started this blog in 2005, but didn’t work for federation. So this is a test to see if the post will properly federate now that I’ve changed the username. Here’s hoping!
I had to change my wordpress username as it contained characters that were fine back when I started this blog in 2005, but didn’t work for federation. So this is a test to see if the post will properly federate now that I’ve changed the username. Here’s hoping!
Then you can follow and see all of the blog’s posts. There is a bit of an error with my author posts, but since I’m the only author on this blog (I think there are maybe 2 posts by my brother), it’s not a big deal. I’m not sure what the etiquette / norms are if someone has a blog on the Fediverse. Is it gauche for me to also post about those my blog posts on my own Mastodon account? I expect the norms will evolve along with the Fediverse, especially as it expands to include Facebook and Tumblr (assuming their owners go along with that idea). For now I’m probably going to post a limited number of blog posts on my Mastodon account - I guess as a way of boosting. Or maybe I’ll just boost my blog’s posts? Again, I imagine it’s going to evolve for all of us as time goes on. (Although, as I wrote that previous sentence, I guess boosting it makes the most sense)
I started off the year mostly working on Python projects. For January and February I finally started making some great progress with understanding modern web frameworks and use of CSS frameworks rather than rolling my own. This not only helped with the Prophecy Practicum project, but would form the backbone to a lot of coding this year. I also wrote a utility to tally up my videos for my end of year video game roundup, saving me literal hours of time. As you can read from following the link above, I also worked on my long-running Extra Life Donation Tracker code.
November was not a huge programming month for me. On the weekends I was a little more focused with family stuff and videogames. But I did manage work on a couple projects.
I was on Identi.ca back when it first launched and I joined Mastodon a few years ago. Identi.ca had a decent number of FLOSS devs at the time, but by the time of Mastodon, Twitter was ascendant. So “no one” was on Mastodon. Even a few of the FLOSS developers I followed on Mastodon never posted on there. Network effects - it’s the reason almost everyone who threatens to leave Facebook never does; social media is only useful if you can be social (ie your friends/acquaintances are on it).
I first heard MxPx 28 or 29 years ago. At the time my family was still a church-going family. This was my first experience with the idea of a youth group that played rock song versions of the praise music. So I was jazzed to go to church every Wednesday and Sunday. The middle school youth group also had a CD lending library. Thus was I introduced to DC Talk, Newsboys, Audio Adrenaline, and MxPx via their album Teenage Politics. At the time, although my household wasn’t one of those that was against dance, alcohol, or whatever books religious folks paniced about (since Harry Potter wasn’t out yet), we weren’t allowed to listen to current secular music because it was a bad influence. We mostly didn’t really know what we were missing. We didn’t have to listen to the religious station because, again, my parents weren’t fanatical about secularism, they just didn’t think rap and modern rock was something we should listen to. So we would listen to the oldies station. To this day, I know just about any pop song from the 50s or 60s. All this is to say that I had no reference point for punk rock. Compared to the other Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) artists out there, this was fast and hard and loud. I was fascinated. Also, unusually for CCM artists at the time, the music was more about being a teenager than it was about God. That’s not to say that God and religion aren’t mentioned on MxPx albums, but they weren’t the majority of what the songs were about.
After spending the last year and change filling in the holes in the MxPx discography from when I last was an active fan with 2000’s The Ever Passing Moment, I have arrived at the final full album I was missing, Plans within Plans. I still have a couple EPs to buy, but this will probably be the last MxPx album review I write until they release their next album. As we went through the discography we saw the band evolve a bit and, either under label pressure or from wanting to explore musically, seem to veer into the territory of bands like My Chemical Romance and Panic! At the Disco. Plans Within Plans is MxPx finally coming full circle towards their original sound while also having evolved since their early albums. To me, this album sounds like MxPx just being MxPx, not sounding like any other band. They’ve learned and grown and both the music and lyrics reflect that, but they’ve come to appreciate who they really are as a band. This was one of those albums that took a few listens for me to truly appreciate. Onto the tracks.
I continued to catch up with the MxPx back catalog and purchased both Panic and Secret Weapon. My initial feelings upon listening were that I liked a lot more songs on Secret Weapon. But maybe, as with Before Everything & After this would turn out to be just a first impression where when looking at each song one at time would leave me feeling differently.
Last October I came back to MxPx, as I detailed in this post about how the lyrics for Friday Tonight led me to finally watch Friday. Over the past half year I would return to their self-titled album on Spotify. (I don’t subscribe to Spofity, but I do use the free tier to discover new artists) Eventually I decided to go ahead and buy the Deluxe version of the album directly from MxPx. It doesn’t appear they’re selling the CD anywhere else (at least it’s not on Amazon).
(the first 3 paragraphs are a slight modification of what I wrote for an Amazon review)
Album front cover
The headline kind of gives it away, but this album definitely sounds like a cross between early/late MxPx and Good Charlotte. You can see on Wikipedia and other places that this was part of a 3ish album trend where MxPx moved more towards the pop part of pop punk. Kind of interesting coming back to it now. I was listening to MxPx albums as they came out in the 90s, but fell off with The Ever Passing Moment. I even briefly joined the fan club and still have the shirt. Because of Reese’s interview on Mike Herrerra’s podcast, I recently started listenign to their self-titled album, which sounds like their early stuff except with lyrics that match grown men the grown men they now are vs kids they were when writing Teenage Politics.
This quarter I mostly listened to my music on pure random with a few variations which’ll be accounted for below. This finally allowed The Beatles to place in 2013. In the last few weeks I just listened to music that I added in this quarter to make sure I had a chance to get to know some of the newer songs.
When I was in middle school in Oregon I was introduced to the concept of non-worship Christian music for the first time. Up until that time the only English music we listened to was Oldies and 70s music. I’d catch a pop or rap song here or there - mostly because the public school buses I rode would listen to the pop or rap stations - but that was it. I think it was like 10% shielding us from the “bad messages in pop music” and 90% my parents just listening to what they enjoyed - which was the music they grew up with. And since those stations were always on when we were growing up, that’s what we grew to like. It’s why I’m the only person in the circle of friends in my age group that knows all the Doo-Wop standards.
I first heard MxPx 28 or 29 years ago. At the time my family was still a church-going family. This was my first experience with the idea of a youth group that played rock song versions of the praise music. So I was jazzed to go to church every Wednesday and Sunday. The middle school youth group also had a CD lending library. Thus was I introduced to DC Talk, Newsboys, Audio Adrenaline, and MxPx via their album Teenage Politics. At the time, although my household wasn’t one of those that was against dance, alcohol, or whatever books religious folks paniced about (since Harry Potter wasn’t out yet), we weren’t allowed to listen to current secular music because it was a bad influence. We mostly didn’t really know what we were missing. We didn’t have to listen to the religious station because, again, my parents weren’t fanatical about secularism, they just didn’t think rap and modern rock was something we should listen to. So we would listen to the oldies station. To this day, I know just about any pop song from the 50s or 60s. All this is to say that I had no reference point for punk rock. Compared to the other Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) artists out there, this was fast and hard and loud. I was fascinated. Also, unusually for CCM artists at the time, the music was more about being a teenager than it was about God. That’s not to say that God and religion aren’t mentioned on MxPx albums, but they weren’t the majority of what the songs were about.
I didn’t really use any new programs this year. I just continued expanding on programs I’ve used in the past.
Python
For Python I continued to mostly use Pycharm. I’ve spoken about it for the past few years, but JetBrains continues to add features that make it easier to work with Python. For example, this year they added a model explorer to have better visibility into your models in Django. They also make running development servers for Django, Flask, and FastAPI a breeze. (Including restarting the server after every save).
I didn’t really use any new programs this year. I just continued expanding on programs I’ve used in the past.
Python
For Python I continued to mostly use Pycharm. I’ve spoken about it for the past few years, but JetBrains continues to add features that make it easier to work with Python. For example, this year they added a model explorer to have better visibility into your models in Django. They also make running development servers for Django, Flask, and FastAPI a breeze. (Including restarting the server after every save).
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
Overall, there was a continuation of trends from last year with just a few changes.
Python
Pycharm
PyCharm has continued to be my IDE of choice for Python programming. The devs haven’t been resting on their laurels, either. Recently they added some extra features to support FastAPI. And they also added some features that I don’t 100% understand that make it easier to test against fake HTTP endpoints. It’s really awesome and definitely worth the price if you program primarily in Python. As I predicted last year, its git features ended up making GitQlient and Git Kraken (on Linux) more or less obsolete for me.
I didn’t really use any new programs this year. I just continued expanding on programs I’ve used in the past.
Python
For Python I continued to mostly use Pycharm. I’ve spoken about it for the past few years, but JetBrains continues to add features that make it easier to work with Python. For example, this year they added a model explorer to have better visibility into your models in Django. They also make running development servers for Django, Flask, and FastAPI a breeze. (Including restarting the server after every save).
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
Overall, there was a continuation of trends from last year with just a few changes.
Python
Pycharm
PyCharm has continued to be my IDE of choice for Python programming. The devs haven’t been resting on their laurels, either. Recently they added some extra features to support FastAPI. And they also added some features that I don’t 100% understand that make it easier to test against fake HTTP endpoints. It’s really awesome and definitely worth the price if you program primarily in Python. As I predicted last year, its git features ended up making GitQlient and Git Kraken (on Linux) more or less obsolete for me.
I’ve been using PyCharm for about a week now across a couple projects. I’d like to note a few things I’m really enjoying:
PyCharm is aware of your venv config and you can use it to pip install new packages. Ok, so pip is easy to use for installing. But it also provides a quick at-a-glance view of the packages you’ve installed and their versions - and I find it easier to view than a pip freeze.
I know KDevelop has this for C++, but it doesn’t really have the same support for Python - being able to run my Python files from within PyCharm as well as being able to run the debugger from within PyCharm is like how new cars unlock for you when you get close. It’s not necessary. It’s not even that huge of an improvement. But it’s a quality of life thing that you miss when it’s not there.
PyCharm is very smart about git. With KDevelop, I could add files withink the GUI (which is nice for making sure the project is aware of the file and provides a quick visual cue). But then I had to remember to git add it (either in the GUI or on the commandline). With PyCharm, every time I add a file through the GUI, it asks me if I want to add it to version control.
PyCharm asking if I want to add the new file to source control
Back in September I wrote about moving to KDevelop for my larger Python projects and also staying with Kate for my smaller projects. I’ve REALLY been enjoying all the features as I work on more and more complex packages involving lots of files. But for a few episodes of Python Bytes now (and/or maybe Talk Python to Me - they share a host) they’ve been talking about how awesome it is to use an IDE that has a Python debugger built in. It may be that KDevelop has that ability (I’m pretty sure it does for C++), but I’m not sure. I am nearly certain that Pycharm does have a debugger built-in. A while ago I’d set up the Pycharm COPR repo on my laptop. I tried playing with it a little at the time, but I was coding on a very small project without a venv, so things didn’t work out well. (Pycharm is pretty opinionated about the way a Python project should work)
For the past 9 years I’ve been using a Garmin watch while swimming. Back then I had a swim-focused watch, now I have a multi-sport watch. Most days the biggest benefits are the fact that I can pre-load a workout (so that I don’t need to print one out or keep my phone nearby (while keeping it safe from water) and the fact that it counts my laps for me. As I wrote 9 years ago, by releasing my brain from keeping track of laps, I can better focus on my technique.
For the past 9 years I’ve been using a Garmin watch while swimming. Back then I had a swim-focused watch, now I have a multi-sport watch. Most days the biggest benefits are the fact that I can pre-load a workout (so that I don’t need to print one out or keep my phone nearby (while keeping it safe from water) and the fact that it counts my laps for me. As I wrote 9 years ago, by releasing my brain from keeping track of laps, I can better focus on my technique.
For the past 9 years I’ve been using a Garmin watch while swimming. Back then I had a swim-focused watch, now I have a multi-sport watch. Most days the biggest benefits are the fact that I can pre-load a workout (so that I don’t need to print one out or keep my phone nearby (while keeping it safe from water) and the fact that it counts my laps for me. As I wrote 9 years ago, by releasing my brain from keeping track of laps, I can better focus on my technique.
For the past 9 years I’ve been using a Garmin watch while swimming. Back then I had a swim-focused watch, now I have a multi-sport watch. Most days the biggest benefits are the fact that I can pre-load a workout (so that I don’t need to print one out or keep my phone nearby (while keeping it safe from water) and the fact that it counts my laps for me. As I wrote 9 years ago, by releasing my brain from keeping track of laps, I can better focus on my technique.
About a decade after someone first suggested that I should join US Masters Swimming, I finally did. Originally it was because a local swim team required swimmers to be USMS members. I didn’t end up joining the team because the pool plus team fees were a bit more than I wanted to spend. But, since I was a member, I was eligible to participate in swim meets now.
This meet was at the Arundel Olympic Center. It was my first time there, and what a beautiful venue for a swim meet! Unlike the other pools in the Carol Chidester series it has 6 or more lanes available for warmup and cooldown while the meet is running. This is due to the fact that it’s a 50 meter pool that’s being converted to a 25 yard pool using a bulkhead. The other half of the pool is where the warmup lanes reside. There is built-in stadium seating; nice and high up so that the entire pool can be viewed from up there. The only bummer was that the spa pool was closed during the meet. That would have been a nice place to rest the muscles while keeping them warm between events.
On Dec 10 2022 I participated in my second swim meet of this year and also my second swim meet as an adult. It was the same day in which I did the Bigfoot Endurance Trail run and rolled my ankle during the run. It wasn’t causing me any issues during my swim or walking to the blocks. But it does mean I wasn’t at full strength for the meet.
On 15 October this year I competed at my first swim meet since high school, some 20ish years ago. Although I’d had various folks encourage me to join US Masters Swimming for almost as long, I’d always found a reason to put it off. Sometime in August or September I decided I wanted to do some swim meets. I think it was around the time that I was coming to terms with the fact that my foot injury was going to keep me from competing in my first marathon this year. I looked around to join a Masters team in order to get better at swimming and they required a membership to US Masters Swimming, so I signed up. After another week or so, I realized they didn’t have a schedule that would work for me, but now that I was registered with USMS, I could compete in swim meets. Luckily for me, the first meet of the 29th Carol Chidester Memorial Swim Series was coming up. I signed up and started looking forward to it.
If there’s one thing I always try and do, it’s to see things from the perspective of others. It doesn’t have to mean that I’ll agree with the person or even think they’re also in the right. But sometimes I come across someone who sees things so differently that I can’t quite comprehend how they could see things so differently. The funny thing is that this doesn’t involve the biggest divide in America now - politics. Rather it’s a lack of self-control that, perhaps, makes me sound like the old man I’m becoming?
For my birthday, my mother got me a Garmin Swim watch. The watch uses an accelerameter and gyroscope to figure out how many laps I’m swimming and what strokes I’m swimming. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough that it was able to allow me to focus on my strokes instead of counting intervals on the first day I used it. I’m not sure what I am doing wrong with breaststroke, but it made it add 2 extra laps to my third set of 400 IM. Even with those issues, (and the fact that something I do with backstroke is so wrong, it thinks I’m doing breaststroke) I was able to confirm some things I’d supposed, but didn’t want to waste time confirming with a less feature-full stopwatch. For example, I confirmed that, on average, I swim 25 meters in 30 seconds with freestyle. I also confirmed that I do my 400s in slightly less than 10 minutes, but slower with each set as I get tired.
Today while swimming it was “Jesus Loves the Little Children” stuck in my head. I haven’t thought about that song since about a year ago when I was comparing with someone from another denomination to see if they sang the same songs in Sunday School. Definitely a weird one to have in the noggin while trying to remember numbers.
When I’m swimming I’m usually just repeating numbers over and over in my head so I don’t forget what lap I’m on - especially important on days when I’m doing 80 laps. Many times I end up saying the numbers along the beat/melody of a song. Today it was Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines. “21 21 21 you know you want 21 21 21 21”
This is the first time in nearly 10 years that I’m moving to a new version of WIndows. I pop the CD in and boot up. I see a text screen as Windows “loads files”.
Nothing here different from a Linux distro. Then the Windows logo pops up.
A bit more complicated than it should have been. That’s really the lesson here. In fact, it appears not to have worked at all despite about five tries. The first two times I did it 100% with the GUI and had no idea why things were going wrong. The third time I did it on the command line so I saw that it was complaining about not having enough space - even though it did. And the fourth time I used the “trick installer into downloading” trick on this page and it still didn’t work. It appears not to be downloading the updates. I’m going to take to the mailing lists to try and figure out what’s going on. No one was able to help (or willing?) on the IRC so for now I remain with Fedora 11.
My wife said since she isn’t using the Linux computer I built for her, that I could use it. It has a Intel Core 2 Duo Dual Core chip, so I was pretty excited to try out 64-bit computing to see if there would be any problems. I installed Fedora 10 since I’m used to that platform. Installation process was pretty much the same as with 32-bit. It took 20 minutes to install. Blender was found in the repositories along with Inkscape - so far so good!
And that day has come: the Computer said “I will convert these
unbelievers, and now that I have Sulphur it will be easy.” At that,
the heavens opened and burning Sulphur descended upon all the world,
taking on many different forms.
The default GDM screen looks a little ugly to me….perhaps it’s just too new.
The new SELinux notification tool may be useful if something is not working correctly, but it just bugs the heck out of me as every single program appears to be trying to access protected memory. Of course, some people may welcome this new program. It looks very nice, but I’ve never been one of those who had problems with SEL to begin with
Man have I been busy. I’m finishing up the wedding I shot a couple of weeks ago, so I haven’t had time for much. I think I have nVidia up and working now, although still just one monitor is working. glxgears gives me 1340 FPS - is that good or bad? I’ll have to look into my blog and see what happened last time. hmm….looks like I didn’t write anything down before. Well, now I have it here for the record for next time.
And it’s called Moonshine. I like the name better than Zod, Fedora Core 6’s name.
Here’s the announcement from the Red Hat Mailing List:
\* From: The Fedora Project
\* To: fedora-announce-list redhat com
\* Subject: Announcing Fedora 7 (Moonshine)
\* Date: Thu, 31 May 2007 03:28:41 -0700
Howdy, cousins! Welcome to our little Fedora hollow, where we’ve
brewed up some mighty, mighty Fedora 7 Moonshine for your enjoyment.
Here, I’ll help you pour that … and some for me … *cough, cough*
Smoooooth … sure does taste good. It’s been sitting here in the jug
for almost a whole month now! Go ahead and help yourself to some
more:
Fedora 7 should be out in 8 days. This time around there isn’t much I’m looking forward to in the new release as they are mostly just laying the groundwork for more changes in future Fedoras. My wish list is better compiz support and just a few newer versions of stuff like Pidgin (formerly Gaim) and Blender.
A few big things in Fedora News. First of all, the Fedora Summit happened recently. They are tackling a lot of things for Fedora Core 7 including blurring the line between Core and Extras (a point of contention for those moved from Core to Extras - they were less important they felt) and finally having a true LiveCD. You can read more about it at Linux.com’s review of the Fedora Summit.
Fedora Core 6 comes with Gaim 2.0 Beta 4. Above you can see it together with the new Fedora Core 6 DNA-style background.
As you can see, things have changed quite a bit in the appearance of Gaim. The largest change to the GUI involves the availability which is now set by a bar at the bottom of the GUI. The biggest complaint I have with this setup is that there isn’t an easy way to set one account as away while another is available.
I’m almost ready to do my first review of FC6. However, I’m still working on getting all the neat AIGLX effects working. After all, that was almost the whole point of upgrading. So far I’ve installed the Compiz package, which gave the the System -> Preferences -> Desktop Effects menu. That didn’t work, so I hit the IRC servers. I was told the latest livna nvidia driver doesn’t support it, but the version in the testing repo should support it. So I’m going to be trying that soon. I also had to add Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “True” to my xorg.conf. I haven’t setup the dual head again yet, but that should be a snap in comparison.
The new version of Fedora is installed. So far, only the X server didn’t work right. It didn’t feel like supporting my dual head setup, so I’ll have to investigate that over the next few days. Other than that, it appears to have installed just fine. By the way, it didn’t take until now to be finished. It finished around 11 last night, but I didn’t want to reboot because I didn’t want to deal with any debugging until today.
The actual installation process began at 2110, so it took about 10 minutes for the dependencies. This part now tends the be the longest part. At times, it even seems to be frozen - at least that’s my experience for all prior upgrades/installs. We’ll see how this one fares.
And, since I downloaded it on my Windows box, the torrent will keep allowing others to download the Zod goodness. I am now beginning the install at 2057.
Fedora Core 6 was 15 minutes late….at least, the anouncement on Linuxtoday.com is 15 minutes after 1400 GMT, although it may just be that Linuxtoday.com didn’t make the anouncement on time. So what’s up with Zod? Well, after naming Fedora after rivers and French cities, it is now named after some weird space alien-sounding name. I’m not sure what Zod is, but I recently read that they consider part of the fun to be to guess how the name relates to the name of the previous release.
The wait is over for Fedora Core 6 will be releasing today, 24 Oct, at 1400 GMT or 0900 EST. Get on those bittorrents so that I can torrent off of you when I get to work. Hopefully, the Livna repositories will get those nvidia drivers working quickly.
I noticed today that, as usual, the Fedora Core release date has slipped. This is a good thing as there are some bugs remaining to be fixed. However, it is annoying for me. I want the new toy! Here’s the explanation:
Fedora Core 6 will be out on 11 Oct 2006 (if they keep to schedule this time). Expect some screenshots once I get the AIGLX special fx working. They’re a little behind SuSe on this one, but still pretty ahead of the game.
If you haven’t done so already, install xen by typing
yum install xen
This will install xen as well as taking care of any needed dependencies. Now you need the xen-enabled kernel so type
yum install kernel-xen0
(That’s a zero there) While we’re waiting for that to install, it’s time to learn some Xen terminology. Xen causes all operating systems to run virtualized. This is why we need the xen kernel. It’s also why Xen is not available on Windows XP- you can’t virtualize an OS that doesn’t expect to be virtualized. However, there is still a primary OS and then a series of guest OSes, depending upon how many OSes you want to run and how much RAM you have. The primary OS is domain 0 and is referred to as dom0 online and pretty much everywhere I’ve read about Xen. All guest OSes are called domU. The first one is called dom0 because programmers start counting with 0. The guests are called domU because U stands for unpriveledged. Unpriviledged means they can’t reboot the physical computer and other such restrictions. Done? Good!
Fedora Core 5 has moved one step closer to being finalized with the release of Test Release 3. I’m currently downloading the torrent of the DVD because I think I want to go ahead and put it on my main machine. Yeah, it’s a test release, but I’m so impatient to get working with Beagle and Fspot! I’ll see what others are doing before I do anything rash. See the official announcement here.
The important thing about installing a multi-disc distro with VMware Player is that it will create a lock on the disc so that it will tell you to change discs, yet when you do, it says the same disc is still in there. The way to counter this is to hit the CD-ROM button at the top of the VMware player window. This toggle button controls whether the CD is mounted or not. The first time you will get some warnings, but by clicking cancel you can tell it to ignore the lock the emulator has on the drive. From then on, changing discs during installation is as simple as toggling the button off and on, to let it know a new CD is in.
The Fedora install was going so well…it was on disc 3 with nary a problem. Then it had the same problem again. For some reason, in the middle of the install it rebooted the laptop again. Frankly, I’m not down with these 3 day installs. Sorry, but my laptop’s days with Fedora have passed. Basically, every time I try to reinstall Fedora I know I’m going to have similar problems. It’s just too slow to endure these kinds of installs. So I’m switching over to Debian on my laptop where upgrades do not require reinstalling the entire system. You just point to a new repo and update your packages as usual. Fedora will remain on my nice fast computer.
I guess Fedora grokked that if this install didn’t work, I was going to install Debian or Ubuntu. It’s currently going through CD 2 without problems. Still slow as heck, but actually making it through. Excellent!
Something happened in the transition from CD1 to CD2. The screen looks like it tried to boot up and then failed. I confirmed that trying to boot fails - of course as only 1/5 of the installation has taken place. I’m going to give it one more shot before I file a bug. Beginning installation….now!
Came home from work expecting to pop in CD 2 for the install. The screen had blacked out and no amount of moving the mouse or tapping keys brought it to life. Rebooted and started the process again. This was at 5pm today. Right now it’s still “preparing to install”. I had a similar problem when I was originally installing FC3 on this computer. Perhaps there’s something that needs to be disabled in laptop installs to keep it from blacking out? The only way to keep things working is to push a button every once in a while to keep it from blacking out. Can’t do that while I’m at work so I’ll give it one more try today. If it doesn’t work, I’ll have to wait until Saturday to install FC5tc2. Of course, I’m losing valuable testing time, but that’s what happens when you try to upgrade Fedora on a 600 Mhz computer! By contrast, on nice fast machines it takes 15 minutes tops for an install. This is excruciating….anyone want to donate money for a new laptop?
I decided to do something I’ve never done before, I’m going to install Fedora Core 5 Test Release 2 and actually help with the debugging process. It was a bit of an internal struggle. By taking part in the debugging, I get to see the new technologies instead of being surprised in March when it comes out as a final release. But, having my laptop here with no real purpose, and thus no consequences if something is broken in the software, I decided to install it. In a previous press release they said that test release 2 would allow upgrading from FC4 (whereas test release 1 did not); if this is the case, then I’ll be doing it on the laptop. If not, I may use some kind of emulation to run it on my Windows Box.
…if they don’t get off schedule. And here is a really awesome review - I’m so excited! I think I may download the test 2 release and install it on my laptop, that will allow me to help out by submitting bugs, and I don’t use my laptop day to day, so if something breaks, it’s ok.
In Fedora Core 4 (and earlier Cores) when the user is in Gnome or KDE, the HAL daemon will automatically recognize when a USB drive is attached to the computer. It will then create an fstab entry and all will be good in the world. I’m not sure if this happens in Debian, but I’m using Debian as a print/file server so I don’t have any GUIs installed. So I will go over my learning process for others who may be having the same difficulties.
There was a heckuva lot of debate on the Fedora Development list server when the extras repository was first mentioned for Fedora Core 4. People were taking exception to the fact that their package was in extras while some other package was in core. Some threatened to stop making FC packages and others just whined a lot. Well, the extras repository has debuted and I hope that people see that it’s really not a bad idea at all, In fact, I think it’s an excellent idea.
I finally got Fedora Core 4 running after nearly 12 hours of installation. Boy, that was a little rough on my patience. The first change I noticed is that the default “time left” bar is candy cane striped now instead of solid blue.
I decided to boot first into Gnome and see what this new “Clear Looks” theme looked like. It pretty much lived up to my expectations. It is a much cleaned-up version of Bluecurve, just as everyone claimed before. By cleaned up I mean that it’s a much more streamlined-looking, post-modern theme. It’s more like XP inthat the corners are more rounded and the buttons look nicer. Unlike XP there’s no annoying red “X” button. The other icons look the same. It may be me, but they look like they are rendered a bit nicer, but it could be in my head. Gnome also seems to run faster than it previously did, but I have no way of testing this. I didn’t do any benchmarking before and my other Linux computer is on a significantly slower processor.
After two days of downloading, finally got Fedora Core 4 downloaded. Currently burning the discs, but I won’t get to play until I get back from work. It’s going to be an ancy day.
At approximately 11 am EST today Fedora Core 4 was officially released to the mirrores and bittorrents. I couldn’t wait to get home to download it and install it on my two Linux machines. I’m currently downloading it - unfortunately it currently says I have 65 hours left, but hopefully that speeds up soon. Happy “birthday” Fedora!
Here I have decided to run the “top” command in the top transparent Eterm window. This is a great command to have running on the desktop. Basically it’s equivalent to hitting control-alt-delete in Windows and then clicking on “processes”. It tells you what you are running on your system, how much RAM/CPU cycles it’s taking up, and a bunch of other information. It dynamically updates so as you run programs you can see what’s holding up the computer. It doesn’t normally have that line running down the middle. That’s a consequence of some glitch when I was taking the screenshot.
Finally I have figured out something else I have wanted to do for MONTHS! If you look on the top-right corner you will see what looks like an embedded terminal in my desktop. The biggest reason why I’ve wanted to do this is simply because it looks really neat to have a terminal “built into” the desktop. I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet, the way people use them to run a logger in the background or other neat utilities. Besides looking really neat, it allows you to enjoy your background while using the terminal instead of covering it up. I mean, what’s the point of going through all the trouble of having such a great background when you can’t even see it? If you are into computers you are now nodding in agreement. So, how did I do this?
I wanted to share my Fluxbox desktop on my main Linux computer both for the geeky motive of showing off my desktop like jocks show off their cars and also to help others achieve the same configurations that I have. Fluxbox, like Blackbox and other *box window managers, are very, very customizable.
Here is the screenshot of my desktop, which you can see in full resolution by clicking it.
First of all, on the left-hand side of the screen you can see my system monitor, gkrellm. If you’ve spent any amount of time checking out screenshots of others’ desktops you’ve definitely seen this system monitor, especially on a non- KDE or Gnome screenshot. I was actually trying to figure out what this program was for months before finally stumbling upon the answer. It is highly customizable both in what it shows and what the colour scheme is. Currently I have it showing my CPU usage, user/program usage, internet traffic, and a few other small things. The best and easiest way to get get gkrellm if you are a Fedora user is to install it from the freshrpms repository via apt or yum. Freshrpms also contains themes and plugins for gkrellm.
I am a little late in mentioning this due to events in my life at the time at which it occurred, but the Fedora Core 4 Test Release 1 is now available! This is only for use on a test machine because, as the test 1 release, it is very full of bugs. However, if you have an extra machine you can throw it on, you can help them in the debugging process. They have all new goodies that you can’t get anywhere else like Gnome desktop 2.10 and KDE desktop 3.4. Most distros are still on 2.8 and 3.2!
I’ll be getting caught up on book reviews, so through the end of the year you’ll see at least one book review per day. I’ll still be occasionally writing my usual blog posts, but the most consistent content will be book reviews.
Woke up this morning to many news stories that the Raspberry Pi 5 was announced (after the head of Raspberry Pi had said there wouldn’t be a Pi 5 in 2023). Interestingly, if you subscribe to the Raspberry Pi magazine, you’ll be first in line for pre-orders. After having read 5 articles summarizing all the new features ( ars technica article, very detailed hackaday article), here are my thoughts as bullet points:
It’s awesome that you get about twice the processor speed for only $5 more than what the Raspberry Pi 4 is now selling for.
However, at $80 for the board (with the need to buy power, case, cooling, etc) the Raspberry Pi is moving out of the realm of an impulse buy item. And, for non-tinkerers, why not buy a Chromebook?
Somehow it has taken 11 years, but we finally have a power button built into the Raspberry Pi 5. Hurray! Supposedly, pushing it will trigger a controlled shutdown.
Unfortunately, there is no longer an no audio out jack. I use one of my Raspberry Pis as an MPD daemon device to play music for the kids at night. In the future I would either need to get an audio hat or a set of USB speakers.
If you prefer watching a video about the new features instead of reading one of the articles above, you can watch Jeff Geerling’s video about the Raspberry Pi 5:
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
Back in May, I set up my Raspberry Pi B as my garage door monitor. Unfortunately it stopped working, I haven’t investigated yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it got hit with the infamous SD card corruption that was a big problem with the early Raspberry Pi boards. (I think I read it’s much less of a problem with the Raspberry Pi 4) So I decided to go ahead and switch it with a Raspberry Pi Zero W, especially since you can get it with headers from Adafruit for only $14. As a bonus, it’s got a better processor (same as the Raspberry Pi 3, I think) and built-in WiFi. It’s also got a smaller footprint, but that doesn’t matter to me for where it’s mounted. So now I’m back to having a Raspberry Pi B without a job to do (assuming the hardware is fine and it just ended up in an unbootable state. I’ve also now got a usb WiFi module for it, so maybe that’ll help me think of something for it to do. I think the Raspberry Pi rover project I got in a Humble Bundle uses a 1st gen Raspberry Pi, but I’d been thinking of using a 4th gen Pi in order to maybe do some more fun stuff with it like maybe some openCV based Computer Vision and/or machine learning.
I noticed that something had gone screwy with the Raspberry Pi 1B in the garage that was monitoring the garage door. I restarted it and discovered that last time I was coding and working on making it more robust if it had a temporary lapse in WiFi (so it wouldn’t crash), I’d created a little error. Fixing that error led me to realize that my new code for robustness had introduced an unfortunate artifact in that it would pass a status of “unchanged” to MQTT. So I fixed that. Code’s now in a good place. I just need to add a few more config options to make it more usable for others who aren’t me. Then I’ll make another release.
The next project I wanted to work on was to see if maybe my environment monitoring might be slightly more reliable with a Raspberry Pi than with an Arduino. So I wanted to do some comparisons. For my bathroom IoT project, I am using:
As things continue to happen in the commercial IoT space like Wink switching to requiring subscription fees, I continue to feel happy that I’m creating my own Internet of Things solutions rather than relying on commercial vendors who can decide to disappear or suddenly start charging fees. The cost for me is that things go at a slower pace and, obviously, don’t have sleek packaging. I think I can live with that.
It’s pretty neat how much technology has changed in the past 8 years. Eight years ago Rich West and I coded up a web server on a microcontroller ( code here) and part of my justification was that, for only $50, someone would be able to have a web server on a microcontroller. Wouldn’t that be so awesome for people without a lot of money for technology? Yet, less than a decade later, the Raspberry Pi can be had for around $50 (give or take depending on the features) and implements an entire computer, not just a web server. You can install a full Linux distro on it and do everything that a Linux disto can do (including serve web pages). I hope we can continue to grow technology like this for years to come.
Now that we’ve had a few months to consider Red Hat’s new course code policy, I wanted to share my thoughts since I’ve been a user of Red Hat’s Fedora since it started back in 2003. I’ve also made heavy use of CentOS and am currently running a server using one of the free RHEL licences that came about from the CentOS Stream controversy. I want to start off with my thoughts and then how I think we may end up in a better place anyway.
I’ve been using Virtualbox for a long time to run virtual machines when I want to check out other distros before I install them on one of my computers or to review them. It’s MOSTLY open source, although some of the key parts like USB 2.0 are free to use, but not open source. So now that Red Hat’s Virtual Machine Manager is starting to look pretty useful I figured I should check it out. That way I could be using a FLOSS virtual machine program - assuming the features were good enough to match Oracle’s offerings. Also, Virtualbox requires a kernel module that has to be recompiled every time a new kernel is installed and that’s annoying. I figured I’d test out both programs by installed a VM of Centos.
Well, the latest craze to hit the Linux bloggers is talking about Empathy. Everyone is talking about it. It’s apparently going to be in the next version of Gnome and Ubuntu is considering replacing Pidgin with Empathy for the next release. First of all, depending on how much work is done on Empathy between now and then, I think this may be a bad idea. Ubuntu is the distro we give our Linux n00b friends to play with. Pidgin can do (more or less) everything Trillian can do (and definitely everything AIM can do - except voice/vid). Do we want them thinking that Linux is crap because they are using the feature incomplete Empathy?
Now that we’ve had a few months to consider Red Hat’s new course code policy, I wanted to share my thoughts since I’ve been a user of Red Hat’s Fedora since it started back in 2003. I’ve also made heavy use of CentOS and am currently running a server using one of the free RHEL licences that came about from the CentOS Stream controversy. I want to start off with my thoughts and then how I think we may end up in a better place anyway.
This month’s Linux Format Magazine came with CentOS 5.2 on the disc. CentOS, in case you don’t know, is a community supported version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. (RHEL) Again, in the unlikely case you don’t know - Red Hat is required to supply the source code to all GPL code it uses in RHEL. What they don’t have to do is supply the Source RPMs which make it extremely easy for a distro like CentOS to exist. They can take the SRPMs and just remove the Red Hat artwork/logos and repackage it off as their own. The GPL allows this. Why in the world would Red Hat do this? They are, in a way, helping for a gratis version of their distro to exist and take away money that might otherwise go to them.
Well, the latest craze to hit the Linux bloggers is talking about Empathy. Everyone is talking about it. It’s apparently going to be in the next version of Gnome and Ubuntu is considering replacing Pidgin with Empathy for the next release. First of all, depending on how much work is done on Empathy between now and then, I think this may be a bad idea. Ubuntu is the distro we give our Linux n00b friends to play with. Pidgin can do (more or less) everything Trillian can do (and definitely everything AIM can do - except voice/vid). Do we want them thinking that Linux is crap because they are using the feature incomplete Empathy?
This post contains my thoughts on a few stories I’ve been saving up that don’t merit a post on their own.
D&D Romance
Just a day after posting about my kids getting into D&D, I came across this article on Tor.com about The Golden Age of D&D Romance. I had no idea it was a genre, but I’m not surprised. Pretty much every genre can be crossed with every other. See The Dresden Files for fantasy mixed with detective noir, for example. After a brief introduction, the author of the piece lists 6 books in the D&D Romance genre. I don’t hate on romance as much as I did before I read a few books in the genre, but these aren’t my cup of tea. That said, they may work for you.
This post contains my thoughts on a few stories I’ve been saving up that don’t merit a post on their own.
D&D Romance
Just a day after posting about my kids getting into D&D, I came across this article on Tor.com about The Golden Age of D&D Romance. I had no idea it was a genre, but I’m not surprised. Pretty much every genre can be crossed with every other. See The Dresden Files for fantasy mixed with detective noir, for example. After a brief introduction, the author of the piece lists 6 books in the D&D Romance genre. I don’t hate on romance as much as I did before I read a few books in the genre, but these aren’t my cup of tea. That said, they may work for you.
It’s been a while since we last went to Disney; five years, in fact. We were originally supposed to go in 2020, but then, a week before our trip, Disney closed for COVID-19. Finally it was time to go back and boy have things changed. Back when we just had Scarlett, I wrote a blog post about Visiting to Disney with a 2-year-old and another about Visiting to Disney with a 3-year-old. While I don’t intend for this blog post to be nearly as formal as those entries, they do serve as a contrast for this trip.
Back in November we took the twins on their first trip to Disney. This time around Scarlett wasn’t as interested in the parades as she was last time, but the twins were REALLY into them. Surprisingly, both twins ended up warming up to the characters. Sam’s reluctance with Mickey on the first day made me think he was going to try and avoid them the entire trip. But as you can see in the video, he eventually got into interacting with the characters.
When I wrote my second fatherhood post, the one about Disney Princesses, I speculated that perhaps the problem most people had with the Disney Princesses was not the movies, but how the company marketed to kids. Since Scarlett is only one, my only exposure to the princesses has been through my own childhood and adulthood love of Disney movies. This Boing Boing post about the princess from Brave, Merida, proves the point - it’s the marketing that gets under everyone’s skin. Here’s the change from the movie version on the left to the marketing version on the right:
[caption id=“attachment_6143” align=“aligncenter” width=“449”] lil kids - CC licensed by jepoycamboy[/caption]
I titled this Part 1 because I am sure I’ll have to revisit this topic in the future. Scarlett is only 1 and she barely cares for television, much less Disney animated films. However, if you don’t think about the future, it has a way of surprising you and finding you unprepared. Of course, as a kid, I loved the Disney cartoons. It was only in the last ten years or so that I came across any articles critical of Disney and how it might be corrupting our daughters. There’s always going to be some degree of hate towards the creators of mass media because we are powerless against them. They’re able to use emotions and psychology to affect us (or those around us) and bypass our rational thinking. Try telling some kid back in the late 90s he can’t have a Power Rangers toy because it promotes violence. He doesn’t know or care about that. He just wants to have one of the rainbow of action figures to play with his friends. Mass media is everywhere and the only way to keep it from affecting your kids is to lock them in the basement - they’ll see it on TV, movies, radio or from friends, teachers, and family members. And Hinds over at The Atlantic recounts how he was unable to keep his daughters from learning about the princesses, despite his best efforts. Interestingly enough, Hinds doesn’t really dwell much on why he’d want to do this to his daughters - it’s considered to be assumed knowledge - of COURSE people want to keep their kids away from Disney Princess Culture. But why?
This post contains my thoughts on a few stories I’ve been saving up that don’t merit a post on their own.
D&D Romance
Just a day after posting about my kids getting into D&D, I came across this article on Tor.com about The Golden Age of D&D Romance. I had no idea it was a genre, but I’m not surprised. Pretty much every genre can be crossed with every other. See The Dresden Files for fantasy mixed with detective noir, for example. After a brief introduction, the author of the piece lists 6 books in the D&D Romance genre. I don’t hate on romance as much as I did before I read a few books in the genre, but these aren’t my cup of tea. That said, they may work for you.
This post contains my thoughts on a few stories I’ve been saving up that don’t merit a post on their own.
D&D Romance
Just a day after posting about my kids getting into D&D, I came across this article on Tor.com about The Golden Age of D&D Romance. I had no idea it was a genre, but I’m not surprised. Pretty much every genre can be crossed with every other. See The Dresden Files for fantasy mixed with detective noir, for example. After a brief introduction, the author of the piece lists 6 books in the D&D Romance genre. I don’t hate on romance as much as I did before I read a few books in the genre, but these aren’t my cup of tea. That said, they may work for you.
A few days ago I read this article over at Tech Republic about how, Mozilla’s greatest achievement is not Firefox, but the Rust programming language. They point to Firefox’s declining numbers in the face of Chrome and Chromium-based browsers and I’m inclined to agree with the author. There is, of course, a kind of poetry to this. Although Netscape was one of the first dot-com companies and beat Microsoft to the punch at creating the first mainstream web browser, it’s not Netscape Navigator which is its greatest legacy. Instead it’s spinning off into Mozilla and, the most poetic part, the creation of the Javascript programming language. (Javascript was written in just a week and a half and this episode of Red Hat’s Commandline Heroes podcast does an excellent job documenting it)
[caption id=“attachment_6153” align=“aligncenter” width=“450”] Firefox (aka Red Panda) busy Not Spying on You[/caption]
A 1 May Ars article and 30 April Wired article mention that a UK company known as Gamma International is selling spyware that pretends to be Mozilla Firefox. Both articles mention that repressive governments have used it to spy on dissidents, but it’s unclear from the article whether the company purposely sells to evil governments or whether it sells this to anybody, including foreign governments. The Wired article mentions that Gamma markets it to governments in general and so, if pressed, would probably say that it’s not meant to be used by evil governments - just people like the FBI trying to catch criminals. Either way, Mozilla has sued for trademark infringement. I applaud them for doing so. Governments may have both legitimate and illegitimate reasons for spying on computer communications, but I don’t think they should be abusing the good will of other companies to do it. Imagine if Gamma was selling Ford cars that were bugged. No one would want to buy a Ford car for fear it might be a bugged version. Come on, guys! Figure out a solution that doesn’t screw over the folks at Mozilla.
At first I used Internet Explorer because we had a free trial of MSN. Then we switched to MCI, who used Netscape (although you could also use IE) and I mostly used Netscape. I think this was around Netscape 4 or 5. I really liked Netscape A LOT and used it almost to the exclusivity of Internet Explorer. Of course, those were the exciting days when every few months Netscape and Internet Explorer would release a new version. As I’ve commented in previous posts, whether or not Firefox ever gains a dominant share (and the same with Linux vs Windows), its mere presence will necessitate innovation from Microsoft. You may have noticed that IE stayed at version 6 for a very long time until Firefox started getting really popular. But I digress. Netscape had all the best plugins and I thought it was the ultimate in the Web experiences. I coded all of my websites with Netscape in mind.
I was trying to pay my Verizon Wireless bill a few weeks ago and it kept having problems. I checked the credit card number, the expiration date, and every other field, but it was still not working. Finally I got fed up enough to call tech support rather than risk being locked out or something. So I gave them a call and the lady says to me, “oh, you’re using Firefox aren’t you?”
“Yes I am” (because I don’t like viruses and other M$ exploits taking over my computer)
“Oh well, I’m sorry, but you can’t use that browser here to pay your bills.”
“What?”
“Oh, don’t worry, our engineers are working on it.”
Last week was the first week of school in Howard County, Maryland. It was a chaotic week for transportation and, I think it was caused in large part by contractor issues. In the USA we tend to believe that privatizing everything makes it better. But, in fact, all it does is create an extra layer of remove from key employees and create inefficiencies. As an example, from this news story:
“My husband is a bus driver for Howard County with a different contractor, and I know that there are companies like his where the drivers don’t have enough routes,” said Andrews, “Instead of us having to drive our kids to school, they need to use some of the existing contracts to fill these routes.”
[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“160” caption=“Katy Ho, a fellow Cornellian from C/O 2005 on the same bus in Brooklyn that I happened to be on.”] [/caption]
One in 1,600,000. That’s odds of randomly meeting someone I know in NYC excluding my wife’s family. And yet, due to construction on the Q line, Danielle and I found ourselves on the bus with Katy Ho, who we hadn’t seen since graduation.
Last week was the first week of school in Howard County, Maryland. It was a chaotic week for transportation and, I think it was caused in large part by contractor issues. In the USA we tend to believe that privatizing everything makes it better. But, in fact, all it does is create an extra layer of remove from key employees and create inefficiencies. As an example, from this news story:
“My husband is a bus driver for Howard County with a different contractor, and I know that there are companies like his where the drivers don’t have enough routes,” said Andrews, “Instead of us having to drive our kids to school, they need to use some of the existing contracts to fill these routes.”
Noticed the Catbite sticker on the wall with the others
As I mentioned during my 2022 Music Wrap-Up, I got back into modern ska via Bad Time Records. So when Bad Time Records announced their Bad Time Records Tour 2023 featuring We Are the Union, Kill Lincoln, and Catbite - it was a no-brainer to buy the tickets. As a bonus, they’re also filming a concert film/documentary during the tour called This is New Tone. The show was at Union Stage in Washington, DC. It was my first timewer seeing any of these bands live, my first concert of 2023, and my first time at Union Stage.
Back in December, before I was having any issues that made me think I was going to have to quit running, I signed up for the Dunedin Rotary Club Triathlon. It would be my first ever Triathlon. (It may end up being my only Triathlon) I set up a Garmin 12-week training plan and, when the time came, I started my training. I was feeling pretty good as the date approached. Unlike many others doing Triathlons, I’ve been swimming my entire life. Not to get ahead of myself, but this is reflected in my 2nd place ranking for the swim portion of the Triathlon.
Last year when I was looking at potential competitions to participate in, it saw that RipIt Events had a Duathlon pretty close to the house. I figured it’d be neat to try out a Run-Cycle-Run event. This would end up being my first competitive cycling event. However, it was scheduled for about ¾ of the way through my Triathlon training so I figured that I would be nice and trained up for the cycling portion.
Once again I participated in the Bigfoot 5 and 10 mile race near my house. However, I think this will truly be the last time. I didn’t fall this time, but it seems that no matter how carefully I step, this trail is designed to make me roll my ankle. I rolled it twice to the point where it hurt and a couple times that didn’t hurt. As I write this post near the end of race day (it will not be published until the new year), my foot is not throbbing and it doesn’t hurt to walk, so I think it was strained a bit, but not sprained (thank goodness).
Since I didn’t cover running last year, I’m going to cover both years in this post.
2021
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I caught the running bug during the Red Hat Summit in 2019. My original goal was to do an official race that would allow me to qualify for a good spot at a Run Disney race. Then COVID-19 hit and killed in-person racing.
Because of various issues I wrote about before (mostly stemming from the issue with my right sesamoids), I ended up canceling my summer and fall races. The last one I was really looking forward to was the Ted Corbitt 15k, honoring Mr. Corbitt who has a long list of achievements, including being the first African-American to run the Olympic Marathon event and being a founding president of the New York Road Runners. This was to be my final competitive road race of 2022.
The Percy Sutton Harlem 5K was both the next race I’d registered for after the Front Runners LGBT Pride Run, and the first race after my doctors cleared me to start running again (“for reals this time”) after an X-Ray and MRI to make sure things were OK in that tiny area under the big toe where there’s so much going on. Both doctors told me to ease myself back into running. They also both gave me the metric of using the next day’s presence or absence of pain as a way to tell if I was doing OK. After the past couple months of trying things out, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best shoe for me is the New Balance 860. Since my old one was worn out (which is why I switched to the 1080 for the BK Half - which may (at least partly) be the reason for my injury), I got myself a new pair at the New Balance store located inside the NYRR RunCenter when I went to pick up my bib. I also took advantage and had them confirm my shoe size while I was there. For this race I chose to run with a dancer pad since my podiatrist is making me new orthotics with a cutout, both doctors suggested at least starting out using it, and I’d learned a new position for the pad that kept my sesamoid area safe while not causing me pain in the other toes. Bad placement of the pad caused me pain during the Pride Run.
As I mentioned in my Setbacks post, I’ve injured my foot. At first I thought it was metatarsalgia, but it’s a closely related issue - sesamoiditis. My podiatrist cleared me to attempt a run after a week and predicted things would be fully healed by 2 weeks in. There were 2 key changes I had to make. First, I had to change out the shoes I wear daily to work - I’d chosen a New Balance model that didn’t have a rigid enough sole. Second, I had to wear dancer pads while recovering. As opposed to the metatarsal pad I’d originally sought out from CVS, it doesn’t cushion the area receiving pressure. Instead it puts the pressure everywhere else. More about that later. I spoke with the coach I’m using to get ready for the Marathon and we agreed that I could try and run the race, but had to keep my pace lower to reduce the chance of injury.
I’ve already communicated this with most of my family and friends who support me in running, but I’ve suffered my second setback of 2022. The first one was back in January when I had to miss out on my first chance to do an in-person half marathon due to catching a really bad cold or flu. I don’t remember which, only that it wasn’t COVID.
Now, a few days away from my next 10K, I seem to have developed a pain in the ball of my right foot. I will be seeing a doctor to find out what it actually is, but there’s a 99.99999% chance that it would not be a good idea to even attempt to run the 10K at a slow speed if I want a chance of recovering in time for the marathon this fall.
I think I’ve become addicted to races. I really missed having races between April ( Cherry Blossom) and the end of May (BK HM) although I did that on purpose to allow myself to rest and train. July, when I once again will be sans race, is probably going to be hard for me.
A couple weeks after the Cherry Blossom race I reached out to my coach to give them my goals for the NYC Marathon this fall. The coach adjusted my training schedule and told me they wanted me to run the race as 10 miles followed by the fastest 5K I would run this year. I was aiming for a time of 1 hour 30 minutes for this race. That would require me to run the ten miles as fast as I had run in DC for the Cherry Blossoms and then do another 5K on top of that, and do it quickly. I set my Garmin to try and do that.
Last fall I finally got to race the official Credit Union Cherry Blossom 10 mile course. This year, I FINALLY was able to run the race on the course in the spring. It was nice for the race to return to its place as the “Rite of Spring”. Although the cherry blossoms reached peak bloom a week before the race, they still made a nice, pretty setting for the race.
A couple weeks ago, anticipating the coming spring showers and the possibility of having to race in the rain, I bought an outfit from Tracksmith’s new Thaw collection. As usual, I brought all my running clothes to NYC, not knowing what the weather has in store. After all, it wasn’t supposed to snow last race. I woke up at 0500 since the MTA trip planner told me I’d need to start my journey at 0544 to get to The Armory by 0730. It was in the 40s outside so while I brushed my teeth I waffled about what to wear. By race time (0900) it would be in the 50s. Complicating things: it was almost guaranteed to rain during the race. So my mid-layer was out. My jacket was waterproof, but that would certainly be too hot for the race. Should I wear it and unzip? In the end, I decided to go for just the Thaw long sleeve shirt, Thaw half tights, Thaw beanie, and inverno gloves. I had my usual pre-race breakfast of a quarter cup of raisins and headed out the door.
My second race for 2022 came right on the heels of the previous one. This time it was for the NYRR Gridiron 4 mile race. After this one I have a break for a little bit before the next race I’m running.
Yup, there’s snow accumulating on my head
This turned out to be my first race run in the snow. I got pretty lucky with my running wardrobe, but I’ll get to that in a second. Early in the week, I checked the weather to see what kind of running clothes to pack; there was a 17% chance of precipitation. Based on the forecast temperature of 33F (versus last week’s 18-22F), I was just going to wear the Tracksmith Brighton base layer, quarter-zip mid-layer, and tights. But I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to just bring my entire Tracksmith wardrobe. The night before the race I once again checked the weather. There was now a 50% chance of snow or rain. When I woke up, the forecast was now 90% chance. So I went with the same getup I had last week - the Brighton base layer, quarter-zip mid-layer, jacket, and Bislett pants. The jacket and pants are both wind and water resistant so I figured they’d keep me a lot warmer. The Bisless pants proved to be especially great to have because they have stirrups that keep the pants from moving up and, therefore, keep the legs from getting wet when it’s snowing. It was snowing when I left the house, on the train ride up to Central Park and as I warmed up. Luckily, the snow stopped right before race started and didn’t start up again until I was done.
Sunday, 6 February 2022, was my first race of 2022. I’d been looking forward to the Fred Lebow Half Marathon to both be my first race of 2022 and first half marathon race. Unfortunately, I got really sick with something not-COVID and couldn’t attend. So I was extra excited about getting to this race. Last year’s COVID winter surge and summer Delta wave meant that I didn’t get to any in-person races until the fall when I FINALLY got to do the CUCB Cherry Blossom race. This year it seems, so far, that in-person races are here to stay with various COVID mitigations in place. NYRR is requiring racers to be fully vaccinated and mask wearing until runners leave the corrals. Folks seem to be mostly complying with the latter, although it’s inevitable that some folks slip through the cracks.
Today I ran my first trail run, the Bigfoot Endurance Trail. I will definitely say that Ripit Events did a great job running the race. There were lots of good reminder emails leading up to the race. They had folks managing parking. Everything went smoothly and, more or less, on time.
The race was at Rockburn State Park, making this the first race for which I didn’t have to get up at an ungodly hour to attend. It’s just a 10 minute-ish drive from the house. I’d never done any of the trails - usually we just take the kids to the playground. Luckily, one of my friends at work warned me to pick up my feet. I don’t think I necessarily run at a shuffle, but it did make me run with more awareness of the trail. This was a good thing because Mother Nature was out to get me! The 10 mile race consisted of two 5-mile loops. On the first loop I mildly rolled both ankles either in sections that were nothing but tree roots or where the gravel or sand weren’t as tightly packed as they could be. However, tragedy struck (at least race-level tragedy) with half a mile to go. I rolled my left ankle HARD. Like, I’m definitely going to need some Ibuprofen and an ice pack when I get home hard. That threw off my gait and so with literally only a quarter of a mile to go, I couldn’t lift my foot high enough and tripped over a root. I took a spill, but was luckily wearing gloves. I only scratched up my knee. Very nicely - perhaps because this is more of a fun-run community thing than the Boston Marathon or something like that - a couple of runners both in front and behind of me stopped to help me up and make sure I was fine. One of them also checked up on me after the race. This tumble cost me for my age group to fall from 2nd place to 3rd place (literally just 20 seconds difference).
After nearly 2 years of training, I finally was able to run the Credit Union Cherry Blossom 10 mile race on 12 Sept. Yeah, last year I ran a virtual race, but that was really no different than a training run. This year we finally had the COVID-19 vaccine and so the race was able to take place in person. It was worth it.
The starting line when I first arrived to the race.
Ever since fall 2019, I’ve been training for the Cherry Blossom 10 mile race, scheduled for 5 April 2020. Unfortunately, like everything else involving more than one person, it’s been scuttled by COVID-19. After all that training, it was disappointing. (I will take a moment to acknowledge that it’s objectively ridiculous to be disappointed by a missed race when people are dying. However, there’s always someone worse off than any other person. eg. I can feel that I’ve had a bad day at work, even if my day wasn’t as bad as someone who found out they had cancer It doesn’t delegitimize their feelings of disappointment as long as they keep it in perspective.) The organizers of the Cherry Blossom Festival race had a solution - a virtual race! Run wherever you can and record your time and it’ll all go on the website. It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly a way to use all that training you’ve done. So today I went ahead and did the race since the weather’s actually good today. It was an AWESOME run. It felt great to do it and, given the insane hills in my neighborhood, I finished feeling that I could definitely kick butt in the Cherry Blossom race next year because their course is not very hilly. It also renewed my confidence in being able to do well in the Baltimore 10-miler this summer (if it’s not cancelled), renowned for being hilly. So how did I do? (if you paid attention, it was spoiled at the top…hehe)
As I’ve mentioned a few times, my first running race was the 5k at the 2019 Red Hat Summit. I caught the bug and started thinking about running longer races. Since a lot of races use official USATF-certified times to qualify or to get a corral placement, I wanted to find a race that was USATF-certified. So in July I signed up for the 9th Annual Annapolis Running Classic. I started training and working my Saturday runs up towards a 10k distance. Today, it finally all paid off.
Miley’s twerking has been way over-exposed. I didn’t write a post about it because I couldn’t give a crap. She just seemed like she was either pulling an Andy Kaufman on us by looking absolutely ridiculous or she was doing a Bieber and losing her marbles.
However, I came across this p retty awesome post written by an African American woman sociologist on how the performance looked to her. These are the types of posts that make me happy that blogs exist. I learned about an experience I couldn’t begin to fathom since I’m neither racially black nor a woman. I didn’t read all the comments on the post, but there were some disagreements from other black women. I’d say you should probably give her more weight than the average blog, considering her PhD, but also remember that not everyone has the same experience - even people of the same race/sex.
Obama will not be the first African-American President of the United States. Barack Obama will be the first mulatto President of the United States of America. This is the myth of race in the USA. Apparently because Barack is half-black, he’s the first African-American President. But if he’s half-black then he’s also half-white. So why isn’t he just the 40-somethingith white President of the US? I don’t understand, if one half is valid, why isn’t the other?
Back in December, before I was having any issues that made me think I was going to have to quit running, I signed up for the Dunedin Rotary Club Triathlon. It would be my first ever Triathlon. (It may end up being my only Triathlon) I set up a Garmin 12-week training plan and, when the time came, I started my training. I was feeling pretty good as the date approached. Unlike many others doing Triathlons, I’ve been swimming my entire life. Not to get ahead of myself, but this is reflected in my 2nd place ranking for the swim portion of the Triathlon.
Last year when I was looking at potential competitions to participate in, it saw that RipIt Events had a Duathlon pretty close to the house. I figured it’d be neat to try out a Run-Cycle-Run event. This would end up being my first competitive cycling event. However, it was scheduled for about ¾ of the way through my Triathlon training so I figured that I would be nice and trained up for the cycling portion.
In March I continued to work on my programming projects as well as a little more Advent of Code.
Things started off with me finishing up my dreamhostapi and Dreamhost_DNS_Go projects in Golang. I got the API working under all the conditions that I need and I worked on both the output of the program and the logging. It now functions quite well for me to keep my dynamic DNS URLs up to date. My next step is something I’m going to do in a few of my cron scripts - have a separate JSON log that could be interpreted so that I could either have a daily email to let me know that the scripts all ran correctly or so that I can load them into Prometheus/Grafana to see on a dashboard how all my scripts are doing.
In March I continued to work on my programming projects as well as a little more Advent of Code.
Things started off with me finishing up my dreamhostapi and Dreamhost_DNS_Go projects in Golang. I got the API working under all the conditions that I need and I worked on both the output of the program and the logging. It now functions quite well for me to keep my dynamic DNS URLs up to date. My next step is something I’m going to do in a few of my cron scripts - have a separate JSON log that could be interpreted so that I could either have a daily email to let me know that the scripts all ran correctly or so that I can load them into Prometheus/Grafana to see on a dashboard how all my scripts are doing.
January was a relatively light programming month for me. I was focused on finishing up end of year blog posts and other tasks. Since Lastfmeoystats is used to generate the stats I need for my end of year music post, I worked on it a little to make some fixes. The biggest fix was to change the chart titles not to be hardcoded. I didn’t realize it until I was reviewing my blog post, but I had hard-coded the year when I first wrote the code a couple years ago. I also changed the limits on some of the data I was collecting so that I could do more expansive trending for my overall stats.
I didn’t do much coding in July, so I decided to combine the July and August wrap-ups.
Python
Dreamhost Dynamic DNS
I decided to clean up and update some code that uses the Dreamhost API to allow for Dynamic DNS. I cleaned up the logging output so that I could figure out why it was sometimes deleting one of my domains rather than just updating the IP. The original programmer had it printing out to the terminal. I used the logging package to send logs out to a file. While I was improving the logging, I also decided to use f-strings to make it more obvious what was going into the output string.
In March I continued to work on my programming projects as well as a little more Advent of Code.
Things started off with me finishing up my dreamhostapi and Dreamhost_DNS_Go projects in Golang. I got the API working under all the conditions that I need and I worked on both the output of the program and the logging. It now functions quite well for me to keep my dynamic DNS URLs up to date. My next step is something I’m going to do in a few of my cron scripts - have a separate JSON log that could be interpreted so that I could either have a daily email to let me know that the scripts all ran correctly or so that I can load them into Prometheus/Grafana to see on a dashboard how all my scripts are doing.
I started off the year mostly working on Python projects. For January and February I finally started making some great progress with understanding modern web frameworks and use of CSS frameworks rather than rolling my own. This not only helped with the Prophecy Practicum project, but would form the backbone to a lot of coding this year. I also wrote a utility to tally up my videos for my end of year video game roundup, saving me literal hours of time. As you can read from following the link above, I also worked on my long-running Extra Life Donation Tracker code.
November was not a huge programming month for me. On the weekends I was a little more focused with family stuff and videogames. But I did manage work on a couple projects.
I started off the year not expecting to do much programming. Compared to some months in 2021, I barely programmed, but I did end up programming much more than I expected. Let’s take a look at what I worked on in the first sixth of the year.
Python Programs
End of Year Video Games Helper
Coming off of last year in which I finally used Python to pull my last.fm data and create graphs, I decided to do the same for my End of Year Video Games blog post. I haven’t posted the code to Github, but here it is:
Across both September and October I got a decent amount of programming done. I just about finished the Learn You Haskell for Great Good book (got up to just before Monads) and started Head First Go. Once I had enough Go language to get started on AoC, I knew I’d be ready for the 2016 problem set. Let’s get into the nitty gritty!
Python (not Advent of Code)
Impractical Python
I finished chapter 11 which contained my old friend the Monty Hall Paradox. I’ve had a version up on my site for a very long time based on a PHP tutorial in Linux Format Magazine. This time I was able to code it in Python as well as creating a GUI version. Chapter 11 also touched upon The Birthday Paradox.
Once again I used a script to pull out the official descriptions of the podcasts as well as the URL where I access the feed. After the official description you’ll see my commentary about the podcast.
Politics
5-4 Pod - Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.
January was a relatively light programming month for me. I was focused on finishing up end of year blog posts and other tasks. Since Lastfmeoystats is used to generate the stats I need for my end of year music post, I worked on it a little to make some fixes. The biggest fix was to change the chart titles not to be hardcoded. I didn’t realize it until I was reviewing my blog post, but I had hard-coded the year when I first wrote the code a couple years ago. I also changed the limits on some of the data I was collecting so that I could do more expansive trending for my overall stats.
Over the last two days, between playing Portal and Age of Empires III (both of which are…awesome!), I’ve been doing a little more flickr hacking. This is very closely related to my previous Flickr program where I checked if my pictures were ready to be moved into the next views groups.
This time I wanted to see which of my photos were not in any groups. So in the case that I’ve missed putting a photo into the 25 views groups because it’s a few pages back and I really don’t have time to go back through all of my photos to find the pictures to put into the groups. I tried that once and it was excrutiatingly slow - even slower than figuring out if it was time to graduate my pictures out of the views groups. So here’s the output of my current program:
So, thanks to a problem I had with rigging up Nick in " Sugar", I’ve temporarily lost interest in animation. This happens to me all the time, and I think I’ve mentioned it before in previous blog posts that I’m too lazy to look up before that I tend to gain and lose interest in my hobbies. For example, I haven’t touched the Wii since I beat Mario Galaxy during Christmas and until this recent problem with “Sugar” happened, I hadn’t done any programming in about a year. Even my interest in photography has ebbed so much that I let my subscription to Digital Camera Magazine lapse.
January was a relatively light programming month for me. I was focused on finishing up end of year blog posts and other tasks. Since Lastfmeoystats is used to generate the stats I need for my end of year music post, I worked on it a little to make some fixes. The biggest fix was to change the chart titles not to be hardcoded. I didn’t realize it until I was reviewing my blog post, but I had hard-coded the year when I first wrote the code a couple years ago. I also changed the limits on some of the data I was collecting so that I could do more expansive trending for my overall stats.
I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).
I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
If you’ve been following my blog for a long time, you know that back in 2014 I was working on a Python program to create hourly btrfs snapshots and cull them according to a certain algorithm. (See all the related posts here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) The furthest I ever got was weekly culling. Frankly, life and school contributed a good excuse not to keep going because I had created a huge headache for myself by attempting to figure out the date and cover all the possible corner cases with unit tests. This is what my code looked like in 2014.
It’s been a while since btrfs was first introduced to me via a Fedora version that had it as the default filesystem. At the time, it was especially brittle when it came to power outages. I ended up losing a system to one such use case. But a few years ago, I started using btrfs on my home directory. And even developed a program to manage snapshots. My two favorite features of btrfs are that Copy on Write (COW) allows me to make snapshots that only take up space when the file that was snapshot changes and the ability to dynamically set up and grow RAID levels. I was able to use this recently to get my photo hard drive on RAID1 without having to have an extra hard drive (because most RAID solutions destroy what’s on the drive).
[root@supermario ~]# /usr/sbin/btrfs scrub start -Bd /media/Photos/
scrub device /dev/sdd1 (id 1) done
scrub started at Tue Mar 21 17:18:13 2017 and finished after 05:49:29
total bytes scrubbed: 2.31TiB with 0 errors
scrub device /dev/sda1 (id 2) done
scrub started at Tue Mar 21 17:18:13 2017 and finished after 05:20:56
total bytes scrubbed: 2.31TiB with 0 errors
I’m a bit perplexed at this information. Since this is a RAID1, I would expect it to be comparing info between disks - is this not so? If not, why? Because I would have expected both disks to end at the same time. Also, interesting to note that the 1TB/hr stopped being the case at some point.
[root@supermario ~]# btrfs scrub status /media/Photos/
scrub status for 27cc1330-c4e3-404f-98f6-f23becec76b5
scrub started at Tue Mar 21 17:18:13 2017, running for 01:05:38
total bytes scrubbed: 1.00TiB with 0 errors
So on Fedora 25 with an AMD-8323 (8 core, no hyperthreading) and 24GB of RAM with this hard drive and its 3TB brother in RAID1 , it takes about an hour per Terabyte to do a scrub. (Which seems about equal to what a coworker told me his system takes to do a zfs scrub - 40ish hours for about 40ish TB)
I’ve been looking at NAS implementations for a long time. I looked at FreeNAS for a while then OpenMediaVault. But what I really wanted was to be able to take advantage of btrfs and its great RAID abilities - especially its ability to dynamically expand. So I was happy when I discovered Rockstor on Reddit. Here are some videos in which I explore the interface and how to work with Rockstor using a VM before setting it up on bare metal.
Looks like I was right about the non-commit and possibly also about the df -h.
Last night at the time I wrote the post:
# btrfs fi show /home
Label: 'Home1' uuid: 89cfd56a-06c7-4805-9526-7be4d24a2872
Total devices 1 FS bytes used 1.91TiB
devid 1 size 2.73TiB used 1.99TiB path /dev/sdb1
Because of grad school, my work on Snap in Time has been quite halting - my last commit was 8 months ago. So I haven’t finished the quarterly and yearly culling part of my script. Since I’ve been making semi-hourly snapshots since March 2014, I had accumulated something like 1052 snapshots. While performance did improve a bit after I turned on the autodefrag option, it’s still a bit suboptimal, especially when dealing with database-heavy programs like Firefox, Chrome, and Amarok. At least that is my experience - it’s entirely possible that this is correlation and not causation, but I have read online that when btrfs needs to figure out snapshots and what to keep, delete, etc it can be a performance drag to have lots of snapshots. I’m not sure, but I feel like 1052 is a lot of snapshots. It’s certainly way more than I would have if my program were complete and working correctly.
When I first installed my new hard drive with btrfs I was happy with how fast things were running because the hard drive was a SATA3 and the old one was SATA2. But recently two things were bugging the heck out of me - using either Chrome or Firefox was painfully slow. It wasn’t worth browsing the web on my Linux computer. Also, Amarok was running horribly - taking forever to go from song to song.
Hard drives are relatively cheap, especially nowadays. But I still want to stay within my budget as I setup my backups and system redundancies. So, ideally, for my backup RAID I’d take advantage of btrs’ ability to change RAID types on the fly and start off with one drive. Then I’d add another and go to RAID1. Then another and RAID5. Finally, the fourth drive and RAID6. At that point I’d have to be under some sort of Job-like God/Devil curse if all my drives failed at once, negating the point of the RAID. The best thinking right now is that you want to have backups, but want to try not to have to use them because of both offline time and the fact that a restore is never as clean as you hope it’ll be.
So, back when I started this project, I laid out that one of the reasons I wanted to use btrfs on my home directory (don’t think it’s ready for / just yet) is that with RAID1, btrfs is self-healing. Obviously, magic can’t be done, but a checksum is stored as part of the data’s metadata and if the file doesn’t match the checksum on one disk, but does on the other, the file can be fixed. This can help protect against bitrot, which is the biggest thing that’s going to keep our children’s digital photos from lasting as long as the ones printed on archival paper. So, like I did the first time, I’ll first be trying it out in a Fedora VM that mostly matches my version, kernel, and btrfs-progs version. So, I went and added another virtual hard drive of the same size to my VM.
Back in August I finally had some time to do some things I’d been wanting to do with my Snap-in-Time btrfs program for a while now. First of all, I finally added the weekly code. So now my snapshots are cleaned up every three days and then every other week. Next on the docket is quarterly cleanups followed up yearly cleanups. Second, the big thing I’d wanted to do for a while now: come up with unit tests! Much more robust than my debug code and testing scripts, it helped me find corner cases. If you look at my git logs you can see that it helped me little-by-little figure out just what I needed to do as well as when my “fixes” broke other things. Yay! My first personal project with regression testing!
# btrfs sub list /home
ID 275 gen 3201 top level 5 path home
ID 1021 gen 3193 top level 275 path .snapshots
ID 1023 gen 1653 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2146
ID 1024 gen 1697 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2210
ID 1025 gen 1775 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2300
ID 1027 gen 1876 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0000
ID 1028 gen 1961 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0100
ID 1029 gen 2032 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0200
ID 1030 gen 2105 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0300
ID 1031 gen 2211 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0400
ID 1032 gen 2284 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0500
ID 1033 gen 2357 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0600
ID 1035 gen 2430 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0700
ID 1036 gen 2506 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0800
ID 1037 gen 2587 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0900
ID 1038 gen 2667 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-1700
ID 1039 gen 2774 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-1800
ID 1040 gen 2879 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-1900
ID 1041 gen 2982 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-2000
ID 1042 gen 3088 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-2100
ID 1043 gen 3193 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-2200
I got my new hard drive that would replace my old, aging /home hard drive. As you read in part 1, I wanted to put btrfs on it. This is my journey to get it up and running. Plugged it into my hard drive toaster and ran gparted.
[caption id=“attachment_7889” align=“aligncenter” width=“421”] Gparted for new drive[/caption]
[caption id=“attachment_7890” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] Gparted for new drive1[/caption]
Recently I once again came across an article about the benefits of the btrfs Linux file system. Last time I’d come across it, it was still in alpha or beta, and I also didn’t understand why I would want to use it. However, the most I’ve learned about the fragility of our modern storage systems, the more I’ve thought about how I want to protect my data. My first step was to sign up for offsite backups. I’ve done this on my Windows computer via Backblaze. They are pretty awesome because it’s a constant backup so it meets all the requirements of not forgetting to do it. The computer doesn’t even need to be on at a certain time or anything. I’ve loved using them for the past 2+ years, but one thing that makes me consider their competition is that they don’t support Linux. That’s OK for now because all my photos are on my Windows computer, but it leaves me in a sub-optimal place. I know this isn’t an incredibly influential blog and I’m just one person, but I’d like to think writing about this would help them realize that they could a) lose a customer and b) be making more money from those with Linux computers.
January was a relatively light programming month for me. I was focused on finishing up end of year blog posts and other tasks. Since Lastfmeoystats is used to generate the stats I need for my end of year music post, I worked on it a little to make some fixes. The biggest fix was to change the chart titles not to be hardcoded. I didn’t realize it until I was reviewing my blog post, but I had hard-coded the year when I first wrote the code a couple years ago. I also changed the limits on some of the data I was collecting so that I could do more expansive trending for my overall stats.
I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).
I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.
KDE Wayland has come a long way support has come a long way since I last wrote about it 8 months ago. Yakuake now shows up in the correct place (although it seems to have a hard time remembering to start up upon login). The lock screen bug hasn’t hit me in the past month. Multi-monitor support is way better now. (And this is without the new update that supposedly makes it even more so solid). Scrolling is still a little screwy in Firefox, but it works perfectly in Vivaldi (my daily driver for quite a few months now).
After using Plasma with KWayland for about a week, I had to go back to X11 because it’s not yet ready for me. There are 3 main issues I’m having:
Occasionally, when I come back to my computer after locking the screen it would say that the screen locker had crashed. I would need to go to antoher TTY and type in a command to unlock it. After I did that, coming back to the TTY that has the GUI just remains black with a mouse cursor. So I would need to reboot the machine.
I cannot drag and drop video files to upload to YouTube with Firefox. I have to click the button on YT and then navigate to the folder that has the video file. (Not sure if there are other things that can’t be dragged in - photo upload to Flickr, for example)
I’ll keep looking to see if they improve things. But for now I’m staying on X11.
KDE Wayland has come a long way support has come a long way since I last wrote about it 8 months ago. Yakuake now shows up in the correct place (although it seems to have a hard time remembering to start up upon login). The lock screen bug hasn’t hit me in the past month. Multi-monitor support is way better now. (And this is without the new update that supposedly makes it even more so solid). Scrolling is still a little screwy in Firefox, but it works perfectly in Vivaldi (my daily driver for quite a few months now).
Fedora provides a nice RPM-OSTree solution for folks who want to use the tech, but don’t want to use Gnome. The install is a bit barebones and doesn’t come with Flathub pre-configured, reducing the number of KDE applications that can be installed after the distro is first installed. Once Flathub is activated and Discover is reloaded, the user can start installing KDE apps. Not a good starting distro now, but with some sensible defaults, it could be great thanks to the way that RPM-OSTree makes the system more maintainable.
A few months ago, someone asked about whether the rices*/modifications/tweaks people displayed on reddit.com/r/unixporn (where people show off their desktops, not human pornography) were actually useful. Someone commented they’d like to see a post on how someone uses their mods. So I decided to write this up.
*I know the term ricing could be considered racist or insensitive. In this context, it’s simply the term of art used on the subreddit.
So I found out today that there is no way to re-enable different backgrounds and plasmoids per virtual desktop. It appears to be a mix of forcing people to finally use activities and a complication that was causing all kinds of bugs (according to their bugzilla). I was bummed for about an hour. The different backgrounds can make it very easy to know what virtual desktop you’re at without having to glance at the pager. And if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time longer than a couple months you have seen my Desktop Screenshots and know how much I customize it in KDE.
Today I upgraded my netbook. Interestingly, this had less problems than yesterday with the guest computer. Perhaps because I wasn’t using KDM on my netbook? Anyway, I was actually expecting a worse time, but it worked out. It appears that KDE Netbook edition didn’t make the jump to Plasma 5. But maybe it’s just a setting I need to discover. See, my netbook is a 2nd gen netbook - not a piece of garbage like our EEE Machine, but it has a sub-HD resolution and so using most programs is hard unless the Window Manager or Desktop Environment is getting rid of window decorations. So far, KDE 5 is OK. I may end up going to Fluxbox. (I did not like XFCE on this screen resolution) Here’s my desktop as of now:
KDE Wayland has come a long way support has come a long way since I last wrote about it 8 months ago. Yakuake now shows up in the correct place (although it seems to have a hard time remembering to start up upon login). The lock screen bug hasn’t hit me in the past month. Multi-monitor support is way better now. (And this is without the new update that supposedly makes it even more so solid). Scrolling is still a little screwy in Firefox, but it works perfectly in Vivaldi (my daily driver for quite a few months now).
After using Plasma with KWayland for about a week, I had to go back to X11 because it’s not yet ready for me. There are 3 main issues I’m having:
Occasionally, when I come back to my computer after locking the screen it would say that the screen locker had crashed. I would need to go to antoher TTY and type in a command to unlock it. After I did that, coming back to the TTY that has the GUI just remains black with a mouse cursor. So I would need to reboot the machine.
I cannot drag and drop video files to upload to YouTube with Firefox. I have to click the button on YT and then navigate to the folder that has the video file. (Not sure if there are other things that can’t be dragged in - photo upload to Flickr, for example)
I’ll keep looking to see if they improve things. But for now I’m staying on X11.
I upgraded to Fedora 36 so I wanted to see all the latest updates to Wayland. I’d been reading about the updates in the KDE and wanted to see if it was more stable. I had to redo my latte dock profile. Other than that, SO FAR the only issues are that the scroll wheel on the mouse scrolls WAY too far on the page, making it almost useless. And Yakuake (the KDE drop down terminal) appears at the middle of the screen instead of at the top. I went to file a bug, but I saw a comment that this is fixed in the next version of Yakuake, so it seems I just need to wait for an update. Otherwise, so far it seems to be working OK.
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
August was a programming-filled month for me. It focused entirely on Python and I mostly continued working on established projects. Let’s jump in!
Amortization
I wanted to re-calculate the amortization table for my home loan for the first time in about a year. As a refresher, I created this program (vs using Excel or an online form) because we are not consistent in the amount of extra principal payments we make. For example, if I get a bonus at work, I might throw all of that bonus into the loan payment. So this program takes variable extra payments into account when creating the amortization table.
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
Across both September and October I got a decent amount of programming done. I just about finished the Learn You Haskell for Great Good book (got up to just before Monads) and started Head First Go. Once I had enough Go language to get started on AoC, I knew I’d be ready for the 2016 problem set. Let’s get into the nitty gritty!
Python (not Advent of Code)
Impractical Python
I finished chapter 11 which contained my old friend the Monty Hall Paradox. I’ve had a version up on my site for a very long time based on a PHP tutorial in Linux Format Magazine. This time I was able to code it in Python as well as creating a GUI version. Chapter 11 also touched upon The Birthday Paradox.
I started off the month thinking it was going to be Python heavy and ended up doing a lot more micro-controller programming. To be fair, I was mostly programming in CircuitPython, but it definitely came out of nowhere.
Python
Civilization VI Webhook in FastAPI
Last month I created a webhook program in Flask to generate notifications when it was someone’s turn in our multiplayer Civilization games. When I posted about it on reddit, someone suggested that I would be better off using FastAPI instead of Flask. I’d been hearing about FastAPI for months on Talk Python to Me and Python Bytes, but I always got the impression that it would only be useful if I was writing my website to be async.
The latest iteration of this series I’ve been playing for the past 25 years was released and the changes have made the game more dynamic and, for the first time in the series, have really made it so that I can’t just do the same thing every game because of how much the terrain makes a difference. It’s been neat and with the reduced gameplay over the past two months, it’s displaced all over games.
Civilization III (15 minutes)
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
I used to have a Team Fortress 2 server on CentOS 6 with Virtual Box. Now that I’m using KVM/QEMU/Libvirt, I wanted to set up a new one. Also, Valve somewhat changed how they worked a few years ago and I wanted a clean slate. I started with a VM with 40GB. It’s not supposed to take that much, but I remember last time it took much more than the 10GB I’d given the VM and I don’t want to have to increase the disk size again.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
I’m a seasonal Team Fortress 2 player. Although I play it here and there at any time of year, I tend to really play a lot during October for the special Halloween missions. This year Valve was busy working on a new mode that was released earlier this week so they released a community-made Halloween mode: Invasion. It’s the first time I’ve spent any money since I spent $2.50 to get a bigger backpack a few years ago. Overall, the new modes were a lot of fun and I’m glad that Valve has gone from what should be the basic level of video game company support- supporting community mods- to allowing the best of the best to make money by sharing in the profits made during community events.
I noticed Dan was on my borders right when I started having the Cho Ku Nu, my special unit. Having played civ and RTS games with Dan, I figured it was strike or be struck. So I went to war. Unfortunately, Dan fights better than AI and because of the terrain features, it became a war of attrition that favored Dan. After a stalemate war, I offered peace and Dan accepted.
[caption id=“attachment_7750” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Poker Night 2[/caption]
Poker Night 2 (8 hrs) - I find Poker Night 2 to be a bit harder than the original. Not sure if they upped the AI or changed anything about it, but I find it a lot harder to win Texas Hold ‘Em in PN2. Luckily, this game also includes Omaha Hold ‘Em and I have been doing a lot better with that game. While I enjoy Samson, I find the Banter to be a little lacking compared to the original. I think the developers did a better job of defining the player’s relationships with each other in the previous game and that led to somewhat better banter. Still, it’s fun to play Poker without worrying about real money and it’s a lot of fun so I’ll probably put some more time into the game later in the year.
Costume Quest (7 hours) - I completed the main Costume Quest and then continued on to the DLC. The game continued to be charming and I enjoyed playing it as well as the simple story arc of the brother and sister realizing they didn’t hate each other that much. Gameplay-wise the game is not too forgiving when you make a mistake. There aren’t any items to use for healing so any mistakes in the Mario RPG-like mechanics (hitting a button on a certain timing to empower your attack or reduce an attack against you) could lead to losing an encounter quite quickly. I think it took me about 5-8 tries on the final boss of the main game to get just the right combination of add-ons (which increase HP or allow you to retaliate when hit) and costumes to make it through to the end. It also doesn’t help that the enemies appear to level up with you. That is to say, if there’s enemy X at the beginning of the game and you come up against him later, he has more HP and hits harder. That’s a bit different than the mechanic used in most of the Squaresoft RPG games I played in my youth. That said, there aren’t really any consequences to losing a fight. As far as I can tell, you don’t even lose candy when you lose a fight. You just end up right where you were before and you have another chance to start the encounter again or move away to change the costume equipped.
In addition to the game I played this month, I’ve decided from now on to include a running total of the top games to see if/how they change with time. For example, when I wasn’t paying attention, Saints Row: The Third made the Top 7. (Which, raptr, is a weird number. Usually these things are multiples of five)
First of all, a quick reminder that my Game of the Year doesn’t necessarily have to come out in 2012. Because I don’t have the time to dedicate to video games, the price premium of buying it new rarely makes sense to me. So my Game of the Year will be my favorite game that I played in 2012.
As I compiled my list I realized that I played a lot less games in 2012. I may not have played a lot less hours (I haven’t bothered comparing the totals with 2011), but I definitely had a lot less variety. A lot of that has to do with the birth of my daughter this year. Only as the year has gone on have I been able to carve out some time here and there to play story-based games. In addition, I resumed pursuing my master’s degree in the fall, right around the time I was able to have a bit more time to myself. I didn’t have any gameplay at all in March, September or October.
Civilization V (17 hrs) - I took advantage of the Steam Fall Sale to finally pick up the Gods and Kings expansion to Civ V. I have enjoyed founding my own religion, Otakuism. Religion plays a much more key role than they did in Civ IV. In the previous game, I would pretty much just found a religion because each city would pay me gold (with certain buildings or government choices) and I’d get a window into cities. In Civ V the religion plays like another level of policies. You get to choose a series of attributes for your religion such as temples giving you gold or faster territory expansion. It tends to make the expansion of religion to other cities and civs a much more important task than before. I’m still a little unsure of how cities pressure other cities to adopt religion because I seemed to have one city flipping even though I couldn’t see any reason for it. (Could have been another civ sending prophets my way) Spies are also added. The spy missions remind me of Assassin’s Creed:Brotherhood assassin missions. Unlike previous iterations of Civ, the spies aren’t on the map. You assign them to a city or city-state and then they either steal you tech (which may not be useful if you’re super advanced and/or playing normal or easier), rig elections in city states (gaining you influence), or protect your cities from being screwed over by other spies. I must admit that I haven’t done much investigating in the civclopedia, but I can’t really see how to generate more spies and so the whole system seems like a mini-game diversion. I continued my strategy of non-aggression unless another civ attacks me or denounces me. Then I drop my hammer on them and take over their capital city and, sometimes, eliminate them entirely. I like that the requirements on resources for building some units has been reconfigured. I usually ended up not using a lot of early-game siege weapons because iron tended to be too scarce. I think it’s a lot more balanced on which units need resources like oil, iron, and horses than before the expansion pack.
[caption id=“attachment_5592” align=“alignleft” width=“480”] Saints Row: The Third - My Engineer Mask[/caption]
Team Fortress 2 (5 hrs) - a lot of this time was spent testing out my new private server which I described setting up in this post.
Civilization V (1 hr) - played a little bit in the game I’m documenting at onemoreturn.ericsbinaryworld.com . Been too busy to play much more than that.
I first heard about virtual machines about six to seven years ago. I couldn’t see a point in wanting to run another computer inside your computer. A few years ago I used VMs to test and blog about Linux distros. In the past year I’ve used it to preview new features in Fedora while the next version was in beta. This week I used them in the most useful way yet: to test server software before implementing them on my public, paid server. These were some of easiest installs I’ve ever done - even easier than Wordpress’ famous Five Minute Install.
[caption id=“attachment_5482” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Mass Effect 2 Space Graves”] [/caption]
Mass Effect 2 (19 hrs) - I knew my wife was getting close to delivering our first child, so I was rushing as quickly as I could to save the galaxy. I got to it with one week to spare. Phew! I didn’t enjoy the story as much as Mass Effect 1, but the gameplay was orders of magnitude better. For one thing I didn’t have to worry about having too many guns. (A frequent problem in the first entry) I also enjoyed the characters a little more (some of them, anyway). I ended up doing a lot more side missions and I felt they were well designed. If too much time doesn’t pass between when I finished the game and when I get free time to blog, I’ll do a writeup on Mass Effect 2 and how I liked it vs the first one. However, it would mostly be a long-winded version of what I said above and with the baby…. well, don’t hold your breath.
There aren’t any new games on here, so I’m only going to mention some quick comments on each.
Plants vs Zombies (29 hrs) - threw a bunch of hours into this game because I just had a handful of achievements left and for some reason I wanted to finish it off. 2 or 3 to go
Civilization V (9 hrs) - still love this game. I wish I had more time for it
Civilization V (75 hrs) - What can I say about this game that I haven’tsaidalready? This is the series that made “One More More Turn…” famous and it still works today. If I were to start a game tonight, I would not go to bed at a reasonable time.
With school over I had plenty of time to get back into video games last month. I had a blast!
Team Fortress 2 (6 hrs) - Got back into this game because my brother-in-law wanted to play it. I’d forgotten how awesomely fun it is to play this game!
Plants vs Zombies (5 hrs) - I wanted a quick game of fun so I went after some achievements in PvZ. I also found this game to be a blast.
For those who are new readers, I’m keeping track of the games I’m playing monthly (via Raptr) and then writing a little blurb on the games. This is in prep for my year-end blog post.
Team Fortress 2 (4 hrs) – I continue to really enjoy this game. I think of all of non-story-based games I have, this one has one of the fastest completion times for a single game. Civilization 5 can take me a week or longer to finish. And my other games fall somewhere between these two. (With a few exceptions like Pacman CE DX)
Mass Effect (2 hrs) - Dan tells me that if I don’t go for the optional quests, I could be near the end. After the next major story beat I’m probably going to write up my next Mass Effect blog post. I’m really enjoying the fiction.
Team Fortress 2 (60 hrs) - I didn’t think I’d ever enjoy playing this game. I am not an FPS person. But it recently went free to play so I figured “why not?” I started playing the game and it’s every bit as fun and funny as the “Meet the X” videos. It’s a lot of fun to formulate the strategies for the game. I’m still learning a lot about that. And just when you think you know what to do, there are the extra weapons you earn for getting certain achievements. They don’t throw off the balance because they give with one hand and take with the other. The Heavy’s gun Natasha, for example, has a higher chance of critical hits, but it takes longer to spin up.
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
Once again I participated in the Bigfoot 5 and 10 mile race near my house. However, I think this will truly be the last time. I didn’t fall this time, but it seems that no matter how carefully I step, this trail is designed to make me roll my ankle. I rolled it twice to the point where it hurt and a couple times that didn’t hurt. As I write this post near the end of race day (it will not be published until the new year), my foot is not throbbing and it doesn’t hurt to walk, so I think it was strained a bit, but not sprained (thank goodness).
Once again I participated in the Bigfoot 5 and 10 mile race near my house. However, I think this will truly be the last time. I didn’t fall this time, but it seems that no matter how carefully I step, this trail is designed to make me roll my ankle. I rolled it twice to the point where it hurt and a couple times that didn’t hurt. As I write this post near the end of race day (it will not be published until the new year), my foot is not throbbing and it doesn’t hurt to walk, so I think it was strained a bit, but not sprained (thank goodness).
Since I didn’t cover running last year, I’m going to cover both years in this post.
2021
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I caught the running bug during the Red Hat Summit in 2019. My original goal was to do an official race that would allow me to qualify for a good spot at a Run Disney race. Then COVID-19 hit and killed in-person racing.
Because of various issues I wrote about before (mostly stemming from the issue with my right sesamoids), I ended up canceling my summer and fall races. The last one I was really looking forward to was the Ted Corbitt 15k, honoring Mr. Corbitt who has a long list of achievements, including being the first African-American to run the Olympic Marathon event and being a founding president of the New York Road Runners. This was to be my final competitive road race of 2022.
The Percy Sutton Harlem 5K was both the next race I’d registered for after the Front Runners LGBT Pride Run, and the first race after my doctors cleared me to start running again (“for reals this time”) after an X-Ray and MRI to make sure things were OK in that tiny area under the big toe where there’s so much going on. Both doctors told me to ease myself back into running. They also both gave me the metric of using the next day’s presence or absence of pain as a way to tell if I was doing OK. After the past couple months of trying things out, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best shoe for me is the New Balance 860. Since my old one was worn out (which is why I switched to the 1080 for the BK Half - which may (at least partly) be the reason for my injury), I got myself a new pair at the New Balance store located inside the NYRR RunCenter when I went to pick up my bib. I also took advantage and had them confirm my shoe size while I was there. For this race I chose to run with a dancer pad since my podiatrist is making me new orthotics with a cutout, both doctors suggested at least starting out using it, and I’d learned a new position for the pad that kept my sesamoid area safe while not causing me pain in the other toes. Bad placement of the pad caused me pain during the Pride Run.
As I mentioned in my Setbacks post, I’ve injured my foot. At first I thought it was metatarsalgia, but it’s a closely related issue - sesamoiditis. My podiatrist cleared me to attempt a run after a week and predicted things would be fully healed by 2 weeks in. There were 2 key changes I had to make. First, I had to change out the shoes I wear daily to work - I’d chosen a New Balance model that didn’t have a rigid enough sole. Second, I had to wear dancer pads while recovering. As opposed to the metatarsal pad I’d originally sought out from CVS, it doesn’t cushion the area receiving pressure. Instead it puts the pressure everywhere else. More about that later. I spoke with the coach I’m using to get ready for the Marathon and we agreed that I could try and run the race, but had to keep my pace lower to reduce the chance of injury.
This morning it suddenly hit me why this injury has messed with my head so much. I realized that “runner” has become a part of my identity and now I’d temporarily (hopefully) lost access to that part of myself.
I’ve already communicated this with most of my family and friends who support me in running, but I’ve suffered my second setback of 2022. The first one was back in January when I had to miss out on my first chance to do an in-person half marathon due to catching a really bad cold or flu. I don’t remember which, only that it wasn’t COVID.
Now, a few days away from my next 10K, I seem to have developed a pain in the ball of my right foot. I will be seeing a doctor to find out what it actually is, but there’s a 99.99999% chance that it would not be a good idea to even attempt to run the 10K at a slow speed if I want a chance of recovering in time for the marathon this fall.
I think I’ve become addicted to races. I really missed having races between April ( Cherry Blossom) and the end of May (BK HM) although I did that on purpose to allow myself to rest and train. July, when I once again will be sans race, is probably going to be hard for me.
A couple weeks after the Cherry Blossom race I reached out to my coach to give them my goals for the NYC Marathon this fall. The coach adjusted my training schedule and told me they wanted me to run the race as 10 miles followed by the fastest 5K I would run this year. I was aiming for a time of 1 hour 30 minutes for this race. That would require me to run the ten miles as fast as I had run in DC for the Cherry Blossoms and then do another 5K on top of that, and do it quickly. I set my Garmin to try and do that.
Last fall I finally got to race the official Credit Union Cherry Blossom 10 mile course. This year, I FINALLY was able to run the race on the course in the spring. It was nice for the race to return to its place as the “Rite of Spring”. Although the cherry blossoms reached peak bloom a week before the race, they still made a nice, pretty setting for the race.
A couple weeks ago, anticipating the coming spring showers and the possibility of having to race in the rain, I bought an outfit from Tracksmith’s new Thaw collection. As usual, I brought all my running clothes to NYC, not knowing what the weather has in store. After all, it wasn’t supposed to snow last race. I woke up at 0500 since the MTA trip planner told me I’d need to start my journey at 0544 to get to The Armory by 0730. It was in the 40s outside so while I brushed my teeth I waffled about what to wear. By race time (0900) it would be in the 50s. Complicating things: it was almost guaranteed to rain during the race. So my mid-layer was out. My jacket was waterproof, but that would certainly be too hot for the race. Should I wear it and unzip? In the end, I decided to go for just the Thaw long sleeve shirt, Thaw half tights, Thaw beanie, and inverno gloves. I had my usual pre-race breakfast of a quarter cup of raisins and headed out the door.
My second race for 2022 came right on the heels of the previous one. This time it was for the NYRR Gridiron 4 mile race. After this one I have a break for a little bit before the next race I’m running.
Yup, there’s snow accumulating on my head
This turned out to be my first race run in the snow. I got pretty lucky with my running wardrobe, but I’ll get to that in a second. Early in the week, I checked the weather to see what kind of running clothes to pack; there was a 17% chance of precipitation. Based on the forecast temperature of 33F (versus last week’s 18-22F), I was just going to wear the Tracksmith Brighton base layer, quarter-zip mid-layer, and tights. But I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to just bring my entire Tracksmith wardrobe. The night before the race I once again checked the weather. There was now a 50% chance of snow or rain. When I woke up, the forecast was now 90% chance. So I went with the same getup I had last week - the Brighton base layer, quarter-zip mid-layer, jacket, and Bislett pants. The jacket and pants are both wind and water resistant so I figured they’d keep me a lot warmer. The Bisless pants proved to be especially great to have because they have stirrups that keep the pants from moving up and, therefore, keep the legs from getting wet when it’s snowing. It was snowing when I left the house, on the train ride up to Central Park and as I warmed up. Luckily, the snow stopped right before race started and didn’t start up again until I was done.
Sunday, 6 February 2022, was my first race of 2022. I’d been looking forward to the Fred Lebow Half Marathon to both be my first race of 2022 and first half marathon race. Unfortunately, I got really sick with something not-COVID and couldn’t attend. So I was extra excited about getting to this race. Last year’s COVID winter surge and summer Delta wave meant that I didn’t get to any in-person races until the fall when I FINALLY got to do the CUCB Cherry Blossom race. This year it seems, so far, that in-person races are here to stay with various COVID mitigations in place. NYRR is requiring racers to be fully vaccinated and mask wearing until runners leave the corrals. Folks seem to be mostly complying with the latter, although it’s inevitable that some folks slip through the cracks.
Today I ran my first trail run, the Bigfoot Endurance Trail. I will definitely say that Ripit Events did a great job running the race. There were lots of good reminder emails leading up to the race. They had folks managing parking. Everything went smoothly and, more or less, on time.
The race was at Rockburn State Park, making this the first race for which I didn’t have to get up at an ungodly hour to attend. It’s just a 10 minute-ish drive from the house. I’d never done any of the trails - usually we just take the kids to the playground. Luckily, one of my friends at work warned me to pick up my feet. I don’t think I necessarily run at a shuffle, but it did make me run with more awareness of the trail. This was a good thing because Mother Nature was out to get me! The 10 mile race consisted of two 5-mile loops. On the first loop I mildly rolled both ankles either in sections that were nothing but tree roots or where the gravel or sand weren’t as tightly packed as they could be. However, tragedy struck (at least race-level tragedy) with half a mile to go. I rolled my left ankle HARD. Like, I’m definitely going to need some Ibuprofen and an ice pack when I get home hard. That threw off my gait and so with literally only a quarter of a mile to go, I couldn’t lift my foot high enough and tripped over a root. I took a spill, but was luckily wearing gloves. I only scratched up my knee. Very nicely - perhaps because this is more of a fun-run community thing than the Boston Marathon or something like that - a couple of runners both in front and behind of me stopped to help me up and make sure I was fine. One of them also checked up on me after the race. This tumble cost me for my age group to fall from 2nd place to 3rd place (literally just 20 seconds difference).
After nearly 2 years of training, I finally was able to run the Credit Union Cherry Blossom 10 mile race on 12 Sept. Yeah, last year I ran a virtual race, but that was really no different than a training run. This year we finally had the COVID-19 vaccine and so the race was able to take place in person. It was worth it.
The starting line when I first arrived to the race.
Ever since fall 2019, I’ve been training for the Cherry Blossom 10 mile race, scheduled for 5 April 2020. Unfortunately, like everything else involving more than one person, it’s been scuttled by COVID-19. After all that training, it was disappointing. (I will take a moment to acknowledge that it’s objectively ridiculous to be disappointed by a missed race when people are dying. However, there’s always someone worse off than any other person. eg. I can feel that I’ve had a bad day at work, even if my day wasn’t as bad as someone who found out they had cancer It doesn’t delegitimize their feelings of disappointment as long as they keep it in perspective.) The organizers of the Cherry Blossom Festival race had a solution - a virtual race! Run wherever you can and record your time and it’ll all go on the website. It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly a way to use all that training you’ve done. So today I went ahead and did the race since the weather’s actually good today. It was an AWESOME run. It felt great to do it and, given the insane hills in my neighborhood, I finished feeling that I could definitely kick butt in the Cherry Blossom race next year because their course is not very hilly. It also renewed my confidence in being able to do well in the Baltimore 10-miler this summer (if it’s not cancelled), renowned for being hilly. So how did I do? (if you paid attention, it was spoiled at the top…hehe)
As I’ve mentioned a few times, my first running race was the 5k at the 2019 Red Hat Summit. I caught the bug and started thinking about running longer races. Since a lot of races use official USATF-certified times to qualify or to get a corral placement, I wanted to find a race that was USATF-certified. So in July I signed up for the 9th Annual Annapolis Running Classic. I started training and working my Saturday runs up towards a 10k distance. Today, it finally all paid off.
Once again I participated in the Bigfoot 5 and 10 mile race near my house. However, I think this will truly be the last time. I didn’t fall this time, but it seems that no matter how carefully I step, this trail is designed to make me roll my ankle. I rolled it twice to the point where it hurt and a couple times that didn’t hurt. As I write this post near the end of race day (it will not be published until the new year), my foot is not throbbing and it doesn’t hurt to walk, so I think it was strained a bit, but not sprained (thank goodness).
Since I didn’t cover running last year, I’m going to cover both years in this post.
2021
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I caught the running bug during the Red Hat Summit in 2019. My original goal was to do an official race that would allow me to qualify for a good spot at a Run Disney race. Then COVID-19 hit and killed in-person racing.
Because of various issues I wrote about before (mostly stemming from the issue with my right sesamoids), I ended up canceling my summer and fall races. The last one I was really looking forward to was the Ted Corbitt 15k, honoring Mr. Corbitt who has a long list of achievements, including being the first African-American to run the Olympic Marathon event and being a founding president of the New York Road Runners. This was to be my final competitive road race of 2022.
The Percy Sutton Harlem 5K was both the next race I’d registered for after the Front Runners LGBT Pride Run, and the first race after my doctors cleared me to start running again (“for reals this time”) after an X-Ray and MRI to make sure things were OK in that tiny area under the big toe where there’s so much going on. Both doctors told me to ease myself back into running. They also both gave me the metric of using the next day’s presence or absence of pain as a way to tell if I was doing OK. After the past couple months of trying things out, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best shoe for me is the New Balance 860. Since my old one was worn out (which is why I switched to the 1080 for the BK Half - which may (at least partly) be the reason for my injury), I got myself a new pair at the New Balance store located inside the NYRR RunCenter when I went to pick up my bib. I also took advantage and had them confirm my shoe size while I was there. For this race I chose to run with a dancer pad since my podiatrist is making me new orthotics with a cutout, both doctors suggested at least starting out using it, and I’d learned a new position for the pad that kept my sesamoid area safe while not causing me pain in the other toes. Bad placement of the pad caused me pain during the Pride Run.
As I mentioned in my Setbacks post, I’ve injured my foot. At first I thought it was metatarsalgia, but it’s a closely related issue - sesamoiditis. My podiatrist cleared me to attempt a run after a week and predicted things would be fully healed by 2 weeks in. There were 2 key changes I had to make. First, I had to change out the shoes I wear daily to work - I’d chosen a New Balance model that didn’t have a rigid enough sole. Second, I had to wear dancer pads while recovering. As opposed to the metatarsal pad I’d originally sought out from CVS, it doesn’t cushion the area receiving pressure. Instead it puts the pressure everywhere else. More about that later. I spoke with the coach I’m using to get ready for the Marathon and we agreed that I could try and run the race, but had to keep my pace lower to reduce the chance of injury.
This morning it suddenly hit me why this injury has messed with my head so much. I realized that “runner” has become a part of my identity and now I’d temporarily (hopefully) lost access to that part of myself.
If there’s one thing I always try and do, it’s to see things from the perspective of others. It doesn’t have to mean that I’ll agree with the person or even think they’re also in the right. But sometimes I come across someone who sees things so differently that I can’t quite comprehend how they could see things so differently. The funny thing is that this doesn’t involve the biggest divide in America now - politics. Rather it’s a lack of self-control that, perhaps, makes me sound like the old man I’m becoming?
I’ve already communicated this with most of my family and friends who support me in running, but I’ve suffered my second setback of 2022. The first one was back in January when I had to miss out on my first chance to do an in-person half marathon due to catching a really bad cold or flu. I don’t remember which, only that it wasn’t COVID.
Now, a few days away from my next 10K, I seem to have developed a pain in the ball of my right foot. I will be seeing a doctor to find out what it actually is, but there’s a 99.99999% chance that it would not be a good idea to even attempt to run the 10K at a slow speed if I want a chance of recovering in time for the marathon this fall.
I think I’ve become addicted to races. I really missed having races between April ( Cherry Blossom) and the end of May (BK HM) although I did that on purpose to allow myself to rest and train. July, when I once again will be sans race, is probably going to be hard for me.
A couple weeks after the Cherry Blossom race I reached out to my coach to give them my goals for the NYC Marathon this fall. The coach adjusted my training schedule and told me they wanted me to run the race as 10 miles followed by the fastest 5K I would run this year. I was aiming for a time of 1 hour 30 minutes for this race. That would require me to run the ten miles as fast as I had run in DC for the Cherry Blossoms and then do another 5K on top of that, and do it quickly. I set my Garmin to try and do that.
Last fall I finally got to race the official Credit Union Cherry Blossom 10 mile course. This year, I FINALLY was able to run the race on the course in the spring. It was nice for the race to return to its place as the “Rite of Spring”. Although the cherry blossoms reached peak bloom a week before the race, they still made a nice, pretty setting for the race.
A couple weeks ago, anticipating the coming spring showers and the possibility of having to race in the rain, I bought an outfit from Tracksmith’s new Thaw collection. As usual, I brought all my running clothes to NYC, not knowing what the weather has in store. After all, it wasn’t supposed to snow last race. I woke up at 0500 since the MTA trip planner told me I’d need to start my journey at 0544 to get to The Armory by 0730. It was in the 40s outside so while I brushed my teeth I waffled about what to wear. By race time (0900) it would be in the 50s. Complicating things: it was almost guaranteed to rain during the race. So my mid-layer was out. My jacket was waterproof, but that would certainly be too hot for the race. Should I wear it and unzip? In the end, I decided to go for just the Thaw long sleeve shirt, Thaw half tights, Thaw beanie, and inverno gloves. I had my usual pre-race breakfast of a quarter cup of raisins and headed out the door.
My second race for 2022 came right on the heels of the previous one. This time it was for the NYRR Gridiron 4 mile race. After this one I have a break for a little bit before the next race I’m running.
Yup, there’s snow accumulating on my head
This turned out to be my first race run in the snow. I got pretty lucky with my running wardrobe, but I’ll get to that in a second. Early in the week, I checked the weather to see what kind of running clothes to pack; there was a 17% chance of precipitation. Based on the forecast temperature of 33F (versus last week’s 18-22F), I was just going to wear the Tracksmith Brighton base layer, quarter-zip mid-layer, and tights. But I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to just bring my entire Tracksmith wardrobe. The night before the race I once again checked the weather. There was now a 50% chance of snow or rain. When I woke up, the forecast was now 90% chance. So I went with the same getup I had last week - the Brighton base layer, quarter-zip mid-layer, jacket, and Bislett pants. The jacket and pants are both wind and water resistant so I figured they’d keep me a lot warmer. The Bisless pants proved to be especially great to have because they have stirrups that keep the pants from moving up and, therefore, keep the legs from getting wet when it’s snowing. It was snowing when I left the house, on the train ride up to Central Park and as I warmed up. Luckily, the snow stopped right before race started and didn’t start up again until I was done.
Sunday, 6 February 2022, was my first race of 2022. I’d been looking forward to the Fred Lebow Half Marathon to both be my first race of 2022 and first half marathon race. Unfortunately, I got really sick with something not-COVID and couldn’t attend. So I was extra excited about getting to this race. Last year’s COVID winter surge and summer Delta wave meant that I didn’t get to any in-person races until the fall when I FINALLY got to do the CUCB Cherry Blossom race. This year it seems, so far, that in-person races are here to stay with various COVID mitigations in place. NYRR is requiring racers to be fully vaccinated and mask wearing until runners leave the corrals. Folks seem to be mostly complying with the latter, although it’s inevitable that some folks slip through the cracks.
Today I ran my first trail run, the Bigfoot Endurance Trail. I will definitely say that Ripit Events did a great job running the race. There were lots of good reminder emails leading up to the race. They had folks managing parking. Everything went smoothly and, more or less, on time.
The race was at Rockburn State Park, making this the first race for which I didn’t have to get up at an ungodly hour to attend. It’s just a 10 minute-ish drive from the house. I’d never done any of the trails - usually we just take the kids to the playground. Luckily, one of my friends at work warned me to pick up my feet. I don’t think I necessarily run at a shuffle, but it did make me run with more awareness of the trail. This was a good thing because Mother Nature was out to get me! The 10 mile race consisted of two 5-mile loops. On the first loop I mildly rolled both ankles either in sections that were nothing but tree roots or where the gravel or sand weren’t as tightly packed as they could be. However, tragedy struck (at least race-level tragedy) with half a mile to go. I rolled my left ankle HARD. Like, I’m definitely going to need some Ibuprofen and an ice pack when I get home hard. That threw off my gait and so with literally only a quarter of a mile to go, I couldn’t lift my foot high enough and tripped over a root. I took a spill, but was luckily wearing gloves. I only scratched up my knee. Very nicely - perhaps because this is more of a fun-run community thing than the Boston Marathon or something like that - a couple of runners both in front and behind of me stopped to help me up and make sure I was fine. One of them also checked up on me after the race. This tumble cost me for my age group to fall from 2nd place to 3rd place (literally just 20 seconds difference).
After nearly 2 years of training, I finally was able to run the Credit Union Cherry Blossom 10 mile race on 12 Sept. Yeah, last year I ran a virtual race, but that was really no different than a training run. This year we finally had the COVID-19 vaccine and so the race was able to take place in person. It was worth it.
The starting line when I first arrived to the race.
Ever since fall 2019, I’ve been training for the Cherry Blossom 10 mile race, scheduled for 5 April 2020. Unfortunately, like everything else involving more than one person, it’s been scuttled by COVID-19. After all that training, it was disappointing. (I will take a moment to acknowledge that it’s objectively ridiculous to be disappointed by a missed race when people are dying. However, there’s always someone worse off than any other person. eg. I can feel that I’ve had a bad day at work, even if my day wasn’t as bad as someone who found out they had cancer It doesn’t delegitimize their feelings of disappointment as long as they keep it in perspective.) The organizers of the Cherry Blossom Festival race had a solution - a virtual race! Run wherever you can and record your time and it’ll all go on the website. It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly a way to use all that training you’ve done. So today I went ahead and did the race since the weather’s actually good today. It was an AWESOME run. It felt great to do it and, given the insane hills in my neighborhood, I finished feeling that I could definitely kick butt in the Cherry Blossom race next year because their course is not very hilly. It also renewed my confidence in being able to do well in the Baltimore 10-miler this summer (if it’s not cancelled), renowned for being hilly. So how did I do? (if you paid attention, it was spoiled at the top…hehe)
As I’ve mentioned a few times, my first running race was the 5k at the 2019 Red Hat Summit. I caught the bug and started thinking about running longer races. Since a lot of races use official USATF-certified times to qualify or to get a corral placement, I wanted to find a race that was USATF-certified. So in July I signed up for the 9th Annual Annapolis Running Classic. I started training and working my Saturday runs up towards a 10k distance. Today, it finally all paid off.
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
Because I’ve been busy with programming and other tasks (including getting re-addicted to Cities: Skylines), I’ve got a roundup from about the last week or so in programming.
Python
Python Morsels
I got the mid-tier of the Pycharm Humble Bundle which came with a bit of a subscription to Python Morsels. Every week Trey Hunner, a Python trainer, sends subscribers a problem to solve along with a few bonus questions to deepen the learning. Here’s what I’ve loved so far:
Spent the last few days finalizing the 5.0 release of my Extra Life Donation Tracker and then pushed ahead to get version 5.1 out. Here’s the PyPi page if you want to use it for your Extra Life live streams.
Arduino
I got back to my BBQ Themostat project and did some minor programming while trying to figure out how to run a computer case fan. So far I’m still working on the wiring aspect of this part of the project, but some folks on reddit did point out that part of my problem was getting a pair of my BJT connections mixed up.
The next project I wanted to work on was to see if maybe my environment monitoring might be slightly more reliable with a Raspberry Pi than with an Arduino. So I wanted to do some comparisons. For my bathroom IoT project, I am using:
As things continue to happen in the commercial IoT space like Wink switching to requiring subscription fees, I continue to feel happy that I’m creating my own Internet of Things solutions rather than relying on commercial vendors who can decide to disappear or suddenly start charging fees. The cost for me is that things go at a slower pace and, obviously, don’t have sleek packaging. I think I can live with that.
This was a VERY busy year for my coding. This year I had over 769 commits to GitHub; my previous best was 58 in 2014. The commits were very unevenly distributed. If you look at the graph of my commits, outside of a busy week in January and another in May, I didn’t really start coding until August.
GitHub activity graph
But perhaps commits to GithHub isn’t the best metric. If you look at what I accomplished in the second half of 2019, I worked on an incredible number of projects.
BBQ Thermostat: Arduino MKR 1010 and Therm Shield measuring temperature during a smoke
Today I was smoking a turkey so I figured it was a good time to do a live test of my project. There was good news and bad news. I think it’s illustrated quite well by the following graph:
Grafana graph of my BBQ Thermostat while measuring the smoker temp
I recently started an electronics hacking project to build a thermostat for my Weber Smokey Mountain. You can find details at Hackaday.io, but if you’ve been here long enough you know that I don’t trust other sites to continue to exist. (It’s why I copy my book reviews over from Good Reads). As of right now I’ve got the board able to read temperatures from a thermocouple that I send, via WiFi, to an MQTT broker. Then, via Python I take subscribe to that MQTT topic and put it into InfluxDB. From there I use Grafana to graph it. Here’s an early beta where I was trying to make sure it was working from end-to-end:
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
I started off the month thinking it was going to be Python heavy and ended up doing a lot more micro-controller programming. To be fair, I was mostly programming in CircuitPython, but it definitely came out of nowhere.
Python
Civilization VI Webhook in FastAPI
Last month I created a webhook program in Flask to generate notifications when it was someone’s turn in our multiplayer Civilization games. When I posted about it on reddit, someone suggested that I would be better off using FastAPI instead of Flask. I’d been hearing about FastAPI for months on Talk Python to Me and Python Bytes, but I always got the impression that it would only be useful if I was writing my website to be async.
It’s been a pretty busy 2 weeks. I’ve basically either been finishing up end of year blog posts or programming. Let’s jump in!
Extra Life Donation Tracker
I have the 5.3 release of my Extra Life Donation Tracker. I had a few minor refactoring goals for that release, but also a few user-facing enhancements. I added in the ability to grab the user’s avatar as well as their team’s avatar. They can now use that as an input in either XSplit or OBS. During these two weeks I also fixed a user-reported bug on crashes if a donor had emoji in their name. Oh emoji, you’re the bane of my programming existence!
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
Back when I was doing GameDev.Tv’s Unity 2D class, I really wanted to know how to do multiplayer games (I also wanted some better support on using Xbox/PS3 remotes in games). Well, this year they released their Multiplayer class. So, naturally, I bought it up. I started working on it, resulting in two Github Repos. In the first section we were learned the basics of the Mirror add-on. I’m currently working through the second section, where we will create a basic RTS. I haven’t reached a real differentiation point from the GameDev folks. That may come later after we get past the basics.
The sixth, and final, game of the Udemy class on Unity 2D was a tileset Metroid-Vania game which the instructors named Tilevania. I never played Metroid and maybe only played Castlevania once, but its legacy does persist in some newer games like Spelunky.
Tilevania in the Unity UI
This was the closest I’ve come to making a Mario clone. My favorite part of the development process was creating the tile editor rules that allows me to drag around the tiles for the foreground and have it automatically determine if it should be a grass piece, dark, or full of rocks. As usual with the games we used to learn concepts for the course, there is a lot left to do to make a fully-fledged game. I made note of a few items in the tickets on the Github page.
We learned a lot of techniques and reinforced even more, but the biggest thing I learned was how to do Sprite Sheet animation. Having done bone-based animation in Blender years ago, I have to say that in comparison, sprite sheet animation is easy-peasy. The tradeoff is less flexibility - you only have what your artist drew (or you bought or got for free online), but it essentially automates everything about animation.
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
Overall, there was a continuation of trends from last year with just a few changes.
Python
Pycharm
PyCharm has continued to be my IDE of choice for Python programming. The devs haven’t been resting on their laurels, either. Recently they added some extra features to support FastAPI. And they also added some features that I don’t 100% understand that make it easier to test against fake HTTP endpoints. It’s really awesome and definitely worth the price if you program primarily in Python. As I predicted last year, its git features ended up making GitQlient and Git Kraken (on Linux) more or less obsolete for me.
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
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.
This used to look pretty regular. Just two parallel lines with the devel branch connecting into the master branch here and there. But then I merged master into devel because I added issue templates on the github website directly into master. Things got….interesting….
When I wrote about checking out KDevelop, I mentioned that it was due to a blog post by the Kate developers about how to evolve Kate going forward. Last night I came across a new article in the same vein in which they looked at potential git GUIs to use from within Kate. In my KDevelop post, I mentioned that I use QGit, but it can look a bit small in the screenshot of my 3 monitor desktop. So this is my typical QGit setup:
When MakeMKV added a new requirement for ccextractor, allowing it to grab subtitles that are encoded on the DVD or Blueray as Closed Captioning instead of subtitles, there wasn’t a package available for Fedora. (There is now, but at the time where wasn’t) So I wanted to make an RPM that I could host on Fedora’s COPR for others who needed the package. There was a problem with their shell script for building RPMs. At the time I just kept hacking away at it until I was able to build RPMs. But I didn’t think about how the manual process wouldn’t be sustainable as changes were made to CC Extractor. They weren’t having releases too often, so I didn’t worry about it. But then they made a new release and I knew that this time, having leveled up on my git-fu, I would try and figure out how to fix that problem and submit a pull request.
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
As you recall from the previous blog post, I’d installed Unity and JetBrains on my Fedora 32 computer via Flatpaks. I was going to use them for the Unity Multiplayer course I was taking on Udemy. Unfortunately it was an immediate fail and in lesson one after they have me install a new inputs library and restart Unity, it would always crash upon loading the file. I’m currently installing Unity 2020.1 on my Windows computer where I don’t expect to have that issue. Assuming I don’t, then it’s a big fat nope on using Unity on Fedora via Flatpak (at least for this class). Which, to be fair, is not on their supported OS list - which is only Ubuntu and CentOS 7. (And the latter for movie-making)
As I mentioned last year in my 2019 in Programming post, I created a bunch of 2D games in Unity by following along with the Gamedev.tv classes. I would watch the videos on Linux and jump over to my Windows computer for the programming, learning how to use SourceTree and Microsoft Video Studio in the process. But for some reason, going back and forth with the KVM when running Unity would sometimes freeze up the Windows computer. So when I saw someone on Fedora Planet running Unity Hub, I thought I’d see if there was a Flatpak - and there IS! Also, I’ve fallen in love with JetBrain’s Pycharm, so I thought I’d go ahead and use their game dev IDE, Rider. ( There’s a Flatpak for that, too!) So, let’s see how well this works!
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
Overall, there was a continuation of trends from last year with just a few changes.
Python
Pycharm
PyCharm has continued to be my IDE of choice for Python programming. The devs haven’t been resting on their laurels, either. Recently they added some extra features to support FastAPI. And they also added some features that I don’t 100% understand that make it easier to test against fake HTTP endpoints. It’s really awesome and definitely worth the price if you program primarily in Python. As I predicted last year, its git features ended up making GitQlient and Git Kraken (on Linux) more or less obsolete for me.
Just in time for Halloween I discovered the Dracula set of dark themes.They’ve got themes for nearly every code editor and shell/console program you can think of. Here’s Yakuake with the Dracula Konsole theme:
Yakuake with Dracula theme
And here’s Kate with the Dracula theme:
Kate with Dracula theme
I like the color scheme, but the font’s a bit small, so I might make a variant theme with a slightly larger font size.
When I wrote about checking out KDevelop, I mentioned that it was due to a blog post by the Kate developers about how to evolve Kate going forward. Last night I came across a new article in the same vein in which they looked at potential git GUIs to use from within Kate. In my KDevelop post, I mentioned that I use QGit, but it can look a bit small in the screenshot of my 3 monitor desktop. So this is my typical QGit setup:
A couple days ago, I wrote about giving KDevelop another look and posted it to reddit’s r/kde. In my post, I’d said it was annoying to have to configure the color schemas per file. Someone commented on the subreddit that if you use the View->Schema menus it’s per file while if you go into Settings->KDevelop settings you can change it for all files.
As a side effect I explored the same options in Kate and set it up like this:
When I first started programming it was just at the prompt of my Tandy computer. Then it was in the QBasic text editor on the IBM computers at school. But when I started programming again with “real” languages, I ended up going with Emacs. Although I was first annoyed at the way commands like save were prefixed, it became my favorite editor. I think that was partially because of diving headfirst into the free software movement and partially because I didn’t like vi’s different modes and how annoying that made things if you didn’t realize you weren’t in the text entry mode. Eventually, I moved on to Kate because I love KDE (been running it as my main desktop for over 10 years now) and I loved the features it enabled. Also, since vi (or vim) is found EVERYWHERE while Emacs usually requires installation, I ended up switching to vi whenever I’m ssh’d into a computer. If you add plugins like powerline, it can be pretty awesome to use. Even on my desktop if I’m editing /etc/fstab I’m more likely to pull up vi than the weight of KDE (not that it takes up THAT much RAM).
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
Overall, there was a continuation of trends from last year with just a few changes.
Python
Pycharm
PyCharm has continued to be my IDE of choice for Python programming. The devs haven’t been resting on their laurels, either. Recently they added some extra features to support FastAPI. And they also added some features that I don’t 100% understand that make it easier to test against fake HTTP endpoints. It’s really awesome and definitely worth the price if you program primarily in Python. As I predicted last year, its git features ended up making GitQlient and Git Kraken (on Linux) more or less obsolete for me.
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
Overall, there was a continuation of trends from last year with just a few changes.
Python
Pycharm
PyCharm has continued to be my IDE of choice for Python programming. The devs haven’t been resting on their laurels, either. Recently they added some extra features to support FastAPI. And they also added some features that I don’t 100% understand that make it easier to test against fake HTTP endpoints. It’s really awesome and definitely worth the price if you program primarily in Python. As I predicted last year, its git features ended up making GitQlient and Git Kraken (on Linux) more or less obsolete for me.
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
Overall, there was a continuation of trends from last year with just a few changes.
Python
Pycharm
PyCharm has continued to be my IDE of choice for Python programming. The devs haven’t been resting on their laurels, either. Recently they added some extra features to support FastAPI. And they also added some features that I don’t 100% understand that make it easier to test against fake HTTP endpoints. It’s really awesome and definitely worth the price if you program primarily in Python. As I predicted last year, its git features ended up making GitQlient and Git Kraken (on Linux) more or less obsolete for me.
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
It’s been a pretty busy 2 weeks. I’ve basically either been finishing up end of year blog posts or programming. Let’s jump in!
Extra Life Donation Tracker
I have the 5.3 release of my Extra Life Donation Tracker. I had a few minor refactoring goals for that release, but also a few user-facing enhancements. I added in the ability to grab the user’s avatar as well as their team’s avatar. They can now use that as an input in either XSplit or OBS. During these two weeks I also fixed a user-reported bug on crashes if a donor had emoji in their name. Oh emoji, you’re the bane of my programming existence!
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
As you recall from the previous blog post, I’d installed Unity and JetBrains on my Fedora 32 computer via Flatpaks. I was going to use them for the Unity Multiplayer course I was taking on Udemy. Unfortunately it was an immediate fail and in lesson one after they have me install a new inputs library and restart Unity, it would always crash upon loading the file. I’m currently installing Unity 2020.1 on my Windows computer where I don’t expect to have that issue. Assuming I don’t, then it’s a big fat nope on using Unity on Fedora via Flatpak (at least for this class). Which, to be fair, is not on their supported OS list - which is only Ubuntu and CentOS 7. (And the latter for movie-making)
As I mentioned last year in my 2019 in Programming post, I created a bunch of 2D games in Unity by following along with the Gamedev.tv classes. I would watch the videos on Linux and jump over to my Windows computer for the programming, learning how to use SourceTree and Microsoft Video Studio in the process. But for some reason, going back and forth with the KVM when running Unity would sometimes freeze up the Windows computer. So when I saw someone on Fedora Planet running Unity Hub, I thought I’d see if there was a Flatpak - and there IS! Also, I’ve fallen in love with JetBrain’s Pycharm, so I thought I’d go ahead and use their game dev IDE, Rider. ( There’s a Flatpak for that, too!) So, let’s see how well this works!
This was a VERY busy year for my coding. This year I had over 769 commits to GitHub; my previous best was 58 in 2014. The commits were very unevenly distributed. If you look at the graph of my commits, outside of a busy week in January and another in May, I didn’t really start coding until August.
GitHub activity graph
But perhaps commits to GithHub isn’t the best metric. If you look at what I accomplished in the second half of 2019, I worked on an incredible number of projects.
The sixth, and final, game of the Udemy class on Unity 2D was a tileset Metroid-Vania game which the instructors named Tilevania. I never played Metroid and maybe only played Castlevania once, but its legacy does persist in some newer games like Spelunky.
Tilevania in the Unity UI
This was the closest I’ve come to making a Mario clone. My favorite part of the development process was creating the tile editor rules that allows me to drag around the tiles for the foreground and have it automatically determine if it should be a grass piece, dark, or full of rocks. As usual with the games we used to learn concepts for the course, there is a lot left to do to make a fully-fledged game. I made note of a few items in the tickets on the Github page.
We learned a lot of techniques and reinforced even more, but the biggest thing I learned was how to do Sprite Sheet animation. Having done bone-based animation in Blender years ago, I have to say that in comparison, sprite sheet animation is easy-peasy. The tradeoff is less flexibility - you only have what your artist drew (or you bought or got for free online), but it essentially automates everything about animation.
The fourth game we worked on was another game that I spent a lot of my childhood playing. We made a Galaxian/Galaga clone:
Laser Defender - a Galaga Galaxian clone
My mom’s youngest brother had a Nintendo and lots of arcade ports. When I was young he lived in the condo above my grandmother’s condo and whenever we’d go visit her, I’d ask if I could visit him so we could play games. The game I loved playing the most there was Galaga because of the frantic pace.
My journey through 2D game development using the Unity engine continued with our third project: a clone of Brick Breaker or Arkanoid. In case you’ve never seen it before, this is Arkanoid:
Arkanoid
It’s got a pretty important legacy, Breakout, the version that Atari created, was an important stepping stone for the two Steves of Apple (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak).
So it makes sense that this would be one of the games we would use on our learning journey. This is what my first level looks like:
I’ve been playing video games since I was somewhere around 5 or 6 years old and got a Nintendo Entertainment System for my birthday from one of my aunts. I also inherited a Tandy computer from my dad when I was younger. We had a bunch of edutainment games - like this Sesame Street game (that unfortunately a quick search on Google Images does not turn up) where you had to suck the Tweedles (bugs from Ernie’s flower box) to solve math problems. I also, and I’ve mentioned this before in several places on the net, learned to program from a book on BASIC and made myself a bunch of simple games, including Madlibs clones.
note: I wrote this on 17 April, a full week before it is published on the blog
[caption id=“attachment_4398” align=“aligncenter” width=“450” caption=“Acer Aspire One - out of the box”] [/caption]
Nearly six years ago I bought my first laptop. I’d never seen the point of laptops over desktops - the value per dollar just isn’t there. But I was going to be traveling for work now and again and needed to be able to get in contact with the family while away. I got an old Acer that was on sale at best buy because it was the last one left. A year after buying that laptop, netbooks came out. I got my wife one of the first Asus EEE PCs because she was going on a work trip didn’t want to haul my heavy laptop around. So for the past few years we’ve traveled with both of those so I can use my laptop to watch my movies and she can use her netbook to watch hers. But I’m getting tired of that heavy laptop and now netbooks aren’t saddled with crippled versions of Linux and inferior hardware. So I got myself a new Acer Aspire One from Amazon. I’d seen the same one at Costco for $50 more (because it has double the battery life) and I’d wanted to get it for a while now. I’m going to be traveling to Chicago for a trip soon, and since my back has been giving me issues, I figured it was the time to go to a lighter laptop.
I have not yet tried out Gnome Shell or Ubuntu Unity, but the biggest complaint most people level against them is that our desktops are being tablet-ified. Sure, there need to be new, innovative interfaces for tablets and phones, but that’s no reason to abandon the desktop. Sure, perhaps the average Joe (or Jane) will be using tablets more and more, but some of us have real work to get done. We need to do photo editing, programming, video editing, 3D modeling, and other tasks that require something more than a glorified smart phone. This is where KDE excels.
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
Overall, there was a continuation of trends from last year with just a few changes.
Python
Pycharm
PyCharm has continued to be my IDE of choice for Python programming. The devs haven’t been resting on their laurels, either. Recently they added some extra features to support FastAPI. And they also added some features that I don’t 100% understand that make it easier to test against fake HTTP endpoints. It’s really awesome and definitely worth the price if you program primarily in Python. As I predicted last year, its git features ended up making GitQlient and Git Kraken (on Linux) more or less obsolete for me.
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).
The last concert I attended was Jonathan Coulton with Paul and Storm back in June of 2021. At the time we thought perhaps we were out of the woods with COVID. Instead, variant after variant has COVID a never ending fact life. For a while I was thinking that perhaps we’d eventually vaccinate our way out of this situation, but the vaccines haven’t proven to quite work that way. So, after passing up on a bunch of concerts this year, I decided to go see I Fight Dragons with MC Lars and Schaffer the Dark Lord. I just decided to wear a mask to keep myself from getting sick (especially since I’ve still got a few races and meets left this year).
I have been following I Fight Dragons for almost a decade now, including their journey from self-produced to being a label band and rejecting that to going back to being self-produced. I was a backer on their last album, the ambitious concept record The Near Future. That was a seemingly long five years ago. I’ve said before that I ended up enjoying the B-side of the record a lot more, and I think that’s because the lyrics resonated a bit more with me. But for a while I thought maybe the stress of the Kickstarter (in which they ended up ditching an almost completed version of the album and starting over) had split the band.
I hadn’t seen I Fight Dragons on tour since Warped Tour three or four years ago (I missed an opportunity to see them at MagFest a couple years ago), but I really enjoyed that set and I’ve been enjoying their work on their new album. They’ve been sharing the progress of songs from acoustic roughs to rhythm roughs, and so on. It’s been a lot of fun to see how the songs evolve. Tickets were only $15 and it was at the Metro Gallery in Baltimore, so I figured I’d go check it out.
At the end of my interview about starting the Kickstarter project, Brian Mazzaferri of I Fight Dragons opened the door to speaking with him about the process when it was all done. It was, as is the case with many Kickstarter projects, very exhausting and we only recently had time to actually do the interview. In the interview I briefly mention the delays in the vinyl album. This actually a pretty big problem in the music industry at the moment. Demand for vinyl has increased to a point where the record pressing plants can’t keep up with demand, but not yet to the point where it makes sense to open a new factory (with all the upfront costs involved). Even The Protomen’s new album The Cover Up has had its vinyl release delayed due to production delays. Of course, the new old tech is cassette tapes, so perhaps vinyl demand will fall a little. Time will tell. Without further ado, the interview:
Posts like this one and others I’ve mentioned recently help explain why I’ve had an increase in hatred of pop music as my music tastes have expanded. (Although I don’t think there’s anything wrong with enjoying Bubblegum - as it was once known - most of it is garbage) The record industry, as with any established industry (and not too differently from fast food chains), hates risk. They take artists who put out amazing mix tapes and make them bland. As a corollary, when I do enjoy mainstream acts (as opposed to indie), I tend to enjoy the songs they don’t play on the radio. (Lana Del Rey and Fall Out Boy are perfect examples)
This year I bought LOTS of albums. I don’t know if it’s the most albums I’ve purchased in one year since writing these blog posts or even since keeping track of Scrobbles. I do know that while I listened to my music randomly, in general, I did also listen to entire albums whenever I purchased one. Sometimes I’d listen to the album a few times and other times I’d take the album purchase as an opportunity to review the artist’s previous work. I know that was the case with Five Iron Frenzy (although that was also concert prep as I mentioned a few days ago), Relient K, I Fight Dragons, and Fall Out Boy. It was a very fun year for me, musically. Kacey Musgraves, for example, was a reminder that country music doesn’t have to suck. Disclosure made me realize that I could still like loop-heavy electronic music. I hope that I can continue to explore new sounds in 2014.
I’m writing this in late August - by the time this post appears I should have received all of my Kickstarter goods or they should be in the mail. Interestingly, even though the Kickstarter backer cycles were spread over about a three month period, they’re all supposed to be delivering the product at around the same time - 4th quarter of this year. As of the time of this writing, this is the status of my Kickstarters:
Those of you who have been reading this blog long enough know that I often write my blog posts during my lunch break at work and set it to post at some point in the future. I’m writing this post almost 1 month before it is to appear on the blog. So in the middle of July I find myself in what many who have backed projects probably experience as the Kickstarter Lull. I backed a project by I Fight Dragons and interviewed them about it here and I backed a comic project by Greg Pak and Jonathan Coulton. During the backing period as a way to drum up support there was a constant stream of both updates and digital goodies. IFD, in particular, gave backers 2 albums (live concert recording and a conceptual album) and a concert film. A little while after the backing period was over, the projects contacted us for the info they needed to fulfill our backer rewards. Since then I haven’t heard from either of them. On the rational side, I’m glad they’re focusing on creating what we paid them to create. But after the constant communications it just feels odd to have “radio” silence. Now we just wait for the products to be created. In the case of these two projects, the members involved are all veterans: IFD put out records before having a record company contract and Greg Pak has already done about a half dozen Kickstarters. So, outside of catastrophe, I don’t fear for my money. I could see where this silence might be more disturbing with an unproven team.
For the second quarter in a row The Beatles have NOT made the list! But that’s easily explained: I have been listening to a lot of new music and a lot of playlists that don’t include The Beatles. But as you’ll see, they kinda snuck in sideways. This quarter I spent a lot of time listening to Jonathan Coulton and I Fight Dragons because of their Kickstarters, which I backed. I Fight Dragons released two albums as Kickstarter bonuses - a live recording of their most recent concert and a remix album of sorts in which the band members sung different arrangements of the songs. There was also the new Fall Out Boy album, Save Rock and Roll. I really enjoyed the album but it was overtaken in my mind by the previously mentioned IFD and JoCo music and I quickly forgot they had a new album out. Again, that’s a shame since I did enjoy it and while I was in Florida last week I quickly tired of “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark”. Incidentally, I was reminded of why I stopped listening to live radio - it’s far too repetitive. I think the true problem is that it’s too formulaic in its repetition. I didn’t mind hearing “The Princess Who Saved Herself” every day for a week because the songs surrounding it were always different. On a separate note, I got some music for Father’s Day and I’ll mention that below.
Back on 4 May I backed a Kickstarter project for the first time ever - I Fight Dragon’s Project Atma. Anyone who’s been following my last.fm posts knows that I really like the Chicago-based band. I first discovered I Fight Dragons when listening to a web comics podcast that featured “No One Likes Superman Anymore” from 2009’s Cool is Just a Number EP as the closing song. I have no idea if they had permission from I Fight Dragons, but it was quite fortuitous for the band as it led to me buying Welcome to the Breakdown and Kaboom! (and participating in this Kickstarter) As I’ve said before, the band is the inverse of Anamanaguchi. They are a rock band that uses Nintendos and Gameboys to create extra background instruments (whereas Anamanaguchi tends to have the instruments take the background to the chiptunes). Here’s one of the songs of their new album, Kaboom!
Throughout the month of October I alternated between listening to newly acquired music (of which I had quite a bit) and a dynamic playlist that was weighted so that most of the music had auto-ratings above 90, less music above 75, and even less above 50. Any song that I listened to only once would fit in the third category. After that, if I skipped it just once it would fall out of the group. So it gave me a nice mix of music including forgotten favorites. Now that I’ve listened to a good chunk of my library since the last time the Amarok database was corrupted I may modify the playlist to include the caveat that it couldn’t have been played in the last x days. I’m not sure if I want to make the date large enough that I only hear songs once per quarter or my standard two week waiting period. Given how little time I have to listen to music nowadays I might go for the 90 days. I also spent some chunks of time listening to my music on random on Google Music. That’s completely random so I end up hearing some songs I didn’t even remember ever acquiring. A lot of my new music came from Jamendo when I got an email with the month’s most popular songs and I decided to do a search for ska. Although I really enjoy ska, I got into it rather late so I don’t have very much ska music. (Mostly just Five Iron Frenzy, Save Ferris, No Doubt, and the Orange County Supertones - who are an OK ska band - I mostly like their least ska songs)
For people of my generation (and the younger ones of the previous one) video games are cultural phenomenon no less important to the way our brains work than books, music, or movies. So it’s no surprise that our music, which has been inspired by books and movies in the past is now being inspired by video games. What was surprising to me were all the different manifestations this inspiration has taken.
The last concert I attended was Jonathan Coulton with Paul and Storm back in June of 2021. At the time we thought perhaps we were out of the woods with COVID. Instead, variant after variant has COVID a never ending fact life. For a while I was thinking that perhaps we’d eventually vaccinate our way out of this situation, but the vaccines haven’t proven to quite work that way. So, after passing up on a bunch of concerts this year, I decided to go see I Fight Dragons with MC Lars and Schaffer the Dark Lord. I just decided to wear a mask to keep myself from getting sick (especially since I’ve still got a few races and meets left this year).
I hadn’t seen I Fight Dragons on tour since Warped Tour three or four years ago (I missed an opportunity to see them at MagFest a couple years ago), but I really enjoyed that set and I’ve been enjoying their work on their new album. They’ve been sharing the progress of songs from acoustic roughs to rhythm roughs, and so on. It’s been a lot of fun to see how the songs evolve. Tickets were only $15 and it was at the Metro Gallery in Baltimore, so I figured I’d go check it out.
The last concert I attended was Jonathan Coulton with Paul and Storm back in June of 2021. At the time we thought perhaps we were out of the woods with COVID. Instead, variant after variant has COVID a never ending fact life. For a while I was thinking that perhaps we’d eventually vaccinate our way out of this situation, but the vaccines haven’t proven to quite work that way. So, after passing up on a bunch of concerts this year, I decided to go see I Fight Dragons with MC Lars and Schaffer the Dark Lord. I just decided to wear a mask to keep myself from getting sick (especially since I’ve still got a few races and meets left this year).
Since I didn’t cover running last year, I’m going to cover both years in this post.
2021
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I caught the running bug during the Red Hat Summit in 2019. My original goal was to do an official race that would allow me to qualify for a good spot at a Run Disney race. Then COVID-19 hit and killed in-person racing.
The Percy Sutton Harlem 5K was both the next race I’d registered for after the Front Runners LGBT Pride Run, and the first race after my doctors cleared me to start running again (“for reals this time”) after an X-Ray and MRI to make sure things were OK in that tiny area under the big toe where there’s so much going on. Both doctors told me to ease myself back into running. They also both gave me the metric of using the next day’s presence or absence of pain as a way to tell if I was doing OK. After the past couple months of trying things out, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best shoe for me is the New Balance 860. Since my old one was worn out (which is why I switched to the 1080 for the BK Half - which may (at least partly) be the reason for my injury), I got myself a new pair at the New Balance store located inside the NYRR RunCenter when I went to pick up my bib. I also took advantage and had them confirm my shoe size while I was there. For this race I chose to run with a dancer pad since my podiatrist is making me new orthotics with a cutout, both doctors suggested at least starting out using it, and I’d learned a new position for the pad that kept my sesamoid area safe while not causing me pain in the other toes. Bad placement of the pad caused me pain during the Pride Run.
As I mentioned in my Setbacks post, I’ve injured my foot. At first I thought it was metatarsalgia, but it’s a closely related issue - sesamoiditis. My podiatrist cleared me to attempt a run after a week and predicted things would be fully healed by 2 weeks in. There were 2 key changes I had to make. First, I had to change out the shoes I wear daily to work - I’d chosen a New Balance model that didn’t have a rigid enough sole. Second, I had to wear dancer pads while recovering. As opposed to the metatarsal pad I’d originally sought out from CVS, it doesn’t cushion the area receiving pressure. Instead it puts the pressure everywhere else. More about that later. I spoke with the coach I’m using to get ready for the Marathon and we agreed that I could try and run the race, but had to keep my pace lower to reduce the chance of injury.
I think I’ve become addicted to races. I really missed having races between April ( Cherry Blossom) and the end of May (BK HM) although I did that on purpose to allow myself to rest and train. July, when I once again will be sans race, is probably going to be hard for me.
A couple weeks after the Cherry Blossom race I reached out to my coach to give them my goals for the NYC Marathon this fall. The coach adjusted my training schedule and told me they wanted me to run the race as 10 miles followed by the fastest 5K I would run this year. I was aiming for a time of 1 hour 30 minutes for this race. That would require me to run the ten miles as fast as I had run in DC for the Cherry Blossoms and then do another 5K on top of that, and do it quickly. I set my Garmin to try and do that.
A couple weeks ago, anticipating the coming spring showers and the possibility of having to race in the rain, I bought an outfit from Tracksmith’s new Thaw collection. As usual, I brought all my running clothes to NYC, not knowing what the weather has in store. After all, it wasn’t supposed to snow last race. I woke up at 0500 since the MTA trip planner told me I’d need to start my journey at 0544 to get to The Armory by 0730. It was in the 40s outside so while I brushed my teeth I waffled about what to wear. By race time (0900) it would be in the 50s. Complicating things: it was almost guaranteed to rain during the race. So my mid-layer was out. My jacket was waterproof, but that would certainly be too hot for the race. Should I wear it and unzip? In the end, I decided to go for just the Thaw long sleeve shirt, Thaw half tights, Thaw beanie, and inverno gloves. I had my usual pre-race breakfast of a quarter cup of raisins and headed out the door.
Back when I first started getting into the internet and hadn’t started using Linux yet, I needed a way to get onto the chat protocol known as IRC. Back then I used mIRC. Later on I started using Linux and used all kinds of IRC programs including XChat, BitchX, and Konversation. But recently most open source projects (which is what I’d used it for recently) have moved to the Matrix protocol. So I was surprised to see that mIRC was still a thing when I saw this news post:
November was not a huge programming month for me. On the weekends I was a little more focused with family stuff and videogames. But I did manage work on a couple projects.
I was on Identi.ca back when it first launched and I joined Mastodon a few years ago. Identi.ca had a decent number of FLOSS devs at the time, but by the time of Mastodon, Twitter was ascendant. So “no one” was on Mastodon. Even a few of the FLOSS developers I followed on Mastodon never posted on there. Network effects - it’s the reason almost everyone who threatens to leave Facebook never does; social media is only useful if you can be social (ie your friends/acquaintances are on it).
It’s been three years since the last time I posted about micro-blogging. Since then Google Buzz has been killed off, Google Plus has taken its place, Tumblr has arrived on the scene, and Identica doesn’t exist in the same way as it once did. I’m also using KDE now, so I went from using Gwibber to using Choqok:
I used Tumblr for about a year but I abandoned it because it’s just animated gifs and curation of the work of others. Out of all the Tumblrs I followed (about 20) only about 3 of them produced original content. All the rest were just reblogs. Also, there’s too much porn on there to use at work.
The thing I like the most about Twitter is the ability to interact with creatives in real time. In the past you had to write a letter to a writer, artist, musician, etc and hope that, maybe, they’d actually read it and that, maybe, they’d feel compelled to reply with something more than boilerplate. I started following Paolo Rivera after meeting him at Baltimore Comic-Con. (Related topic: meeting a bunch of creators in person at Baltimore Comic-Con helped make them more “real” to me. I’m not a jerky person, but it really does give me pause when I post a criticism to someone on twitter. Unlike these guys.) So when Paolo tweeted something from his blog that I wanted to comment on, I kept failing the captcha he had on the comments. I tweeted and (to my surprise) was retweeted by Paolo:
A little past the end of February I started having problems with my internet connected devices. In the basement we have a Roku box that the wife uses to watch Netflix. She reported that it was no longer connecting to Netflix. We’d had issues before with it needing to be re-registered with Netflix, but that did not seem to be the case. I’d click on the Netflix channel and it would say “retrieving movies” for a while and then pop back to the main menu. At first I thought something was wrong with the Roku box, so I tried the Amazon channel, but that worked and I was able to watch my content. I figured it’d resolve itself. So she just popped in the latest DVD from Netflix into our DVD player. Later that night she was in the bedroom and learned that our Samsung BluRay player was no longer connecting to Netflix. I thought that was weird, but figured maybe it was a Netflix problem. I checked on my computer and I couldn’t log into the Netflix site. Neither could Danielle on her computer. These were Linux boxes (Fedora and Ubuntu respectively) so I tried on my Windows computer. Strangely, that one could log in. That’s weird. I tried on both Firefox and Chrome with no difference. So then I tried the guest computer - that computer hadn’t been used since December and I knew it was working for Netflix back then. That would help me eliminate the possibility that I’d installed a distro update that had killed it for me. (I knew that didn’t totally make sense because of the BluRay Player and Roku) That one could reach it either. What was going on here? Was Netflix blocking Linux? Well, I figured it might go away so I waited until the next day.
I wrote this code a while back because a website that does the same thing seemed to miss my posts every other week. So I figured I’d write my own in python to do the same thing to me. Then I just put it into a cron job to automatically run it every Sunday. I’m going to be posting the code on my GPL code page. Here it is for you to see and for Google to index. Just fill in the appropriate variables with the secret keys you get from each site’s API.
Almost exactly 2 years ago I started micro-blogging. Back then I signed up for Twitter, Pownce, and Plurk accounts. One month later I concluded that I really liked Twitter and that Pownce and Plurk were annoying. A few days later I discovered Identi.ca - a FLOSS version of Twitter and decided I would send frivolous tweets to Twitter and tecnological dents to Identi.ca. Then, a little while later Pownce was taken off the net. So what has happened in the intervening years?
I came to a disturbing realization the other day - I’ve come to feel that whatever isn’t online isn’t real. This came about thanks to the Wii’s insanely stupid online policy. Everything about playing online with the Wii is an exercise in frustrating the user. Rather than always be connected to the net when the console is on (like modern computers, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3), the Wii attempts to connect to the game servers at the time you wish to play the game. This leads to the very frustrated experience of wanting to play online, loading up into the game you want to play and then realizing that the system is having problems connecting to the Internet. So you have to back out to the Wii menu and trouble-shoot the problem. This wouldn’t be so vexing if it didn’t take the Wii ages to load games, including the “don’t throw your effing Wiimote around” warning every time! Even in games where it doesn’t make sense! (Like Rock Band)
As I mentioned in my post Micro-blogging: One Month Later, I hadn’t really used Pownce much at all. Even now, 4 months later, I haven’t touched it. In fact, ever since that post in August, I only used it once to transfer a file to my brother. I thought there wasn’t much room on the net for so many micro-blogging services. Most people, including CNN’s Rick Sanchez, use Twitter. And if you’re hard-core into libre software, there’s Identica. So I didn’t see why anyone would use Pownce. On top of that, Pownce was supposed to make money by getting people to pay for extra services. I just didn’t see any value in what they were charging for. So, I wasn’t too surprised when I got an email last Monday that Pownce was going to close shop.
In my first look at the micro-blogs I had some pretty good feelings about Twitter. That has basically carried over for the past few weeks. I added a Twitter plugin to my blog, using it for quick thoughts I don’t want to elaborate on with a blog post. I’m also using Twitux on my Linux computer for posting without having to load up the Twitter site. I haven’t really been using the Flock Twitter plugin because it doesn’t seem to update correctly or often enough. I’m enjoying using it for those quick thoughts. I’m definitely going to keep using Twitter for the foreseeable future. So I feel the way about Twitter as I did a month ago - I like it.
I’ve known about micro-blogging for 1-2 years now - ever since I first started hearing about Twitter. Up until now I’ve been vehemently against the whole micro-blogging trend. To begin with, it requires anyone who wants to keep up with my writing to check yet another website! On top of that, I just can’t see a point to it. I even told my brother last weekend, why can’t I just have nice, short posts on my blog? But recently I’ve been hearing more and more about these micro-blogging services. It keeps being mentioned over and over on the net, in podcasts, pretty soon I’m sure CNN will be doing a piece on it. I know I’m late to the party when, according to Wikipedia, Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton have Twitter accounts. But, still, I hear all these complaints micro-blogging overload and people talking about ridiculously inane things such as what they just ate for lunch.
While a book about web technologies is undoubtablely going to get out of date (especially when Javascript is involved), I would definitely recommend this book if you want to do some data visualization either as part of your job or for an undergrad, grad, or PhD project. While I would probably use FastAPI rather than Flask, I heard recently that the Javascript library the author uses, D3, is still one of the best in class libraries for this kind of work.
August was a programming-filled month for me. It focused entirely on Python and I mostly continued working on established projects. Let’s jump in!
Amortization
I wanted to re-calculate the amortization table for my home loan for the first time in about a year. As a refresher, I created this program (vs using Excel or an online form) because we are not consistent in the amount of extra principal payments we make. For example, if I get a bonus at work, I might throw all of that bonus into the loan payment. So this program takes variable extra payments into account when creating the amortization table.
I’ve read lots of books covering web frameworks or GUI programming (both involve UI design and a different workflow where you’re often waiting for user input), but this one is one of the best I’ve ever read. While it’s traditional for a book to culminate in a blog or social media app (and this one does it too) there’s something about the way Grinberg writes that makes it so much more approachable. Also, something only more modern books can do, he has a github repo with all the code with commits that match different sections of the book.
As October came around, it was time to get ready for Hacktoberfest. I’ve been participating for the past few years and I love the fact that DigitalOcean supports this project which gets more people to contribute to free and open source software.
In the past, I’ve often contributed to my Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since the program is pretty mature at this point, most of the issues I have would have taken me too long, especially with how busy I’ve been with non-programming projects lately. So I dedicated my efforts to helping with some quality of life issues for the Prophecy Practicum (Django Version) that I’ve coded up for my friend.
I started off the year not expecting to do much programming. Compared to some months in 2021, I barely programmed, but I did end up programming much more than I expected. Let’s take a look at what I worked on in the first sixth of the year.
Python Programs
End of Year Video Games Helper
Coming off of last year in which I finally used Python to pull my last.fm data and create graphs, I decided to do the same for my End of Year Video Games blog post. I haven’t posted the code to Github, but here it is:
June was mostly Python, although I did do chapter 1 of Scratch 3 Games for Kids with Sam. He really, really enjoyed it and I anticipate doing the challenge problems and maybe chapter 2 in July or August.
Books
I read the intro and first couple chapters of both Flask Web Development, 2nd Edition and Data Visualization with Python and Javascript, both from a recent Humble Bundle. The Flask book may be useful for learning more about creating a non-Django site and, even if I mostly stick with FastAPI, it should provide some concepts that are applicable across both frameworks. With the data visualization book, I would love to use that to better visualize my annual Last.fm stats.
As I did last time, I wanted my web browser post to contain both news stories about browsers that have caught my attention and my thoughts on the newest web browser I’m trying out. Let’s start with the news.
As you probably have heard if you’re paying any attention to browsers, one of the selling points of using Brave is that they replace tracking ads on the net with their own ads and then “pay” you for viewing those ads. You can then take that money and pay it out to the creators you care about and continue to support the web while not being tracked and not just blocking all ads, keeping the creators from getting paid. Sounds too good to be true? Well, this article argues that it is. Here’s a screenshot of the new tab page on Brave on my Linux computer:
It’s been seven months since I last wrote about testing out new browsers on my computers. In addition to talking about what I’m doing, I wanted to muse about whether Mozilla really missed the mark with Firefox.
I’m going to start with the second point first. I forgot what brought them to my attention, but it turns out that while there are less browsers based on Firefox than there used to be (most of them are based on Chromium nowadays), there are at least two browsers based on Firefox that are still being developed: Waterfox and Palemoon. Waterfox is privacy-focused. They make a big deal about that on their site and FAQ. Palemoon is focused on being efficient and (it seems to me) still uses the old Firefox extensions. Why does this mean that Mozilla messed up? Well, first of all, I believe that Mozila sees Firefox as a privacy-focused browser. They may or may not have the same protections as Waterfox, but if they do, they have done a very bad job of marketing it. When it comes to Palemoon, I remember (at least according to commenters on Ars Technica) that when Firefox changed their extension format and caused all the old extensions to be deprecated, a lot of folks left for Chrome. At the time there wasn’t really much distinguishing the browsers, but getting rid of all the extensions, which are heavily used by power users, seemed like a really bad way to keep market share.
Brave didn’t last very long for me on Windows. I just don’t do enough on there to make use of their ad blocking and ad replacing tech. On the other hand, I’ve been using more and more of Vivaldi’s features. I just started using their Web panels - this allows you to have a web page on the left that loads up in a small section - great for pages that you would like to reference here and there without cluttering up your tabs. I’m using it on my Windows computer to keep some Web panels with notes on what I’d like to do in some games - like Civ VI, Darkest Dungeon, and Cities Skylines.
I’ve been using Vivaldi on Windows for about four months now. As I keep saying, my browser needs on Windows aren’t too huge. Mostly I access youtube, the Stardew Valley Farm uploaded, and Google Docs. But I want to keep checking out new browsers on Windows first precisely since they are so important on my Linux computer. I don’t want to mess up a good thing there.
Well, on Linux I bounced back and forth between Firefox and Chrome, depending on which one was getting better performance. At this point, for what I do, Firefox is the winner for me. I use it on my laptop and desktop and it gets things done without getting in my way. I don’t necessarily have the most modern GUI setup because it tends to keep your GUI settings as you upgrade. This is what it looks like:
When I wrote my second fatherhood post, the one about Disney Princesses, I speculated that perhaps the problem most people had with the Disney Princesses was not the movies, but how the company marketed to kids. Since Scarlett is only one, my only exposure to the princesses has been through my own childhood and adulthood love of Disney movies. This Boing Boing post about the princess from Brave, Merida, proves the point - it’s the marketing that gets under everyone’s skin. Here’s the change from the movie version on the left to the marketing version on the right:
Interestingly enough, I was originally exploring whether to change to the new Bjork theme I’d just heard about. Unfortunately, unlike previous theme changes, it required me to completely redo my homepage while the page was live. It was NOT a good experience. But I did start playing around with the built-in themes. For the past few years I’ve found that I have preferred the built-in themes to anything else out there.
When I switched to Twenty Nineteen almost a year ago, I wasn’t sure if I was going to stick with the theme so I never did my theme documentation blog post. So here’s what the previous theme, Twenty Sixteen, which I had for about 2.5 years, looked like:
I’m not sure I like how the main blog page looks. While it seems to copy something like Ghost or Jekyll (some of the Wordpress competitors popular among the technical set), It has something of an unfinished look to it. I do really like the way individual posts look, particularly when they have a featured image set. And, to some degree, thanks to Facebook, Twitter, and other sites - users are much more likely to land on a blog post than on the main blog page. But right now I’m not sure I’m happy with the theme. I may switch back early next week. If I stick with Twenty Nineteen, I’ll make my usual post about changing themes that contains some screenshots to remember how the blog looked with Twenty Sixteen.
While I enjoyed the new theme overall, one thing was nagging at me as I went to bed last night - the padding around the menu, header, and site identity took up WAAAAAAY too much space. So I made the menu more nested to make it appear on the right as it does in the example site for the theme. I might need to make a few more tweaks to that to make sure certain pages are surfaced rather than hidden.
I was looking around recently at the Wordpress annual themes and was looking into Twenty Sixteen. While it hadn’t spoken to me when it was released, it did have some features that seemed perfect for me now. The first is that images are given even more room to breathe in this theme. Since I’ve featured photography quite a bit on my blog over the past 11 years, this was something I definitely wanted. I have toyed with the idea of having a separate blog for my photography that has a dedicated photography theme, but since my tastes are always shifting, I think it’s better to just keep it all together on one blog. Another feature is the addition of pull-quotes - something I was trying to figure out how to do via plugins. Finally there is the sub-title you see above - I love those. I plan to have some fun with it in the future.
Almost exactly two years ago, I changed to the Twenty Thirteen theme. It was a breath of fresh air after what I’d used before. The font is beautiful and it was much less cluttered than the themes I’d used before. One of the things I like is that the color scheme quickly tells the user what kind of post I’m making. In practice, the post types made a bit less sense for the way I blog than if I were a Tumblr refuge, but it does make for a nice, colorful theme.
Finally switched over to Twenty Thirteen now that Wordpress 3.6 is out. It’s going to take some time for me to get things looking the way I want them. Anyway, I LOVE the new fonts - much better readability than the previous theme.
I found a Wordpress theme that I mostly like called Hal 5.0. I think the top image is a little over the top, but the overall theme is ok. I edited the font size up from the default - the font designer must have amazing eyesight. I also added in tag listings into the blog posts. Overall, I’m much happier with this look than with the previous one. I still think that, someday, I’ll make my own theme so I can be completely happy with it instead of finding one that’s good enough on the Wordpress site.
This theme is really annoying me, mostly because it’s a fixed width theme. That means that the theme doesn’t expand if you expand your Window or have a wide screen monitor. Mostly, it means annoying things like this blog post title. As you can see, it cuts into the metadata such as the date/time. Also this theme doesn’t support tags. So you may see some strangeness as I change themes. I couldn’t find any that I truly wanted and, in the end, I think I’m just going to end up making my own theme.
I had the ramart theme for over 2 years, since announcing it in this post. I’ve had it for practically the entire life of this blog, so I thought it would be fitting to record how it looked. Perhaps I can go back to it if I can convince someone to redo it as a Wordpress 2.3 compliant theme or perhaps it’s time to move on. I haven’t really decided just yet.
First of all, I was unsuccessful in getting my previous theme to work with the new features. Second, the current theme I have selected is god-awful. However, I really, really like the widgets idea a LOT! So I’m going to need to find a better theme that supports widgets. I tried about 4 different ones, but this one was the best. Really, the only thing I don’t like about it is that images flow out of the boxes instead of the boxes expanding. I’ll work on it or just roll back to my old one and forget about widgets.
I’m going to try and upgrade my theme to work with the latest Wordpress feature - widgets. Therefore, the blog might look a little ugly as I attempt to get the theme to work.
Interestingly enough, I was originally exploring whether to change to the new Bjork theme I’d just heard about. Unfortunately, unlike previous theme changes, it required me to completely redo my homepage while the page was live. It was NOT a good experience. But I did start playing around with the built-in themes. For the past few years I’ve found that I have preferred the built-in themes to anything else out there.
One day last week I was a little bored at lunchtime so I started clicking on the Wordpress Dashboard links to different developer blogs. Turns out Wordpress 3.6 is coming out soon and it’s going to focus on bringing post formats to the fore and creating a consistent way of handling them within the database. I had no idea this was introduced back in Wordpress 3.1. I don’t know if I missed the notification or if it didn’t mean anything to me because I hadn’t used Tumblr yet. Here are two great explanations: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/post-formats/ and http://wpdaily.co/future-post-formats/ . If you don’t feel like reading those, basically think of how when you make a post on Tumblr it asks you if it’s an image, post, link, etc. That determines the interface it gives you and, depending on your Tumblr theme, determines how to present the information you put into it. Given that one of the post formats is Annotation (meant to be a short post) and given that I quickly grew tired of Tumblr and how it doesn’t have a proper commenting system, I’m probably going to use that for shorter, less fleshed out posts rather than having a Tumblr blog.
I last changed themes in April 2008. It hasn’t quite been a year yet, but as was the trigger last time, the latest version of wordpress doesn’t work with this theme. Last time it was tags and the time before that it was widgets. Now I want a theme that fully supports Wordpress 2.7 - especially the threading of comments and other such features. I believe I have found one that works. Also, with my current theme it has that annoying large header at the top. My dad didn’t even realize I had linked him to my blog. He thought that header image was what he was suppopsed to look at. I also think it’s interesting that this new theme is a brownish colour as was my original Tripod-hosted blog. Here are some images of the current theme for historical reasons
I found a Wordpress theme that I mostly like called Hal 5.0. I think the top image is a little over the top, but the overall theme is ok. I edited the font size up from the default - the font designer must have amazing eyesight. I also added in tag listings into the blog posts. Overall, I’m much happier with this look than with the previous one. I still think that, someday, I’ll make my own theme so I can be completely happy with it instead of finding one that’s good enough on the Wordpress site.
This theme is really annoying me, mostly because it’s a fixed width theme. That means that the theme doesn’t expand if you expand your Window or have a wide screen monitor. Mostly, it means annoying things like this blog post title. As you can see, it cuts into the metadata such as the date/time. Also this theme doesn’t support tags. So you may see some strangeness as I change themes. I couldn’t find any that I truly wanted and, in the end, I think I’m just going to end up making my own theme.
This morning I updated my Fedora 36 computer and suddenly it could no longer find any sound devices. Thanks to a Fedora user who commented on this reddit thread, I found that the solution was to downgrade my Pipewire packages. Specifically, at this point in time:
This morning I updated my Fedora 36 computer and suddenly it could no longer find any sound devices. Thanks to a Fedora user who commented on this reddit thread, I found that the solution was to downgrade my Pipewire packages. Specifically, at this point in time:
After using Plasma with KWayland for about a week, I had to go back to X11 because it’s not yet ready for me. There are 3 main issues I’m having:
Occasionally, when I come back to my computer after locking the screen it would say that the screen locker had crashed. I would need to go to antoher TTY and type in a command to unlock it. After I did that, coming back to the TTY that has the GUI just remains black with a mouse cursor. So I would need to reboot the machine.
I cannot drag and drop video files to upload to YouTube with Firefox. I have to click the button on YT and then navigate to the folder that has the video file. (Not sure if there are other things that can’t be dragged in - photo upload to Flickr, for example)
I’ll keep looking to see if they improve things. But for now I’m staying on X11.
I upgraded to Fedora 36 so I wanted to see all the latest updates to Wayland. I’d been reading about the updates in the KDE and wanted to see if it was more stable. I had to redo my latte dock profile. Other than that, SO FAR the only issues are that the scroll wheel on the mouse scrolls WAY too far on the page, making it almost useless. And Yakuake (the KDE drop down terminal) appears at the middle of the screen instead of at the top. I went to file a bug, but I saw a comment that this is fixed in the next version of Yakuake, so it seems I just need to wait for an update. Otherwise, so far it seems to be working OK.
This morning I updated my Fedora 36 computer and suddenly it could no longer find any sound devices. Thanks to a Fedora user who commented on this reddit thread, I found that the solution was to downgrade my Pipewire packages. Specifically, at this point in time:
Glen Weldon takes us through Batman’s history and evolution and how it was affected by the culture in which it was written. I knew bits and pieces of the story from other histories of comics, but this was the first time I’d read one focused on Batman. There are many ways to tell this story and I think Weldon’s is a very good strategy.
Recently I was thinking about cataloguing my comic books. Recent family events convinced me to get on with it and so I spent all weekend putting the information into the KDE collection database Tellico. It had lots of useful fields to fill out, so I figured I was probably only going to do this once and so I may as well do it correctly. I entered in the names of the writers, pencillers, inkers, and so on. And I learned some interesting stuff.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“If Bloomberg can ride the train, so can Batman”] [/caption]
Sometimes jokes can be very misleading to outsiders. For a few months after hearing jokes about how gamey it was that Joker’s henchmen lost track of Batman as soon as he went up onto a gargoyle I didn’t have any inclination to play the game. It just seemed like it would be too jarring to have enemies shooting at me and suddenly be unable to follow the fact that I went up onto a gargoyle. The truth turned out to be a good compromise. But it brings to light an uncanny valley of a different sort. As games become more and more realistic, how do you represent super heroes in a way that doesn’t destroy the video game?
August was a programming-filled month for me. It focused entirely on Python and I mostly continued working on established projects. Let’s jump in!
Amortization
I wanted to re-calculate the amortization table for my home loan for the first time in about a year. As a refresher, I created this program (vs using Excel or an online form) because we are not consistent in the amount of extra principal payments we make. For example, if I get a bonus at work, I might throw all of that bonus into the loan payment. So this program takes variable extra payments into account when creating the amortization table.
The Percy Sutton Harlem 5K was both the next race I’d registered for after the Front Runners LGBT Pride Run, and the first race after my doctors cleared me to start running again (“for reals this time”) after an X-Ray and MRI to make sure things were OK in that tiny area under the big toe where there’s so much going on. Both doctors told me to ease myself back into running. They also both gave me the metric of using the next day’s presence or absence of pain as a way to tell if I was doing OK. After the past couple months of trying things out, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best shoe for me is the New Balance 860. Since my old one was worn out (which is why I switched to the 1080 for the BK Half - which may (at least partly) be the reason for my injury), I got myself a new pair at the New Balance store located inside the NYRR RunCenter when I went to pick up my bib. I also took advantage and had them confirm my shoe size while I was there. For this race I chose to run with a dancer pad since my podiatrist is making me new orthotics with a cutout, both doctors suggested at least starting out using it, and I’d learned a new position for the pad that kept my sesamoid area safe while not causing me pain in the other toes. Bad placement of the pad caused me pain during the Pride Run.
I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).
I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.
The last time I tried to solder something, it was just a few pins and it gave me so much trouble and took hours. So, when I was thinking about how how I was going to redo my BBQ thermostat with Adafruit Circuit Python and Stemma QT, I was afraid to get the FeatherS2 since it wasn’t sold in a configuration that came with headers already soldered on. The idea of soldering some 28 pins filled me with fear of screwing up the board. After it arrived, I procrastinated. Finally, today I did it. I don’t know what changed from when I tried to solder last time, but it worked reasonably well. Yes, if you look at the picture, I need to fix the USB pin and pin 38 before I try inserting into any headers, but it just took me about 15 minutes and I didn’t have any feelings of giving up or intense frustration. So, I just wanted to celebrate this milestone. Hurray for me!
Since I’ve been making a lot of great progress programming with the kids in Scratch, I bought some Circuit Playground Expresses to program with the kids. The Circuit Playground Express can program in Arduino’s C dialect, CircuitPython, or Microsoft MakeCode, which uses blocks like Scratch. Today Scarlett and I made our first useful bit of code, a digital spinner we called The Sibling Chooser. Here’s the code, and you can see that it is indeed like Scratch:
I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).
I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.
I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).
I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.
I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).
I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.
I started off the year not expecting to do much programming. Compared to some months in 2021, I barely programmed, but I did end up programming much more than I expected. Let’s take a look at what I worked on in the first sixth of the year.
Python Programs
End of Year Video Games Helper
Coming off of last year in which I finally used Python to pull my last.fm data and create graphs, I decided to do the same for my End of Year Video Games blog post. I haven’t posted the code to Github, but here it is:
I’m going to see if I can fix up my blog’s style so that it’s not so narrow because, otherwise, I’ve grown to like this theme. So if the blog looks a little messed up for a little while it’s because I’m editing the style sheet.
I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).
I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.
I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).
I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.
I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).
I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.
I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).
I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.
I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).
I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.
Been quite busy with Python, keeping me away from other pursuits, like video games. (Although the kids have been requesting Spelunky 2 whenever it’s time to hang out with them)
Extra Life Donation Tracker (eldonationtracker)
For my Extra Life Donation Tracker I pushed out a new release, v5.2.2. A user of my program (man, I never get tired of how awesome that is!!) had wholly anonymous donors which was causing an issue I thought I’d handled. But it turns out that the folks that run the Donor Drive API are a little inconsistent in how they handle that in the donor endpoint vs the donations endpoint. So I pushed that fix out and now things should be dandy for game day (about 2 weeks away!!)
There’s apparently a bit of a software fail for the LEGO company. When you launch the LEGO Boost app, it won’t continue until you’ve updated the firmware. It asks you to connect so it can update it, but it never actually updates. As I learned in this reddit thread, you actually need to get a different app and use that to update the firmware. Having to use a different bit of software while making you think the software you expect to use can handle the firmware upgrade is a HUGE fail in my book. Hopefully they fix this soon, but if they don’t -at least this resource can be here for anyone searching Google for the answer.
I know I’m late to coming across this, but I found a presentation where someone was explaining the idea behind Fedora.next where there are 3 core products: Fedora Server, Fedora Workstation, and Fedora Cloud. But I also think it works rather well if you think of Gnu/Linux distros as LEGO sets and Windows/OSX as Playmobil. (Also, I’m now at the point in my life where I realize the benefits of each system, although I still think people should have the right to explore code they run)
I can’t do any better than the description I have on flickr: (Although I’ve made some modifications for clarity)
My brothers and I were avid LEGO builders/players. This was our city. Of the sets here (back when 99% of the LEGOs didn’t have much of a facial expression) most of them are mine. The gas station, race track, RV, and police station were mine. Dan had the fire station, pizza place, and underwater set.
After using Plasma with KWayland for about a week, I had to go back to X11 because it’s not yet ready for me. There are 3 main issues I’m having:
Occasionally, when I come back to my computer after locking the screen it would say that the screen locker had crashed. I would need to go to antoher TTY and type in a command to unlock it. After I did that, coming back to the TTY that has the GUI just remains black with a mouse cursor. So I would need to reboot the machine.
I cannot drag and drop video files to upload to YouTube with Firefox. I have to click the button on YT and then navigate to the folder that has the video file. (Not sure if there are other things that can’t be dragged in - photo upload to Flickr, for example)
I’ll keep looking to see if they improve things. But for now I’m staying on X11.
Fedora provides a nice RPM-OSTree solution for folks who want to use the tech, but don’t want to use Gnome. The install is a bit barebones and doesn’t come with Flathub pre-configured, reducing the number of KDE applications that can be installed after the distro is first installed. Once Flathub is activated and Discover is reloaded, the user can start installing KDE apps. Not a good starting distro now, but with some sensible defaults, it could be great thanks to the way that RPM-OSTree makes the system more maintainable.
A few months ago, someone asked about whether the rices*/modifications/tweaks people displayed on reddit.com/r/unixporn (where people show off their desktops, not human pornography) were actually useful. Someone commented they’d like to see a post on how someone uses their mods. So I decided to write this up.
*I know the term ricing could be considered racist or insensitive. In this context, it’s simply the term of art used on the subreddit.
I have KDE connect installed on my computer and phone. KDE connect allows phone alerts to appear on my computer - letting me see if I’m getting a text or something. It just went off, letting me know I had a phone call. What’s neat is that I was listening to music and it paused the music until the phone call was over. While there might be some circumstances where that wouldn’t be the best default (say a party where I was playing the music), it’s certainly neat in the context of a personal computer.
So I found out today that there is no way to re-enable different backgrounds and plasmoids per virtual desktop. It appears to be a mix of forcing people to finally use activities and a complication that was causing all kinds of bugs (according to their bugzilla). I was bummed for about an hour. The different backgrounds can make it very easy to know what virtual desktop you’re at without having to glance at the pager. And if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time longer than a couple months you have seen my Desktop Screenshots and know how much I customize it in KDE.
Today I upgraded my netbook. Interestingly, this had less problems than yesterday with the guest computer. Perhaps because I wasn’t using KDM on my netbook? Anyway, I was actually expecting a worse time, but it worked out. It appears that KDE Netbook edition didn’t make the jump to Plasma 5. But maybe it’s just a setting I need to discover. See, my netbook is a 2nd gen netbook - not a piece of garbage like our EEE Machine, but it has a sub-HD resolution and so using most programs is hard unless the Window Manager or Desktop Environment is getting rid of window decorations. So far, KDE 5 is OK. I may end up going to Fluxbox. (I did not like XFCE on this screen resolution) Here’s my desktop as of now:
It’ll be of no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I’m both a fan of the Fedora distribution of Linux as well as the KDE desktop. For the first time in six years, the KDE desktop is changing again. While the change is not as radical as the change from KDE 3 to KDE 4, it’s still a big technological change. I decided I couldn’t wait until May to experience it, so I took a look at the current beta from within virt-manager. Here’s the default desktop:
On the guest computer I updated to Kubuntu Vivid Alpha so I could check out KDE 5. Looks awesome - lots of polish over KDE 4. Sad that I’ll lose my current settings, but a chance to recreate with a new desktop.
After using Plasma with KWayland for about a week, I had to go back to X11 because it’s not yet ready for me. There are 3 main issues I’m having:
Occasionally, when I come back to my computer after locking the screen it would say that the screen locker had crashed. I would need to go to antoher TTY and type in a command to unlock it. After I did that, coming back to the TTY that has the GUI just remains black with a mouse cursor. So I would need to reboot the machine.
I cannot drag and drop video files to upload to YouTube with Firefox. I have to click the button on YT and then navigate to the folder that has the video file. (Not sure if there are other things that can’t be dragged in - photo upload to Flickr, for example)
I’ll keep looking to see if they improve things. But for now I’m staying on X11.
I started off with just a boot install of CentOS 8, so I wouldn’t have Gnome or any other unnecessary cruft installed. After installation, I enabled the EPEL repository - latest directions for that are here.
I have not yet tried out Gnome Shell or Ubuntu Unity, but the biggest complaint most people level against them is that our desktops are being tablet-ified. Sure, there need to be new, innovative interfaces for tablets and phones, but that’s no reason to abandon the desktop. Sure, perhaps the average Joe (or Jane) will be using tablets more and more, but some of us have real work to get done. We need to do photo editing, programming, video editing, 3D modeling, and other tasks that require something more than a glorified smart phone. This is where KDE excels.
A few weeks ago, I upgraded to KDE 4.6.1 in Fedora 14 from KDE 4.5. The first login after reboot dumped me into Gnome. What the heck was going on? Apparently, in GDM, the entry had changed from KDE4 to KDE Plasma Desktop. Once I logged in that way, I was able to see the new KDE. The biggest change I saw was that notifications looked much nicer. It’s hard to quantify in what way they looked nicer, but something they changed about the appearance is makes it more appealing to my eyes. Also, the way it animates really helps a lot. For example, when two of my contacts sign into IM networks at the same time, the second notification is smaller so that my desktop is not overwhelmed with notifications. If I mouse over the second one, it grows and the first one shrinks.
I started using KDE in November of last yea r so I figured that I’d give an update on how things are working for me four months in. First off, KDE 4.6.x has not yet hit the official Fedora repositories. Since I like to yum upgrade or preupgrade from release to release, I try to stay with the official repos and RPMFusion. So no KDE 4.6 for me. At this rate, it doesn’t seem that it’s going to make it until around Fedora 15. But, if that means they iron out any extra bugs, that’s fine with me. So, with that said, let’s get to the info.
I have three main hobbies: photography, my webcomic and programming. After spending a year working on my 365 Project, I’ve been taking a lot less photos as that part of my brain takes a break. After working with Dan to get the story for INM worked out through May of this year and working on strips that will appear this March, I wanted to take a bit of a break from that. The one bit of code I wrote for myself that I use on a daily basis is my flickr views code.
Some developers are working on a neat new program menu for KDE called Raptor Menu. Thanks to Plasma and other underlying KDE 4 technologies it is now a pretty trivial hack to change the program menu if you don’t like the default. Such enhancements exist for KDE 3, but they are all very kludgey. Thanks to Plasma’s modular nature, it’s easy to replace it. Even the KDE developers have acknowledged this when people have complained about their new program menu. Bear with them to fix it, they say, but if you don’t like it, it’s now very easy to implement your own.
I think I’ve become addicted to races. I really missed having races between April ( Cherry Blossom) and the end of May (BK HM) although I did that on purpose to allow myself to rest and train. July, when I once again will be sans race, is probably going to be hard for me.
A couple weeks after the Cherry Blossom race I reached out to my coach to give them my goals for the NYC Marathon this fall. The coach adjusted my training schedule and told me they wanted me to run the race as 10 miles followed by the fastest 5K I would run this year. I was aiming for a time of 1 hour 30 minutes for this race. That would require me to run the ten miles as fast as I had run in DC for the Cherry Blossoms and then do another 5K on top of that, and do it quickly. I set my Garmin to try and do that.
I love the idea of having art on the gates that come down when the the restaurant is closed. Rather than the ugly grey, possibly tagged with grafitti, we get this amazing art.
I saw this when I was doing a boardwalk run this summer. I’d been visiting Coney Island for nearly 20 years at this point, but the recent revitalization has been impressive to see. That includes ideas like this art that bring happiness and joy even when Nathan’s is closed.
Here are your new desktop backgrounds for July 2011!
Just click on the one that matches your monitor type and then either right-click and set as desktop or save it to your computer and save it as your desktop manually.
And once again we return to Brooklyn for this Top 200 Photo.
photo #129 is:
Danielle’s family lives off of the last stop for the Q or B trains (as of this writing). So it’s a great place to photograph if you want to have an empty subway car. It can get really busy in the summertime with people headed to the beach, but usually it’s pretty empty at that stop.
To Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn for today’s Top 200 Photos.
photo #146 is:
One of the main bonding activities between my father-in-law and myself (and other members of Danielle’s family) was going fishing. Danielle’s father has almost always owned a boat and used fishing as his method of relaxation. For quite a number of years, I joined him on his Fourth of July fishing trips. Usually along for the ride were Anh Dat and one of Co Sao’s sons. For the most part, no one spoke and we just fished. It’s only because of weird conditions in recent years that I have stopped going. The penultimate time I went, it was actually freezing on the 4th of July (but only over the water). I had to borrow a sweater and I was still freezing. The water was also very choppy and it was the first time I got seasick. The last time I went, the water was so choppy that even Duc started getting seasick. So I skipped a year or two and then he sold the boat, so I haven’t been fishing in a few years. This photo is a panorama of the area where he docked his boat. It was near a movie theatre, Jodan’s Lobster Dock, and a TGIF.
And I continue to through my Top 200 most viewed photos on flickr.
Photo #197 is:
Brighton Beach in Brooklyn is one of my homes-away-from-home. I’ve been going there to visit the family that became my in-laws for about 10 years. It was so exciting to find out that they lived so close to the famous Coney Island. I’m certain there will be more photos of Coney Island as this project goes on. It’s one of the easiest places for me to shoot because it’s only a 10 to 15 minute walk if I’m in a hurry vs a 45+ minute ride to Manhattan. Although I’ve never ridden the Wonder Wheel, I’ve always had a fascination with it because every time the fair came to Florida, I’d ride the Ferris Wheel. I am not sure if I’m forgetting some memory, but I don’t think I’ve ever done the cliche riding of the wheel with a date, but maybe I can somewhat buck that by riding the Wonder Wheel with the wife. Along with the Cyclone roller coaster, the Wonder Wheel is one of the oldest and most iconic structures at Coney Island.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Luna Park, the new section of Coney Island”] [/caption]
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I went to NYC over Father’s Day weekend to see the Mermaid Parade. Well, as if that wasn’t crazy enough, I went BACK to Coney Island that night to photograph the new Luna Park. I have been documenting the changes to Coney Islan d and so I wanted to document the aftermath. I took both of the digital cameras I had used that afternoon and proceeded to take some low light photos. I would have preferred to have gone a little earlier in the evening to take the photos, but we thought it might have been a little crowded. By the time we went, it wasn’t too crowded, but there were still plenty of people still in their mermaid costumes hanging around.
In reading the New York Daily Photo Blog, I happened to come across a post about the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. I mentioned to my wife that I wanted to try and attend next time it happened. Being the awesome wife that she is, she kept her eye out for the date and let me know it would coincide with Father’s Day weekend this year. So we decided to get a two-for-one deal and go to NYC to see the parade.
Life sure is strange. This morning I was sure I’d be buying a Holga today. After talking to Danielle, it even seemed that SHE would get one too. She wanted to have one loaded with color film and one loaded with black and white film. Then she asked a few questions. I can’t remember the exact words, but it got me thinking. Do I REALLY want a Holga? I mean, the biggest attraction for me was the ability to medium format film. As I mentioned on 12 Feb, it’s a connection with the past and a chance to shoot with better film than I ever did. But the more I looked at other photographers’ Lomo results, the more I wondered if this was how I wanted to re-experience film. What put me off the most is the fact that the results are so random. I don’t understand how people go on vacations to places as far away as Asia with a Lomo as their sole means of capturing their experiences. They could be getting completely blown out photos the whole time and come back without any photo memories.
[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“160” caption=“Katy Ho, a fellow Cornellian from C/O 2005 on the same bus in Brooklyn that I happened to be on.”] [/caption]
One in 1,600,000. That’s odds of randomly meeting someone I know in NYC excluding my wife’s family. And yet, due to construction on the Q line, Danielle and I found ourselves on the bus with Katy Ho, who we hadn’t seen since graduation.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Lovers on the Boardwalk”] [/caption]
A few weeks ago I took yet another stroll on Brighton Beach’s Boardwalk. This famous boardwalk goes from Brighton Beach past Coney Island all the way to Seagate. This time around I took some iconic photos from the area. In other words, these are exactly the types of photos you would see included in any survey of boardwalk photos. Here’s the GPS track of where I went in a static PNG and then as a Google Map so you can zoom in and scroll around.
I think I’ve become addicted to races. I really missed having races between April ( Cherry Blossom) and the end of May (BK HM) although I did that on purpose to allow myself to rest and train. July, when I once again will be sans race, is probably going to be hard for me.
A couple weeks after the Cherry Blossom race I reached out to my coach to give them my goals for the NYC Marathon this fall. The coach adjusted my training schedule and told me they wanted me to run the race as 10 miles followed by the fastest 5K I would run this year. I was aiming for a time of 1 hour 30 minutes for this race. That would require me to run the ten miles as fast as I had run in DC for the Cherry Blossoms and then do another 5K on top of that, and do it quickly. I set my Garmin to try and do that.
Sunday, 6 February 2022, was my first race of 2022. I’d been looking forward to the Fred Lebow Half Marathon to both be my first race of 2022 and first half marathon race. Unfortunately, I got really sick with something not-COVID and couldn’t attend. So I was extra excited about getting to this race. Last year’s COVID winter surge and summer Delta wave meant that I didn’t get to any in-person races until the fall when I FINALLY got to do the CUCB Cherry Blossom race. This year it seems, so far, that in-person races are here to stay with various COVID mitigations in place. NYRR is requiring racers to be fully vaccinated and mask wearing until runners leave the corrals. Folks seem to be mostly complying with the latter, although it’s inevitable that some folks slip through the cracks.
I gave a short reply, but I felt Twitter was inadequate to truly express myself. Of course, Diversity Panels have been around long enough that by 1997’s Chasing Amy (source of the header image), they were already making jokes about how some folks were always relegated to the Diversity Panel (click to play):
This strange, COVID-filled year was the year WorldCon was local to me, so I figured it was the best time to check it out. I didn’t need to pay for a hotel or flight, just a few days of parking and metro line fees. Overall, I thought it was fine. I enjoyed the panels I attended, especially when Scalzi read from his upcoming book, Kaiju Preservation Society. But I didn’t become a convert like the folks at the First Time Attendees panel who have been attending for decades. Outside of that, I had a few thoughts about my experiences this year:
Last fall I finally got to race the official Credit Union Cherry Blossom 10 mile course. This year, I FINALLY was able to run the race on the course in the spring. It was nice for the race to return to its place as the “Rite of Spring”. Although the cherry blossoms reached peak bloom a week before the race, they still made a nice, pretty setting for the race.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
It’s interesting that after the photos I took at the park, I put the camera away for almost exactly 4 years - these photos are from 13 April 2015. We don’t go to the Cherry Blossom Festival every year because it seems pretty pointless. The same trees and masses of people do not make for the best of times. But, with Scarlett finally 3 years old we figured she might enjoy it this time around.
This year was the first year since Scarlett was born that we went around the entire Tidal Basin. I’d say it was well worth it as we all had a good time and I even got some good photos out of it!
Scarlett and Danielle at the Cherry Blossom Festival
Once again we arrive at the USA’s Capital for today’s Top 200 Photo.
photo #94 is:
I spoke about the Cherry Blossom Festival early in this project (/2011/02/09/top-200-photos-195/). This is a panorama I constructed of about a quarter of the tidal basin that gives a good idea of what the cherry blossoms look like.
No #196 because it was occupied by a photo I already featured. I didn’t capture all the top 200 photos on the first day, so there is some movement in the photo rankings. Starting with this one, I decided to capture 20 at a time to minimize the issues.
Last fall I finally got to race the official Credit Union Cherry Blossom 10 mile course. This year, I FINALLY was able to run the race on the course in the spring. It was nice for the race to return to its place as the “Rite of Spring”. Although the cherry blossoms reached peak bloom a week before the race, they still made a nice, pretty setting for the race.
After nearly 2 years of training, I finally was able to run the Credit Union Cherry Blossom 10 mile race on 12 Sept. Yeah, last year I ran a virtual race, but that was really no different than a training run. This year we finally had the COVID-19 vaccine and so the race was able to take place in person. It was worth it.
The starting line when I first arrived to the race.
I made some portraits of Scarlett. I used the same setup as when I did Sam and Stella’s November portraits, except with the octobox on the left this time.
Scarlett created these models one day in October when she was feeling creative. I liked the models so much that I built a small box for photographing them. I fell behind on my photos, so I’m posting my favorite poses now.
Sparklers were an ever-present feature of my childhood 4th of July celebrations. This year we introduced the twins to sparklers (I’m pretty sure Scarlett has used them at least once before). They kids had a lot of fun and there were a couple burn-scares, but I think it was worth the slight parental anxiety. (Did our parents care? They seemed a lot more laize-faire about us with sparklers, but maybe they were just good at hiding their fears?) Took out the DSLR and introduced the kids to light painting. Scarlett had the winning light-painting photo that made it past the multiple discard passes.
I love just about everything in this shot. Even the hair is pretty neat, although I would have preferred for it not to cross the middle of Scarlett’s face.
There was something about this image that reminded me of older snapshots. I think it’s the fact that it’s a candid moment, not perfectly sharp as Scarlett moved out of the focal plane; but it’s not out of focus - you can see that from the shirts. So when I was processing the shot, I went for an older look. I think I ended up applying a Kodachrome effect.
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:
Since becoming a parent it’s been a common theme of the blog that I find it fascinating experiencing the kids getting older and, therefore, more able to process the world around them. This winter was the first time the twins could be out in the snow for more than just a few minutes. Not only were they more able to weather the cold, but they were also strong enough to move around in the snow without too much frustration. They were also finally able to have a snowball fight. Although, watch Sam’s face closely from beginning to end in the following video, it’s priceless:
Scarlett drew this back in September when the kids were playing a lot of Spelunky. It’s interesting to see which parts of the game imprinted on her mind.
Just as with the farm portraits, this year both kids were enthusiastic about the portraits. I was bracing for Sam to once again hate the idea of portraits, but his urge to do what his sisters were doing was stronger - or maybe he’s just over whatever he hated about it last year. I’m really happy with how the portraits came out this year - particularly for Sam. It helps that the little guy is ALWAYS smiling (unless he’s been told he can’t do something). Here’s my favorite Sam portrait:
Another year and the kids grow older. Last year was a disaster - the twins did NOT want their photos taken. We didn’t get any good portraits. This time everyone was game and we got good portraits - at least the first time around. When we reconvened a little later, the kids were over the idea of pumpkin photos, or at least Scarlett was.
Funny thing about this is that I could say this reflects their moods, but really only Stella is being genuinely Stella. Usually you can’t catch Sam without a smile on his face (although he *is* going through the whiny 2 year old phase), and Scarlett’s the most neutral.
This year Scarlett did hip hop as her dance class and the instructor selected a Pink Ladies meets Hip Hop sort of outfit for the kids. Like last year I did a portrait session with Scarlett in her costume. Unlike last year, it actually came out nice this year. (Last year I rushed it and the lighting was off)
Scarlett's Pre-Recital Portraits
Scarlett's Pre-Recital Portraits
Scarlett's Pre-Recital Portraits
Scarlett's Pre-Recital Portraits
Scarlett's Pre-Recital Portraits
Scarlett's Pre-Recital Portraits
After seeing another dad do it last year, I decided to rent a lens this year so I could have much better low light performance. I rented the 70-200 II IS L lens. On the plus side, I was very happy with how close I was able to zoom to Scarlett without having to push the ISO past the limits of my camear. On the minus side, I just don’t have that much experience with dance photography and this year Scarlett’s class only had one dance. So although the lens was a reasonable $100 to rent, I am not sure if I’m going to do it again next year (assuming Scarlett does dance class again) since I only got 3 photos worth sharing.
Danielle and I went to Mount Vernon back when we first moved here and were exploring new things to do in our free time that were unique to the area.
We’d thought of bringing our parents to see Washington’s house and property, but the timing never quite worked out - you really want to visit in the Spring or Fall, not during the Summer or Winter. So it remained a place we’d only been to once even as we made multiple trips to the same couple Smithsonian museums and zoos.
This Easter we went to the farm so they kids could hunt for eggs there and then enjoy the farm. Unlike my childhood, Easter’s pretty cold up here as you can see.
It’s pretty ridiculous to me, considering almost my entire childhood consisted of going to the local park.
Stella’s been enjoying horseback riding for a bit now, but this was the first time she was old enough to do it on her own without me holding onto her the entire time.
Back in November we took the twins on their first trip to Disney. This time around Scarlett wasn’t as interested in the parades as she was last time, but the twins were REALLY into them. Surprisingly, both twins ended up warming up to the characters. Sam’s reluctance with Mickey on the first day made me think he was going to try and avoid them the entire trip. But as you can see in the video, he eventually got into interacting with the characters.
Jumping forward (I’m still generally working on photos from August because I’ve fallen behind with other responsibilities and playing some video games for Extra Life), we get to Halloween photos. Once again these awesome costumes were sewn by my mother-in-law.
This year Scarlett concluded a season of ballet and tap with a recital. It was pretty neat to see it all come together after having seen it in bits throughout the season. Here are some of the photos I took. I think next year I’ll do the same thing the guy behind me did and rent some f2.8 glass so I can freeze the action a bit more and get less motion blur.
Got together with Scarlett to shoot a portrait session for her fifth year of life! I can’t believe 5 years ago she was fighting for her life at the Johns Hopkins NICU. (Support them through my Extra Life campaign) Thanks to Dan getting me a boom stand for my birthday or Christmas (I don’t remember which) I could have a hair light and keep her hair from fading into the background as I made sure it was pure black (or close enough).
Every year since Scarlett was born we’re been going to Clark’s Eliok Farm to get a pumpkin to decorate the house (and in later years for Scarlett to carve). This time was the first year for Sam and Stella. Overall they did extraordinarily well for 11 month olds who’d never been to a pumpkin patch before. Only Stella cried and that was only after it had gone on for a while.
When I went to do the 10 Month Photos for the Twins, Scarlett really wanted to participate. She helped me with the color picker and white balance. Then, afterwards, she wanted to do these veil photos. My favorite thing is that I didn’t tell her to do ANY of this. This is what she wanted to do and I just photographed. I enjoy her creativity.
While I think that part of what really makes this image work is the way I converted it to black and white, I do really envy my wife for having a good eye and good timing to capture the photo.
I just noticed there’s a watermelon on the ground next to Scarlett. That isn’t some kind of asian ritual, shame on you if you thought that. Anyway, Scarlett had her first day of school a while ago. I guess it can be an emotional time for some parents - that’s what I’ve heard on the grapevine. For me the only emotion was excitement! I was curious to see how she’d do in school and what she’d think of it. She’d never been in daycare, but we did do a couple one-week classes this summer and she seemed to enjoy those. Turns out that school appealed to some of her nature - wanting to know things and wanting to be around other kids. She’s excited about school every day and sad on the weekends when she doesn’t have school. Couldn’t ask for a better start to her educational career.
It’s a recurring theme that we forgot that our kids are people, just tiny people who perhaps haven’t finished developing all of their mental and emotional abilities yet. You expect them to eat the same thing every day and like the same TV shows and songs. But we aren’t like that, why should they be? That’s often made pretty evident to me with Scarlett and photos. Sometimes she’s dying to be in photos and ends up photo bombing everyone. Other times it doesn’t matter how much it means to me to have a photograph of a particular event or moment in her life. She does NOT want to be photographed and nothing can make her participate.
It’s pretty crazy how much Scarlett has grown since she first started going to Coney Island. Before, there were only a few rides she liked or could go on. Now she’s going on roller coasters! I wonder if she’ll want to go on adult coasters with me when she’s old enough. I guess we’ll see what thinks about being twisted and turned about.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
It’s interesting that after the photos I took at the park, I put the camera away for almost exactly 4 years - these photos are from 13 April 2015. We don’t go to the Cherry Blossom Festival every year because it seems pretty pointless. The same trees and masses of people do not make for the best of times. But, with Scarlett finally 3 years old we figured she might enjoy it this time around.
Well, everyone’s growing up. Dan’s the last to get married (the youngest three siblings don’t count because there’s too big a gap). Here are some photos from his engagement party.
Stella and her great-grandparents at Dan's Engagement Party
Eric and Dan at Dan's Engagement Party
Eric, Dan, and Katie at Dan and Katy's Engagement Party
Double Rainbows!
Double Rainbows!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Somewhere over the rainbow!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Scarlett and the Rainbow
Scarlett and Abuelo Roman at Dan's Engagement Party (and a rainb
Scarlett and Abuela Carmen at Dan's Engagement Party
Scarlett and Abuela Carmen at Dan's Engagement Party
We’re hardly ever dressed up so nicely. So when we all got dressed up for Dan’s engagement party, I wanted to get a quick family portrait before we left. The pose wasn’t perfect due to the rush, and I’ll be elaborating a bit more on that in a future blog post, but I do like it as a bit of record keeping. Slightly more than a snapshot, but not how I’d have done it if we weren’t in a hurry.
It’s a time-honored tradition for us to photograph babies in the purple bucket. We did it for Nam, Lan, and Scarlett. Now it was time for the twins to do it.
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--004-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--021-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--032-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--034-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--046-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--047-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--055-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--060-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--063-1
Scarlett wanted to do it again, so now we have this comparison. Baby Scarlett:
I wanted to take a photo of Scarlett on this background with this dress. She’s in her crazy 4 year old phase, so the poses were all of her own design0. The only one I was able to direct her to do was the one with the glasses. Here’s the lighting diagram:
Most of the time I avoid taking my camera to the park because I know I’m going to be busy playing with the kids and the camera would just get in the way. But this weekend I brought it for some reason and I was able to get some fun shots like this one.
One of Scarlett’s favorite things to do is to slide on this slide and then have me touch her so she can discharge all the static onto me. Sometimes enough charge has built up that it actually hurts!
When Scarlett was born, I went a little crazy. Sure, it’s natural for first time parents, especially someone with my personality. But I think I also deserve some slack because it was a difficult, complicated pregnancy and then Scarlett needed surgery in her first week of life in order to live.
So when I saw myself starting to act crazy again (after another crazy pregnancy with premie babies), my solution was to withdraw. If I didn’t get too attached, I wouldn’t have such visceral reactions to my underweight daughter not eating. So I threw myself into my books and video games. It was made easier by the fact that my mother in law was here, so I had more opportunities to run off. But then, a week ago (and I’m writing this post about a month before this will appear on my blog), I realized that I had been letting their infancy slide past me without enjoying it. And so I put myself back into their lives. This was made easier by nearly five months of the doctor weighing Stella and finally being OK with her weight. Also, we’d found out she was lactose intolerant and switching her away from mother’s milk and cow-based formula caused her to transform into a happy baby. But now I’m really enjoying the heck out of the twins and it’s a joy to see them each day.
There’s a story about my childhood my mom is fond of telling. My dad asks Daniel (the brother born after me) to do something. To my father’s consternation, he refuses because it would make me mad. It’s funny to see a similar situation going on with the twins and Scarlett. Part of it is familiarity - Scarlett is home with them every day; but the kids will smile or laugh more easily with her than with me. This video is an example of that which I found amusing. We’ll see if I find it amusing if I find myself in a situation similar to my father.
One of the photgraphers on Adorama’s channel has a show called You Keep Shooting. That advice worked rather well when I took Scarlett into the studio with me for a photo shoot that would be used for my Black and White Conversion Challenge. (While the videos are already live on Youtube, the blog post that ties it together has not yet been published) Scarlett tends to be a pretty awesome model for a four year old amateur. She was patient and took direction for about 10 minutes or so. Then she wanted to do her own thing. Mostly that involved jumping and dancing and asking me to photograph her doing it. I zoomed out to get more of her body on the jumps and in doing so ended up with the beauty dish in the frame. While it would be only of a medium difficulty to remove it in Photoshop or GIMP (and trivial to crop it out), I felt that it added to a feel of performance when combined with the red background. The only thing would have made it more perfect for that theme would have been if she’d been wearing a dress or tutu.
You never know what’s going to happen when you try to take portraits of babies. Throw in the extra unpredictability of kids of any age and it’s a crapshoot whether a photo shoot is going to turn out to be fun with rewarding photos or a series of photos of your children crying.
One thing we have on our side with the studio being in the basement is that we can take photos when the kids are ready, not on a hope and prayer that they’ll be ready when we get to Sears, Target, or wherever people are getting portraits done nowadays. So we started off with easy portraits in the morning on the “Baby Portrait Couch”. Hey, it’s a tradition started with Scarlett!
Just in case the captions for the photos don’t appear on your RSS reader or on Facebook, here’s what I wrote as the caption to the photos:
“Inspired by title I chose for my photo for the twins’ four month photo which didn’t come out quite the way I wanted it to, I decided to do this image. I love how it came out.”
I also usually don’t post more than one version of a photo - I have a definitive version and just go with that, but this time Scarlett came up while I was trying to to figure out which one I preferred and she insisted on a different one than I would have chosen, so I decided to share them all.
I wanted to do this earlier - somewhere around 2 month portraits. I was re-energized to try the idea after seeing someone do a photo that made it look like their kid was bounding out of the crib with her stuffed animals. I did not take the Sam and Stella images from some other random image. They were right there where you see them. All I did was erase my body (or I’d be in here thrice). Still, if I were to do it again, I’d have Sam and Stella flying near me rather than against the wall. They end up too small and it lessens the impact of the shot. Well, there’s always next time. (And there’s always less edited shots!)
We had an inflatable pool for use with ball pit balls, but I thought it would be fun to take it outside so Scarlett could play with a water in a different way than usual.
Some people still treat TV as if it’s the boob tube (that’s boob as in dummy, not breast). But Scarlett’s kid’s cartoons led her to learn some stuff that led to the following exchange:
Danielle (rhetorically): Why does this monkey have a frog on its head?
Eric: It’s Swedish. (The toy is from Ikea)
Danielle: What?
Scarlett: No, it’s symbiosis!
Eric: Symbiosis? (I wonder if she knows what it means) What does that mean?
I’ve been looking forward to this moment for a long time - Scarlett finally plays on her own, allowing me to photograph her. It’s much harder to capture the awesome moments if you’re also playing along with your little one. I have lots of spontaneous photos of her extended cousins (and even my adopted brothers) at a young age, but a lot less of her because of that. Here’s a batch from April:
I know there’s a fine line between a parent being impressed by their child and a parent bragging. Nonetheless, I thought this drawing Scarlett did was pretty good for a 3 year old.
For more or less the first time since mid-June, last night Scarlett slept the entire night without needing her blanket fixed, her hair-tie fixed, or a cup of water. It was nice to get some rest.
I was explaining bands to Scarlett and she wanted to see an example. The only concert movie I had was from the I Fight Dragons Chicago show. I put that on and she rocked out; And asked me to dance with her. The first video (blurry because she’s so close, I think) she is spinning on my finger. The second she’s dancing on her own. I didn’t think to record video until well into things so she’s not going as crazy with the dancing as she had been.
I know this was months ago, but I started writing this back then and just got the opportunity to finish it recently.
[caption id=“attachment_7634” align=“aligncenter” width=“427”] Scarlett Trick Or Treating at Ellicott City[/caption]
This year was Scarlett’s second Halloween, but the first one where she had some kind of a clue about what was going on. The previous year we’d dressed her up as Toad, but other than the giant head-piece, I don’t think it was too different from any other day in her life. This time around, although she didn’t really see a point in collecting the candy because she doesn’t eat it - she did present her basket to each person giving out candy.
I’ve mentioned before that I find Scarlett’s mental development utterly fascinating. As someone who’s always been fascinated with the science of cognition ( You Are Not So Smart is my new favorite podcast) and psychology, it’s amazing to see her capabilities grow and change as long with her physical growth. Her most recent new ability is understanding cause and effect. If you ask her a “why” question, she gives a “Because” answer. Now, this can border on the surreal absurd as when she recently painted her face with finger paint. The exchange went like this:
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post (yeah, they’re back to back this time). For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
More Scarlett - this time getting the Christmas tree. It made me sad that we didn’t do the lights on her again this year. Then again, she might have wanted to do it all the time - so maybe that’s a good thing.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
Once again a focus on Scarlett. Looking back on these photos I realize how easy it was to get to smile back then. It sounds ridiculous to say she’s gotten more jaded - she’s not even two, for Pete’s sake. But she does spend more time brooding and is a bit more specific about what makes her smile. Perhaps this is part of the reason why some couples decide to have more children - to get back that ultra-innocence of baby-hood before the slightly less innocent toddler-hood what with its tantrums and such.
Scarlett first did this about three weeks ago before she started watching Disney’s The Little Mermaid non-stop. I was playing with her in the living room and she was making her various stuffed animals dance to the music. Then she took two animals - a dog and a cat or something and put their faces together and said “kissing”. This was baffling to me because Danielle and I don’t really have lots of PDA. It’s not a conscious decision, it’s just that we’re usually trying to juggle about three things at once when Scarlett’s around. And she pretty much only watches PBS and I doubt there’s much lip-on-lip kissing on there. So I wonder where she picked it up? It may be like the other things that people blame on daycare (biting, hitting, etc), kids just pick it up from the ether or they see it once - that one time you had some TV show on or that one time the wife and I kissed in front of her - and it just gets ingrained in their heads. Not sure, but definitely fascinated that it happened.
[caption id=“attachment_7418” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Scarlett and I in the Kitchen before Bedtime[/caption]
Yesterday Scarlett pointed at herself and said, “Me… Scarlett”. She’s responded to her own name forever, but she is just now starting to realize that she is but one of many people inhabiting her reality. She is a person named Scarlett, I am a person “named” Daddy, and so on. It’s always been incredibly fascinating for me to see how her perception of the world has changed as she’s gotten older. It fascinates me more than her acquisition of new physical and mental skills (which is still cool on its own). Later on I asked her, “What’s your name?” And she responded, “Scarlett.” Up until now she’s just given us a blank “duh” stare whenever we’ve asked her that question. I’m sure this is but one of the reasons that parents put up with the stress of raising a child - for moments like this.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
I think in these photos Scarlett is finally starting to have the same facial features as 1.5 year old Scarlett.
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
The video called Keyboard Scarlett comes from the fact that I found out I was able to make her laugh hysterically if I moved her hands back and forth on the table like Keyboard Cat. Interestingly, now that she has full agency over her limbs, she hates when I do anything like this.
Sleep is one of the most stress-inducing topics for parents. Well, for first time parents. I imagine that, baring some medical conditions, once you’ve figured out how to get one kid to sleep through the night, you can reapply the template over and over. I think one of the reasons sleep tends to be so stressful is that parents are so gosh-darned competitive. It’s ridiculous, but every parent is in a competition with every other parent. People like me are cognizant that this is stupid and don’t do it consciously, but my mind is always playing on my parental fears and bringing it up. “Hey, that kid can walk/talk/insert skill and is the same age as Scarlett so why can’t Scarlett do that?” Other people do it on purpose - it’s how they get their sense of worth - their kid is better than those around them. These are the same people who will be asking in 18 years what college Scarlett is getting into - not because they care but because they want to tell me what school little Dylan got into. And sleep is one of those activities where the parents actually have some control (unlike their mental skills) and so it’s seen as a sign of bad or weak parenting if you can’t get your kids to sleep through the night.
Unsurprisingly, Scarlett is once again the subject of the Photojojo. Also captured, a visit by the in-laws. I think the most interesting thing is that I find her way cuter as she looks now vs a year ago. But back then I found her way cute. Scientists say it peaks at age 4. I guess we’ll see.
I don’t think any father ever sets out to spoil his daughters. After all, not only does that lead to a mal-adjusted human, it makes her more likely to make bad decisions. But when she’s capable of looking this cute (at least to me, but all parents get like +100 cuteness points on their own kids over strangers’ kids), it’s so hard to be cross with her for long. In fact, I don’t know if this theory has ever been discredited, but some scientists think that kids look cute exactly for this reason - so we don’t lose our cool with them as much as otherwise would - at least until their brains have developed to the point where they can be liable for their actions.
My favorite thing about being a first-time father is watching Scarlett’s mind develop and acquire the skills necessary to be human. Anyone who paid a passing attention in biology class knows that humans are born more immature and less capable than almost every other animal. It has to do with walking upright shrinking the female pelvis while the ever-growing brain required a larger head. The result is that kids have to be born before their heads would be so large we’d be exploding from our mother’s vaginas like a horrible, horrible version of Alien. (As it is, quite a few women need an episiotomy to have a safe childbirth) And I’m not the only one to find this transformation into humanity so incredible as to refer to babies as not quite human. Jonathan Coulton mentions this in a throwaway line about his living situation while recording his song, The Presidents:
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
Scarlett’s only 2-2.5 months old in these photos and the most striking things are how tiny she is and how much in awe she seems of the world around her. No mean feat considering how tiny she remains compared to her peers. But it definitely takes a lot more to astound her than it did a year ago.
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
I took a long time to publish the previous post, so here we are again. It’s mostly Scarlett Easter photos. As I sit here and look at a photo of this year’s Easter photo, it’s pretty awesome to see how much she’s changed. For one thing, she’s mobile now, so it was a challenge to get her to sit there while we took the photo. For another, she can actually sit on her own.
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
The biggest takeaway which is SOOOOO crazy is how much Scarlett has changed in just 1 year. Only 365 days. And she looks COMPLETELY different!
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
I wrote a long time ago in It’s A Binary World 1.0 about all of the symbolism in Chrono Trigger. That game was extremely deep for a video game, but Square (now Square-Enix) has been known to have some very intellectual aspects to their games. Before, I spoke of Massamune, the gurus of time, and how certain aspects of the game spoke to racism. This time I uncovered another metaphor in the video game by watching a movie.
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
I started off playing the same multi-player games we’ve been playing for years now. Then I heard Civ VI comes out this year and so that inspired me to play a solo game.
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
The latest iteration of this series I’ve been playing for the past 25 years was released and the changes have made the game more dynamic and, for the first time in the series, have really made it so that I can’t just do the same thing every game because of how much the terrain makes a difference. It’s been neat and with the reduced gameplay over the past two months, it’s displaced all over games.
Civilization III (15 minutes)
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
Yeah, so the first video I recorded in September is missing the video game footage. Whoops! Either way, I finished The Witcher this month. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, this is another game I tried thanks to the Giant Bomb guys - specifically Vinnie. I thought the game was overall a lot of fun. I feel like the throughline of the story could probably have been done a little better. Even before I spent a couple months away from the game, I was only tenuously connected to how my actions were leading to anything being done other than being against the Salamandra. Still, the story was neat and the twist at the end was pretty crazy in a good way. I look forward to The Witcher 2, but I probably won’t get to it until 2016 due to some family stuff coming up over the next few months.
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.
I’ve learned a lot of great tips and about a lot of awesome packages (hello, rich), but the best thing I’ve ever learned isn’t even Python specific. The most recent episode mentioned https://regex101.com and I don’t think I’ll ever again find myself banging my head against the wall when my regex isn’t working! Thanks @mkennedy !
Overall, there was a continuation of trends from last year with just a few changes.
Python
Pycharm
PyCharm has continued to be my IDE of choice for Python programming. The devs haven’t been resting on their laurels, either. Recently they added some extra features to support FastAPI. And they also added some features that I don’t 100% understand that make it easier to test against fake HTTP endpoints. It’s really awesome and definitely worth the price if you program primarily in Python. As I predicted last year, its git features ended up making GitQlient and Git Kraken (on Linux) more or less obsolete for me.
Overall, there was a continuation of trends from last year with just a few changes.
Python
Pycharm
PyCharm has continued to be my IDE of choice for Python programming. The devs haven’t been resting on their laurels, either. Recently they added some extra features to support FastAPI. And they also added some features that I don’t 100% understand that make it easier to test against fake HTTP endpoints. It’s really awesome and definitely worth the price if you program primarily in Python. As I predicted last year, its git features ended up making GitQlient and Git Kraken (on Linux) more or less obsolete for me.
Overall, there was a continuation of trends from last year with just a few changes.
Python
Pycharm
PyCharm has continued to be my IDE of choice for Python programming. The devs haven’t been resting on their laurels, either. Recently they added some extra features to support FastAPI. And they also added some features that I don’t 100% understand that make it easier to test against fake HTTP endpoints. It’s really awesome and definitely worth the price if you program primarily in Python. As I predicted last year, its git features ended up making GitQlient and Git Kraken (on Linux) more or less obsolete for me.
Overall, there was a continuation of trends from last year with just a few changes.
Python
Pycharm
PyCharm has continued to be my IDE of choice for Python programming. The devs haven’t been resting on their laurels, either. Recently they added some extra features to support FastAPI. And they also added some features that I don’t 100% understand that make it easier to test against fake HTTP endpoints. It’s really awesome and definitely worth the price if you program primarily in Python. As I predicted last year, its git features ended up making GitQlient and Git Kraken (on Linux) more or less obsolete for me.
Overall, there was a continuation of trends from last year with just a few changes.
Python
Pycharm
PyCharm has continued to be my IDE of choice for Python programming. The devs haven’t been resting on their laurels, either. Recently they added some extra features to support FastAPI. And they also added some features that I don’t 100% understand that make it easier to test against fake HTTP endpoints. It’s really awesome and definitely worth the price if you program primarily in Python. As I predicted last year, its git features ended up making GitQlient and Git Kraken (on Linux) more or less obsolete for me.
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.
Quite a bit has changed since I first started this series about 18 months ago. Back then I was sure I would only be trying Microsoft Edge on Windows and that I would be sticking with Firefox on Linux. Yet Microsoft Edge is now available for Linux, Mac, and Android. On my laptops I continue to prefer non-Firefox browsers. Things continue to be interesting in this realm.
Quite a bit has changed since I first started this series about 18 months ago. Back then I was sure I would only be trying Microsoft Edge on Windows and that I would be sticking with Firefox on Linux. Yet Microsoft Edge is now available for Linux, Mac, and Android. On my laptops I continue to prefer non-Firefox browsers. Things continue to be interesting in this realm.
Brave didn’t last very long for me on Windows. I just don’t do enough on there to make use of their ad blocking and ad replacing tech. On the other hand, I’ve been using more and more of Vivaldi’s features. I just started using their Web panels - this allows you to have a web page on the left that loads up in a small section - great for pages that you would like to reference here and there without cluttering up your tabs. I’m using it on my Windows computer to keep some Web panels with notes on what I’d like to do in some games - like Civ VI, Darkest Dungeon, and Cities Skylines.
Well, on Linux I bounced back and forth between Firefox and Chrome, depending on which one was getting better performance. At this point, for what I do, Firefox is the winner for me. I use it on my laptop and desktop and it gets things done without getting in my way. I don’t necessarily have the most modern GUI setup because it tends to keep your GUI settings as you upgrade. This is what it looks like:
In these last two months of the year I only worked on Advent of Code.
November
In November I worked through part of the 2016 problem set. I didn’t get too far because of how many languages I was doing at this point. Eventually I decided to allow myself to get a bit further in Python and then catch up with the other languages. Whenever I’d get stuck I’d go back to the other languages. Overall, once I’d figured out Python - Ruby, Perl, and Golang would be pretty easy. Haskell would still be hard, but I started getting the hang of it near the end of the month.
Across both September and October I got a decent amount of programming done. I just about finished the Learn You Haskell for Great Good book (got up to just before Monads) and started Head First Go. Once I had enough Go language to get started on AoC, I knew I’d be ready for the 2016 problem set. Let’s get into the nitty gritty!
Python (not Advent of Code)
Impractical Python
I finished chapter 11 which contained my old friend the Monty Hall Paradox. I’ve had a version up on my site for a very long time based on a PHP tutorial in Linux Format Magazine. This time I was able to code it in Python as well as creating a GUI version. Chapter 11 also touched upon The Birthday Paradox.
This strange, COVID-filled year was the year WorldCon was local to me, so I figured it was the best time to check it out. I didn’t need to pay for a hotel or flight, just a few days of parking and metro line fees. Overall, I thought it was fine. I enjoyed the panels I attended, especially when Scalzi read from his upcoming book, Kaiju Preservation Society. But I didn’t become a convert like the folks at the First Time Attendees panel who have been attending for decades. Outside of that, I had a few thoughts about my experiences this year:
This strange, COVID-filled year was the year WorldCon was local to me, so I figured it was the best time to check it out. I didn’t need to pay for a hotel or flight, just a few days of parking and metro line fees. Overall, I thought it was fine. I enjoyed the panels I attended, especially when Scalzi read from his upcoming book, Kaiju Preservation Society. But I didn’t become a convert like the folks at the First Time Attendees panel who have been attending for decades. Outside of that, I had a few thoughts about my experiences this year:
Today I ran my first trail run, the Bigfoot Endurance Trail. I will definitely say that Ripit Events did a great job running the race. There were lots of good reminder emails leading up to the race. They had folks managing parking. Everything went smoothly and, more or less, on time.
The race was at Rockburn State Park, making this the first race for which I didn’t have to get up at an ungodly hour to attend. It’s just a 10 minute-ish drive from the house. I’d never done any of the trails - usually we just take the kids to the playground. Luckily, one of my friends at work warned me to pick up my feet. I don’t think I necessarily run at a shuffle, but it did make me run with more awareness of the trail. This was a good thing because Mother Nature was out to get me! The 10 mile race consisted of two 5-mile loops. On the first loop I mildly rolled both ankles either in sections that were nothing but tree roots or where the gravel or sand weren’t as tightly packed as they could be. However, tragedy struck (at least race-level tragedy) with half a mile to go. I rolled my left ankle HARD. Like, I’m definitely going to need some Ibuprofen and an ice pack when I get home hard. That threw off my gait and so with literally only a quarter of a mile to go, I couldn’t lift my foot high enough and tripped over a root. I took a spill, but was luckily wearing gloves. I only scratched up my knee. Very nicely - perhaps because this is more of a fun-run community thing than the Boston Marathon or something like that - a couple of runners both in front and behind of me stopped to help me up and make sure I was fine. One of them also checked up on me after the race. This tumble cost me for my age group to fall from 2nd place to 3rd place (literally just 20 seconds difference).
It’s easy to lust after photo opportunities elsewhere as I did in a recent post. But when you find that happening, just remember there’s a whole world in your backyard. If you live in an urban neighborhood like the protagonist of Pecker, you can focus on portraits and street photography - candid or otherwise. But if you live in a suburban or rural area, you’ll find a lot of naturalistic photo opportunities in your backyard. For inspiration, take a look at these photos taken in my backyard and my parents’ backyard. (I’ve stretched the definition of backyard a little to include the surrounding neighborhood that’s within a short walk - say, within a mile) (Yes, a lot of them are birds, but that’s what really interests me outside)
I was practicing my macro photography and I chose to try and photograph myself. And I decided to focus on my stubble because that seems to be a perpetual feature of mine. I was very happy with the comments I ended up getting.
I love the idea of having art on the gates that come down when the the restaurant is closed. Rather than the ugly grey, possibly tagged with grafitti, we get this amazing art.
I saw this when I was doing a boardwalk run this summer. I’d been visiting Coney Island for nearly 20 years at this point, but the recent revitalization has been impressive to see. That includes ideas like this art that bring happiness and joy even when Nathan’s is closed.
And I continue to through my Top 200 most viewed photos on flickr.
Photo #197 is:
Brighton Beach in Brooklyn is one of my homes-away-from-home. I’ve been going there to visit the family that became my in-laws for about 10 years. It was so exciting to find out that they lived so close to the famous Coney Island. I’m certain there will be more photos of Coney Island as this project goes on. It’s one of the easiest places for me to shoot because it’s only a 10 to 15 minute walk if I’m in a hurry vs a 45+ minute ride to Manhattan. Although I’ve never ridden the Wonder Wheel, I’ve always had a fascination with it because every time the fair came to Florida, I’d ride the Ferris Wheel. I am not sure if I’m forgetting some memory, but I don’t think I’ve ever done the cliche riding of the wheel with a date, but maybe I can somewhat buck that by riding the Wonder Wheel with the wife. Along with the Cyclone roller coaster, the Wonder Wheel is one of the oldest and most iconic structures at Coney Island.
The beach was covered with snow, but that didn’t seem to bother the seagulls. As I approached, they let me get really close and if I got closer they preferred to run rather than fly.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Lovers on the Boardwalk”] [/caption]
A few weeks ago I took yet another stroll on Brighton Beach’s Boardwalk. This famous boardwalk goes from Brighton Beach past Coney Island all the way to Seagate. This time around I took some iconic photos from the area. In other words, these are exactly the types of photos you would see included in any survey of boardwalk photos. Here’s the GPS track of where I went in a static PNG and then as a Google Map so you can zoom in and scroll around.
Fedora provides a nice RPM-OSTree solution for folks who want to use the tech, but don’t want to use Gnome. The install is a bit barebones and doesn’t come with Flathub pre-configured, reducing the number of KDE applications that can be installed after the distro is first installed. Once Flathub is activated and Discover is reloaded, the user can start installing KDE apps. Not a good starting distro now, but with some sensible defaults, it could be great thanks to the way that RPM-OSTree makes the system more maintainable.
When I first started programming it was just at the prompt of my Tandy computer. Then it was in the QBasic text editor on the IBM computers at school. But when I started programming again with “real” languages, I ended up going with Emacs. Although I was first annoyed at the way commands like save were prefixed, it became my favorite editor. I think that was partially because of diving headfirst into the free software movement and partially because I didn’t like vi’s different modes and how annoying that made things if you didn’t realize you weren’t in the text entry mode. Eventually, I moved on to Kate because I love KDE (been running it as my main desktop for over 10 years now) and I loved the features it enabled. Also, since vi (or vim) is found EVERYWHERE while Emacs usually requires installation, I ended up switching to vi whenever I’m ssh’d into a computer. If you add plugins like powerline, it can be pretty awesome to use. Even on my desktop if I’m editing /etc/fstab I’m more likely to pull up vi than the weight of KDE (not that it takes up THAT much RAM).
As KDE 5 reaches 5.2 and many begin to debate its features (this is a small evolution on 4 compared to the difference between 3 and 4) there has been an ever-increasing assertion that Activities are pointless. (At least it appears that way to me) I wanted to share how I use Activities, why they make me more productive, and why they’re the biggest feature keeping me on KDE.
So, I have lots of Activities: Main, Media, School, Photography, Video Games, Video Editing, Programming, and Reading. In its current implementation, each Activity must have the same number of virtual desktops; three in my case. In each activity I make use of different widgets. On nearly all of them are the brilliant folder view and application launcher widgets. These allow me to quickly see the folders relevant to the task at hand. In the case of the Multimedia activity, desktop 1, this is very useful for my workflow. Let’s look at that desktop:
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
The biggest takeaway which is SOOOOO crazy is how much Scarlett has changed in just 1 year. Only 365 days. And she looks COMPLETELY different!
Around a year ago I decided to KDE in Spanish to learn some technical terms. Back then I was using GDM, but now I’m using KDM. I didn’t see a way to set the language! How would I change the language to Spanish? I took a look online and found instructions. I’m going to reproduce them here for others. The great thing about the way that KDE handles things vs the way that Gnome does is that you can set a fallback language. When might this be useful? Let’s take a Vietnamese computer user. Vietnamese people (at least of a certain age) tend to be fluent in Vietnamese and French with some familiarity with English. So a Vietnamese person could set his computer to Vietnamese with a fallback to French for any programs that didn’t have translations into Vietnamese. As usual, I LOVE the level of customization in the KDE desktop.
I did it! I have created my first ever useful GUI program. After all these years of thinking that all the useful GUIs had already been invented - I found an itch to scratch. And here’s how the final, working version looks:
And so there it is! I was actually surprised that this last little bit of the program wasn’t as hard to finish up as I thought it would be. So, as currently implemented, when the plasmoid loads up it makes the data engine fill itself. Once that’s complete you can click on the buttons along the top to load up all the photos from that group that are ready to be promoted to the next group. Clicking on a particular photo loads up the small thumbnail. View on flickr allows you to jump to the website in case you want or need to do that. Originally I implemented it so that if the next part was hard, I’d at least have the functionality of the command line version of this software. Then came the new part that happens to be easier in a GUI than on the commandline. You can add the photo to the next group and remove it from the current one. The reason I did it that way was so that if the photo couldn’t be added to the next group, it wouldn’t be removed from the current one. I tested it first with a fake group and then the real thing and it works fine. Before I post the code for my data engine and plasmoid, I have some cleaning up to do. I also need to add in a bit more functionality for robustness. After that, if I’m going to make it so that anyone can use it (and post it on kde-look.org), I will need to do some extra work. So that’s version 0.1. For version 0.2 here’s what I’d have on my TODO list:
OK, so it’s been a year since I last blogged about working on this program. I tried working on the data engine in August and then got stuck right around the time I started my first semester of grad school so I had to drop it, even though it got stuck in my head and I was thinking about it for weeks until the light bulb went off. I wrote my idea and just had the idea to work on it recently. I have to say that, overall, QML is pretty awesome for making a quick GUI. I’ve always struggled with GUI code, but with QML I was able to put together a quick GUI in about 20 minutes. Now, don’t judge QML too harshly because my plasmoid looks ugly. It looks ugly because I just put together the minimum GUI to implement grabbing data from my Data Engine. Once I get everything working right, I’ll fix it up. After all, GUIs are really so easy in QML that it can be the icing on the cake in the end.
So I took a look at Blogilo a few days ago. So, taking a look at my Blogilo post I have to say that it is pretty much ALMOST there for the perfect offline blogging tool for someone using Wordpress. Sure, it doesn’t allow your to create categories, but a blog like mine that’s been around for ~7 years probably has all the categories it needs. The extra fidelity can come from tags which Blogilo hands just fine.
For the most part, I haven’t seen the point of using blog editors like Blogilo. While there might have been a purpose to them back in the dialup days, it seems pointless in the days of always on broadband connections. Also, back before blog software like Wordpress had their great visual editors, I could see the need. However, I guess I could see some use for it on my laptop. I often compose blog posts on there in a text editor when I’m traveling. It would be nice to have it all formatted correctly and ready to go when I got an internet connection rather than have to load up Wordpress then spend time formatting it when I could have done that on my laptop while I didn’t have a connection.
I’ve been reading a lot about kde-telepathy and it seems to be the next evolution beyond Kopete. So I decided to check it out in my Fedora Rawhide VM since that’s going to have the latest packages and telepathy is still in deep beta. When I installed all the packages that seemed to be important, I got the following when I launched it from the alt-F2 menu.
[caption id=“attachment_5130” align=“aligncenter” width=“384” caption=“kde-telepathy accounts menu in Fedora Rawhide (F17)”] [/caption]
Back when I first started using Linux I was using a very underpowered computer that I got donated as part of my research at school. So OpenOffice.org was a real pain in the butt to use. It took forever to load! KOffice, on the other hand, loaded up quickly. At that time, with KOffice 1, they had the presentation program, the spreadsheet, and the word processing program.
At the time there were two neat things about KWord that I really liked and they both stemmed from something I was doing at the time. I was the head of the Phi Sigma Pi (scholastic frat) alumni team. We had a newsletter to get out. Turned out that KWord, as it worked at the time, allowed for very easy desktop publishing. I don’t think it was intended to replace Scribus, but when compared to Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Writer, it was MUCH easier to set the layout. That made it really easy to create. With MS Word (at least 2000 and 2003) it was SUCH a PITA to try and get images where you wanted to be and to have text properly wrap around it. We had all kinds of issues in this class I took my sophomore year in which we had a tutorial class session on how to do this and it was still horrible to work with. KWord also had the ability to output to PDF which was great as I was trying to help the frat save money by seeing if we could get the alumni to accept emails instead of letters. They ended up rebuffing that offer, but at least it was something I was able to do. (I hadn’t discovered cutePDF and other ways to create free PDFs on Windows)
Sure, it’s a tired and cliche phrase, but hurray for the wisdom of the crowd. I’ve received comments on identi.ca, twitter, and in the comments here with answers to nearly all my problems with KDE. Let’s see if I can get them all to work. First off, I was told that my problem with Konversation not getting my password in time to keep me from being signed into the fedora-unregistered could be solved by setting the password as a server password. Alright! That worked! woohoo! Before I’d had it set to just run the /msg identify command.
There was a time when I thought Amarok was the best music player on Linux. I even used to run it in Gnome as you can see from this 2005 screenshot. In that first link you can read me gushing over Amarok 1.4. I loved all the integrated technologies, especially the metadata juggling Amarok did. The first few Amarok 2.x releases with the KDE 4 libraries were complete crap. They were ugly and were missing nearly all of Amarok’s features. (Mirroring the complaints people were having about KDE 4 at the time) When I took a look at Amarok and KDE 4.4 in October I said I would take another look at Amarok.
For some reason, I didn’t get Linux Format Magazine issue #110 when I was supposed to. I ordered another copy and it arrived recently, so it’s time for another slate of Linux reviews. Unfortunately, something appears to be wrong with the way they mastered the magazine DVD, because I was unable to boot into any of the Slax options. So I went online and got the latest ISO off of http://www.slax.org.
Compiz-Fusion, as you surely know is responsible for eye candy on GNU/Linux distros such as windows that turn into paper airplanes when the user minimizes it to turning the desktop into a spinning cube. There’s something about the wobbly windows that provides some a sense of inertia that just makes things feel a little more dynamic on the desktop. I can’t explain it, but some of the effects make the GUI slightly more useful. However, Compiz-Fusion isn’t perfect.
On my system, running Fedora 7 and Compiz causes the computer to refuse to exit Gnome. I always have to go into a terminal and shut the computer down that way and it’s extremely annoying. So I’ve decided to run KDE as my default desktop instead of Gnome. We’ll see if I can rekindle the fire I used to have for KDE or if it will annoy me enough to drive me back to Gnome.
KDE.news has reported on part of the progress of KDE 4 specific to SVG graphcs. (I know that’s redundant) It’s redundant because SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. Ever since about 2 years ago, Gnome and other projects began to move to SVG rather than PNG, JPG or other types of graphics. “What’s the advantage?” you may be asking yourself. Well, the advantage lies in how pictures are represented in SVG instead of, say, PNG and its ilk.
I used to love KDE and thought it was so much better than GNOME. Especially after discovering Superkaramba, I was sure nothing could beat KDE in terms of cool factor. Later I started using more GTK applications so I gravitated towards GNOME, fluxbox, and XFCE. Also, I ended up not really using the SuperKaramba widgets that much because they were always buried under my other windows….where I was doing real work!
In my KDE 3.5 post, I mentioned it was the final release of KDE before KDE 4. According to this interview on O’Reilly with a KDE developer, there are some BIG changes a’ comin’! It looks like KDE will be going through some paradigm shifts in the way they think about the desktop. Interestingly enough, it is tentatively slated to come out in Fall of 2006, around the time that Windows Vista with IT’S paradigm shift in desktop philosophy should be coming out. It will be interesting to see where this goes. Both KDE and MS seem to be moving towards Apple’s chic desktop concepts.
KDE 3.5 is the last KDE release before KDE 4. As you will know if you are into the Linux world, most projects reserve a major number change for possible imcompabilities. It’s part of the reason why Gnome is no longer following math and is at release 2.13, which is larger than 2.9. When Gnome finally switches to 3, it’s open season for breaking compatibility with all the GTK+ apps that work with the past few years of Gnome. It’s a chance for programmers to say, “Hey, when I made function foo, I had to use a hack to make it work with the Gnome 2.0 series. Now, I can rewrite the Gnome libraries to make it work with proper programming techniques so it works right.” The same will happen with KDE 4, which is having a rewrite of many of the core libraries.
Fedora provides a nice RPM-OSTree solution for folks who want to use the tech, but don’t want to use Gnome. The install is a bit barebones and doesn’t come with Flathub pre-configured, reducing the number of KDE applications that can be installed after the distro is first installed. Once Flathub is activated and Discover is reloaded, the user can start installing KDE apps. Not a good starting distro now, but with some sensible defaults, it could be great thanks to the way that RPM-OSTree makes the system more maintainable.
Ever since a class during my undergrad which mentioned technology that can help make sure the real world is accessible to all folks no matter what their physical limits may be, I’ve been very interested in the topic. It’s led to my interest on web accessibility (although I’m not always perfect when it comes to this blog) as well as in other realms. One of my favorite series from the Game Maker’s Toolkit Youtube channel is his yearly wrap-up on how accessible games were that year. Here is his 2020 video:
Ever since a class during my undergrad which mentioned technology that can help make sure the real world is accessible to all folks no matter what their physical limits may be, I’ve been very interested in the topic. It’s led to my interest on web accessibility (although I’m not always perfect when it comes to this blog) as well as in other realms. One of my favorite series from the Game Maker’s Toolkit Youtube channel is his yearly wrap-up on how accessible games were that year. Here is his 2020 video:
Ever since a class during my undergrad which mentioned technology that can help make sure the real world is accessible to all folks no matter what their physical limits may be, I’ve been very interested in the topic. It’s led to my interest on web accessibility (although I’m not always perfect when it comes to this blog) as well as in other realms. One of my favorite series from the Game Maker’s Toolkit Youtube channel is his yearly wrap-up on how accessible games were that year. Here is his 2020 video:
Every once in a while, while reading Wikipedia to try and figure out why some show from my childhood isn’t available on DVD, I read that music rights are holding back the DVD. I understand that these shows were created back before DVDs and, therefore, some kind of weird legal loophole is keeping the tv show rights holders from using the music. But I think that whoever owns the music should just let it be used! Why? Because it can end up leading to music sales for the music rights holder. This wasn’t the case in the bad old days of records and CDs. But now that the viewer can just buy any song he/she wants, the music rights holder is just losing money for no reason. Recent example: Danielle is currently working her way through the Nip/Tuck DVDs. After watching the season four finale, she searched around the Internet to find the song and then bought it off Amazon.
Twenty years ago today I was a freshman at Cornell University. I’d only been to NYC once before, during my family’s college tour trip in spring of 2000.
It was part of my college visitation trip and it was a surprise that we would get to see NYC. It was a miserable day, but I was ecstatic to see this place I’d only heard of in movies.
I begged my mom to let us visit the World Trade Center since I’d seen Kevin go up there in Home Alone 2 and I wanted to stand at the top of the world in the largest city in the world. But there wasn’t time for that. She said we’d see them next time we came to NYC….
I didn’t do much coding in July, so I decided to combine the July and August wrap-ups.
Python
Dreamhost Dynamic DNS
I decided to clean up and update some code that uses the Dreamhost API to allow for Dynamic DNS. I cleaned up the logging output so that I could figure out why it was sometimes deleting one of my domains rather than just updating the IP. The original programmer had it printing out to the terminal. I used the logging package to send logs out to a file. While I was improving the logging, I also decided to use f-strings to make it more obvious what was going into the output string.
I didn’t do much coding in July, so I decided to combine the July and August wrap-ups.
Python
Dreamhost Dynamic DNS
I decided to clean up and update some code that uses the Dreamhost API to allow for Dynamic DNS. I cleaned up the logging output so that I could figure out why it was sometimes deleting one of my domains rather than just updating the IP. The original programmer had it printing out to the terminal. I used the logging package to send logs out to a file. While I was improving the logging, I also decided to use f-strings to make it more obvious what was going into the output string.
On 30 June 2021, I attended my first concert since COVID-19 started. I was masked since the Delta variant is a thing and singing indoors is definitely an activity that increases transmission. Despite that, it was awesome to get to do it again and there was a real sense of joy in the room from both the audience and the performers at once again being able to engage in the ancient human ritual of enjoying music as a crowd.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): They were awesome at Warped Tour - I can’t wait until they go on the Projecet Atma tour. Manufacturing delays at the vinyl plant meant that the album was delayed. Still don’t have it - should be in my hands in December.
Jonathan Coulton, Greg Pak, and others – Code Monkey Save World (music and comics): Still missing the new music and The Princess Who Saved Herself. To be fair, the latter wasn’t promised until early 2015.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): Things are on track with IFD. They are posting awesome videos of the recording process. It’s already March so as long as there aren’t any more delays, the album will be here in a few short months! Also, they’ll be on the Van’s Warped Tour, so I’ll be attending Warped Tour for the first time to go see them (and quite a few other bands I really like)
This year I bought LOTS of albums. I don’t know if it’s the most albums I’ve purchased in one year since writing these blog posts or even since keeping track of Scrobbles. I do know that while I listened to my music randomly, in general, I did also listen to entire albums whenever I purchased one. Sometimes I’d listen to the album a few times and other times I’d take the album purchase as an opportunity to review the artist’s previous work. I know that was the case with Five Iron Frenzy (although that was also concert prep as I mentioned a few days ago), Relient K, I Fight Dragons, and Fall Out Boy. It was a very fun year for me, musically. Kacey Musgraves, for example, was a reminder that country music doesn’t have to suck. Disclosure made me realize that I could still like loop-heavy electronic music. I hope that I can continue to explore new sounds in 2014.
It’s December and I should have gotten all of my Kickstarter products by now. But that’s not exactly what happened. Every single one of my Kickstarters was late except the one I had the least faith and relationship with - Random Encounter’s Let Me Tell You a Story.
I’m writing this in late August - by the time this post appears I should have received all of my Kickstarter goods or they should be in the mail. Interestingly, even though the Kickstarter backer cycles were spread over about a three month period, they’re all supposed to be delivering the product at around the same time - 4th quarter of this year. As of the time of this writing, this is the status of my Kickstarters:
Those of you who have been reading this blog long enough know that I often write my blog posts during my lunch break at work and set it to post at some point in the future. I’m writing this post almost 1 month before it is to appear on the blog. So in the middle of July I find myself in what many who have backed projects probably experience as the Kickstarter Lull. I backed a project by I Fight Dragons and interviewed them about it here and I backed a comic project by Greg Pak and Jonathan Coulton. During the backing period as a way to drum up support there was a constant stream of both updates and digital goodies. IFD, in particular, gave backers 2 albums (live concert recording and a conceptual album) and a concert film. A little while after the backing period was over, the projects contacted us for the info they needed to fulfill our backer rewards. Since then I haven’t heard from either of them. On the rational side, I’m glad they’re focusing on creating what we paid them to create. But after the constant communications it just feels odd to have “radio” silence. Now we just wait for the products to be created. In the case of these two projects, the members involved are all veterans: IFD put out records before having a record company contract and Greg Pak has already done about a half dozen Kickstarters. So, outside of catastrophe, I don’t fear for my money. I could see where this silence might be more disturbing with an unproven team.
For the second quarter in a row The Beatles have NOT made the list! But that’s easily explained: I have been listening to a lot of new music and a lot of playlists that don’t include The Beatles. But as you’ll see, they kinda snuck in sideways. This quarter I spent a lot of time listening to Jonathan Coulton and I Fight Dragons because of their Kickstarters, which I backed. I Fight Dragons released two albums as Kickstarter bonuses - a live recording of their most recent concert and a remix album of sorts in which the band members sung different arrangements of the songs. There was also the new Fall Out Boy album, Save Rock and Roll. I really enjoyed the album but it was overtaken in my mind by the previously mentioned IFD and JoCo music and I quickly forgot they had a new album out. Again, that’s a shame since I did enjoy it and while I was in Florida last week I quickly tired of “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark”. Incidentally, I was reminded of why I stopped listening to live radio - it’s far too repetitive. I think the true problem is that it’s too formulaic in its repetition. I didn’t mind hearing “The Princess Who Saved Herself” every day for a week because the songs surrounding it were always different. On a separate note, I got some music for Father’s Day and I’ll mention that below.
This song is awesome and, best of all, it’s been released under a Creative Commons license, so I can share it with you all without fear of the RIAA breathing down my neck!
I first heard Code Monkey on a recent episode of Linux Outlaws. It’s a song about a code monkey who is having a hard time with his boss and with unrequited office love. It’s a tale any code monkeys will find familiar. You can either download it at this post or, if that takes too long, off of Jonathan Coulton’s blog. His l ast.fm page says he came out with a new song a year for a whole year, so check that out. There may be some other really awesome ones.
On 30 June 2021, I attended my first concert since COVID-19 started. I was masked since the Delta variant is a thing and singing indoors is definitely an activity that increases transmission. Despite that, it was awesome to get to do it again and there was a real sense of joy in the room from both the audience and the performers at once again being able to engage in the ancient human ritual of enjoying music as a crowd.
Upgrade the main computer to Fedora 34. The upgrade was uneventful, but left me with a few little annoyances. It’s running Wayland, so there’s no longer a primary monitor. Also, something is slamming my processors and some programs are taking a long time to load. I was hoping things would be in better shape by this point in the life-cycle, but every once in a while there’s a buggier Fedora.
June was mostly Python, although I did do chapter 1 of Scratch 3 Games for Kids with Sam. He really, really enjoyed it and I anticipate doing the challenge problems and maybe chapter 2 in July or August.
Books
I read the intro and first couple chapters of both Flask Web Development, 2nd Edition and Data Visualization with Python and Javascript, both from a recent Humble Bundle. The Flask book may be useful for learning more about creating a non-Django site and, even if I mostly stick with FastAPI, it should provide some concepts that are applicable across both frameworks. With the data visualization book, I would love to use that to better visualize my annual Last.fm stats.
June was mostly Python, although I did do chapter 1 of Scratch 3 Games for Kids with Sam. He really, really enjoyed it and I anticipate doing the challenge problems and maybe chapter 2 in July or August.
Books
I read the intro and first couple chapters of both Flask Web Development, 2nd Edition and Data Visualization with Python and Javascript, both from a recent Humble Bundle. The Flask book may be useful for learning more about creating a non-Django site and, even if I mostly stick with FastAPI, it should provide some concepts that are applicable across both frameworks. With the data visualization book, I would love to use that to better visualize my annual Last.fm stats.
It’s been a pretty busy 2 weeks. I’ve basically either been finishing up end of year blog posts or programming. Let’s jump in!
Extra Life Donation Tracker
I have the 5.3 release of my Extra Life Donation Tracker. I had a few minor refactoring goals for that release, but also a few user-facing enhancements. I added in the ability to grab the user’s avatar as well as their team’s avatar. They can now use that as an input in either XSplit or OBS. During these two weeks I also fixed a user-reported bug on crashes if a donor had emoji in their name. Oh emoji, you’re the bane of my programming existence!
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
Back when I was doing GameDev.Tv’s Unity 2D class, I really wanted to know how to do multiplayer games (I also wanted some better support on using Xbox/PS3 remotes in games). Well, this year they released their Multiplayer class. So, naturally, I bought it up. I started working on it, resulting in two Github Repos. In the first section we were learned the basics of the Mirror add-on. I’m currently working through the second section, where we will create a basic RTS. I haven’t reached a real differentiation point from the GameDev folks. That may come later after we get past the basics.
Because I’ve been busy with programming and other tasks (including getting re-addicted to Cities: Skylines), I’ve got a roundup from about the last week or so in programming.
Python
Python Morsels
I got the mid-tier of the Pycharm Humble Bundle which came with a bit of a subscription to Python Morsels. Every week Trey Hunner, a Python trainer, sends subscribers a problem to solve along with a few bonus questions to deepen the learning. Here’s what I’ve loved so far:
Because last week was busy with house projects, this week I continued the ocean/water-themed programming from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The first project was a game I made with Stella (her first computer game creation), a boat race in Scratch. While we mostly stuck to the tutorial, we did partake in the challenges, including adding a shark and figuring how to have background music (which Stella chose on her own). That turned out to be really tough as my attempts to figure out how to use the loops led to stuttering. Eventually I figured it out and you can see what I did, the rest of the code, and how the game plays by watching the video below:
I had a lot less variety in my programming month, but still had a lot of fun doing it. In fact, Programming consumed most of my leisure thoughts. More about why I was doing it below, but I’ve been reading Programming Perl as well as skimming through Introducing Go and Learn You A Haskell for Great Good!. Ever since some folks used Haskell during last year’s Advent of Code and this guy’s videos that I mentioned in an early 2021 blog post, I’ve been very curious about the language. In fact, at this point I’ve decided that Go and Haskell will be the next two languages I learn.
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
A user of my Extra Life Donation Tracker program discovered that I had introduced a regression for brand new users who didn’t have a persistent setting. I thought about it overnight and it was exactly what I thought it would be - when I switched away from threading for the GUI, I forgot to add a way to tell participant.py to reload its settings values. I also decided to take a page from a programming podcast I heard recently and change the settings GUI to only have a “Save” button instead of a persistent save button AND a Save button. Especially when I wanted most people to hit persistent save, and that’s not what they’d most likely do by default. So I ended up making 5.2 release to fix both of those issues.
Since I’ve been making a lot of great progress programming with the kids in Scratch, I bought some Circuit Playground Expresses to program with the kids. The Circuit Playground Express can program in Arduino’s C dialect, CircuitPython, or Microsoft MakeCode, which uses blocks like Scratch. Today Scarlett and I made our first useful bit of code, a digital spinner we called The Sibling Chooser. Here’s the code, and you can see that it is indeed like Scratch:
I had a lot less variety in my programming month, but still had a lot of fun doing it. In fact, Programming consumed most of my leisure thoughts. More about why I was doing it below, but I’ve been reading Programming Perl as well as skimming through Introducing Go and Learn You A Haskell for Great Good!. Ever since some folks used Haskell during last year’s Advent of Code and this guy’s videos that I mentioned in an early 2021 blog post, I’ve been very curious about the language. In fact, at this point I’ve decided that Go and Haskell will be the next two languages I learn.
I started off the month thinking it was going to be Python heavy and ended up doing a lot more micro-controller programming. To be fair, I was mostly programming in CircuitPython, but it definitely came out of nowhere.
Python
Civilization VI Webhook in FastAPI
Last month I created a webhook program in Flask to generate notifications when it was someone’s turn in our multiplayer Civilization games. When I posted about it on reddit, someone suggested that I would be better off using FastAPI instead of Flask. I’d been hearing about FastAPI for months on Talk Python to Me and Python Bytes, but I always got the impression that it would only be useful if I was writing my website to be async.
Because I’ve been busy with programming and other tasks (including getting re-addicted to Cities: Skylines), I’ve got a roundup from about the last week or so in programming.
Python
Python Morsels
I got the mid-tier of the Pycharm Humble Bundle which came with a bit of a subscription to Python Morsels. Every week Trey Hunner, a Python trainer, sends subscribers a problem to solve along with a few bonus questions to deepen the learning. Here’s what I’ve loved so far:
A user of my Extra Life Donation Tracker program discovered that I had introduced a regression for brand new users who didn’t have a persistent setting. I thought about it overnight and it was exactly what I thought it would be - when I switched away from threading for the GUI, I forgot to add a way to tell participant.py to reload its settings values. I also decided to take a page from a programming podcast I heard recently and change the settings GUI to only have a “Save” button instead of a persistent save button AND a Save button. Especially when I wanted most people to hit persistent save, and that’s not what they’d most likely do by default. So I ended up making 5.2 release to fix both of those issues.
As I was going through my feed reader recently, I came across an article from Ars Technica, that I’d skipped over when it first came out, which announced that the All Your Base Meme is now 20 years old. I couldn’t believe it. It was my first meme, a few years before Numa Numa would be the meme that crossed over into regular pop culture. It led me to The Laziest Men on Mars’ page on Mp3.com, which was a kind of proto- Bandcamp in the early 2000s where indie bands (and some commercial bands) would put up MP3s to gain followers. ( This ended up being my favorite song from The Laziest Men on Mars) Here is the video that took over all of us on the Internet 20 years ago:
I started off the month thinking it was going to be Python heavy and ended up doing a lot more micro-controller programming. To be fair, I was mostly programming in CircuitPython, but it definitely came out of nowhere.
Python
Civilization VI Webhook in FastAPI
Last month I created a webhook program in Flask to generate notifications when it was someone’s turn in our multiplayer Civilization games. When I posted about it on reddit, someone suggested that I would be better off using FastAPI instead of Flask. I’d been hearing about FastAPI for months on Talk Python to Me and Python Bytes, but I always got the impression that it would only be useful if I was writing my website to be async.
I started off the month thinking it was going to be Python heavy and ended up doing a lot more micro-controller programming. To be fair, I was mostly programming in CircuitPython, but it definitely came out of nowhere.
Python
Civilization VI Webhook in FastAPI
Last month I created a webhook program in Flask to generate notifications when it was someone’s turn in our multiplayer Civilization games. When I posted about it on reddit, someone suggested that I would be better off using FastAPI instead of Flask. I’d been hearing about FastAPI for months on Talk Python to Me and Python Bytes, but I always got the impression that it would only be useful if I was writing my website to be async.
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
Because I’ve been busy with programming and other tasks (including getting re-addicted to Cities: Skylines), I’ve got a roundup from about the last week or so in programming.
Python
Python Morsels
I got the mid-tier of the Pycharm Humble Bundle which came with a bit of a subscription to Python Morsels. Every week Trey Hunner, a Python trainer, sends subscribers a problem to solve along with a few bonus questions to deepen the learning. Here’s what I’ve loved so far:
BBQ Thermostat: Arduino MKR 1010 and Therm Shield measuring temperature during a smoke
Today I was smoking a turkey so I figured it was a good time to do a live test of my project. There was good news and bad news. I think it’s illustrated quite well by the following graph:
Grafana graph of my BBQ Thermostat while measuring the smoker temp
I recently started an electronics hacking project to build a thermostat for my Weber Smokey Mountain. You can find details at Hackaday.io, but if you’ve been here long enough you know that I don’t trust other sites to continue to exist. (It’s why I copy my book reviews over from Good Reads). As of right now I’ve got the board able to read temperatures from a thermocouple that I send, via WiFi, to an MQTT broker. Then, via Python I take subscribe to that MQTT topic and put it into InfluxDB. From there I use Grafana to graph it. Here’s an early beta where I was trying to make sure it was working from end-to-end:
These are some old computer parts I had lying around. They were broken and I think I was saving them as teaching tools. I think I threw them out before we moved. It’s a graphics card, sound card, and hard drive.
I started off the month thinking it was going to be Python heavy and ended up doing a lot more micro-controller programming. To be fair, I was mostly programming in CircuitPython, but it definitely came out of nowhere.
Python
Civilization VI Webhook in FastAPI
Last month I created a webhook program in Flask to generate notifications when it was someone’s turn in our multiplayer Civilization games. When I posted about it on reddit, someone suggested that I would be better off using FastAPI instead of Flask. I’d been hearing about FastAPI for months on Talk Python to Me and Python Bytes, but I always got the impression that it would only be useful if I was writing my website to be async.
It seems that it’s time to look back at a year of COVID-19. Scalzi did it. Ars Technica did it. I’m not usually a huge bandwagon jumper, but I thought, “why not?” This has been a huge, disruptive event. It might be therapeutic to write about it.
It was 11 March (I believe) when the WHO officially declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. One of the first things I remember hearing about COVID-19 was the cruise ship that was stuck offshore because President Trump was so afraid of the numbers rising that he couldn’t let the folks off the ship. Turns out that was going to be a foreshadowing the likes of which we couldn’t quite understand at the time. My first inkling that maybe this was starting to become an issue in the US was in late February or early March when we went to visit relatives in New York City and they were against eating out because they were scared of getting sick. At the time, we thought they were just being a bit germaphobic. In fact, at the end of March we went to a restaurant for what we didn’t know at the time would be our last time to go out to eat for a year. (To date we still haven’t eaten out, not even for outdoor dining)
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
Back when I was doing GameDev.Tv’s Unity 2D class, I really wanted to know how to do multiplayer games (I also wanted some better support on using Xbox/PS3 remotes in games). Well, this year they released their Multiplayer class. So, naturally, I bought it up. I started working on it, resulting in two Github Repos. In the first section we were learned the basics of the Mirror add-on. I’m currently working through the second section, where we will create a basic RTS. I haven’t reached a real differentiation point from the GameDev folks. That may come later after we get past the basics.
Spent the last week debugging that script. Turns out the key to getting it to run in cron is to add export DISPLAY=:0 && before your command. That’s because Chrome will not launch without a display to send Chrome to.
Python Morsels
The most recent Python Morsels exercise was to figure out if a number was a perfect square. Trey began his problem statement this way: “This week I want you to write a function that might seem simple at first, but there’s a number of ways to solve it.” It definitely took some out of the box thinking for me to figure out how I was going to solve the base case. The math.sqrt() function returns a float so that it can give answers for non-perfect squares. So I kept thinking and I realized that any perfect, non-complex square root must be an integer. So I came up with the conditional to return. (And after all this Pythonic learning, I’ve learned not to evaluate for truth and then return a variable. Just return the evaluation)
Been quite busy with Python, keeping me away from other pursuits, like video games. (Although the kids have been requesting Spelunky 2 whenever it’s time to hang out with them)
Extra Life Donation Tracker (eldonationtracker)
For my Extra Life Donation Tracker I pushed out a new release, v5.2.2. A user of my program (man, I never get tired of how awesome that is!!) had wholly anonymous donors which was causing an issue I thought I’d handled. But it turns out that the folks that run the Donor Drive API are a little inconsistent in how they handle that in the donor endpoint vs the donations endpoint. So I pushed that fix out and now things should be dandy for game day (about 2 weeks away!!)
I made some portraits of Scarlett. I used the same setup as when I did Sam and Stella’s November portraits, except with the octobox on the left this time.
Somewhat without intention, I’ve ended up alternating portraits for the twins between outdoor portraits and indoor portraits. This year was time for indoor portraits. (Although, to be fair, if it hadn’t been freezing, I might have ended up breaking the tradition) Here’s the setup I used:
It’s a variant on a setup that has been very successful for me with portraits of the kids. I went back to a white background for the first time in a few years. The last time I used it with Scarlett I had an uneven white that looked horrendous to my eye and was a real pain in the butt to try and correct in Photoshop (or was it GIMP?). I never got it quite right and ended up sticking to the black background for a while. But I wanted to do something different. So this time I grabbed my two studio strobes (I believe they’re 100W strobes that someone got me as a present some 8 or so years ago) and threw them into umbrellas to make sure the light would hit the background evenly. With these lights I had to go to somewhere around 80% power in order to get a pure white background according to the spectrograph in camera. Then I posed the twins in front of those lights, so they needed a light for themselves. I used my old Canon 580EX inside of my gigantic octagon (I think it’s somewhere around 3 feet or more in diameter). I wanted to shoot at F8 to try and get the best chance of ensuring the twins would be in focus, so I had to push the 580EX to full power. After this session, I ended up buying a bracket so that next time I can throw my 430EX in there, too.
Sparklers were an ever-present feature of my childhood 4th of July celebrations. This year we introduced the twins to sparklers (I’m pretty sure Scarlett has used them at least once before). They kids had a lot of fun and there were a couple burn-scares, but I think it was worth the slight parental anxiety. (Did our parents care? They seemed a lot more laize-faire about us with sparklers, but maybe they were just good at hiding their fears?) Took out the DSLR and introduced the kids to light painting. Scarlett had the winning light-painting photo that made it past the multiple discard passes.
A few days ago, I had the opportunity to ask the twins what they did that day while they were isolated from each other.
Stella: “We played LEGO and built a lot of cool things.”
Sam: “We went to Costco and then came right back home.”
Mind you, they both had the exact same day and did the exact same things. If I had to guess at why they focused on the things they did, I’d say that Sam’s answer was based on the fact that he likes to go out, especially to the park. So he was upset they’d left the house and hadn’t done anything he found fun. I’m not sure why Stella only focused on the LEGOs, but she is still playing with them a few days later, so maybe she was really happy to have new things to play with.
Over the years I’ve taken many, many photos of my kids at Coney Island. Lots of them have come out great. But I think this batch of photos is among the best photos I’ve taken of the kids at Coney Island thus far.
In some cases, it’s the expressions on the twins’ faces.
I’m on a motorcycle!
I see you!
Yeah, I know how to use this
Other times, I succeeded in getting the perfect action shot.
Sam sat on my lap and looked at the keyboard on the desk. At first he tried to do the ABCs, but he was stymied by the QWERTY layout. So then he looked at the numbers. He started with 1 and counted up. As Scarlett did before him, he automatically said “10” when he got to the 0. I told him, “That’s not 10, that’s 0”. To which he replied, “Zero doesn’t belong here! It belongs here! [pointing to the beginning of the row of numbers]”.
Scarlett was watching Peg + Cat which has an episode called Mack the Fork. So she asked me if that was a song and I told her that Mack the Knife was a song and she asked me to play it. Then the following exchange with my 3.5 year old happened:
Back in March it was an incredibly windy day so we decided to go to the park to fly a kite. I also took my DSLR because it’d been some time since I’d used it and thought I might get some good shots. This one was my favorite one and I thought it really captured a special moment.
Since becoming a parent it’s been a common theme of the blog that I find it fascinating experiencing the kids getting older and, therefore, more able to process the world around them. This winter was the first time the twins could be out in the snow for more than just a few minutes. Not only were they more able to weather the cold, but they were also strong enough to move around in the snow without too much frustration. They were also finally able to have a snowball fight. Although, watch Sam’s face closely from beginning to end in the following video, it’s priceless:
If there’s one pleasure I was denied by growing up in Florida, it was getting to play with the fall leaves. (Of course, I was spared having to rake them - something that takes me a good afternoon here if I do it well). But my kids get to enjoy it.
Sam in the leaves
Sam’s expression notwithstanding, I wonder what it is that kids enjoy about it. Is it making a mess of a pile? Is it the crunch of the leaves? The novelty of it all? Scarlett’s been doing it for a while and she still enjoys it. Whatever it is - I’m glad I get to be there to see it and enjoy their enjoyment.
Just as with the farm portraits, this year both kids were enthusiastic about the portraits. I was bracing for Sam to once again hate the idea of portraits, but his urge to do what his sisters were doing was stronger - or maybe he’s just over whatever he hated about it last year. I’m really happy with how the portraits came out this year - particularly for Sam. It helps that the little guy is ALWAYS smiling (unless he’s been told he can’t do something). Here’s my favorite Sam portrait:
Another year and the kids grow older. Last year was a disaster - the twins did NOT want their photos taken. We didn’t get any good portraits. This time everyone was game and we got good portraits - at least the first time around. When we reconvened a little later, the kids were over the idea of pumpkin photos, or at least Scarlett was.
Funny thing about this is that I could say this reflects their moods, but really only Stella is being genuinely Stella. Usually you can’t catch Sam without a smile on his face (although he *is* going through the whiny 2 year old phase), and Scarlett’s the most neutral.
Danielle and I went to Mount Vernon back when we first moved here and were exploring new things to do in our free time that were unique to the area.
We’d thought of bringing our parents to see Washington’s house and property, but the timing never quite worked out - you really want to visit in the Spring or Fall, not during the Summer or Winter. So it remained a place we’d only been to once even as we made multiple trips to the same couple Smithsonian museums and zoos.
This Easter we went to the farm so they kids could hunt for eggs there and then enjoy the farm. Unlike my childhood, Easter’s pretty cold up here as you can see.
It’s pretty ridiculous to me, considering almost my entire childhood consisted of going to the local park.
Stella’s been enjoying horseback riding for a bit now, but this was the first time she was old enough to do it on her own without me holding onto her the entire time.
Back in November we took the twins on their first trip to Disney. This time around Scarlett wasn’t as interested in the parades as she was last time, but the twins were REALLY into them. Surprisingly, both twins ended up warming up to the characters. Sam’s reluctance with Mickey on the first day made me think he was going to try and avoid them the entire trip. But as you can see in the video, he eventually got into interacting with the characters.
I took Sam and Stella to the park on Columbus Day (Scarlett was in school) and they were finally old enough that I could step back to take photos while they worked their way through the jungle gym.
Jumping forward (I’m still generally working on photos from August because I’ve fallen behind with other responsibilities and playing some video games for Extra Life), we get to Halloween photos. Once again these awesome costumes were sewn by my mother-in-law.
Each of the three kids is a little different, of course. Sam LOVES loud things. He loves cars and trains and planes and …. lawnmowers! When I cut the grass he follows me around. When others cut the grass he wants to follow THEM around.
I can’t believe how much they’ve grown. Summer 2016 we were pushing them around in this car, now they’re pushing it around. (Youtube vids which may not carry over to FB - you may need to click through to the blog)
(if you usually see my blog posts on FB, I am pretty sure they don’t carry over Youtube embeds, so come to the blog to see the videos)
If you’re an only child, you don’t know what it’s like to have to live with your kiddie tormentor. Growing up, the three of us each alternated as the aggressor and the aggrieved. As Stella proves here, you don’t have to the the oldest to be the one causing issues.
One of my favorite photo sets was from the first time Scarlett was running around chasing bubbles. I tried to do the same with the twins, but since they were less familiar with bubbles, they decided to catch them with their faces…
We’ll see what happens spring 2017, but I was surprised they were a little more patient than Scarlett and so didn’t fall on account of running on the steep (for their little legs) incline.
The photos appearing over the next few days are from the first time we took them out to run around on the driveway. Before that, they’d always been pushed in tricycles or strollers.
Year one with Sam was a year full of smiles. There almost isn’t a thing you can do that he won’t smile at. I think the only times I haven’t seen him smile were during teething and when someone took a toy from him (usually Stella).
[caption id=“attachment_12341” align=“aligncenter” width=“840”] Sam’s First Carousel Ride[/caption]
Why do kids enjoy carousel rides so much? Shoot, why do we have so much nostalgia for them as adults? I have no idea. I could probably put together some BS about a cultural memory of horseback riding, but frankly I think it’s just the first amusement park ride a kid is able to go on. This is Disney before your tiny brain can even comprehend the existence of such a place. And, unlike a car, I think it’s pretty evident even to the kids that there is no utilitarian function here - you end up roughly where you started.
I figured this might be the only year I can pick their costume, so I *had* to go with The Wonder Twins from the old Super Friends cartoon. My mother-in-law sewed up the awesome costumes.
That near-year flew by! I can’t believe a year ago we were nervously attending Dina’s wedding, unsure if the kids were going to want to pop out early and steal the show.
Every year since Scarlett was born we’re been going to Clark’s Eliok Farm to get a pumpkin to decorate the house (and in later years for Scarlett to carve). This time was the first year for Sam and Stella. Overall they did extraordinarily well for 11 month olds who’d never been to a pumpkin patch before. Only Stella cried and that was only after it had gone on for a while.
Thanks to having Scarlett be the first photo with a color checker that has a white balance section, I was able to get the lighting and white balance perfect in that photo and then copy those settings to the other photos. After that, just a few tweaks to get each photo perfect. Allowed me to make the most of my limited time. Enjoy the photos!
Once again just assigning intention to some random toddler stuff, but I just love how he looks like he just heard his favorite team won the World Series, or something.
While I think that part of what really makes this image work is the way I converted it to black and white, I do really envy my wife for having a good eye and good timing to capture the photo.
When I was dating Danielle, during one of the trips to her house I asked to see old family photos. That was a big tradition in our house as I got the bug for documenting things with photography from my mother. Each of my brothers and I have about two dozen photo albums full of photos of us from back when you had to pay for film and pay for development. They had but a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the photos my mom did, but one photo that cracked me up was a photo my future father-in-law had taken of Dina (future sister-in-law) and one of Danielle’s cousins punished, crying against the wall. It was a funny image, but baffling that it’d be something worth capturing, especially in the film days. And I saw him do it with the new generation of kids as Danielle’s cousins started having kids.
Stella loves anything she can climb on. Scarlett hasn’t developed a love for climbing trees, but Stella might. Put anything in front of her that’s a bit off the ground and she’ll try to get on top of it. Not sure if she’s trying to reach what the adults and her big sister can or if she’s just climbing it for the same reason people climb Everest: Because It’s There.
Sam constantly reminds me of Linus from The Peanuts. He loves nothing better than to cuddle with a nice soft blanket or toy and he can’t keep his thumb out of his mouth. I was successful in keeping Scarlett from getting into that and we had to make Stella stop because she kept throwing up. No luck with Sam, but I’ve yet to see a mentally stable adult sucking their thumb, so we’ll get through it eventually. (First time parents should remember that with everything - like potty training - have you ever seen someone who doesn’t have mental issues who isn’t a potty trained adult?)
The funny thing about this age is that the kids start making all kinds of faces at the adults. But for the most part, I doubt it really means anything. For the most part they’re learning by imitating and trying things out and seeing what kinds of reactions they get. But we can’t help but ascribe intentions to their facial expressions. Then again, we do this with inanimate objects, it’s part of what makes us human. (Or at least puts us in a small category of animals)
I took this photo back in August. I’ve said it before on the blog when talking about Scarlett, but it’s incredible how much the babies change in their first year. Sure, at this point it’s 100% of his life. But eventually you reach this age where you don’t really change all that much from year to year. You get a little fatter or skinnier and maybe lose a little hair, but it’s on going back multiple years where you really see the change. But look at Sam closer to birth:
Scarlett’s first time at the beach was much younger - five or six months - but with the twins it was just a lot harder to go on vacation. There are two of them to deal with, to pack formula for, etc. Also, for a long time Stella would spontaneously throw up. We’d dealt with that with Scarlett when we went on the trip to her first Christmas - where she kept throwing up in the car. It’s not fun.
We’re hardly ever dressed up so nicely. So when we all got dressed up for Dan’s engagement party, I wanted to get a quick family portrait before we left. The pose wasn’t perfect due to the rush, and I’ll be elaborating a bit more on that in a future blog post, but I do like it as a bit of record keeping. Slightly more than a snapshot, but not how I’d have done it if we weren’t in a hurry.
Ever since Sam was born, I’ve been looking forward to a 4 generation male portrait. I’d done a female line portrait with Scarlett up to her great-grandmother. It was finally time to do the same for me. While we were out there and dressed up, we took a few other configurations of family photos. All the males are wearing guayaberas, a traditional shirt worn in the Caribbean, especially in Cuba.
It’s a time-honored tradition for us to photograph babies in the purple bucket. We did it for Nam, Lan, and Scarlett. Now it was time for the twins to do it.
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--004-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--021-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--032-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--034-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--046-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--047-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--055-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--060-1
Twins in Purple Bucket - 2016-07-04--063-1
Scarlett wanted to do it again, so now we have this comparison. Baby Scarlett:
So much I want to say all at once…I hate when that happens - makes me wish we could speak in parallel threads. Well, I guess I’ll start with the credit. There are lots of photos I’ve posted on here taken by Danielle. But usually by the time I get a chance to post photos I can’t remember for sure who took the photos. Generally, if the photo is taken with the Canon Powershot S100 it’s a greater than 80% chance it was taken by Danielle. But not only has not much time passed since the photo was taken (allowing me to know it was Danielle who took it), but it’s just so perfect, I had to make sure to credit her for having the photographic eye.
I meant to write about the lighting setup in the blog post in which I uploaded the photos from the 7 Month photo shoot, but with twin 7 month olds, there’s never enough time for anything - even with my mother-in-law in town helping us out. Oh well, at least I don’t have to pay per post.
First of all, I’d like to discuss the concept I wanted to go for. For the Five Month photos, I went with the balloon theme I posted about here. For month six, I didn’t do anything special. Danielle did her usual couch portraits. But this time around I had a bit more time for the photos and I started thinking about it a week or two in advance. Unlike 2 months ago, both children were able to sit on their own now for extended periods of time. As of when I took the 7 month photos, the only thing that made them tip over was when they got over-excited and tipped back. It’d been a while since I had done portraits with the black background and I wanted to switch it up a bit. Because I don’t have any formal photography training, I like to browse the work of other photographers to get ideas I can take and make my own. Gavin Hooey, who has a great series of videos on Youtube through the photography store Adorama, has a dark grey background at his studio. He likes to have a highlight behind the model rather than just a plain dark background. If you look at his photos, he does it more often than he doesn’t. I figured it might help with the look of the photos. If you don’t do it, then you really do need to use a light as a hair light in order to keep dark-haired subjects from merging into a black background.
When Danielle brought out a hoodie for Sam a few weeks ago, I knew I had to photograph him in it for the incongruity of him just being a little baby in a hoodie. But I wasn’t sure what look I was going to go for. Then I remembered my snoot. Hooked that up to the flash and boom, no need for Photoshop or anything - this is exactly how it came out of the camera.
Danielle mentioned that it looked like I’d messed around with the image because the strings on Sam’s photo looked fake. Actually, that’s how it was captured in the camera. The strings were reflective and, as I’m about to get into, there was a lot of light in this shoot. There are only two things I did to edit these photos. For both of them, the balloons ended up floating higher than the backdrop. So I had to extend the backdrop digitally. Luckily for other reasons that I’ll get into in the lessons learned section, I’d been trying to blow out the background and make it pure white. In computer terms, I wanted it represented by (255,255,255) or pure white. So it was less of a pain to extend the background to make it look real - I didn’t need to use a clone or healing brush. It was already white so I just painted in white (I actually did something a little more complex, but this is fine for the analogy). For Sam’s photo, the balloons and strings caused a bit of a shadow behind the strings so it’s not pure white there. The strings are so skinny that it wasn’t worth trying to paint over this with white. I tried a couple times and then gave up and reverted it.
When Scarlett was born, I went a little crazy. Sure, it’s natural for first time parents, especially someone with my personality. But I think I also deserve some slack because it was a difficult, complicated pregnancy and then Scarlett needed surgery in her first week of life in order to live.
So when I saw myself starting to act crazy again (after another crazy pregnancy with premie babies), my solution was to withdraw. If I didn’t get too attached, I wouldn’t have such visceral reactions to my underweight daughter not eating. So I threw myself into my books and video games. It was made easier by the fact that my mother in law was here, so I had more opportunities to run off. But then, a week ago (and I’m writing this post about a month before this will appear on my blog), I realized that I had been letting their infancy slide past me without enjoying it. And so I put myself back into their lives. This was made easier by nearly five months of the doctor weighing Stella and finally being OK with her weight. Also, we’d found out she was lactose intolerant and switching her away from mother’s milk and cow-based formula caused her to transform into a happy baby. But now I’m really enjoying the heck out of the twins and it’s a joy to see them each day.
There’s a story about my childhood my mom is fond of telling. My dad asks Daniel (the brother born after me) to do something. To my father’s consternation, he refuses because it would make me mad. It’s funny to see a similar situation going on with the twins and Scarlett. Part of it is familiarity - Scarlett is home with them every day; but the kids will smile or laugh more easily with her than with me. This video is an example of that which I found amusing. We’ll see if I find it amusing if I find myself in a situation similar to my father.
You never know what’s going to happen when you try to take portraits of babies. Throw in the extra unpredictability of kids of any age and it’s a crapshoot whether a photo shoot is going to turn out to be fun with rewarding photos or a series of photos of your children crying.
One thing we have on our side with the studio being in the basement is that we can take photos when the kids are ready, not on a hope and prayer that they’ll be ready when we get to Sears, Target, or wherever people are getting portraits done nowadays. So we started off with easy portraits in the morning on the “Baby Portrait Couch”. Hey, it’s a tradition started with Scarlett!
Just in case the captions for the photos don’t appear on your RSS reader or on Facebook, here’s what I wrote as the caption to the photos:
“Inspired by title I chose for my photo for the twins’ four month photo which didn’t come out quite the way I wanted it to, I decided to do this image. I love how it came out.”
I also usually don’t post more than one version of a photo - I have a definitive version and just go with that, but this time Scarlett came up while I was trying to to figure out which one I preferred and she insisted on a different one than I would have chosen, so I decided to share them all.
I wanted to do this earlier - somewhere around 2 month portraits. I was re-energized to try the idea after seeing someone do a photo that made it look like their kid was bounding out of the crib with her stuffed animals. I did not take the Sam and Stella images from some other random image. They were right there where you see them. All I did was erase my body (or I’d be in here thrice). Still, if I were to do it again, I’d have Sam and Stella flying near me rather than against the wall. They end up too small and it lessens the impact of the shot. Well, there’s always next time. (And there’s always less edited shots!)
I could have gone for something more elaborate, but at this age, it’s a lot just to get them awake enough for portraits. There are plenty of months for crazier shots.
Been taking lots of shots of the kids, but one finally came out nice!
(edit: Ah, I figured it out, I can’t let the blog create resized versions of my giant files. To get the original size file (for printing) click here! It will look horrible in your web browser)
A few months ago, someone asked about whether the rices*/modifications/tweaks people displayed on reddit.com/r/unixporn (where people show off their desktops, not human pornography) were actually useful. Someone commented they’d like to see a post on how someone uses their mods. So I decided to write this up.
*I know the term ricing could be considered racist or insensitive. In this context, it’s simply the term of art used on the subreddit.
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
The biggest takeaway which is SOOOOO crazy is how much Scarlett has changed in just 1 year. Only 365 days. And she looks COMPLETELY different!
A few months ago, someone asked about whether the rices*/modifications/tweaks people displayed on reddit.com/r/unixporn (where people show off their desktops, not human pornography) were actually useful. Someone commented they’d like to see a post on how someone uses their mods. So I decided to write this up.
*I know the term ricing could be considered racist or insensitive. In this context, it’s simply the term of art used on the subreddit.
Today was the big one, time to upgrade supermario, my workhorse machine. As usual I had to remove the kmod-nvidia packages. This time around, because my card was getting a little long in the tooth, it was the kmod-nvidia-340xx packages. I also had a bunch of plasmoid packages to get rid of that I didn’t need to remove on the other computers because I was only a heavy plasmoid user on this computer. Thankfully, I’d long since abandoned all the ones I had to get rid of. After running fedup 3 times (once initially, once after removing plasmoids, and once after removing kmod-nvidia packages) to make sure nothing was expected by the program to cause problems upon upgrade, I finally rebooted to upgrade. If the past is any indication, I should be able to get to a screen where I can reinstall kmod-nividia after the upgrades. I’m only a tiny bit worried that Fedora only seems to connect to the internet when a GUI comes up, but if it comes to that I’ll investigate what I need to do and be sure to publish the procedures here for anyone else in the same boat.
It messed with DNS resolution for my local network, at least temporarily. I couldn’t resolve any websites that needed to hit our local DNS server. I did some Googling and saw that the resolver tech was changed from Fedora 32 to Fedora 33. I change a setting for my NIC and then changed it back and either that fixed it or (some websites mentioned just needing to give it some time). Either way, that was it. Relatively smooth.
While new versions of Fedora have been pretty darned stable for a few years now, I usually wait a while after a release to upgrade. This year waiting ended up turning into just leaving it alone. But with February half-way done, we’re actually starting to get kind of close to the Fedora 34 release date. So I figured President’s Day was as good a day as any to do the upgrade.
It came out this Tuesday and last night I updated my laptop. The only thing I had to do for the upgrade was remove a python3-test package. Since I’m using virtual environments, for the most part I don’t care which Python packages the system has. So that was a nice, easy upgrade! Good job Fedora packagers and testers! Speaking of Python, it’ll be nice to start upgrading my projects to Python 3.9. (Fedora 33 includes the latest programming language versions as part of its “First” values)
It messed with DNS resolution for my local network, at least temporarily. I couldn’t resolve any websites that needed to hit our local DNS server. I did some Googling and saw that the resolver tech was changed from Fedora 32 to Fedora 33. I change a setting for my NIC and then changed it back and either that fixed it or (some websites mentioned just needing to give it some time). Either way, that was it. Relatively smooth.
While new versions of Fedora have been pretty darned stable for a few years now, I usually wait a while after a release to upgrade. This year waiting ended up turning into just leaving it alone. But with February half-way done, we’re actually starting to get kind of close to the Fedora 34 release date. So I figured President’s Day was as good a day as any to do the upgrade.
It came out this Tuesday and last night I updated my laptop. The only thing I had to do for the upgrade was remove a python3-test package. Since I’m using virtual environments, for the most part I don’t care which Python packages the system has. So that was a nice, easy upgrade! Good job Fedora packagers and testers! Speaking of Python, it’ll be nice to start upgrading my projects to Python 3.9. (Fedora 33 includes the latest programming language versions as part of its “First” values)
It’s been about a month since Fedora 32 was released, so I decided to try and upgrade Supermario to Fedora 32. First I had to disable the dropbox repo since they don’t have a Fedora 32 binary yet. Other conflicts included:
bat in module
gimp in module
meson in module
ninja in module
pythnon3-pytest-testmon (doesn’t belong in a distupgrade repo)
python2-beautifulsoup neds python2-lxml
The python ones are no-brainer to me. I use virtual environments now so I don’t care about the system libraries. I can get rid of those.
Because I have this VM registered to Katello (Foreman plugin) to receive updates (basically as a way of both keeping track of the computers and VMs on my network and also to have a GUI to pulp for caching RPMs), I had to deal with Katello-Agent. The latest RPM in the official Foreman/Katello repos is unfortunately for Fedora 29. That version of Fedora has been out of maintenance for a long time. Maybe Foreman (upstream for Satellite) is just used by most of their customers for RHEL sites that don’t have any Fedora nodes? So I did find this copr that provides updated versions: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/slaanesh/system-management/
Recently upgraded my server to Fedora 31 as the Fedora 30 support window had closed. All I had to do was disable the bat Modular Repo. It wasn’t obvious I needed to do this at first, but I found a bugzilla that covered it. Then everything proceeded.
I also updated my main laptop to Fedora 32; it’s always my first upgrade since it’s not my main machine. That one required a few modular repos to be disabled as well as a bunch of conflicts from Python 2 packages. By using dnf’s –auto-erase (or whatever the command actually is), everything proceeded and seems to be running just fine. I was a little worried at first with the warning about coming back from a locked screen in KDE, but I decided I could live with it on the laptop. So far, either the issue doesn’t affect my laptop or I haven’t triggered the conditions.
Back when Fedora 30 came out, I updated my laptop, but I left my main computer and the HTPC on Fedora 29. The former because I was busy with something at the time and didn’t want the disruption of an upgrade; the latter because the family depends on it for entertainment. However, with Fedora 31 coming out next Tuesday, the support window of Fedora 29 is over. The HTPC didn’t give any issues when I started the upgrade (at of this time it’s still running the upgrade), but my main computer did. This time it complaint about ripright and whois-mkpasswd.
I was able to get Kurio, my netbook, to upgrade to Fedora 23 without issue. BlueYoshi, the living computer, is still unable to upgrade. So far it’s tripping up on dolphin-emu, OBS-MP, and some Gnome package. I’m not sure if that’s something that’ll be fixed as RPMFusion continues to update their Fedora 23 packages or if I’ll have to do the old uninstall/reinstall dance that I sometimes have to do with these non-free packages that don’t get QA’d for a Fedora release. Not going to be doing my main computer any time soon.
Tried to upgrade the living room computer to Fedora 23. As of the time when I tried, because the RPMFusion repo wasn’t ready for Fedora 23, it couldn’t upgrade. I’ll try again in a day or two if the repo is up.
As many of you know, according to the Google search terms that bring people here. I am of the not-so-humble opinion that Fedora’s upgrade process is about as pleasant as being forced to walk through the desert without a canteen of water. First of all, they recommend to just do a fresh install which is a non-starter for me. I’d have to waste way too much time restoring all my files and settings. Ubuntu and Debian seem to get me through upgrades without reinstalling without any problems. I blogged about the horrors up upgrading to Fedora 8 here and here. I blogged about how awesome the yum upgrade worked here,here,here, and here.
While new versions of Fedora have been pretty darned stable for a few years now, I usually wait a while after a release to upgrade. This year waiting ended up turning into just leaving it alone. But with February half-way done, we’re actually starting to get kind of close to the Fedora 34 release date. So I figured President’s Day was as good a day as any to do the upgrade.
Went ahead and upgraded. Only had to get rid of python2-twitter and an older nvidia package. Other than that it seems to be running relatively smoothly.
When I tried to upgrade the laptop a couple days ahead of the Tuesday release date, assuming that the sources were as good as gold at that point, the upgrade process complained about the Kdevelop Python plugin and didn’t want to proceed. I figured if this persisted past Tuesday I would just use it as an opportunity to try out PyCharm Community Edition. But once Tuesday came around I was able to upgrade to Fedora 31 with nary a problem. So that was probably the smoothest upgrade I’ve had since Fedora Core 1.
Back when Fedora 30 came out, I updated my laptop, but I left my main computer and the HTPC on Fedora 29. The former because I was busy with something at the time and didn’t want the disruption of an upgrade; the latter because the family depends on it for entertainment. However, with Fedora 31 coming out next Tuesday, the support window of Fedora 29 is over. The HTPC didn’t give any issues when I started the upgrade (at of this time it’s still running the upgrade), but my main computer did. This time it complaint about ripright and whois-mkpasswd.
My main computer is now on Fedora 24. This time around I only had to uninstall HDR Merge (which was from my COPR and I hadn’t built a Fedora 24 version yet) and OBS-Studio because there isn’t a Fedora 24 package for it yet. Not bad.
After rebooting, I didn’t have graphics. Then rebooting once more kicked the akmod into gear and now things appear to be working well. 2 more computers left to upgrade to Fedora 24 - the VM server and the Kodi living room box.
Fedora 24 was released yesterday. I updated Daisy, my big laptop, first since it’s not critical. If the update broke something I wouldn’t care. The only hitch it had was that I had to reinstall the RPMFusion repos from the RPM for Fedora 24. Otherwise it was saying that one of the packages wasn’t signed and refused to do the upgrade. Probably has something to do with the fact that for the last release or two, RPMFusion wasn’t exactly in the best of conditions. I’m currently updating my netbook (Kuribo), but that’s more of an all-evening affair since it’s just running on an Intel Atom. There are three more Fedora machines in the house - SuperMario, TanukiMario, and BlueYoshi. I’ll probably save the livingroom Kodi (BY) for last since everyone in the house uses that to watch TV.
Over its long tenure as a band, Five Iron Frenzy has had some really silly songs. Songs like “Arnold, Willis, and Mr. Drummond”, “Oh, Canada”, “Blue Comb ‘78”, “The Untimely Death of Brad”, “Where is Micah?”, and many others. But they’ve also always been a really political band. On their first album, Upbeats and Beatdowns, they had the song “Anthem” which spoke about politicians wrapping themselves in themes of nationalism. “Milestone” also dealt with racism and prejudice. “Beautiful America” tackled both politics and another constant theme across FIF’s albums - rampant capitalism. Over the rest of the discography there was:
On 6 Nov I went to my 2013 concert. Because of time and money concerns, Danielle and I typically go to a maximum of two concerts a year, and usually just one concert. I was completely unable to resist seeing Five Iron Frenzy in their first tour since breaking up nearly a decade ago. I didn’t really care for Reel Big Fish and I hoped that Five Iron Frenzy would go first as Co-headliner so I could leave early. In fact, although being a fan of ska, the only Reel Big Fish song I’d ever heard was “Everbody’s Doin’ the Fish” because it was the Florida Marlins’ theme song for a season or two. A large part of that comes from the fact that when I got into ska, in the 1990s, I was only into Christian music to the exclusion of secular music - as was encouraged by my middle school church. (My high school church actually shied away from Christian music, which I thought was weird, considering how good it had gotten by the early 2000s) So I listed to Five Iron Frenzy, The OC Supertones, and The Skadaddles. This was going to be my first Five Iron Frenzy concert in nearly 15 years when I saw them at a festival in Florida (and actually filmed a pretty decent video bootleg)
This year I bought LOTS of albums. I don’t know if it’s the most albums I’ve purchased in one year since writing these blog posts or even since keeping track of Scrobbles. I do know that while I listened to my music randomly, in general, I did also listen to entire albums whenever I purchased one. Sometimes I’d listen to the album a few times and other times I’d take the album purchase as an opportunity to review the artist’s previous work. I know that was the case with Five Iron Frenzy (although that was also concert prep as I mentioned a few days ago), Relient K, I Fight Dragons, and Fall Out Boy. It was a very fun year for me, musically. Kacey Musgraves, for example, was a reminder that country music doesn’t have to suck. Disclosure made me realize that I could still like loop-heavy electronic music. I hope that I can continue to explore new sounds in 2014.
This quarter I mostly listened to my music on pure random with a few variations which’ll be accounted for below. This finally allowed The Beatles to place in 2013. In the last few weeks I just listened to music that I added in this quarter to make sure I had a chance to get to know some of the newer songs.
This quarter was a mix of listening to the music I had at work and listening on pure random. Once again Amarok lost the first played and last played stats. Of all the stats to lose, these are the least detrimental, but it makes the “don’t play songs I’ve heard in the last x days” playlists not work. So I just went on pure random and rediscovered some music I’d forgotten about. Once again no Beatles on the top 15. We’ll see if they can rectify that next quarter. (Note: I have added Amazon affiliate links this time around. If you use them to buy the music, it helps support this site)
For this quarter I’ve gone back and forth between picking albums to listen to and having dynamic playlists determine what I listen to. For most of March I was listening to a bunch of free South by Southwest samplers with some pretty GREAT music. Not a lot of repeat among the artists there so none of them appear on this list. Some of those songs could potentially end up in the most listened song list at the end of the year.
Throughout the month of October I alternated between listening to newly acquired music (of which I had quite a bit) and a dynamic playlist that was weighted so that most of the music had auto-ratings above 90, less music above 75, and even less above 50. Any song that I listened to only once would fit in the third category. After that, if I skipped it just once it would fall out of the group. So it gave me a nice mix of music including forgotten favorites. Now that I’ve listened to a good chunk of my library since the last time the Amarok database was corrupted I may modify the playlist to include the caveat that it couldn’t have been played in the last x days. I’m not sure if I want to make the date large enough that I only hear songs once per quarter or my standard two week waiting period. Given how little time I have to listen to music nowadays I might go for the 90 days. I also spent some chunks of time listening to my music on random on Google Music. That’s completely random so I end up hearing some songs I didn’t even remember ever acquiring. A lot of my new music came from Jamendo when I got an email with the month’s most popular songs and I decided to do a search for ska. Although I really enjoy ska, I got into it rather late so I don’t have very much ska music. (Mostly just Five Iron Frenzy, Save Ferris, No Doubt, and the Orange County Supertones - who are an OK ska band - I mostly like their least ska songs)
Because the pandemic left me at home for a couple months, this year I played about double the amount of games from my previous record. You can watch the video below or read the text below that to find out what I thought of the games I played this year and which game I named as my 2020 Game of the Year.
Gwent (73 hours 24 minutes): Other than playing the beta a few years ago, the last time I played a CCG was Magic the Gathering back in the mid-1990s. I had no idea I would end up so addicted to this game for the first half of 2020. Eventually what took me away from the game is the fact that to maximize your experience with the game, you have to play every day. And I just have so many other games I want to play, books I want to read, the kids and wife to hang out with. I couldn’t give that much to a game. I do still have it on my rotation, so I get to it now and again. When I play, I find it quite fun, so I think Gwent will be with me for a while.
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
The next project I wanted to work on was to see if maybe my environment monitoring might be slightly more reliable with a Raspberry Pi than with an Arduino. So I wanted to do some comparisons. For my bathroom IoT project, I am using:
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
Although I’ve had a website since the mid-90s, it was 2005 or thereabouts that I first started hosting my own sites rather than relying on other sites. The first bit of hosting involved blogging and I tried a few different software packages before settling on Wordpress. And other than playing around with phpBB for my family and trying out Drupal for a bit for another site, that was it for a long time. Then Google abandoned Google reader so I moved to ttrss. And it was awesome and I didn’t have to worry it would ever go away because I was hosting it. But then this year I learned that Google Music was going to be going away and all the users were going to be pushed to Youtube Music. Unsure of whether my uploaded tracks would really migrate over (Amazon and some others have recently decided they weren’t going to host personally updated tracks), I decided to host Ampache. This had the side-benefit of actually allowing me to listen to my music collection at work since work blocks anything from Google Play. The most recent bit of self-hosting was because Google is about to get rid of Hangouts. Or rather, push all the regular Joes off in favor of making it a business tool. So that, coupled with Slack no longer working at work, led me to start up a Matrix server. That’s been plenty of fun, especially figuring out how to Federate, which allows me to access any open rooms from any other Matrix server.
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
Somewhere around 15 years ago, I started learning Python because I’d gotten deep into genealogy and started using the free and open source project Gramps. As I was also pretty deep into free software (somewhere around that time I became a supporting member of the FSF for a few years - and I think my smile.amazon.com still donates to them) I got interested in the idea of helping projects by contributing code. Python seemed like it wasn’t too hard to learn (compared to C++), so I started learning. I never did end up contributing to Gramps as I found GUI programming incredibly hard. In fact, it was something like 6 years ago before I created some useful GUIs (that weren’t copied out of tutorials) and only last year that I started making good, competent GUIs using the QT toolkit.
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
With the twins, I messed around with a Neopixel strip. Not sure what I’d do with one in a future project, but at least I know how to program it in MakeCode now. Our project:
Since I’ve been making a lot of great progress programming with the kids in Scratch, I bought some Circuit Playground Expresses to program with the kids. The Circuit Playground Express can program in Arduino’s C dialect, CircuitPython, or Microsoft MakeCode, which uses blocks like Scratch. Today Scarlett and I made our first useful bit of code, a digital spinner we called The Sibling Chooser. Here’s the code, and you can see that it is indeed like Scratch:
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go?
Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below!
Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much.
C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on my game, but I did start a new GameDev.tv class.
Learning Ruby? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say I learned Ruby. I did finish the book Ruby Wizardry and I took copious notes. But until I do some practice - maybe via some code katas, I don’t think I’ll have solidified it in my mind.
3D Game Dev? Nope, not really.
Rust and Go? Not even close. Although I did make sure to get some books on the languages.
So, what happened? On the programming front, I wanted to continue my journey to truly master Python after having used it at a surface level for the past 15ish years. I dedicated myself to doing the Python Morsels challenges (more on that below) and working through various Python development exercises. Outside of programming, the time I had off from COVID was used to play with my kids and they wanted to play lots of video games. So we took advantage of having way more time than usual to do that. So a lot of my goals slipped. We’ll get to 2021 predictions at the end, so let’s take a look at 2020!
Back in May, I set up my Raspberry Pi B as my garage door monitor. Unfortunately it stopped working, I haven’t investigated yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it got hit with the infamous SD card corruption that was a big problem with the early Raspberry Pi boards. (I think I read it’s much less of a problem with the Raspberry Pi 4) So I decided to go ahead and switch it with a Raspberry Pi Zero W, especially since you can get it with headers from Adafruit for only $14. As a bonus, it’s got a better processor (same as the Raspberry Pi 3, I think) and built-in WiFi. It’s also got a smaller footprint, but that doesn’t matter to me for where it’s mounted. So now I’m back to having a Raspberry Pi B without a job to do (assuming the hardware is fine and it just ended up in an unbootable state. I’ve also now got a usb WiFi module for it, so maybe that’ll help me think of something for it to do. I think the Raspberry Pi rover project I got in a Humble Bundle uses a 1st gen Raspberry Pi, but I’d been thinking of using a 4th gen Pi in order to maybe do some more fun stuff with it like maybe some openCV based Computer Vision and/or machine learning.
As I mentioned before, I got a Raspberry Pi Zero W to replace my Arduino MKR WIFI 1010 and ENV board in the bathroom. My Pimoroni Enviro Mini pHAT (or bonnet, as Adafruit calls them) finally arrived a few days ago, so I setup a git repository for my code. The Pimoroni git Enviro+/Enviro Mini repository has a one-line configuration, but I’d rather do things manually so I know what I’m doing and also so I can set up a proper requirements.txt in my Python venv.
The next project I wanted to work on was to see if maybe my environment monitoring might be slightly more reliable with a Raspberry Pi than with an Arduino. So I wanted to do some comparisons. For my bathroom IoT project, I am using:
As I’ve done for the past few years now, a self-portrait at the end of the year to document how I looked this year. This year I went with both a split-tone shot and a black and white shot.
I thought last year’s description was perfect, so I’m going to repurpose it here. Yeah, yeah – even before Instagram was a thing my family was already making fun of me for taking self-portraits or for my 365 project of self-portraits 8 or so years ago. But for me this is part of my most primal photographic urge; even stronger than the urge to create art. It’s the urge to document my life and the life of those around me. And so I take these self-portraits at roughly the same time every year to be able to view them as a series documenting my aging. And so here is the one I took in 2019.
As I continue to work through my backlog of photos from last year (I’m finally done with 2018 after this post!), I come to my annual self-portrait. Yeah, yeah - even before Instagram was a thing my family was already making fun of me for taking self-portraits or for my 365 project of self-portraits 8 or so years ago. But for me this is part of my most primal photographic urge; even stronger than the urge to create art. It’s the urge to document my life and the life of those around me. And so I take these self-portraits at roughly the same time every year to be able to view them as a series documenting my aging. And so here is the one I took in 2018.
I wanted to do this earlier - somewhere around 2 month portraits. I was re-energized to try the idea after seeing someone do a photo that made it look like their kid was bounding out of the crib with her stuffed animals. I did not take the Sam and Stella images from some other random image. They were right there where you see them. All I did was erase my body (or I’d be in here thrice). Still, if I were to do it again, I’d have Sam and Stella flying near me rather than against the wall. They end up too small and it lessens the impact of the shot. Well, there’s always next time. (And there’s always less edited shots!)
Welcome to a new set of posts in which I take a look at the t-shirts I’ve accumulated and comment on why I have them and what they mean to me.
It was the 1990s. I was fully into my Christian revival and the USA was into swing music. I was at a concert to see my new, favorite ska band, Five Iron Frenzy.
Whether or not you consider my 365 Project to be a year’s worth of selfies depends largely on whether you believe in the point of 365 projects. But I would say the selfie is more like the pictures you see on Facebook. Like others I viewed them with disdain. Then I came across an interesting article.
I know most people hate selfies. They groan and complain about them, from the duck lips to the filters. Why, just the word “selfie” can induce legendary amounts of eyerolling.
I forgot what the term was called, but you know how it goes: you learn a new concept and suddenly see examples everywhere. (Or look into buying a new car only to discover that “everyone” is driving it) Once I jumped into the rabbit hole of Disney Princess Culture and our daughters, it seemed to be never-ending. I happened to come across a post in my feed reader in which a photographer was trying to figure out how to photograph her daughter for her 5 year old portraits:
One of the biggest trends on flickr is to start a 365 Project. This usually means taking one self-portrait a day for an entire year. This project is often misunderstood by those outside of flickr, especially since they’re used to the selfie-culture of MySpace and Facebook. It’s not a vanity project. A 365 Project is about taking the adage about becoming a better writer through writing every day to photography. It also has a special bonus of teaching the photographer what it’s like to be the subject. Many of us photo-geeks are behind the camera way more often than we’re in front of it. Sometimes we struggle with how to communicate to our subjects how to achieve the vision we have in our head. By being both the photographer and the subject, we learn to appreciate both points of view.
Back when I compiled the Top 200 Photos feature, this was #10:
and now it’s:
which was not in the top 20 before, so it has really gained a lot of views. That comes from the fact that it’s on Pixel-Peer as an example of that lens’ abilities.
The original Top 200 Photo in the #18th spot was:
and the current #18 photos is:
this photo has been on the rise ever since Bradley Manning’s trial started up.
Since it took about a year for my Top 200 photos feature to run its course, I wanted to go back and see how things changed within the Top 20 in that year. When I posted the feature, this was #20:
Reflections and Self-Portraits in today’s Top 200 Photo.
photo #116 is:
Ever since I was young I was fascinated by visual depictions of infinity. It’s such a strange concept to get one’s mind around and I’m a visual person. So I’ve always loved looking into parallel mirrors. I also used to love hooking up a video camera to a TV and then filming the TV. The infinite scene there was so awesome to observe.
No #140 because it was already covered. As I write this, photo #140 has 416 views and photo #121 has 459 views. So they’re still close enough that just one view can cause a photo to jump 3 or more spots up.
photo #139 is:
Another boring night in Maryland. Another cool photo with the wife. I had been reading a book of famous photographers and there was this one guy who took photos of beautiful women, but always framed the shot so that he would be reflected in a mirror. So I decided to go with that. Danielle decided to play with kimonos Dan had brought back from his trip to Japan and put on some makeup so I could take photos. I think my favorite aspect of the photo is her half smile.
I was practicing my macro photography and I chose to try and photograph myself. And I decided to focus on my stubble because that seems to be a perpetual feature of mine. I was very happy with the comments I ended up getting.
For a while I was doing yoga at our local gym at work. It was quite a revelation. Media usually portrays it as a girly exercise that’s just a bunch of weird stretching poses. Yoga actually requires quite a bit of strength - especially in the “core” muscles. A lot of the poses left me feeling as tired as a weight training workout. I enjoyed it a lot and I only stopped going because my schedule changed and made it hard for me to attend. I’d definitely try it again if I could.
I’m writing this post two days before my 365 project ends. It will be published morning upon which I will take my last photo. I decided to end it with an eight-part story. You can start here and follow the photos in the set “The Dark Assignment” which should be open on the right. (Better than going directly to the set where you might end up seeing the end instead of following along) I’m not going to post my 365 retrospective now, that will come after I’m completely done. But I haven’t blogged about my 365 project since last October. So I wanted to share some of my favorite photos since then.
In September I made two new recipes. One was the Lamb and Grilled Onion burger from Weber’s Big Book of Burgers. I also tried a hot and fast recipe for pulled pork from Raichlen’s Project Fire. The taste was good, but the biggest hit was the recipe he had for a mustard sauce.
beef short rib ragu
For October the only new recipe I made was America’s Test Kitchen’s recipe for beef short rib ragu. I really enjoyed a different take on a ragu than the more French and Cuban versions I’d had in the past. It is definitely a recipe I’d like to make again.
As food stocks started to normalize towards the middle of COVID summer, I started to take advantage and try out more new dishes. It also helped that we were FINALLY able to find yeast again!
Chicago-style pepperoni pan pizza
hoisin-glazed baby back ribs
oatmeal-rasin bread
Grilled brined zucchini with cilantro-yogurt sauce
succotash
vanilla icebox cookies
The Chicago-style pepperoni pan pizza was one of the first recipes I wrote down to make. However, I never seemed to have both time and pepperoni at the same time. So I finally made it. I think America’s Test Kitchen’s decision to have me precook the pepperoni to render some of the fat helped both mellow the pepperoni taste (my kids were able to eat it) and keep this from being a greasy mess.
May was Cuban food month. I’d received a new cookbook of recipes from the Miami diaspora and back in Cuba. So I tried my hand at a few new recipes. Technically, I’d done the breaded steak (usually called Chicken Fried Steak in the USA) and pork shoulder Cuban style before, but this was the first time doing it with these recipes. I was very happy with all the results, although I learned a few things along the way for the next time I make these dishes.
When it came to new dishes, April was all about bread. First, I made a no-knead bread with America’s Test Kitchen’s recipe.
Almost No-Knead Bread
It came out OK. I actually tried it again the following day to try and get a darker crust. The funny thing is that this is one of the easiest breads to make and yet it’s the one I’ve had the worst results with. The crumb wasn’t as open as it was supposed to be and for all the time it took to proof it was pretty meh.
While I did a lot of cooking in March, I only made one new dish - Brown Sugar cookies. I’d had regular sugar cookies my entire life. I’m pretty sure this is the first time I had sugar cookies made with brown sugar instead. The brown sugar definitely took these cookies to a whole other taste realm where the molasses in the sugar added another dimension to the taste. I’m not saying it’s supplanted [white] sugar cookies in my heart, but that there’s a place for each of them. If the kids ate more cookies or if I didn’t care about my heart health (most cookies have a LOT of butter) I’d make these a lot more often.
Very low number of new dishes. Mostly because I was obsessed with programming and Gwent.
Both recipes were from America’s Test Kitchen. The pizza recipe was a challenge to be able to make a pizza that would be ready in an hour and not suffer too much from not having the pizza ferment for a few days. I thought it was alright. Despite liberally dusting the pizza peel, had a hard time getting the pizza off.
Without a doubt, the biggest story to tell about my cooking in 2019 is learning how to make, and no longer be intimidated by, breads. I made 15 different new breads and biscuits this year, including new family favorites like the Amish Friendship Bread and Brown Butter-Cardemom Banana bread. Also, there were the harder breads like the braided cinnamon bread and hot cross buns.
cinnamon swirl bread
After spending years wanting to make my own bacon, I finally did!
December had a relatively low number of new dishes. I made a pasta bolognese from a new cookbook that I found rich and delicious. I had an OK attempt at flat bread. I needed to roll out the bread a bit thinner because it didn’t really fulfill the “flat” part of flat bread. The Spanish garlic soup was pretty good, except they didn’t mention how much Sherry vinegar to use and I guessed a little too high. The coffee cake was pretty good, and the first time I’d made one.
Lots of Mexican food and a some other neat, ambitious dishes in August. The by this point the chicken chilaquiles were one of the oldest chicken dishes on my To-Make list. I just never happened to have the ingredients around and I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a hit or a flop. Finally, I decided to do it! I went overly ambitious and made my own corn tortillas, which I then toasted in the oven to create chips which I then put into the chilaquilas. It was quite delicious. On the other hand I was not a fan of “Dave’s Fish Tacos” from the Weber Charcoal Grilling book. But, redemption came in the form of Easy Weeknight Chicken Tacos, one of the newest additions to my To-Make list from America’s Test Kitchen’s Cook it in your Dutch Oven. It had a good blend of citrus and Mexican flavors. I’d definitely like to make it again.
I finally made bacon from scratch for the first time, so that deserves its own gallery:
One of the things that had been stopping me was the fact that Costco only sold pork bellies already sliced for Korean dishes. Then, the weekend I was going to ask them if I could buy a full pork belly, they had one there. They said customers had been asking for it so they were going to start selling some whole. It was a pretty neat experience making my own bacon. I can see why it’s so expensive - it involves a lot of waiting and a lot of labor.
The biggest dish for me this month was the pit beef, which I’d been wanting to make for at least two years now. I finally went ahead and smoked it according to Meathead’s recipe (along with his recipe for Tiger Sauce - a type of horseradish). I was afraid after waiting for so long I’d have hyped it up too much in my head, but it turned out to be my new favorite way to eat roast beef.
Sometimes you only think you don’t like a dish because you simply don’t like the way it’s been prepared for you in the past. This has happened to me with a LOT of foods. Most recently I realized had written off oatmeal simply because my tastes didn’t match that of the others around me. From childhood to adulthood I’d only been given instant oatmeal if I’d asked to taste oatmeal. It has a place in people’s lives, but like most instant foods, the instant version is a pale imitation of the real thing. Then, when I got married my wife ate steel cut oats. I tried them, but again didn’t like them. It wasn’t until Red Hat Summit this year when I ended up trying them again because I wasn’t really feeling the other breakfast options. And it turned out that I could indeed enjoy oatmeal. It’s just that I liked it more al dente than my wife. Armed with the knowledge that oatmeal didn’t have to be mushy, I set about figuring out the right water to oats ratios to get it to the consistency I preferred. Now, at least once a week I have oatmeal with some fruit and, if we have some in the house, nuts. In the photo above I have some brown suger, but I’ve stopped adding that. With the sugars in the fruit, it’s not necessary. I do add a little vanilla extract and, if the flavors make sense, some cinnamon or cardamom.
I didn’t cook many new dishes in May, although I did have some encores of dishes that the family enjoyed. Since there are too few dishes to group them by theme, I’ll just go chronologically this month.
Ever since getting America’s Test Kitchen’s book on Mexican dishes, I’d made some great enchiladas a few times. Both their beef and ground beef enchiladas bring some great flavors to the table. The former is a bit more flavorful, but it also takes longer. So I wanted to see how the casserole version would come out. Overall, it’s very similar in flavor and tastes very good. Where it excels is as a party or potluck food. In the same dish that only makes about 12 conventional enchiladas, you can feed a lot more people because individual squares can be cut to any size. Also, like a lasagna, it has layers so there’s more to eat for a given amount of space on the dish.
April was a month for getting a little more ambitious as well as trying variations on dishes I’d made before. Among the variations I would count the tilefish, grilled chicken thighs, and bratwust hot tub. The tilefish was just a variation on the Raichlen grilled fish recipe I’d tried before with blackfish. This time I removed the scales to ensure the flavoring on the outside of the fish wouldn’t be wasted. It still wasn’t quite what I wanted, but I think grilled fish like this one is a great candidate for an after-grill marinade. I’ll try that next time. The grilled chicken thighs were a variation on the gochujang paste recipe from America’s Test Kitchen. I liked the mustard-tarragon paste, but Danielle was pretty blase about it. Finally, the bratwurst hot tub was the third such variation on braising bratwurst on the grill. It was fine, but I prefer Meathead and America’s Test Kitchen’s versions to Raichlen’s, which was the one I did here.
March was a bad time to have gluten allergies in my house. I did a lot of baking and most of it turned out great. The bake-sale muffins (used blueberries) in particular were a huge hit. I never knew blueberry muffins could taste so good. I’m kind of mad at every place I’ve ever eaten them before for making me think they couldn’t taste all that great. On the flip side, I was not a fan of the banana-poppy seed muffins. I think for now I’ll stick to banana bread and banana snack cake when I need to get rid of some ripe bananas. The lemon-buttermilk pound cake fell somewhere in the middle. It was good, but I find the loaf lemon pound cake I make to be easier and taste just as good. Then again, I have some mods I need to make to this recipe next time around to maybe get a better consistency.
February is when I started really getting confident about my bread-making skills. Most of it was great although I didn’t like either of the two buttermilk biscuit recipes I made in February. By contrast the Amish Cinnamon Bread (ATK’s version of Amish Friendship bread) and Brown Butter-Cardamom Banana breads were SO GOOD. Both have been made again in the few months since. Everyone who was here to celebrate a birthday party couldn’t get enough of the Amish bread. The North Carolina cheese biscuits were another of those recipes where Danielle was skeptical when I told her what I was making, but ended up really liking them. The pork posole was good, but flavor-wise reminded me a lot of the chili from the same ATK book. The Vermouth cracked potatoes from Milk Street were certainly a different flavor than I’m used to for potatoes, but I wasn’t dying to make it again. By contrast I loved the stuffed chicken. It had a pesto I finally loved (no pine nuts and lots of basil) and great flavor. It was my mom’s favorite dish for the weekend she was visiting. The skillet turkey burgers were also great. The panade made it the best turkey burgers I’d ever had even though I would still prefer a beef burger if given a choice. Finally, the thai chicken soup was good and spicy.
Macadamia nut, White Chocolate, and Cranberry Cookies
In January I made a lot less new things than in previous months, but I did prove that even in sub-freezing temperatures I still BBQ and Smoke. My least favorite were the macadamia nut, white chocolate, and cranberry cookies. I’ve liked white chocolate and macadamia nut cookies in the past, but this was my first time adding cranberries. But it was the macadamia nuts I wasn’t a fan of this time. I’m not sure why, I just didn’t liek the taste. The fattoush was a neat taste for a new salad and I learned how easy it is to make your own pita chips! The glazed ribs were OK, but I didn’t fill the water pan in the Weber Smokey Mountain and I think that led to a more smokey/burnt taste as the glaze dripped off and into the empty water pan. The Big Butts Pork Steak was pretty awesome, though. The recipe also contained my favorite home-made BBQ sauce. I definitely look forward to revisiting that recipe!
Bourbon Burger with Caramelized Onions and Horseradish sauce
chopped winter salad with butternut squash
Egg and Sausage McMuffin
English Muffins
English Muffins
Ground Beef Enchladas
Ladybird Johnson’s Barbecue Sauce
roti canai
Brussels Sprouts with Lemon
Thai-Style Pork Burgers
It’s hard to say which dish was the best one, because lots of them came out great. But it’s pretty easy to say which was the worst - the roti canai came out very much unlike what I was trying to replicate despite following a recipe that went along with a youtube video. Second worst were the English muffins, but they were WAY better than the roti was. They just came out more dense than I was hoping for and they didn’t quite have the nooks and crannies they were supposed to. This was a relatively fast recipe from my Cook it in Cast Iron book. I’ve got another in Bread Illustrated that has a longer rise overnight in the fridge so maybe that one will come out better. Lady Bird Johnson’s BBQ sauce came from Legends of Texas Barbecue, a part of a Humble Cookbook bundle. I took it with me to my mom’s house for Christmas. It was the first time I’d ever made it, but I thought it came out really well - it got lots of kudos. The ground beef enchiladas were a great approximation of the beef enchiladas which normally take twice as long to cook. The Egg and sausage McMuffin came from learning how to make the egg cook the right way by reading about it on Serious Eats. It was pretty good, but I was wishing I had some Canadian bacon instead so it could be more like the real thing. The Brussels sprouts with lemon was a dish I made to try something different with the veggie and it turned out great. It was a very simple recipe that I was able to memorize and so I also made it during Christmas at my folks’ and people really liked it - even those who professed not to like Brussels sprouts. The chopper winter salad with butternut squash came from Dinner Illustrated and it was a very fun, new type of salad that I’d never eaten before. Danielle has made roasted butternut squash before, but we usually consume it via soup. Finally, the two burgers. Of the two, the Bourbon burger was the more universal hit. Danielle was really impressed with my caramelized onions (given my newbie status on making them) and the horseradish sauce was pretty good, too. While I liked the Thai-style pork burgers, Danielle wasn’t quite into the taste of Asian-style pork in a burger. That said, I also cooked them in the carbon steel pan to try and get more use out of it, but it was just a little smaller than the 12 inch pan the recipe called for and so the pan was a bit crowded and I think that deterred some Maillard reaction from happening.
While I was swimming last week I came to the realization that my daily snack between lunch and dinner hits pretty much all the food groups. I usually have some afternoon tea with milk (dairy - check!), a couple servings of whatever fruit we happen to have at the house (fruit/veggie - check!), and peanut-butter filled pretzels (carbs, protein, and fats/salts - check, check check!)
The biggest success of the new dishes in Nov 2018 was the grilled chicken fajitas. We already had a recipe we often used for grilled chicken fajitas, but I wanted to stretch out and used the recipe from America’s Test Kitchen Mexican Recipes book. The biggest disappointment was the Georgian Chicken Soup (Chikhirtma). It was almost universally reviled in the house. I thought ti was fine, but everyone else hated it. The Milk Street Barbecue Rub No. 2 gives poultry a taste similar to satay, so it works quite well with peanut sauce. The mushroom pork omelet was promising, but I added way too many mushrooms because they called for mushrooms by weight and I used dried mushrooms rather than regular, hydrated mushrooms. Everyone liked the chicken tonkatsu, but only I liked the tonkatsu sauce. Finally, the donuts were a bummer, but I think that’s because it didn’t rise as much as it was supposed to, leaving it a bit dense.
In September I tried out four new recipes. The grilled breakfast quesadillas were surprisingly great. An egg is cracked into a ring of cheese and topped with grilled bacon and cilantro. The cauliflower gratin was WAY too rich for just Danielle and I to finish it. But I could see it working well for a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. The carnitas were a great indoor version. Finally, for the first time I grilled a full, in tact fish. My father-in-law had given me some sea bass he caught and I filled it with aromatics and then covered it in more herbs and aromatics after grilling. It was very, very good.
It’s been 2.5 years since I discovered Amazingribs.com and Meathead when I was trying to figure out why my BBQ wasn’t as good as the best BBQ joints I’d visited. Last year I ordered the 2016 and 2017 Annuals from Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country as well as getting into Chris Kimball’s spin-off Milk Street. This year I continued my journey with the purchase of a bunch of cookbooks in a Humble Bundle sale as well as ATK’s Dinner Illustrated and Milk Street’s Tuesday Nights, both of which focus on weeknight meals that can be completed in 1 hour or less. I also began to take some steps towards being able to cook intuitively via Samin’s Salt Fat Acid Fire which I haven’t read, but I did see the Netflix show of the same name.
We’ve been growing plants and herbs at the house for a few years now (but not as many as I wish we had in retrospect). But, as far as I could find with a cursory search, I’d never done an end of summer summary of how the growing season went for us. I know there are still somewhere between a few weeks and a couple months before first frost, but I don’t expect anything to radically change between now and then.
For the first time in a few years, my mom was going to be in town for Mother’s Day. We didn’t have a ton of events to attend or anything, so I asked her what she would like for dinner if she could have anything. She said she wanted prime rib, so I figured it was the perfect time for me to try out a prime rib roast on one of my BBQs. Meathead has lots of tips for eliminating most of the hassle of making a prime rib roast. First of all, remove the ribs - they only serve to block heat and keep the roast from cooking evenly. Second, use twine to make it into a cylinder so it cooks evenly from the outside to the inside.
We were debating what to eat. There are a lot of dishes we like, but it’s easy to forget all of them when you’re constantly thinking of the half dozen foods your toddlers eat and the dozen or so foods your preschooler eats. Lamb was on sale at Costco, so I told the wife we should have lamb and I would cook it outside and we’d have gyros. Well, modified gyros because we used naan for the bread instead of pita. The image above is Danielle’s wet brine for the meat. Based on the size of the chunks Danielle chopped up, I decided to do a reverse sear.
I’ve been perfecting my diner style hamburgers (aka quarterpounders) thanks to the tips from Amazingribs.com. But there’s a guy at work I talk to about grilling, BBQ, and smoking. He was telling me about his bacon cheeseburgers. I thought about how I tend not to like bacon cheeseburgers in restaurants. Usually either the bacon or the cheese is substandard and I end up just preferring a hamburger. But then I thought about one key thing - when I make the burgers I decide all the ingredients.
For a long time we’d been avoiding New York Strip Steak. I’d tried to grill some a long time ago and it just couldn’t hold a candle to a Ribeye. But recently my father-in-law bought a bunch and gave us some so I gave it another shot. I took all I’d learned in the past year or so from Meathead and used my thermometer to get a prefer medium steak. Here’s where I ended up:
On 30 April of this year I came across an article on Eater about how restaurants can deal with No-Shows. I didn’t even know this was a big enough thing that restaurants have multiple strategies to deal with it. Every time I’ve made a reservation to a restaurant, I’ve gone. I set reservations because I (or I and my wife and whoever else is involved) have decided to go out to eat and want to be sure we’ll not have to wait too long to be seated. Or, in the of exclusive restaurants, ensure we’ll actually get a table. I could understand people not showing up because of a life event - someone gets sick or dies. But I don’t understand the mindset of making a reservation without an intention to attend. Additionally, the biggest reason I make reservations is, as stated above, to ensure I get a table in a reasonable amount of time. Nearly every place I’ve ever made reservations at has a line out the door and even with a reservation I sometimes have to wait 15-30 minutes for my table. That said, they wouldn’t write this whole article if there weren’t a bunch of people skipping out on reservations so I wanted to answer their suggestions.
Rather than pile up my daily photos whenever I forget to post them, I’ll just post them one at a time and build up a stream of photos. I haven’t been in much a textual blogging mood recently. Perhaps that’ll return eventually.
Whenever I’m in Oahu, I love eating at this ramen joint. If your only experience of ramen is cup o’ noodles, you haven’t had real ramen. Check it out next time you’re in a heavy Japanese neighborhood. This place has good price and service and the food is pretty filling - especially if you get the rice and dumplings.
I’ve recently begun to notice a disturbing trend: anything that’s good for you will cost you more. The most serious infraction comes from the food supply. When I go to buy ground beef, cheapest of the beef products, there are three tiers of product available for me to purchase. The cheapest product is ground beef with the default amount of fat. Since ground beef is already among the scrap left from a cow, this fat content can be pretty high. Since I eat ground beef fairly regularly, about once every two weeks or less, this is unacceptable. So I can choose 95% lean ground beef or 97% lean ground beef. However, these products are more expensive. In other words, economics would tell me to eat the meat that was worse for my body. However, I am a rational human being who is not a slave to any theorems of economics; I choose to buy the expensive 97% lean ground beef. Of course, if I really want to get a leaner beef product, I can go from ground beef (where $5 will feed me many times) to filet mignion (where $16 will feed me twice - max). Not only will it contain more vitamins and less fat, but the tenderness of the meat is also healthier for my digestive system, and, to a trivial degree, my teeth.
It’s been a very, very long time since I tried using a different shell than the bash shell. Back some 10-15 years ago I remember hearing about fish and trying it out. I think it broke some bash paradigms so I went back to bash. I could have sworn I tried zsh in the past, but I could be wrong. I know the last shell I tried out didn’t let me use ‘*’ during a dnf update to update all the packages that start with the same prefix, say all the 1500-ish texlive packages. That annoyed me so I went back to bash. If it was on this computer it was on a previous install or previous /home directory because I couldn’t find any evidence of zsh. No profiles or other such dot files that I could find. (Not that I looked too hard).
First up is tldr. This something I’ve wanted ever since I started with Linux 16 years ago! Basically it gives you the examples part of a man page. For both of these I’m going to use a screenshot because copy/pasting it into the blog doesn’t do it justice.
Whenever you’re working with the file directory structure or with text in general, you can’t do any better than using the command line. For example, I was recently copying a bunch of files off of some old CDs because I was noticing that they were starting to develop bit-rot. (I couldn’t access all the files anymore) For reasons I don’t wish to get into right now, it’s easier to not have spaces in filenames in Linux. It’s not because Linux can’t handle spaces in filenames - it can. But if you’re a semi-hacker like me, spaces in filenames can wreak total havoc on your scripts. So I wanted to remove spaces off of around 200 or so files.
One of the best things about Linux is the ability to write shell scripts. These are most often used as utility programs to do repetitive tasks for you. I just wrote my first one on Sunday and here it is followed by commentary.
It’s been a very, very long time since I tried using a different shell than the bash shell. Back some 10-15 years ago I remember hearing about fish and trying it out. I think it broke some bash paradigms so I went back to bash. I could have sworn I tried zsh in the past, but I could be wrong. I know the last shell I tried out didn’t let me use ‘*’ during a dnf update to update all the packages that start with the same prefix, say all the 1500-ish texlive packages. That annoyed me so I went back to bash. If it was on this computer it was on a previous install or previous /home directory because I couldn’t find any evidence of zsh. No profiles or other such dot files that I could find. (Not that I looked too hard).
It’s been a very, very long time since I tried using a different shell than the bash shell. Back some 10-15 years ago I remember hearing about fish and trying it out. I think it broke some bash paradigms so I went back to bash. I could have sworn I tried zsh in the past, but I could be wrong. I know the last shell I tried out didn’t let me use ‘*’ during a dnf update to update all the packages that start with the same prefix, say all the 1500-ish texlive packages. That annoyed me so I went back to bash. If it was on this computer it was on a previous install or previous /home directory because I couldn’t find any evidence of zsh. No profiles or other such dot files that I could find. (Not that I looked too hard).
Scarlett created these models one day in October when she was feeling creative. I liked the models so much that I built a small box for photographing them. I fell behind on my photos, so I’m posting my favorite poses now.
Scarlett created these models one day in October when she was feeling creative. I liked the models so much that I built a small box for photographing them. I fell behind on my photos, so I’m posting my favorite poses now.
On 8 Dec I saw the announcement that Red Hat (which had made CentOS an in-house distro a year or two ago) was changing CentOS from being a free clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to focusing solely on CentOS Stream. ( The CentOS press release; The Red Hat press release) This would make the progression of features and elements: Fedora -> CentOS Stream -> RHEL. At first, like many others, I felt hurt by this change. It will take place at the end of next year. Usually CentOS follows a support widow similar to that of RHEL, so I was expecting a decade or so for the servers I converted from CentOS 7 to CentOS 8. While I generally run Fedora on many of my computers, I prefer not to have to upgrade every 6 months for my servers. That’s a level of disruption I could do without. That said, after I read this blog post, I had a slightly more nuanced view of things. I still think it should have taken effect with CentOS 9, which I think is due in the next year or so (RH is accelerating releases of new RHELs). But it certainly makes a clearer upstream to downstream path for Red Hat.
A little over a year ago, I put CentOS 7 on my Acer Aspire One. We had no idea when RHEL 8 was coming out (turns out just a few months later when I was at the Red Hat Summit, it was the release party for RHEL 8), so 7 went on there. And at Red Hat Summit I learned that, while running CentOS 7, suspend worked on that netbook. However, it was already pretty old by the time I put it on the netbook and it was missing certain libraries and had old versions of libraries like Go so I couldn’t do something like install Weechat-Matrix on there.
Often people try and dissuade you from installing CentOS onto a laptop because they say the chipsets on the laptops are so varied it’s likely you will end up unable to use your laptop because the drivers aren’t there. Well, I don’t know if it’s because this netbook is so old (I mean, netbooks as a category don’t exist anymore - having been supplanted by tablets) or just uses common chipsets, but when I ended up with some Fedora configuration error that I didn’t want to bother debugging (I hate using the netbook on an everyday basis because the keys are too small and the screen is pretty low resolution), I figured it’d be a fun time to test if I could install CentOS on there. During the installation GUI the trackpad worked fine and WiFi connected just fine as well. So if you’ve still got one of these lying around and prefer the longer support windows of CentOS / RHEL - feel free to install CentOS on there.
I used to have a Team Fortress 2 server on CentOS 6 with Virtual Box. Now that I’m using KVM/QEMU/Libvirt, I wanted to set up a new one. Also, Valve somewhat changed how they worked a few years ago and I wanted a clean slate. I started with a VM with 40GB. It’s not supposed to take that much, but I remember last time it took much more than the 10GB I’d given the VM and I don’t want to have to increase the disk size again.
People often recommend using CentOS for your desktop machine if you find Fedora’s pace to be too fast. Does this even make sense? I decided to explore the idea of CentOS 7 as a desktop computer using my wife’s requirements as the benchmark. Why? Because my wife likes long term support distros. What’s more long term support than Red Hat/CentOS’s 10 years of support for each version?
In my ideal home setup, I’d have computers in every room. I’m not horribly far off, but it’s mostly via old laptops and computers that I’ve retired from regular use or had donated from family members. As more of our movie purchases become BluRay (and with 4k video around the corner), some of those old computers just aren’t up to snuff when it comes to 720P and higher. I have a Roku 3 in the basement for running on the treadmill and that’s capable of handling higher quality video, but it’s not compatible with the way I’ve ripped my media. After a bit of investigation, it looked like Emby might be the right choice for me. So I installed it on the CentOS VM that runs my homeserver. The first thing I had to do to get it to work well was to change the Mono garbage collection.
This month’s Linux Format Magazine came with CentOS 5.2 on the disc. CentOS, in case you don’t know, is a community supported version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. (RHEL) Again, in the unlikely case you don’t know - Red Hat is required to supply the source code to all GPL code it uses in RHEL. What they don’t have to do is supply the Source RPMs which make it extremely easy for a distro like CentOS to exist. They can take the SRPMs and just remove the Red Hat artwork/logos and repackage it off as their own. The GPL allows this. Why in the world would Red Hat do this? They are, in a way, helping for a gratis version of their distro to exist and take away money that might otherwise go to them.
As I documented before, I’ve had problems with Pogoplug and Arch Linux running my servers. Recently I’ve been having problems logging in via SSH on my updated Fedora computers. From what I can tell from a little research, it seems the old way of connecting had a flaw so updated SSH doesn’t want talk to unupdated SSH. So I tried to update Arch Linux and once again ended up with a borked computer. And it’s not something I did wrong - everyone had complaints of the change from /usr/bin (and some other bins) bricking systems. If Pogoplug had a display, I’d have been able to fix it. I tried reinstalling, but something has changed that makes the Pogoplug no longer work. Sick of having stuff go wrong every time I update, I decided this was the time to implement the Home Server Project.
As you recall from the previous blog post, I’d installed Unity and JetBrains on my Fedora 32 computer via Flatpaks. I was going to use them for the Unity Multiplayer course I was taking on Udemy. Unfortunately it was an immediate fail and in lesson one after they have me install a new inputs library and restart Unity, it would always crash upon loading the file. I’m currently installing Unity 2020.1 on my Windows computer where I don’t expect to have that issue. Assuming I don’t, then it’s a big fat nope on using Unity on Fedora via Flatpak (at least for this class). Which, to be fair, is not on their supported OS list - which is only Ubuntu and CentOS 7. (And the latter for movie-making)
As I mentioned last year in my 2019 in Programming post, I created a bunch of 2D games in Unity by following along with the Gamedev.tv classes. I would watch the videos on Linux and jump over to my Windows computer for the programming, learning how to use SourceTree and Microsoft Video Studio in the process. But for some reason, going back and forth with the KVM when running Unity would sometimes freeze up the Windows computer. So when I saw someone on Fedora Planet running Unity Hub, I thought I’d see if there was a Flatpak - and there IS! Also, I’ve fallen in love with JetBrain’s Pycharm, so I thought I’d go ahead and use their game dev IDE, Rider. ( There’s a Flatpak for that, too!) So, let’s see how well this works!
I just found out today that PyGame 2.0 was released yesterday, on the 20th anniversary of the software. One of the first steps I took with Python was a series of games I made from tutorials in Linux Format Magazine. On Github I’ve got my shifter game and my Space Invaders clone. The shifter game is a little wonky since I haven’t touched the code in over a decade. But I was able to make the one shift needed to make the Space Invaders clone work on Python 3. So you can enjoy those and celebrate that PyGame development has picked up steam again.
Spent the last week debugging that script. Turns out the key to getting it to run in cron is to add export DISPLAY=:0 && before your command. That’s because Chrome will not launch without a display to send Chrome to.
Python Morsels
The most recent Python Morsels exercise was to figure out if a number was a perfect square. Trey began his problem statement this way: “This week I want you to write a function that might seem simple at first, but there’s a number of ways to solve it.” It definitely took some out of the box thinking for me to figure out how I was going to solve the base case. The math.sqrt() function returns a float so that it can give answers for non-perfect squares. So I kept thinking and I realized that any perfect, non-complex square root must be an integer. So I came up with the conditional to return. (And after all this Pythonic learning, I’ve learned not to evaluate for truth and then return a variable. Just return the evaluation)
Been quite busy with Python, keeping me away from other pursuits, like video games. (Although the kids have been requesting Spelunky 2 whenever it’s time to hang out with them)
Extra Life Donation Tracker (eldonationtracker)
For my Extra Life Donation Tracker I pushed out a new release, v5.2.2. A user of my program (man, I never get tired of how awesome that is!!) had wholly anonymous donors which was causing an issue I thought I’d handled. But it turns out that the folks that run the Donor Drive API are a little inconsistent in how they handle that in the donor endpoint vs the donations endpoint. So I pushed that fix out and now things should be dandy for game day (about 2 weeks away!!)
Been quite busy with Python, keeping me away from other pursuits, like video games. (Although the kids have been requesting Spelunky 2 whenever it’s time to hang out with them)
Extra Life Donation Tracker (eldonationtracker)
For my Extra Life Donation Tracker I pushed out a new release, v5.2.2. A user of my program (man, I never get tired of how awesome that is!!) had wholly anonymous donors which was causing an issue I thought I’d handled. But it turns out that the folks that run the Donor Drive API are a little inconsistent in how they handle that in the donor endpoint vs the donations endpoint. So I pushed that fix out and now things should be dandy for game day (about 2 weeks away!!)
It took me a while to get the hang of the many, many options within Podcast Republic so that I could get it to work the way I wanted - automatically downloading episodes on WiFi. Unlike Doggcatcher, but more like other modern pod catchers, you can stream a podcast instead of always having to download it. The option is nice, but it does introduce complexity. As usual, it was annoying at first to have the pod catcher think it needed to download every single episode from the podcasts you subscribed to.
I’ve been using Vivaldi on Windows for about four months now. As I keep saying, my browser needs on Windows aren’t too huge. Mostly I access youtube, the Stardew Valley Farm uploaded, and Google Docs. But I want to keep checking out new browsers on Windows first precisely since they are so important on my Linux computer. I don’t want to mess up a good thing there.
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.
This is the first post continuing my exploration of web browsers outside of Firefox and Google Chrome. You can read the introduction here.
Running Vivaldi for the first time.
For the first browser I wanted to check out on Windows, I decided to check out Vivaldi. My thought process is that I’m most likely to end up with Brave, so better to save that one for last. But as I went through the first-run process in Vivaldi and saw the nice polish the browser seems to have, it really started tugging on me, saying, “Are you sure you wouldn’t want to just stay with Vivaldi?” For this first post, I’d like to cover the first-run process and then a little video poking around the interface. This’ll be followed up in a while with any impressions I’ve come away from my usage of Vivaldi on Windows.
Well, on Linux I bounced back and forth between Firefox and Chrome, depending on which one was getting better performance. At this point, for what I do, Firefox is the winner for me. I use it on my laptop and desktop and it gets things done without getting in my way. I don’t necessarily have the most modern GUI setup because it tends to keep your GUI settings as you upgrade. This is what it looks like:
(just so you know, you should be able to click on most of the screenshots to see them more clearly)
Earlier this year, I took a look at flock. It didn’t impress me. In fact, I found it so useless to my browsing habits that I didn’t even bother to review it. I neglected to mention last time that Flock is built upon the same Gecko backend as Firefox. This is, as I have mentioned before, one of the best things about free and open source licenses. Firefox is a great technology, but it’s meant to be the every-man’s browser. This is expressed by Firefox’s own team and it’s why they have the plugin architecture. They feel that the Mozilla Suite became extremely bloated as it had a web browser, IRC client, email, and (I think) calendar built into it. It was a bit intimidating for first time users and took up quite a bit of RAM. Also, from a programmer’s perspective, it’s a lot harder to maintain something so complex. So, for Firefox they went for just developing a solid browser. Anything missing could be implemented via plugins.
I’m writing this from flock, a new web browser which comes with a lot of built-in utitlities for the most popular web technologies including flickr and blogging. I’m writing this post from within flock’s blog utility. I’m not sure yet if this is a worthy feature or just a gimmick. I intend to try flock out for a few days and see.
It’s just like the old days of Netscape vs Internet Explorer when more and more technologies kept emerging. After IE won the battle things were stagnant until Firefox came around with their tabbed browsing and so forth. We’ll see how this turns out!
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
As you know, I had CentOS 7 on the Acer Aspire and it was working fine. After CentOS 8 came out, I went ahead and installed it there. It worked fine, but there aren’t as many packages in EPEL for CentOS and RHEL 8. I went on a journey to try and get the i3 window manager working, but I would have had to recreate way too many packages in order to get it to work. So I tried to go to Ubuntu. I couldn’t find a minimal installer that wasn’t for servers, so I went with the Kubuntu install, intending to use that to install qtile or another tiling manager (the resolution on this thing is just too atrocious for a real Window Manager or Desktop Environment). But Kubuntu was just insanely buggy - probably due to the low specs of the netbook. Also, apparently qtile had been knocked out of the Ubuntu repos. The qtile documentation implied it was still available in Debian, so I put Debian on the netbook using a minimal install where I went ahead and install LXQT just to be on the safe side and have some kind of GUI if things didn’t work out. At first wifi wasn’t working, but eventually I landed on this page which explains all the quirks of installing on the Acer Aspire One. I had to enable the non-free repos and install the broadcom-sta-dkms driver. After a reboot, I finally had wifi. Unfortunately, qtile isn’t in the Debian repos anymore either. So I’m going to give installing from pypi a shot and if not, maybe try Arch?
There’s a lot that’s gotten to feel old with my Acer Aspire One. I hate the pitifully low screen resolution and it doesn’t even have enough oomph to run KDE netbook. But one thing I DO like about it - it has lots of USB ports. I hear many of the newer computers are aping apple and reducing ports.
Because of my age relative to the era of computer, for a good portion of my life computers were Serious Things used for work and school. They also belonged to the family and there’s no way we could have gotten away with putting stickers on them without getting in trouble. So back in 2006 when I went to Blackhat and Defcon, for the first time I saw people’s laptops covered in stickers. The EEE PC (new at the time) had a meetup session where I saw others who’d painted their machines various colors. I’d ended up with a bunch of stickers after Blackhat and Defcon, so I decorated my first-ever laptop, an Acer.
I first migrated to CrunchBang Linux because they kept talking about it on Linux Outlaws. Specifically they mentioned how fast it was and, if I recall correctly, Fab was using it on his netbook. My laptop battery life was quickly dwindling so, if I wanted to be able to use it on a plane, I needed a fast-booting distro. I enjoyed Crunchbang and the neat way it was setup. I loved just hitting Win-W to launch Firefox. Conky was really neat Terminator was the best term program I’d ever used. But it was getting a little long in the tooth. The most recent stable version was at least a year old if not 18 months old. It wasn’t keeping up with the Ubuntu releases. I was stuck using Firefox 3.0 (or some other such old version) Then came the announcement they were switching to a Debian base. Even if I stuck with CrunchBang, I’d be forced to reinstall anyway. So I decided to give Lubuntu a shot. I knew Ubuntu was too resource-heavy for my crappy battery life. I looked around and Lubuntu seemed to be the lightest - even lighter than Xubuntu. Could it match CrunchBang? CrunchBang took ten seconds from login to usable desktop and about 30 seconds until wifi was up.
I noticed that something had gone screwy with the Raspberry Pi 1B in the garage that was monitoring the garage door. I restarted it and discovered that last time I was coding and working on making it more robust if it had a temporary lapse in WiFi (so it wouldn’t crash), I’d created a little error. Fixing that error led me to realize that my new code for robustness had introduced an unfortunate artifact in that it would pass a status of “unchanged” to MQTT. So I fixed that. Code’s now in a good place. I just need to add a few more config options to make it more usable for others who aren’t me. Then I’ll make another release.
As things continue to happen in the commercial IoT space like Wink switching to requiring subscription fees, I continue to feel happy that I’m creating my own Internet of Things solutions rather than relying on commercial vendors who can decide to disappear or suddenly start charging fees. The cost for me is that things go at a slower pace and, obviously, don’t have sleek packaging. I think I can live with that.
I’ve been using Vivaldi as my default browser for about a week now. As I said in the penultimate paragraph of the post where I mentioned exploring various browsers, I don’t really use my browser on Windows for much more than uploading YouTube videos. And I mentioned last time that it wasn’t the best setup when squished to a half 1080p Window while trying to upload YouTube videos with the tabs on the right. I also had to close the bar on the left. Here’s what that looks like:
This is the first post continuing my exploration of web browsers outside of Firefox and Google Chrome. You can read the introduction here.
Running Vivaldi for the first time.
For the first browser I wanted to check out on Windows, I decided to check out Vivaldi. My thought process is that I’m most likely to end up with Brave, so better to save that one for last. But as I went through the first-run process in Vivaldi and saw the nice polish the browser seems to have, it really started tugging on me, saying, “Are you sure you wouldn’t want to just stay with Vivaldi?” For this first post, I’d like to cover the first-run process and then a little video poking around the interface. This’ll be followed up in a while with any impressions I’ve come away from my usage of Vivaldi on Windows.
I’ve been dreaming (no foolin’) about this for two or more years now - having one computer running Linux with a Windows VM for gaming when there aren’t Linux ports. Less hardware overhead for me. But until now VMs haven’t been able to gain native use of the graphics card. This guy figured out how to do it and it’s great. I’m likely going to do this next time I do a CPU/Motherboard refresh.
This is the first time in nearly 10 years that I’m moving to a new version of WIndows. I pop the CD in and boot up. I see a text screen as Windows “loads files”.
Nothing here different from a Linux distro. Then the Windows logo pops up.
Innovation is one of those things we pretend to want and then complain when it happens. It’s like women who say they want sensitive men who understand their feelings and then always fall for the bad boy. In the technology world, everyone always views copying with disdain. “Where’s the innovation?” they decry. Case in point, everyone is always yelling at Microsoft for stealing copying Apple’s GUI interface with Windows 95. (Everyone seems to forget Apple stealing borrowing from Xerox) When they try to get innovative with Vista or Windows 7 everyone complains they can’t find anything because it was moved around. Linux is not immune to these complaints. On the one hand, everyone mocks Linux for co-opting technologies from other operating systems. “Oh, you have a dock - why do you always have to copy the Mac?” or the ever-present “If Linux really wants to take the lead, they’ll have to stop copying Windows and Mac and start innovating on their own.” But then, when Linux improves upon something from the leading OS all you hear is, “Why is everything so different? Until Linux is easy for a Windows user to just jump over to without relearning things, they’ll never succeed.”
It’s been about a month since Fedora 32 was released, so I decided to try and upgrade Supermario to Fedora 32. First I had to disable the dropbox repo since they don’t have a Fedora 32 binary yet. Other conflicts included:
bat in module
gimp in module
meson in module
ninja in module
pythnon3-pytest-testmon (doesn’t belong in a distupgrade repo)
python2-beautifulsoup neds python2-lxml
The python ones are no-brainer to me. I use virtual environments now so I don’t care about the system libraries. I can get rid of those.
Because I have this VM registered to Katello (Foreman plugin) to receive updates (basically as a way of both keeping track of the computers and VMs on my network and also to have a GUI to pulp for caching RPMs), I had to deal with Katello-Agent. The latest RPM in the official Foreman/Katello repos is unfortunately for Fedora 29. That version of Fedora has been out of maintenance for a long time. Maybe Foreman (upstream for Satellite) is just used by most of their customers for RHEL sites that don’t have any Fedora nodes? So I did find this copr that provides updated versions: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/slaanesh/system-management/
Yesterday I mentioned some issues with my Ortek MCE VRC-1100 remote and certain buttons not working. Figured out that in addition to removing the XF…. entries in dconf, also have to remove them in gsettings. Specifically, I had to use the commands:
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys stop-static [’’]
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys play-static [’’]
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys pause-static [’’]
After that, everything was working as it should. So far no negatives to using Fedora Silverblue as our HTPC. We’ll see if that changes as I try to get Lutris to launch some Wine games.
One thing to know about Silverblue is that it’s a Gnome environment. I was already running Gnome for the HTPC, but I prefer KDE for my computers usually. When I was installing Silverblue there was no option to go for KDE or anything else. On Silverblue you install via Flatpaks. Any regular installs (ostree instead of rpms) also requires a reboot.
Originally I was going to mess around with Silverblue in a VM before considering using it on my HTPC. In theory it sounded like it would work very well - an immutable, rollback-able OS seems like the perfect thing for the one computer that ALWAYS needs to work for less tech-savvy folks in the house. But the first release of Silverblue seemed to still be a bit rough around the edges. Lots of recent blog posts on Fedora Planet (a blog aggregator for folks who participate in the Fedora project) seemed to indicate that things were in a better place now for Silverblue. Still, I was going to first mess around in a VM. But then I had to reboot the computer after things went awry with the display and this time I wasn’t able to get around the Free Magic issue that had been plaguing me for a few months now since upgrading to Fedora 31 (in anticipation of Fedora 30 being out of the support window). The Free Magic issue basically would appear after the grub menu and while others’ reports on bugzilla seemed to indicate that a kernel upgrade fixed it for them, such was not the case for me. For a while it worked such that if I was there on reboot and hit enter on the grub entry, it would work (while it would fail if you left it to boot on its own). But tonight it would not yield. The computer had gone catatonic. So, I figured it was as good a time as any to try and move to Silverblue. As a bonus, I was going to move the installation to an SSD, so I still have the old, borked installation if things go completely wrong (although I’d still need to fix the Free Magic issue).
Well, on Linux I bounced back and forth between Firefox and Chrome, depending on which one was getting better performance. At this point, for what I do, Firefox is the winner for me. I use it on my laptop and desktop and it gets things done without getting in my way. I don’t necessarily have the most modern GUI setup because it tends to keep your GUI settings as you upgrade. This is what it looks like:
So I’ve been using reKonq for about 3 weeks now. (Regardless of what the date of this blog post is in relation to the previous one - I usually write these ahead of time and then stick them into the queue) So here we go:
The Good
-Appears to have “Download them All” built-in if you enable the KGet settings in the preferences
-Integrates perfectly with KDE
-When you start up a new tab and then click on “recently closed tabs” the list of tabs has thumbnails of the sites. I think this is great because it helps you quickly find the site you’re looking for.
I’ve been using web browsers since Internet Explorer 1 and Netscape Navigator 3. I’ve blogged about my browserhistoryquiteabit. I’ve ended up using Chrome on all my platforms. It works on Linux and Windows and I can have my bookmarks synced up across all those platforms. Now, I’m not a huge user of bookmarks. From my earliest days back in the 1990s when I used to perfectly curate my bookmarks into folders and subfolders to the mid-2000s when Epiphany and Firefox implemented tags on bookmarks, pretty much anything I’ve ever bookmarked has gone into a status of “out of sight== out of mind”. In fact, the only way I’ve been able to effectively use bookmarks is to use the space under the address bar to store them so I can see them. This is what Chrome looks like on my machines:
Well, on Linux I bounced back and forth between Firefox and Chrome, depending on which one was getting better performance. At this point, for what I do, Firefox is the winner for me. I use it on my laptop and desktop and it gets things done without getting in my way. I don’t necessarily have the most modern GUI setup because it tends to keep your GUI settings as you upgrade. This is what it looks like:
On first startup, I thought - hmm this browser looks a bit bubbly. Reminds me a bit of MSN Browser in the late 90s. Then I suddenly noticed something - no top bar on the browser! Where’s the File, Edit, Tools, menu so common to Windows programs? Even the tabs are right up in the titlebar window. But you know what? I like it - more room for viewing my websites. Tabs load up ridiculously fast. And the little things are so nice - like how there are animations when you create the tabs. They slide out from the left. Or when you close a tab, all the ones to the right of it slide over to the left. It’s pointless eye candy, but I love it! It really adds to the experience.
I don’t know how long I intend to keep doing this, but I decided I wanted to document my programming as I went along. So yesterday I worked on Scratch and here’s today’s entry.
Ruby
A while ago I got a bunch of kids’ programming books in a Humble Bundle. I tried showing Ruby to my oldest, but I did it one year too soon (she wasn’t yet reading as well as she is today and couldn’t type as well as she can today) so for now she’s not into programming. But I was curious to see how it was presented since the book uses a story to present it (quite different from the Python book in the same bundle). Went through chapter 2 today and, so far, it seems that Ruby is pretty readable like Python is. That said, I’m not sure puts makes more sense than print, but maybe if I delve into the history of Ruby, I’ll understand why it’s puts? The author of this book uses snake case for variable names. I wonder if that’s because it’s the Ruby standard to use snake case instead of camel case or just to make it easier for the kids following along. I *did* really like the built in next and pred methods on numbers. Definitely more readable than a var++ or var = var + 1. Or rather, if you don’t have decades of programming experience (as I do), I think it’s just a faster bit of cognition to see var.next and understand it vs the older ways of doing the same thing.
What I love about programming is the instant feedback. In most programming languages, after you set up a framework for the barest bones of a program you can then run it at every step of the way to confirm that you are moving towards your goal. What I love second-most about programming is the fact that I am using my computer to solve a problem and free myself from tedium.
Last year when I went to Red Hat Summit, I saw a lot of use of Satellite. I’d tried the 5.x series’ upstream Spacewalk and it didn’t quite work out for me. But this time I would try it out, gosh darnit! I mean, with the Katello plugin it would even include Pulp, which I’d been interested in trying out before because it could cache RPMs during an upgrade. So I’ve been messing with it here and there. However,I don’t use Puppet scripts (it’s like Chef or Ansible in principle) and I don’t have the need to provision new machines or VMs (especially when that’s already pretty easy with Cockpit and/or Virt-Manager). It’s already easier and works more consistently for me to keep track of whether my computers are up to date (and update them if not) with Cockpit. The RPM caching part of it was neat, but recently it stopped working consistently. Upgrades are VERY fragile and messing up on installing a plugin could bork the whole system. Also the necessary files - puppet, katello-agent, etc were always behind in providing packages for Fedora. Turns out it was a bunch of extra work and frustration just to keep track of my computers - and I was already doing that in Dokuwiki.
Because I have this VM registered to Katello (Foreman plugin) to receive updates (basically as a way of both keeping track of the computers and VMs on my network and also to have a GUI to pulp for caching RPMs), I had to deal with Katello-Agent. The latest RPM in the official Foreman/Katello repos is unfortunately for Fedora 29. That version of Fedora has been out of maintenance for a long time. Maybe Foreman (upstream for Satellite) is just used by most of their customers for RHEL sites that don’t have any Fedora nodes? So I did find this copr that provides updated versions: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/slaanesh/system-management/
Last year when I went to Red Hat Summit, I saw a lot of use of Satellite. I’d tried the 5.x series’ upstream Spacewalk and it didn’t quite work out for me. But this time I would try it out, gosh darnit! I mean, with the Katello plugin it would even include Pulp, which I’d been interested in trying out before because it could cache RPMs during an upgrade. So I’ve been messing with it here and there. However,I don’t use Puppet scripts (it’s like Chef or Ansible in principle) and I don’t have the need to provision new machines or VMs (especially when that’s already pretty easy with Cockpit and/or Virt-Manager). It’s already easier and works more consistently for me to keep track of whether my computers are up to date (and update them if not) with Cockpit. The RPM caching part of it was neat, but recently it stopped working consistently. Upgrades are VERY fragile and messing up on installing a plugin could bork the whole system. Also the necessary files - puppet, katello-agent, etc were always behind in providing packages for Fedora. Turns out it was a bunch of extra work and frustration just to keep track of my computers - and I was already doing that in Dokuwiki.
Because I have this VM registered to Katello (Foreman plugin) to receive updates (basically as a way of both keeping track of the computers and VMs on my network and also to have a GUI to pulp for caching RPMs), I had to deal with Katello-Agent. The latest RPM in the official Foreman/Katello repos is unfortunately for Fedora 29. That version of Fedora has been out of maintenance for a long time. Maybe Foreman (upstream for Satellite) is just used by most of their customers for RHEL sites that don’t have any Fedora nodes? So I did find this copr that provides updated versions: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/slaanesh/system-management/
Because I have this VM registered to Katello (Foreman plugin) to receive updates (basically as a way of both keeping track of the computers and VMs on my network and also to have a GUI to pulp for caching RPMs), I had to deal with Katello-Agent. The latest RPM in the official Foreman/Katello repos is unfortunately for Fedora 29. That version of Fedora has been out of maintenance for a long time. Maybe Foreman (upstream for Satellite) is just used by most of their customers for RHEL sites that don’t have any Fedora nodes? So I did find this copr that provides updated versions: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/slaanesh/system-management/
I’ve been dreaming (no foolin’) about this for two or more years now - having one computer running Linux with a Windows VM for gaming when there aren’t Linux ports. Less hardware overhead for me. But until now VMs haven’t been able to gain native use of the graphics card. This guy figured out how to do it and it’s great. I’m likely going to do this next time I do a CPU/Motherboard refresh.
As I mentioned in my k3s on Ubuntu 2020.04 post, I really thought that Ubuntu 2020.04’s server install was prety slick. I’m used to text-only server installs looking like this:
Arch Linux Installation Begins
Here’s a step-by-step collection of screenshots and my thoughts on each step of Ubuntu 2020.04’s server install:
Language Selection
Just starting off, with the language selection, you can see this isn’t the usual ugly ncurses install. It looks like a beautiful matte black.
Clearly there’s a lot I don’t get about Kubernetes and I didn’t install a GUI in that VM so I can’t use the dashboard (which can only be viewed at localhost - or so the instructions seem to indicate) So I decided to go back to basics and look at the Hello Minikube tutorial, but run it in my k3s VM.
So I think this is the first part of why I was having problems yesterday with the pod I created from Podman. A lot of the commands I saw online implied a deployment, but I hadn’t created one. This is evidenced by:
As I’ve been working on learning server tech, I’ve gone from virtualization to Docker containers and now Podman containers and Podman pods. The pod in Podman comes from a view towards Kubernetes. I moved to Podman because of the cgroupsv2 issue in Fedora 31 and so I figured why not think about going all the way and checking out Kubernetes? Kubernetes is often stylized as k8s and a few months back I found k3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distro that’s meant to work on edge devices (including Raspberry Pis!). For some reason (that I don’t seem to find on the main k3s site), I got it in my head that it was better tailored to Ubuntu than Red Hat, so I decided to also take Ubuntu Server 2020.04 for a spin.
Clearly there’s a lot I don’t get about Kubernetes and I didn’t install a GUI in that VM so I can’t use the dashboard (which can only be viewed at localhost - or so the instructions seem to indicate) So I decided to go back to basics and look at the Hello Minikube tutorial, but run it in my k3s VM.
So I think this is the first part of why I was having problems yesterday with the pod I created from Podman. A lot of the commands I saw online implied a deployment, but I hadn’t created one. This is evidenced by:
As I’ve been working on learning server tech, I’ve gone from virtualization to Docker containers and now Podman containers and Podman pods. The pod in Podman comes from a view towards Kubernetes. I moved to Podman because of the cgroupsv2 issue in Fedora 31 and so I figured why not think about going all the way and checking out Kubernetes? Kubernetes is often stylized as k8s and a few months back I found k3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distro that’s meant to work on edge devices (including Raspberry Pis!). For some reason (that I don’t seem to find on the main k3s site), I got it in my head that it was better tailored to Ubuntu than Red Hat, so I decided to also take Ubuntu Server 2020.04 for a spin.
Clearly there’s a lot I don’t get about Kubernetes and I didn’t install a GUI in that VM so I can’t use the dashboard (which can only be viewed at localhost - or so the instructions seem to indicate) So I decided to go back to basics and look at the Hello Minikube tutorial, but run it in my k3s VM.
So I think this is the first part of why I was having problems yesterday with the pod I created from Podman. A lot of the commands I saw online implied a deployment, but I hadn’t created one. This is evidenced by:
As I’ve been working on learning server tech, I’ve gone from virtualization to Docker containers and now Podman containers and Podman pods. The pod in Podman comes from a view towards Kubernetes. I moved to Podman because of the cgroupsv2 issue in Fedora 31 and so I figured why not think about going all the way and checking out Kubernetes? Kubernetes is often stylized as k8s and a few months back I found k3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distro that’s meant to work on edge devices (including Raspberry Pis!). For some reason (that I don’t seem to find on the main k3s site), I got it in my head that it was better tailored to Ubuntu than Red Hat, so I decided to also take Ubuntu Server 2020.04 for a spin.
Yesterday I was at a conference dedicated to DevOps and so Red Hat and Google were there to talk about containers, especially Docker and Kubernetes. While summarizing it to some of my employees today, I was asked about what I see as the benefits of Docker containers relative to Virtual Machines. I mentioned that one of the great things is that Docker containers are immutable. All of your data’s actually written to a folder that’s essentially mounted in the container.
Yesterday I mentioned some issues with my Ortek MCE VRC-1100 remote and certain buttons not working. Figured out that in addition to removing the XF…. entries in dconf, also have to remove them in gsettings. Specifically, I had to use the commands:
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys stop-static [’’]
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys play-static [’’]
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys pause-static [’’]
After that, everything was working as it should. So far no negatives to using Fedora Silverblue as our HTPC. We’ll see if that changes as I try to get Lutris to launch some Wine games.
One thing to know about Silverblue is that it’s a Gnome environment. I was already running Gnome for the HTPC, but I prefer KDE for my computers usually. When I was installing Silverblue there was no option to go for KDE or anything else. On Silverblue you install via Flatpaks. Any regular installs (ostree instead of rpms) also requires a reboot.
Originally I was going to mess around with Silverblue in a VM before considering using it on my HTPC. In theory it sounded like it would work very well - an immutable, rollback-able OS seems like the perfect thing for the one computer that ALWAYS needs to work for less tech-savvy folks in the house. But the first release of Silverblue seemed to still be a bit rough around the edges. Lots of recent blog posts on Fedora Planet (a blog aggregator for folks who participate in the Fedora project) seemed to indicate that things were in a better place now for Silverblue. Still, I was going to first mess around in a VM. But then I had to reboot the computer after things went awry with the display and this time I wasn’t able to get around the Free Magic issue that had been plaguing me for a few months now since upgrading to Fedora 31 (in anticipation of Fedora 30 being out of the support window). The Free Magic issue basically would appear after the grub menu and while others’ reports on bugzilla seemed to indicate that a kernel upgrade fixed it for them, such was not the case for me. For a while it worked such that if I was there on reboot and hit enter on the grub entry, it would work (while it would fail if you left it to boot on its own). But tonight it would not yield. The computer had gone catatonic. So, I figured it was as good a time as any to try and move to Silverblue. As a bonus, I was going to move the installation to an SSD, so I still have the old, borked installation if things go completely wrong (although I’d still need to fix the Free Magic issue).
I started off with just a boot install of CentOS 8, so I wouldn’t have Gnome or any other unnecessary cruft installed. After installation, I enabled the EPEL repository - latest directions for that are here.
A little over a year ago, I put CentOS 7 on my Acer Aspire One. We had no idea when RHEL 8 was coming out (turns out just a few months later when I was at the Red Hat Summit, it was the release party for RHEL 8), so 7 went on there. And at Red Hat Summit I learned that, while running CentOS 7, suspend worked on that netbook. However, it was already pretty old by the time I put it on the netbook and it was missing certain libraries and had old versions of libraries like Go so I couldn’t do something like install Weechat-Matrix on there.
Somewhere around 15 years ago, I started learning Python because I’d gotten deep into genealogy and started using the free and open source project Gramps. As I was also pretty deep into free software (somewhere around that time I became a supporting member of the FSF for a few years - and I think my smile.amazon.com still donates to them) I got interested in the idea of helping projects by contributing code. Python seemed like it wasn’t too hard to learn (compared to C++), so I started learning. I never did end up contributing to Gramps as I found GUI programming incredibly hard. In fact, it was something like 6 years ago before I created some useful GUIs (that weren’t copied out of tutorials) and only last year that I started making good, competent GUIs using the QT toolkit.
Recently I got a bunch of manga through a Humble Bundle sale. Having read “authentic” style manga before, the Kobo Clara HD seemed to be about the right size to read manga without having to do any zooming. So, naturally I uploaded the .epub for the Kobo. It was HORRIBLE. It cut off part of the image and made it impossible to read. After a bit of Googling around, I found the suggestion to use the .CBZ file, as the Kobo was capable of reading it. That worked very well. The only real bummer is that it has a margin around the page that makes it just SLIGHTLY reduced in size. It’s not a problem for the text, but some of the fine details can be a little hard to make out. Overall, it worked VERY well and I recommend it as a way to read manga in ebook form (allowing you to carry all of a modest run on your device). (But might not fit all of, say, One Piece or Dragon Ball.)
A big difference from 9 years ago is that I don’t use the dedicated ereader as much as I used to. Mostly that comes down to the fact that I don’t read as much before bed and I have limited other places to use the ereader. Usually I’m either reading on my phone or on the computer. But there’s one time that I really love the ereader - when I’m traveling, particularly by plane. This way I can read during the entire trip without draining my cell phone battery. As Scarlett has gotten old enough to read, I figured she could have the Nook (to keep from straining her eyes constantly with the backlit tablet) and I’d still want an ereader for travel. Additionally, who knows - I might go back to more reading at home or before bed when a backlit phone just isn’t ideal. So I got the Kobo Clara HD.
Clarkesworld Magazine has wonderful metadata for their issues and anthologies that requires little work from me:
Tor books had an awesome DRM-free policy that I love and that allows me to go to the ebook vendor of my choice. And they give away a free book every month as long as you agree to get some marketing emails from them. But their metadata is not so great:
Come on, Tor! You publish Science Fiction! Let’s get some better metadata on those ebook files!
I write this to you because you are the largest and most powerful companies in your ecosystems. The digital world has become ridiculous and you need to be leaders in rectifying the situation. Let’s start with Amazon. The two biggest digital things you sell are books and music. Back in the analog world before commerce became a Wonderland distortion, if I bought a book or CD, any member in my household could access this item. It didn’t matter if I bought the book or my wife bought the book. We could both read it. The same went with a CD. Either of us could grab the CD off the shelf and put it into our portable CD player. But now go to the Kindle (or any other e-reader system) and Amazon CloudPlayer. Sure, either of us could pick up the e-reader to read a book. But what if we both want to read a different book at the same time. How can we access each other’s libraries? What about if we each want to listen to the same music library from Amazon CloudPlayer on our smart phones or other devices? For various reasons, like Amazon recommendations, it makes sense for us to have different accounts instead of a family account.
[caption id=“attachment_3556” align=“aligncenter” width=“450” caption=“Barnes and Noble Nook and the a case for the Nook”] [/caption]
As you may remember, a few months ago I decided to rethink the issue of ebooks. I was going back and forth about buying the Barnes and Noble Nook just before my recent flight to Florida. I had been looking forward to the flight as a chance to read through some of Cory Doctorow’s fiction. In the end, I decided I didn’t want to spend the money on the device and read it on my laptop. This was less than ideal. The laptop only had about 20 minutes of charge on the battery and so I had to split up reading the book between the outbound and inbound trips. Sometime in the near future Danielle and I are going to be taking a much longer flight, so I caved and decided to buy the nook.
Recently I got a bunch of manga through a Humble Bundle sale. Having read “authentic” style manga before, the Kobo Clara HD seemed to be about the right size to read manga without having to do any zooming. So, naturally I uploaded the .epub for the Kobo. It was HORRIBLE. It cut off part of the image and made it impossible to read. After a bit of Googling around, I found the suggestion to use the .CBZ file, as the Kobo was capable of reading it. That worked very well. The only real bummer is that it has a margin around the page that makes it just SLIGHTLY reduced in size. It’s not a problem for the text, but some of the fine details can be a little hard to make out. Overall, it worked VERY well and I recommend it as a way to read manga in ebook form (allowing you to carry all of a modest run on your device). (But might not fit all of, say, One Piece or Dragon Ball.)
I started reading this series 10 years ago. For whatever reason, I stopped a couple books short from the end. Last year I started re-reading them for a series over on Comic POW! ( http://www.comicpow.com/thread/unders… ) Overall, I’ve enjoyed the story almost as much as I did the first time around (when I was closer in age to Keitaro). Many manga and anime are full of Fan Service and, as you’d expect from a series involving a college guy living with HS-College age girls, there’s plenty here. But this entire volume was essentially just one giant fan service episode for 100 or so pages. Given that Akamatsu has actually really provided some of these characters a lot of emotional and personal growth it was just annoying and repetitive. The entire volume feels as though Akamatsu had to make, say, 100 issues and he realized his story only required 95 issues so he’s stalling. Instead of one nonsensical issue within the volume, the whole thing hinges on the girls being fired or quitting over and over as they fight with Keitaro’s sister, who’s running things while he’s in America.
Like, perhaps, many of my readers, I knew Jane Lui’s music mostly from her cover songs. But I really liked her voice and so I decided to back the Kickstarter for her new album, Surrija. By the time this review is published, I’ll have had the album for about 2 months. For this review I’ll first focus on my initial impressions and then my impressions after having listened for a while.
Like, perhaps, many of my readers, I knew Jane Lui’s music mostly from her cover songs. But I really liked her voice and so I decided to back the Kickstarter for her new album, Surrija. By the time this review is published, I’ll have had the album for about 2 months. For this review I’ll first focus on my initial impressions and then my impressions after having listened for a while.
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.
I was reading Serious Python by Julien Danjou as well as looking through other Python repos when I realized that my Extra Life Donation Tracker repo was a mess. (It’ll be different by the time you read this, but here’s how it looked at the time) After learning about how things should be structured and reading Mr. Danjou’s book about how I could use Sphinx to auto-document my code, I decided to undertake the challenge. However, there was a lot to learn and this code is used by many others for their Extra Life campaigns. I wanted to start off with much simpler code, so I started off by packetizing my lastfm-twitter code. It was a fun journey over the last week or so as I learned how to restructure my code and auto-document. (I also learned a lot about how to use Drone CI, which I’m using for my home projects that aren’t on GitHub) As the final lesson, I taught myself how to create a package for PyPi via Drone CI and so, I now have a PyPi package that anyone can import with pip!
I had been hanging on to these books in case I ever found myself wanting to do some Java programming. But as I’ve come to learn (mostly because of Python, but also through following the Perl 6 saga), languages change and evolve and so a couple books from nearly 20 years ago probably won’t be more useful than a newer book or a good Google search.
Cornell’s CS101 class textbook back when I was a freshmanI don’t remember what class this was for, but Cornell sure loved Java back then.
This was a VERY busy year for my coding. This year I had over 769 commits to GitHub; my previous best was 58 in 2014. The commits were very unevenly distributed. If you look at the graph of my commits, outside of a busy week in January and another in May, I didn’t really start coding until August.
GitHub activity graph
But perhaps commits to GithHub isn’t the best metric. If you look at what I accomplished in the second half of 2019, I worked on an incredible number of projects.
The fourth game we worked on was another game that I spent a lot of my childhood playing. We made a Galaxian/Galaga clone:
Laser Defender - a Galaga Galaxian clone
My mom’s youngest brother had a Nintendo and lots of arcade ports. When I was young he lived in the condo above my grandmother’s condo and whenever we’d go visit her, I’d ask if I could visit him so we could play games. The game I loved playing the most there was Galaga because of the frantic pace.
My journey through 2D game development using the Unity engine continued with our third project: a clone of Brick Breaker or Arkanoid. In case you’ve never seen it before, this is Arkanoid:
Arkanoid
It’s got a pretty important legacy, Breakout, the version that Atari created, was an important stepping stone for the two Steves of Apple (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak).
So it makes sense that this would be one of the games we would use on our learning journey. This is what my first level looks like:
I’ve been playing video games since I was somewhere around 5 or 6 years old and got a Nintendo Entertainment System for my birthday from one of my aunts. I also inherited a Tandy computer from my dad when I was younger. We had a bunch of edutainment games - like this Sesame Street game (that unfortunately a quick search on Google Images does not turn up) where you had to suck the Tweedles (bugs from Ernie’s flower box) to solve math problems. I also, and I’ve mentioned this before in several places on the net, learned to program from a book on BASIC and made myself a bunch of simple games, including Madlibs clones.
The plot twist at the end is awesome, but so is the programmer’s debate going on, especially since we were talking about this at work this week. Another great xkcd from Randall Monroe:
Today I finished up yet another class. The first one I finished up was a project where I was conducted a study for the School of Electrical Engineering to switch over to Linux and open source alternatives. I also published my study as my first publication at Lulu.com. It was great to have one class out of the way, especially one which was such a joy to participate in.
Today I wrapped up another favorite class, microcontroller design. As my faithful readers know, I’ve been providing the source code to each of the labs we completed during the semester. Well, today my group demoed our final project to our professor and TA. They were quite impressed with the progress we had made on the code, despite its limitations. Our final project, a web server on a microcontroller, was a lot of fun to work on. There were a lot of frustrating times, but it’s the good kind of frustration that motivates one to try as hard as they can to get around the problem. One of my favorite taks is to participate in design and debugging, trying to get my design to work because I know it *should* be working, so what did I forget? Was it simply a semi-colon? Was it something more significant, some kind of oversight? It was hard sticking to the project and keeping Rich from rewriting it from scratch, but I think we had a much better product because we sat through all of our problems and figured out what the original author of the source code we were basing it off of had done. After all, in a real work environment you have to figure what the previous guy did. There is no time to rewrite the code, no matter how awesome you are at coding. I will be posting the code and my report soon, probably over the next few days. I invite and challenge anyone out there to work on the code and make it more robust and reliable, there is PLENTY of room for that. You just need an Atmel Mega32 and STK500 development board. (As well as the computer on which one does the programming)
I have posted the latest code from the work Rich and I have done for our microcontroller class at Cornell. We are releasing all of our code under the GPL license so feel free to use it, modify it, and have fun with it. The code is modified C code and assembly language for the Atmel Mega32 chip running on an STK500 board. It should be easily available from Atmel or perhaps your local electronic hobbyist shop.
If you go to my main page, you can see where I have added a new section, C code from a class I’m taking this semester. We’re making a lot of really cool designs based upon the Atmel CPU, which is readily available for those who like to tinker. I’ve put up my first project, a reaction time tester. It has the user push a button, waits approximately two seconds plus a random amount to keep the user from guessing, and then displays the user’s reaction time. It also keeps the user from cheating by detecting if they are holding the button down.
This was a VERY busy year for my coding. This year I had over 769 commits to GitHub; my previous best was 58 in 2014. The commits were very unevenly distributed. If you look at the graph of my commits, outside of a busy week in January and another in May, I didn’t really start coding until August.
GitHub activity graph
But perhaps commits to GithHub isn’t the best metric. If you look at what I accomplished in the second half of 2019, I worked on an incredible number of projects.
This was a VERY busy year for my coding. This year I had over 769 commits to GitHub; my previous best was 58 in 2014. The commits were very unevenly distributed. If you look at the graph of my commits, outside of a busy week in January and another in May, I didn’t really start coding until August.
GitHub activity graph
But perhaps commits to GithHub isn’t the best metric. If you look at what I accomplished in the second half of 2019, I worked on an incredible number of projects.
First of all, I was wrong about needing to trigger it to update. The default configuration is to update the feeds every hour, 10 at a time. This is configurable, but I think that arrangement works fine to me. Having been using it on my phone for a few days now, I’m really liking the formatting and how nice it looks. If there’s one negative thing, it’s that the links can be a bit tiny for my fingers to click on. Otherwise, it’s looking like I’m going to stick with Miniflux.
For the past six years, since Google Reader closed in 2013, I’ve been self-hosting my RSS feeds via Tiny Tiny RSS. Overall it’s been OK, except for a few years I missed that the update method had been changed and I hadn’t updated. Then I learned the new method was to clone the git repo. I did it and kept up with it. There was something I didn’t set up way back when with my MySQL so it’s got a weird miscount between the app and the tab header. But otherwise it was working just fine enough.
For the past six years, since Google Reader closed in 2013, I’ve been self-hosting my RSS feeds via Tiny Tiny RSS. Overall it’s been OK, except for a few years I missed that the update method had been changed and I hadn’t updated. Then I learned the new method was to clone the git repo. I did it and kept up with it. There was something I didn’t set up way back when with my MySQL so it’s got a weird miscount between the app and the tab header. But otherwise it was working just fine enough.
For the past six years, since Google Reader closed in 2013, I’ve been self-hosting my RSS feeds via Tiny Tiny RSS. Overall it’s been OK, except for a few years I missed that the update method had been changed and I hadn’t updated. Then I learned the new method was to clone the git repo. I did it and kept up with it. There was something I didn’t set up way back when with my MySQL so it’s got a weird miscount between the app and the tab header. But otherwise it was working just fine enough.
Although I’ve had a website since the mid-90s, it was 2005 or thereabouts that I first started hosting my own sites rather than relying on other sites. The first bit of hosting involved blogging and I tried a few different software packages before settling on Wordpress. And other than playing around with phpBB for my family and trying out Drupal for a bit for another site, that was it for a long time. Then Google abandoned Google reader so I moved to ttrss. And it was awesome and I didn’t have to worry it would ever go away because I was hosting it. But then this year I learned that Google Music was going to be going away and all the users were going to be pushed to Youtube Music. Unsure of whether my uploaded tracks would really migrate over (Amazon and some others have recently decided they weren’t going to host personally updated tracks), I decided to host Ampache. This had the side-benefit of actually allowing me to listen to my music collection at work since work blocks anything from Google Play. The most recent bit of self-hosting was because Google is about to get rid of Hangouts. Or rather, push all the regular Joes off in favor of making it a business tool. So that, coupled with Slack no longer working at work, led me to start up a Matrix server. That’s been plenty of fun, especially figuring out how to Federate, which allows me to access any open rooms from any other Matrix server.
BBQ Thermostat: Arduino MKR 1010 and Therm Shield measuring temperature during a smoke
Today I was smoking a turkey so I figured it was a good time to do a live test of my project. There was good news and bad news. I think it’s illustrated quite well by the following graph:
Grafana graph of my BBQ Thermostat while measuring the smoker temp
I recently started an electronics hacking project to build a thermostat for my Weber Smokey Mountain. You can find details at Hackaday.io, but if you’ve been here long enough you know that I don’t trust other sites to continue to exist. (It’s why I copy my book reviews over from Good Reads). As of right now I’ve got the board able to read temperatures from a thermocouple that I send, via WiFi, to an MQTT broker. Then, via Python I take subscribe to that MQTT topic and put it into InfluxDB. From there I use Grafana to graph it. Here’s an early beta where I was trying to make sure it was working from end-to-end:
Macadamia nut, White Chocolate, and Cranberry Cookies
In January I made a lot less new things than in previous months, but I did prove that even in sub-freezing temperatures I still BBQ and Smoke. My least favorite were the macadamia nut, white chocolate, and cranberry cookies. I’ve liked white chocolate and macadamia nut cookies in the past, but this was my first time adding cranberries. But it was the macadamia nuts I wasn’t a fan of this time. I’m not sure why, I just didn’t liek the taste. The fattoush was a neat taste for a new salad and I learned how easy it is to make your own pita chips! The glazed ribs were OK, but I didn’t fill the water pan in the Weber Smokey Mountain and I think that led to a more smokey/burnt taste as the glaze dripped off and into the empty water pan. The Big Butts Pork Steak was pretty awesome, though. The recipe also contained my favorite home-made BBQ sauce. I definitely look forward to revisiting that recipe!
Last time I was in Florida my mom took me to a specialty BBQ store, Just Grillin, off of Dale Mabry in Carrollwood. I didn’t know such places existed. I thought everyone just bought their grills at a hardware store, Amazon, or direct from the company. It was a pretty great to be able to see and touch Yoders, Weber Summits, and other high-end BBQs. They also came by with some chicken they’d cooked in the back using a variety of rubs they sell. Oh yeah, the entire wall behind the register was full to the brim with rubs and sauces - most (if not all) of them local or competition group rubs. Any rub you wanted to try would be poured into a tasting cup. Sure, it’s not the same as having the rub on some food, but it’s certainly better than the blind buying we have to do with supermarket rubs. As a gift, mom said she’d get me any rub I wanted to try, so I picked up Thunderbird Chicken Scratch. Then a bunch of travel meant I had to keep waiting impatiently until I could finally try it. Last night I finally got my chance.
Part of the fun of being into BBQ has been trying new things. As I’ve mentioned before, when I was growing up “BBQ” was what we called grilling and it MOSTLY consisted of burgers and hot dogs. Very occasionally it would be something else. Lots of lighter fluid and mediocre results. But now I know about low and slow and smoking and 2-zone grilling. And once I mastered ribs, chicken, and brisket it was time to experiment. So I tried Meathead’s recipe for Alabama Birds with White Sauce.
In the past few years I’ve been moving away from seeing pizza as junk food towards seeing it as another food that is sometimes made with care, skill, and love and sometimes make in a hurry for a buck. I can’t remember the exact timeline and can’t be bothered to search for photo evidence, but the two restaurants that changed my mind on pizza were Two Amys in Maryland and Grimaldi’s in Brooklyn. Two very different styles of pizza, but Grimaldi’s cooked in a fire-based pizza oven and authentic Neopolitan at Two Amys. So now there was a new measurement against which to measure all pizzas: the wood-fired pizza.
Do you know why a lot of people don’t BBQ that often? Because they always make the same thing and that’s boring. So I’ve been going through all the recipes in Meathead’s book (and other sources) to see if anything else is tasty to my palette. This time it was smoked chicken. I cut the chicken in half.
I took the skin off because Danielle was going to take off the skin anyway and since this was a rub-based recipe, that would remove all the flavor as well.
I’d tackled all the major BBQ meats. It was time to try and make my own sauce. So I assembled all my ingredients and followed Meathead’s recipe. It’s supposed to be like KC Classic, which I’ve never had. I also went with the secret optional ingredient of Tamarind paste.
Then I finished cooking
And canned it while it was still hot:
So what was the verdict? Again, I’ve never had KC Classic. My favorite commercial BBQ sauce is Trader Joe’s Kansas City sauce and that’s nice and sweat. This sauce was very tangy. While it has grown on me over the past couple months, it’s definitely not my favorite and my wife doesn’t like it at all. I want to try one more time, this time tweaking it to be a sweeter sauce. Also, I want to see how it changes when caramelized, something I haven’t had a chance to do yet. Still, it was fun to make my own and add it to my other BBQ/smoke creations.
I had been wanting to do brisket for a very long time, but I couldn’t find anywhere convenient to buy a whole packer brisket. But right before I was convinced I was going to have to go to a butcher, Costco decided to carry them.
Yeah, it was 20 lbs, which is ridiculous for what was essentially going to be just 3 adults, but it was USDA Prime for only $3/lb! I had no choice. I put it in my shopping cart and resolved to deal with the consequences later.
For the first time in a few years, my mom was going to be in town for Mother’s Day. We didn’t have a ton of events to attend or anything, so I asked her what she would like for dinner if she could have anything. She said she wanted prime rib, so I figured it was the perfect time for me to try out a prime rib roast on one of my BBQs. Meathead has lots of tips for eliminating most of the hassle of making a prime rib roast. First of all, remove the ribs - they only serve to block heat and keep the roast from cooking evenly. Second, use twine to make it into a cylinder so it cooks evenly from the outside to the inside.
This past winter I smoked a pork shoulder for the first time. I learned some lessons, continued to work on getting better with my kettle, and decided it was time for pulled pork again.
I cut the pork shoulder into roughly equal halves. I had three things I wanted to experiment with:
Would it cook faster?
Would it be nice to have twice as much bark?
I wanted to try a Mexican-ish rub on one to have pulled pork tacos.
In my opinion, for a long Weber Kettle cook you can’t beat a snake. If it’s going to go VERY long, it can be a pain as you have to move the water pan to continue the snake. But for medium-long cooks, it’s a nice, perfect way to have a consistent temperature throughout the cook.
As a manger, I’m often thinking of ways to show my employees how much I appreciate their hard work. Recently, while watching a Meathead video, I saw his quote at the end that cooking for someone is an act of love. And love is not far off from appreciation so I figured I’d ask my employees if they’d like it if I made them some smoked baby back ribs for the cost of raw materials. We settled on a half rack per person, salad, and bread for $6. So then I just had to pick a date to make the food. Thanks to my mom getting me the Weber Kettle for my birthday this year, I had enough room to smoke to the ribs across both my BBQs as long as I used rib racks. So I used the Weber 6605 rib racks (which you saw in the featured image and will see again below)
Long-time readers of my blog will know that while I’ve been working at mastering my grills for a few years now, it was in 2016 that I decided I would take my BBQ to the next level. Back in June I smoked baby back ribs for the first time. Then I realized that I wanted to step up my smoking game I’d need a Weber Kettle. Mom got me one for my birthday and at that time I started pining for a chance to take on one of the two kings of BBQ: Pulled Pork or Brisket. The local area made up my mind for me. Apparently it’s next to impossible to get full packer brisket in Maryland. So pulled pork it would be.
Ever since I bought my house and got a BBQ/grill I’ve learned that most of what I thought of as BBQ growing up was actually grilling. The key difference is that you BBQ at a lower temperature (typically around 225 F) and that BBQ is cooked via indirect heat. Grilling is cooking directly over a fire and, typically, done at the highest heat your BBQ/grill can provide (at the very least starting around 350 F and higher). Although I’ve been cooking ribs successfully on the BBQ/Grill for the past 6ish years, I’ve never really been BBQing them. So I looked around on the web and I found the recipe for Last Meal Ribs.
On my Father’s Day Weekend visit to NYC I finally got to see some MoMA exhibits I’d wanted to see for months. First off was a Picasso exhibit called “Variations”. Ever since my parents took me to the Dali Museum in St Petersburg, FL six years ago, I’ve been very interested in painters – especially artists from the 1930s-1950s and the surrealist and associated movements. Also, as a person of Spanish heritage, I’ve had a special interest in artists from the region. So I was very excited to see this Picasso exhibit.
BBQ Thermostat: Arduino MKR 1010 and Therm Shield measuring temperature during a smoke
Today I was smoking a turkey so I figured it was a good time to do a live test of my project. There was good news and bad news. I think it’s illustrated quite well by the following graph:
Grafana graph of my BBQ Thermostat while measuring the smoker temp
I recently started an electronics hacking project to build a thermostat for my Weber Smokey Mountain. You can find details at Hackaday.io, but if you’ve been here long enough you know that I don’t trust other sites to continue to exist. (It’s why I copy my book reviews over from Good Reads). As of right now I’ve got the board able to read temperatures from a thermocouple that I send, via WiFi, to an MQTT broker. Then, via Python I take subscribe to that MQTT topic and put it into InfluxDB. From there I use Grafana to graph it. Here’s an early beta where I was trying to make sure it was working from end-to-end:
Went ahead and upgraded. Only had to get rid of python2-twitter and an older nvidia package. Other than that it seems to be running relatively smoothly.
I’ve been hearing about Podman for a while now - at Red Hat Summit and at various local Red Hat presentations. I’ve seen the slides where the RHEL presenter (it’s always the same guy, but I’m terrible with names - after a bit of research, I think it’s Dan Walsh) asks you to pledge to call them container images, not Docker images, etc. But up until now, even though I’m a huge Red Hat fan, I’ve continued to use Docker as my container engine because I am just running a few containers for myself. I don’t even use a one-machine Docker Swarm. I use docker-compose. And that’s just not something that Podman is ever going to officially support. This makes sense because Red Hat is thinking enterprise. And in the enterprise there are two scenarios: 1) Orchestration - vanilla Kubernetes, OpenShift, etc - and 2) are devs running docker run (or podman run) to test the images before putting them into the orchestrator. I’m an anti-pattern, even if I’m not the only one doing things this way.
When I tried to upgrade the laptop a couple days ahead of the Tuesday release date, assuming that the sources were as good as gold at that point, the upgrade process complained about the Kdevelop Python plugin and didn’t want to proceed. I figured if this persisted past Tuesday I would just use it as an opportunity to try out PyCharm Community Edition. But once Tuesday came around I was able to upgrade to Fedora 31 with nary a problem. So that was probably the smoothest upgrade I’ve had since Fedora Core 1.
Back when Fedora 30 came out, I updated my laptop, but I left my main computer and the HTPC on Fedora 29. The former because I was busy with something at the time and didn’t want the disruption of an upgrade; the latter because the family depends on it for entertainment. However, with Fedora 31 coming out next Tuesday, the support window of Fedora 29 is over. The HTPC didn’t give any issues when I started the upgrade (at of this time it’s still running the upgrade), but my main computer did. This time it complaint about ripright and whois-mkpasswd.
Scarlett drew this back in September when the kids were playing a lot of Spelunky. It’s interesting to see which parts of the game imprinted on her mind.
Sometimes Scarlett asks me to draw with her. So I drew this scene:
Of course, what we “see” is dependent upon our state of mind. Having been watching lots of fairy tale cartoons, her first guess was that I’d drawn a dragon and a dinosaur. Her second guess, of course, was correct that it was a giraffe and rhino. She then added a bird and some apples for the giraffe.
I know there’s a fine line between a parent being impressed by their child and a parent bragging. Nonetheless, I thought this drawing Scarlett did was pretty good for a 3 year old.
On my Father’s Day Weekend visit to NYC I finally got to see some MoMA exhibits I’d wanted to see for months. First off was a Picasso exhibit called “Variations”. Ever since my parents took me to the Dali Museum in St Petersburg, FL six years ago, I’ve been very interested in painters – especially artists from the 1930s-1950s and the surrealist and associated movements. Also, as a person of Spanish heritage, I’ve had a special interest in artists from the region. So I was very excited to see this Picasso exhibit.
I went to the Lomography store yesterday and it was a very interesting experience. The store matches the aesthetic of the Lomography movement. It has a very casual feel to it. It definitely belongs in Greenwich Village. The wall is a huge collage of Lomo prints; most appeared to be of or taken in New York City. There was a lot of repetition and it had the feel or working well as a larger work of art. It’s worth visiting the store just to see the wall. But the layout was also great - all the cameras are sitting on a table in the middle and you can touch them and handle them and get a feel for the camera. I have a feeling they would have probably let me load some film in and take some shots for them to keep. (And I might have if I hadn’t been there with others) The table has an outline of each camera beneath it with the price of the camera listed. The staff (well, the one woman there at that time) was very knowledgeable and helpful. Definitely a good hire. There were also tons of books and magazines wholly consisting of Lomographic images.
I think that nearly everyone who has ever learned about the Fibonacci Sequence is fascinated by how quickly it grows. I wanted to illustrate that, so I created this collage with some modifications to J im’s makeCollage.pl script. The rules were that each picture takes the place of a number on the Fibonacci Sequence and is displayed that many times. Of course, I skipped Fibonacci number 1, which is 0. No point in having a picture show up 0 times. So the first picture is shown once, as is the second. Then two times, then three, then…..
First up is tldr. This something I’ve wanted ever since I started with Linux 16 years ago! Basically it gives you the examples part of a man page. For both of these I’m going to use a screenshot because copy/pasting it into the blog doesn’t do it justice.
First up is tldr. This something I’ve wanted ever since I started with Linux 16 years ago! Basically it gives you the examples part of a man page. For both of these I’m going to use a screenshot because copy/pasting it into the blog doesn’t do it justice.
First up is tldr. This something I’ve wanted ever since I started with Linux 16 years ago! Basically it gives you the examples part of a man page. For both of these I’m going to use a screenshot because copy/pasting it into the blog doesn’t do it justice.
Three years ago I wrote a post (along with a Youtube video) about how to set up a KVM VM with Dual Monitors (or even triple monitors). Since then there’s been a bit of a change. I loaded up remote viewer and, for some reason, I couldn’t add more monitors to my Linux KVM VM. Turns out what you have to do is look at the Video (QXL) section in virt-manager. Look at how many “heads” it has listed. For example:
I’ve been looking at NAS implementations for a long time. I looked at FreeNAS for a while then OpenMediaVault. But what I really wanted was to be able to take advantage of btrfs and its great RAID abilities - especially its ability to dynamically expand. So I was happy when I discovered Rockstor on Reddit. Here are some videos in which I explore the interface and how to work with Rockstor using a VM before setting it up on bare metal.
I used to have a Team Fortress 2 server on CentOS 6 with Virtual Box. Now that I’m using KVM/QEMU/Libvirt, I wanted to set up a new one. Also, Valve somewhat changed how they worked a few years ago and I wanted a clean slate. I started with a VM with 40GB. It’s not supposed to take that much, but I remember last time it took much more than the 10GB I’d given the VM and I don’t want to have to increase the disk size again.
So, the current solution for bridging with KVM/QEMU/Libvirt involves macvtap. This allows your VM to be seen by computers on the network which is key if you want to, say, run a server or DNS on a VM. However, there’s a catch - the host can’t reach the VM. Sometimes this doesn’t matter and sometimes it does. For example, if the guest is running DNS and you want the host to be able to use it for DNS, this is an issue. There is another way to do it, but it involves ditching Network Manager. I actually like Network Manager. So what am I to do?
I have VM running Emby that I set up a while ago on an low spec machine that had been the guest computer before everyone got Chromebooks and tablets. But it only had 2GB of RAM and I gave 1GB to the VM. So I added some new RAM to bring the system up to 8GB and wanted to start off by giving the VM 4GB to see if that improved performance.
I’ve been using Virtualbox for a long time to run virtual machines when I want to check out other distros before I install them on one of my computers or to review them. It’s MOSTLY open source, although some of the key parts like USB 2.0 are free to use, but not open source. So now that Red Hat’s Virtual Machine Manager is starting to look pretty useful I figured I should check it out. That way I could be using a FLOSS virtual machine program - assuming the features were good enough to match Oracle’s offerings. Also, Virtualbox requires a kernel module that has to be recompiled every time a new kernel is installed and that’s annoying. I figured I’d test out both programs by installed a VM of Centos.
As I documented before, I’ve had problems with Pogoplug and Arch Linux running my servers. Recently I’ve been having problems logging in via SSH on my updated Fedora computers. From what I can tell from a little research, it seems the old way of connecting had a flaw so updated SSH doesn’t want talk to unupdated SSH. So I tried to update Arch Linux and once again ended up with a borked computer. And it’s not something I did wrong - everyone had complaints of the change from /usr/bin (and some other bins) bricking systems. If Pogoplug had a display, I’d have been able to fix it. I tried reinstalling, but something has changed that makes the Pogoplug no longer work. Sick of having stuff go wrong every time I update, I decided this was the time to implement the Home Server Project.
Three years ago I wrote a post (along with a Youtube video) about how to set up a KVM VM with Dual Monitors (or even triple monitors). Since then there’s been a bit of a change. I loaded up remote viewer and, for some reason, I couldn’t add more monitors to my Linux KVM VM. Turns out what you have to do is look at the Video (QXL) section in virt-manager. Look at how many “heads” it has listed. For example:
The podman saga continues. The podman equivalent of a docker-compose.yml can be created from a pod with the following command:
podman generate kube (name of pod) > (filename).yaml
So I did that with the pod that I’d created with an SELinux context. Now it was time to try it on another Fedora 31 VM to see if it would work. To be on the safe side, I started off creating the phpIPAM folder, chowning it to nobody and chmoding it to 777.
Last time I messed around with Podman, I finally got things working and had what I think was a pretty good understanding of how to go forward. But in order to get things working, I’d had to turn off SELinux. Now it was time to see what I had to do to make Podman work with SELinux. I’ve got some ideas based on some Googling and might also need to try a program called udica to create the right contexts.
I was having trouble printing and couldn’t figure out what was going on. I tried everything, including reinstalling the printer and reinstalling the driver. I was getting a misleading “you are using the wrong driver” message. Turns out SELinux was to blame! I happened to check dmesg and see some audit messages. Then I did a
setenforce 0
to turn it off and printing worked. I tried some restorecons on some directories, but I don’t think that fixed it. What I think fixed it was going into the policycoreutils gui and checking as active the cups module “Allow cups execmem/execstack.” Obviously, I turned setenforce back on after checking the box.
Last time I messed around with Podman, I finally got things working and had what I think was a pretty good understanding of how to go forward. But in order to get things working, I’d had to turn off SELinux. Now it was time to see what I had to do to make Podman work with SELinux. I’ve got some ideas based on some Googling and might also need to try a program called udica to create the right contexts.
Like these random container names that podman generated:
# podman ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
b83a26bb2c5d docker.io/library/mysql:5.6 mysqld 2 minutes ago Up 2 minutes ago 0.0.0.0:8081->80/tcp hungry_wilson
f35ec64d3b3c docker.io/pierrecdn/phpipam:latest apache2-foregroun… 2 minutes ago Up 2 minutes ago 0.0.0.0:8081->80/tcp nice_johnson
Makes me think perhaps there should be a list of adjectives and names that shouldn’t go together?
Yesterday I was at a conference dedicated to DevOps and so Red Hat and Google were there to talk about containers, especially Docker and Kubernetes. While summarizing it to some of my employees today, I was asked about what I see as the benefits of Docker containers relative to Virtual Machines. I mentioned that one of the great things is that Docker containers are immutable. All of your data’s actually written to a folder that’s essentially mounted in the container.
When I went to visit my grandfather in September, he brought out some Havana Club Rum that someone had brought from Cuba.
As best as I can understand things, after the communists took over and nationalized Havana Club, the original creator-owner sold the recipe to the Bacardi family, who’d fled to Puerto Rico.
I’m not a huge drinker, but I can appreciate a good spirit. I did not enjoy drinking this.
I knew that one of the things Castro prided himself on was ridding Cuba of the influence of the American Mob, but I had no idea just how entwined they were with the Batista government. It was also incredible what long-range planners the mobsters were. If younger Americans know anything about these events, it’s from the events of The Godfather, but that movie (or is it part 2?) places the mobster meeting the same week as the revolution. In reality it was decades earlier. In fact, Al Capone had dreamed of Cuba being a Gangster’s Paradise.
I recently heard that Cuba had created their own Linux distribution, Nova. Like many other countries with a rocky relationship with the USA (Russia, China, Iran), Cuba is wary of running their entire computer infrastructure on software developed in the USA. As someone of Cuban ancestry, this development piqued my interested and I decided to check it out. (I figured such a specialist distro would never be on the cover of LXF). According to its distrowatch page, it is a mix of Gentoo, Sabayon, and Ututo. We’ll see if they chose all of the negative aspects of those distros and thus created Satan’s Distro or if they took all that was good and created what Gentoo has the potential to be. So I launch it up in VirtualBox.
A big difference from 9 years ago is that I don’t use the dedicated ereader as much as I used to. Mostly that comes down to the fact that I don’t read as much before bed and I have limited other places to use the ereader. Usually I’m either reading on my phone or on the computer. But there’s one time that I really love the ereader - when I’m traveling, particularly by plane. This way I can read during the entire trip without draining my cell phone battery. As Scarlett has gotten old enough to read, I figured she could have the Nook (to keep from straining her eyes constantly with the backlit tablet) and I’d still want an ereader for travel. Additionally, who knows - I might go back to more reading at home or before bed when a backlit phone just isn’t ideal. So I got the Kobo Clara HD.
[caption id=“attachment_3556” align=“aligncenter” width=“450” caption=“Barnes and Noble Nook and the a case for the Nook”] [/caption]
As you may remember, a few months ago I decided to rethink the issue of ebooks. I was going back and forth about buying the Barnes and Noble Nook just before my recent flight to Florida. I had been looking forward to the flight as a chance to read through some of Cory Doctorow’s fiction. In the end, I decided I didn’t want to spend the money on the device and read it on my laptop. This was less than ideal. The laptop only had about 20 minutes of charge on the battery and so I had to split up reading the book between the outbound and inbound trips. Sometime in the near future Danielle and I are going to be taking a much longer flight, so I caved and decided to buy the nook.
Until now I’ve been quite against ebooks. Back when I was in college I had an iPaq and I downloaded the Microsoft reader to it. I bought about 3 - 5 books for it and, at first, I thought it was great. It would allow you to annotate the book and highlight passages. And it was electronic so I could carry a bunch of books in the space of my PDA. But it was one of the first times I was bitten by digital restrictions management (DRM). I had to reset my PDA because it got into a locked state. After that, I couldn’t read my books until I reauthenticated the PDA. After all, everyone out there is out to destroy authors and steal digital books, so they need to make sure I’m the one who paid for it. This worked the first time around, but the second time I needed to authenticate, the server refused to authenticate the device and I could no longer read the books. So I was out around $20. Imagine buying a regular physical book and then having it no longer work because it wasn’t sure if you were the person who bought it. Yeah, it’s pretty ridiculous.
A big difference from 9 years ago is that I don’t use the dedicated ereader as much as I used to. Mostly that comes down to the fact that I don’t read as much before bed and I have limited other places to use the ereader. Usually I’m either reading on my phone or on the computer. But there’s one time that I really love the ereader - when I’m traveling, particularly by plane. This way I can read during the entire trip without draining my cell phone battery. As Scarlett has gotten old enough to read, I figured she could have the Nook (to keep from straining her eyes constantly with the backlit tablet) and I’d still want an ereader for travel. Additionally, who knows - I might go back to more reading at home or before bed when a backlit phone just isn’t ideal. So I got the Kobo Clara HD.
[caption id=“attachment_3556” align=“aligncenter” width=“450” caption=“Barnes and Noble Nook and the a case for the Nook”] [/caption]
As you may remember, a few months ago I decided to rethink the issue of ebooks. I was going back and forth about buying the Barnes and Noble Nook just before my recent flight to Florida. I had been looking forward to the flight as a chance to read through some of Cory Doctorow’s fiction. In the end, I decided I didn’t want to spend the money on the device and read it on my laptop. This was less than ideal. The laptop only had about 20 minutes of charge on the battery and so I had to split up reading the book between the outbound and inbound trips. Sometime in the near future Danielle and I are going to be taking a much longer flight, so I caved and decided to buy the nook.
A big difference from 9 years ago is that I don’t use the dedicated ereader as much as I used to. Mostly that comes down to the fact that I don’t read as much before bed and I have limited other places to use the ereader. Usually I’m either reading on my phone or on the computer. But there’s one time that I really love the ereader - when I’m traveling, particularly by plane. This way I can read during the entire trip without draining my cell phone battery. As Scarlett has gotten old enough to read, I figured she could have the Nook (to keep from straining her eyes constantly with the backlit tablet) and I’d still want an ereader for travel. Additionally, who knows - I might go back to more reading at home or before bed when a backlit phone just isn’t ideal. So I got the Kobo Clara HD.
Over the years I’ve taken many, many photos of my kids at Coney Island. Lots of them have come out great. But I think this batch of photos is among the best photos I’ve taken of the kids at Coney Island thus far.
In some cases, it’s the expressions on the twins’ faces.
I’m on a motorcycle!
I see you!
Yeah, I know how to use this
Other times, I succeeded in getting the perfect action shot.
It’s pretty crazy how much Scarlett has grown since she first started going to Coney Island. Before, there were only a few rides she liked or could go on. Now she’s going on roller coasters! I wonder if she’ll want to go on adult coasters with me when she’s old enough. I guess we’ll see what thinks about being twisted and turned about.
Coney Island is quite photogenic at night, but even I surprised myself (who had gone a few years ago specifically to take photos there are night) with just how photogenic when I got on the carousel with Scarlett (and her cousins). Here are some photos from that night:
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
Here are your new desktop backgrounds for July 2011!
Just click on the one that matches your monitor type and then either right-click and set as desktop or save it to your computer and save it as your desktop manually.
My latest Photojojo photo time capsule containing the ending to my 365 project and some photos from the Coney Island Mermaid Parade has arrived. Here are the photos:
And I continue to through my Top 200 most viewed photos on flickr.
Photo #197 is:
Brighton Beach in Brooklyn is one of my homes-away-from-home. I’ve been going there to visit the family that became my in-laws for about 10 years. It was so exciting to find out that they lived so close to the famous Coney Island. I’m certain there will be more photos of Coney Island as this project goes on. It’s one of the easiest places for me to shoot because it’s only a 10 to 15 minute walk if I’m in a hurry vs a 45+ minute ride to Manhattan. Although I’ve never ridden the Wonder Wheel, I’ve always had a fascination with it because every time the fair came to Florida, I’d ride the Ferris Wheel. I am not sure if I’m forgetting some memory, but I don’t think I’ve ever done the cliche riding of the wheel with a date, but maybe I can somewhat buck that by riding the Wonder Wheel with the wife. Along with the Cyclone roller coaster, the Wonder Wheel is one of the oldest and most iconic structures at Coney Island.
Last time I mentioned my Franka Solida III, I had just had my first roll in my Yashica developed. I mentioned being a bit worried about the fact that I couldn’t tell what was in focus by looking through the viewfinder. Turns out that my fear was founded as I originally thought the units on the lens were ft when they were in fact meters. The results show:
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Luna Park, the new section of Coney Island”] [/caption]
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I went to NYC over Father’s Day weekend to see the Mermaid Parade. Well, as if that wasn’t crazy enough, I went BACK to Coney Island that night to photograph the new Luna Park. I have been documenting the changes to Coney Islan d and so I wanted to document the aftermath. I took both of the digital cameras I had used that afternoon and proceeded to take some low light photos. I would have preferred to have gone a little earlier in the evening to take the photos, but we thought it might have been a little crowded. By the time we went, it wasn’t too crowded, but there were still plenty of people still in their mermaid costumes hanging around.
In reading the New York Daily Photo Blog, I happened to come across a post about the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. I mentioned to my wife that I wanted to try and attend next time it happened. Being the awesome wife that she is, she kept her eye out for the date and let me know it would coincide with Father’s Day weekend this year. So we decided to get a two-for-one deal and go to NYC to see the parade.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Lovers on the Boardwalk”] [/caption]
A few weeks ago I took yet another stroll on Brighton Beach’s Boardwalk. This famous boardwalk goes from Brighton Beach past Coney Island all the way to Seagate. This time around I took some iconic photos from the area. In other words, these are exactly the types of photos you would see included in any survey of boardwalk photos. Here’s the GPS track of where I went in a static PNG and then as a Google Map so you can zoom in and scroll around.
Like these random container names that podman generated:
# podman ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
b83a26bb2c5d docker.io/library/mysql:5.6 mysqld 2 minutes ago Up 2 minutes ago 0.0.0.0:8081->80/tcp hungry_wilson
f35ec64d3b3c docker.io/pierrecdn/phpipam:latest apache2-foregroun… 2 minutes ago Up 2 minutes ago 0.0.0.0:8081->80/tcp nice_johnson
Makes me think perhaps there should be a list of adjectives and names that shouldn’t go together?
Continuing my LXC project, let’s list the installed containers:
lxc-ls
That just shows the name of the container - lemmy. For completion’s sake, I’m going to start it as a daemon in the background rather than being sent straight into the console:
lxc-start -n lemmy -d
As per usual Linux SOP, it produced no output. Now to jump in:
lxc-console -n lemmy
That told me I was connected to tty1, but did not present a login. Quitting out via Ctrl-a q let me go back to the VM’s tty, but trying again did not get me login. There’s some weird issue that doesn’t allow it to work, however, this did:
I’m continuing on from yesterday’s post to get the VM ready to host LXC. I’m starting with Centos 7 so the first thing I had to do was enable the epel repos:
yum install epel-release
Then, according to the guide I was following, I had to also install these package:
yum install debootstrap perl libvirt
That installed a bunch of stuff. I also get that they’re trying to break out what they’re doing, but they probably could have installed both that and the LXC stuff below in one blow:
As I mentioned before, I’m looking at Linux Containers (LXC) to have a higher density virtualization. To get ready for that, I had to create a network bridge to allow the containers to be accessible on the network.
First I installed bridge-utils:
yum install bridge-utils -y
After that, I had to create the network script:
vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-virbr0
In there I placed:
DEVICE="virbr0"
BOOTPROTO="static"
IPADDR="192.168.1.35" #IP address of the VM
NETMASK="255.255.255.0"
GATEWAY="192.168.1.1"
DNS1="192.168.1.7"
ONBOOT="yes"
TYPE="Bridge"
I’ve been hearing about Podman for a while now - at Red Hat Summit and at various local Red Hat presentations. I’ve seen the slides where the RHEL presenter (it’s always the same guy, but I’m terrible with names - after a bit of research, I think it’s Dan Walsh) asks you to pledge to call them container images, not Docker images, etc. But up until now, even though I’m a huge Red Hat fan, I’ve continued to use Docker as my container engine because I am just running a few containers for myself. I don’t even use a one-machine Docker Swarm. I use docker-compose. And that’s just not something that Podman is ever going to officially support. This makes sense because Red Hat is thinking enterprise. And in the enterprise there are two scenarios: 1) Orchestration - vanilla Kubernetes, OpenShift, etc - and 2) are devs running docker run (or podman run) to test the images before putting them into the orchestrator. I’m an anti-pattern, even if I’m not the only one doing things this way.
Yesterday I was at a conference dedicated to DevOps and so Red Hat and Google were there to talk about containers, especially Docker and Kubernetes. While summarizing it to some of my employees today, I was asked about what I see as the benefits of Docker containers relative to Virtual Machines. I mentioned that one of the great things is that Docker containers are immutable. All of your data’s actually written to a folder that’s essentially mounted in the container.
With modern technology, here’s the pattern I’ve noticed since college. New tech comes out and I can see that it’s neat, but not how I can make use of it. A few years later, I finally come across the right article and it all makes sense to me. I first noticed this with VMs. I couldn’t see a reason to want to use it outside of a server context. Then I used it to review Linux distros. Then I used it to run my network’s services. The same happened with tablets, smart phones, and Docker.
Just in time for Halloween I discovered the Dracula set of dark themes.They’ve got themes for nearly every code editor and shell/console program you can think of. Here’s Yakuake with the Dracula Konsole theme:
Yakuake with Dracula theme
And here’s Kate with the Dracula theme:
Kate with Dracula theme
I like the color scheme, but the font’s a bit small, so I might make a variant theme with a slightly larger font size.
I started using KDE in November of last yea r so I figured that I’d give an update on how things are working for me four months in. First off, KDE 4.6.x has not yet hit the official Fedora repositories. Since I like to yum upgrade or preupgrade from release to release, I try to stay with the official repos and RPMFusion. So no KDE 4.6 for me. At this rate, it doesn’t seem that it’s going to make it until around Fedora 15. But, if that means they iron out any extra bugs, that’s fine with me. So, with that said, let’s get to the info.
I’ve been playing video games since I was somewhere around 5 or 6 years old and got a Nintendo Entertainment System for my birthday from one of my aunts. I also inherited a Tandy computer from my dad when I was younger. We had a bunch of edutainment games - like this Sesame Street game (that unfortunately a quick search on Google Images does not turn up) where you had to suck the Tweedles (bugs from Ernie’s flower box) to solve math problems. I also, and I’ve mentioned this before in several places on the net, learned to program from a book on BASIC and made myself a bunch of simple games, including Madlibs clones.
I finally made bacon from scratch for the first time, so that deserves its own gallery:
One of the things that had been stopping me was the fact that Costco only sold pork bellies already sliced for Korean dishes. Then, the weekend I was going to ask them if I could buy a full pork belly, they had one there. They said customers had been asking for it so they were going to start selling some whole. It was a pretty neat experience making my own bacon. I can see why it’s so expensive - it involves a lot of waiting and a lot of labor.
I’ve been perfecting my diner style hamburgers (aka quarterpounders) thanks to the tips from Amazingribs.com. But there’s a guy at work I talk to about grilling, BBQ, and smoking. He was telling me about his bacon cheeseburgers. I thought about how I tend not to like bacon cheeseburgers in restaurants. Usually either the bacon or the cheese is substandard and I end up just preferring a hamburger. But then I thought about one key thing - when I make the burgers I decide all the ingredients.
I was having an issue with Kdenlive while rending my most recent tutorials for my Extra Life Donation Tracker and so I grabbed the latest Appimage version since it’s more up to date than the version in the Fedora 29 repos. Boy has it changed in the last year or so. Here’s the version in the Fedora 29 repos:
Kdenlive 18.12
And here’s the latest release with the exact same file open:
I would have backed The PDX Broadsides’ Kickstarter for Relatable Content no matter what because I loved Trust Issues and I enjoy nearly all of their older songs. But the thing that made me spread the word everyone and try to get more backers was that they had a goal to do an East Coast tour. When they came to the New Deal Cafe in Greenbelt, MD I was finally able to see them live for the first time. It was also my second time seeing The Misbehavin’ Maidens, who opened for The Doubleclicks earlier in the year.
When I backed The PDX Broadsides’ Kickstarter, they pointed out their friends, The Misbehavin’ Maidens, also had a Kickstarter campaign going on. As I mentioned in the review forRelatable Content, The PDX Broadsides started off as a pirate shanty band. The Misbehavin’ Maidens still are a pirate shanty band, or at least a few of their songs on Swearing is Caring follow sea shanty song structures and melodies. And, other than tamborines and drums, they’re an acapella band.
My second concert of 2019 was almost the exact opposite of the first one. The first one was a big outdoor concert venue (it was in Boston, but was configured like Pier VI in Baltimore) while this one was in the basement of a pizza place called Joe Squared. The first one featured pop artists that everyone has heard while this one featured niche bands that mostly nerds have heard. The first one featured full bands while the Misbehavin’ Maidens performed acapella and The Doubleclicks used an electric cello and other stringed instruments.
I would have backed The PDX Broadsides’ Kickstarter for Relatable Content no matter what because I loved Trust Issues and I enjoy nearly all of their older songs. But the thing that made me spread the word everyone and try to get more backers was that they had a goal to do an East Coast tour. When they came to the New Deal Cafe in Greenbelt, MD I was finally able to see them live for the first time. It was also my second time seeing The Misbehavin’ Maidens, who opened for The Doubleclicks earlier in the year.
This year I have sponsored a lot of Kickstarter creative work, including lots of music. One that I was very excited to support was The PDX Broadsides’ latest album, Relatable Content. They started off as a pirate shanty band and have evolved into a nerd filk band whose songs range from silly to profound. I really enjoyed their last album, Trust Issues, which had some pretty timely songs like Noncompliant (superficially about the Bitch Planet comic, but actually about the Me Too era) and We Want Rey (about representation in nerd toydom). It also had some fun songs (both feature Christian as the lead) like Tiny Little Octopus and Robot vs Boy (which I want to see made into a mini-musical). Their last Kickstarter also had a dirty album called Lust Issues that continued their trend of Shakespeare music with the great Dirtbag Romeo and their dirtier songs from their pirate shanty days with It’s Just Sex.
At the time that I’m writing this, I’ve had Trust Issues for a few days. I signed up for the Kickstarter campaign after The Doubleclicks mentioned them. I then went to the PDX Broadsides’ bandcamp page and ended up buying the entire back catalog.
After having heard the album a few times, here are my first impressions:
Favorite Song: Robot vs Boy - although it seems like it should be the first track to a concept album and leaves me wanting to know more about the story
Most beautiful song: Dolores - about HBO’s Westworld
I’ve done a few travelogues on this blog (like the series covering my trip to the Grand Canyon) and I usually cover things chronologically. However, this time around I’m writing things about 3.5 months later. So rather than worry about covering things chronologically, I’m going to cover them by topic.
Family Vacations
Dan making pizza for the family
We were visiting The Redwoods (or, rather, a number of state (and maybe national?) parks containing Redwood trees) for my mom’s birthday. It was her wish to gather the entire clan for her birthday and to check the Redwoods off her bucket list. This was extra special to her because it’s pretty rare for all of us to be in one place at once time. Dave’s family is in the Pacific Northwest while Dan’s family and mine are in the mid-Atlantic. Mom’s in Florida with my three youngest siblings and dad. With everyone married and with all the parents wanting holiday time we can’t always all make it together for the same holidays.
Today’s post makes the series name somewhat inaccurate, hence the subtitle. We awoke and, having spent the week debating the best course of action, decided it made the most sense for us to all go to the airport to pick up the rental car since it cost the same to get out there whether it was just me or all of us. Additionally, we’d spend less gas than having me circle back around to pick up the girls.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“375”] Crazy boutique Hotel Diva Blackout Curtain[/caption]
We awoke wondering what shape Scarlett would be in. We were instructed to only give her Pedialyte or ginger ale. Scarlett, being her usual picky self, was having none of it. So we decided to try milk. She was OK. The vomiting was over.
When traveling through time zones the first few days are often spent on the home city’s timezone. I ended up spending the entire trip on EST thanks to Scarlett. And that is fine because it made going back to work easy.
As I mentioned yesterday, there were a bunch of diners around our hotel. We spotted Lori’s Diner when we went to get water at Walgreens. It’s a 1950s-style diner with vintage stuff all over the walls and floors. Great breakfast (for a diner) and great staff.
We flew to San Francisco to attend my brother-in-law’s wedding, but Danielle and I had wanted to go there for years so we decided to have a week-long vacation. Scarlett was amazing on the airplane. It was her second flight in her short life. However, the flight to Florida is so short that if you can time it with a nap, it’s EASY to travel with her. The 6 hour trip to San Francisco is another matter entirely. However, we kept her entertained and that kept her calm. There were a lot of other little kids on the plane including a 2-3 year old who spent 30 minutes crying. Scarlett never cried although she does whine every now and again if she doesn’t her needs met - it only lasts a minute or two. We brought crayons and painter’s tape (to stick to the seat) and that seemed to keep her pretty well entertained. When she grew bored of that, I walked her up and back the aisle. She seemed to love seeing so many people. We went back and forth a half dozen times before I grew tired of almost falling onto her when going towards the back of the plane. (The plane was angled up)
I’ve done a few travelogues on this blog (like the series covering my trip to the Grand Canyon) and I usually cover things chronologically. However, this time around I’m writing things about 3.5 months later. So rather than worry about covering things chronologically, I’m going to cover them by topic.
Family Vacations
Dan making pizza for the family
We were visiting The Redwoods (or, rather, a number of state (and maybe national?) parks containing Redwood trees) for my mom’s birthday. It was her wish to gather the entire clan for her birthday and to check the Redwoods off her bucket list. This was extra special to her because it’s pretty rare for all of us to be in one place at once time. Dave’s family is in the Pacific Northwest while Dan’s family and mine are in the mid-Atlantic. Mom’s in Florida with my three youngest siblings and dad. With everyone married and with all the parents wanting holiday time we can’t always all make it together for the same holidays.
Scarlett had been obsessed with Mickey and the Beanstalk so I HAD to snap the photo that heads up this post. But there were also some interesting things going on at PDX as I made my way home:
The day after the wedding we headed out to Mount Hood. While I learned how to ski at the Sugar Mountains in North Carolina, I did most of my skiing at Mount Hood when we lived there. When we first moved up we went to Mt Hood in August and there was some snow there. This was a much hotter year, so you had to go to the top of The Magic Mile to get some snow. I actually heard some people complaining about the quality of the snow….in July…..
I’ve done a few travelogues on this blog (like the series covering my trip to the Grand Canyon) and I usually cover things chronologically. However, this time around I’m writing things about 3.5 months later. So rather than worry about covering things chronologically, I’m going to cover them by topic.
Family Vacations
Dan making pizza for the family
We were visiting The Redwoods (or, rather, a number of state (and maybe national?) parks containing Redwood trees) for my mom’s birthday. It was her wish to gather the entire clan for her birthday and to check the Redwoods off her bucket list. This was extra special to her because it’s pretty rare for all of us to be in one place at once time. Dave’s family is in the Pacific Northwest while Dan’s family and mine are in the mid-Atlantic. Mom’s in Florida with my three youngest siblings and dad. With everyone married and with all the parents wanting holiday time we can’t always all make it together for the same holidays.
I’ve done a few travelogues on this blog (like the series covering my trip to the Grand Canyon) and I usually cover things chronologically. However, this time around I’m writing things about 3.5 months later. So rather than worry about covering things chronologically, I’m going to cover them by topic.
Family Vacations
Dan making pizza for the family
We were visiting The Redwoods (or, rather, a number of state (and maybe national?) parks containing Redwood trees) for my mom’s birthday. It was her wish to gather the entire clan for her birthday and to check the Redwoods off her bucket list. This was extra special to her because it’s pretty rare for all of us to be in one place at once time. Dave’s family is in the Pacific Northwest while Dan’s family and mine are in the mid-Atlantic. Mom’s in Florida with my three youngest siblings and dad. With everyone married and with all the parents wanting holiday time we can’t always all make it together for the same holidays.
Baby birds in BBQ prep station - the mom thought it was the best place to make a nest
I thought I’d blogged before about the bird who made a nest in my BBQ prep station, but a couple quick searches didn’t find it. So the background is that this bird decided the best place to nest is at my BBQ prep station which has a couple shelves that basically look like a bird house (a small, circular hole). I tried to frustrate the bird out of doing it by dumping out the nest daily. At some point I let the bird win. A few months later, these baby birds were born.
I got pretty lucky to arrive as they had some neat birds out where you could get right up next to them. There were also some cool birds out in the bird sanctuary area.
For the first time in something like 3 years I took my Sigma 120-400mm lens to the zoo. I had intended to get some Firefox (Red Panda) photos and videos, but they weren’t there. That was also a bummer for Scarlett as seeing the Red Pandas was the reason she’d asked us to take her to the zoo.
First off we saw one of the pandas:
But what was a lot of fun was taking photos of the birds; birds that would have been quite hard for me to see in the wild. I think they came out pretty nicely considering the darkness in the bird house and the fact that I was hand-holding the lens. It seems like some of the higher ISO photos didn’t even have too much noise, so I’ll explore using it in the future to get the exposure a little more correct in camera. (if the photos look blurry when you click on them, give it a little time to load)
It’s easy to lust after photo opportunities elsewhere as I did in a recent post. But when you find that happening, just remember there’s a whole world in your backyard. If you live in an urban neighborhood like the protagonist of Pecker, you can focus on portraits and street photography - candid or otherwise. But if you live in a suburban or rural area, you’ll find a lot of naturalistic photo opportunities in your backyard. For inspiration, take a look at these photos taken in my backyard and my parents’ backyard. (I’ve stretched the definition of backyard a little to include the surrounding neighborhood that’s within a short walk - say, within a mile) (Yes, a lot of them are birds, but that’s what really interests me outside)
I love how impossibly large these beaks are. I also love how ridiculously colorful these birds are. The beak itself is about 3 different colors. Then the bird itself is another 3 different colors. I really like the depth of field effect in this shot.
Well, we’ve made it to photo #80 and the images are starting to spread out more. Basically, as a general trend, the photos that people like tend to get more views more often. So the images start getting further and further apart in views. As an example, at the time that I’m writing this, this photo has 590 views and #61 has 683 views.
I enjoy all the birds in my backyard, but nothing beats the thrill of identifying a new bird. It’s hard to get a good enough shot to be able to ID it because enough birds look similar enough that it can be hard for the novice birder to identify them.
This is one of my best bird photos both from a subject standpoint and a technical standpoint. Birds are exceptionally hard to photograph. All animals are hard as they’re more unpredictable than humans, but birds are exceptionally frantic. It’s probably partly because they have a few predators and partly because they need to constantly eat because of their high metabolisms. So it’s hard to capture a bird tack sharp like this one. It’s made a little harder by the fact that my camera’s old so I can’t boost the ISO high enough to get a nice, fast shutter speed.
Another hard bird to photograph. The blue jays are in my yard even less often than the cardinals. And they run away at the slightest move by me. But, once again, patience paid off.
Ever since I put up the bird feeders (and even before that) I’ve been trying to get good shots of the cardinal. With my Sigma 120-400mm and some patience I was finally able to succeed. These guys are really skittish. If I come outside when I see them, they run away. So I need to already be standing out there for them to ignore me and come out and let me take their photo. This photo has been increasing in views rather quickly. I’m a pretty big fan of it myself.
It’s been nearly a month since I put up the bird feeders in our house and I have been enjoying them nearly every day since then. In fact, the only negative has been the cost of bird food. But, as my mother-in-law put it, I get the benefits of having birds without the hassle of having them as pets. At first we had a few birds visiting the feeders each day. Now, during the busy bird breakfast hours, we get multiple birds at once. Interestingly, on the whole, the birds to not fight with each other. Rather, if there are more birds than spots at the feeder, they will queue up on nearby branches. I was very surprised by this behaviour because I thought they would surely fight over this nearly infinite food source.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“375” caption=“Just barely beat the sun getting our bird feeders up on the first day”] [/caption]
Almost since we moved into our house we’ve been fascinated by the birds we have seen in our front and back yards. Both the wife and I love birding in general and I love photographing birds. So, after a bit of discussion we decided to get a bird feeder. We ended up getting two of them to accommodate different birds and different seed types. Then I dug a hole and attached the bird feeders to a stick we had in the garage. I read a few books on birds and expected it might take a while for the birds to discover the feeder. I was extremely delighted the following day to find birds at the feeder when I got home from work! These little guys would flit out of the woods, peck a bite, and fly right back out. So it was very hard to get a photo, especially with the sun beginning to set. At the end of this post is the best shot I got.
Baby birds in BBQ prep station - the mom thought it was the best place to make a nest
I thought I’d blogged before about the bird who made a nest in my BBQ prep station, but a couple quick searches didn’t find it. So the background is that this bird decided the best place to nest is at my BBQ prep station which has a couple shelves that basically look like a bird house (a small, circular hole). I tried to frustrate the bird out of doing it by dumping out the nest daily. At some point I let the bird win. A few months later, these baby birds were born.
When MakeMKV added a new requirement for ccextractor, allowing it to grab subtitles that are encoded on the DVD or Blueray as Closed Captioning instead of subtitles, there wasn’t a package available for Fedora. (There is now, but at the time where wasn’t) So I wanted to make an RPM that I could host on Fedora’s COPR for others who needed the package. There was a problem with their shell script for building RPMs. At the time I just kept hacking away at it until I was able to build RPMs. But I didn’t think about how the manual process wouldn’t be sustainable as changes were made to CC Extractor. They weren’t having releases too often, so I didn’t worry about it. But then they made a new release and I knew that this time, having leveled up on my git-fu, I would try and figure out how to fix that problem and submit a pull request.
When MakeMKV added a new requirement for ccextractor, allowing it to grab subtitles that are encoded on the DVD or Blueray as Closed Captioning instead of subtitles, there wasn’t a package available for Fedora. (There is now, but at the time where wasn’t) So I wanted to make an RPM that I could host on Fedora’s COPR for others who needed the package. There was a problem with their shell script for building RPMs. At the time I just kept hacking away at it until I was able to build RPMs. But I didn’t think about how the manual process wouldn’t be sustainable as changes were made to CC Extractor. They weren’t having releases too often, so I didn’t worry about it. But then they made a new release and I knew that this time, having leveled up on my git-fu, I would try and figure out how to fix that problem and submit a pull request.
Based on the file modification dates, I went from using the Digikam SQLite database to using their embedded MySQL database in May 2018. I did it because at the time everyone was saying that for a large database it’s better to use SQL than SQLite. For a long time it seemed to work well enough like that. But, for the last few months, MySQL hasn’t quite been right. It’s been complaining about issues with InnoDB. Unfortunately, in my Googling I couldn’t figure out how to attempt to fix that issue with an embedded database. All the solutions seemed to involve using a “real” MySQL. So, sick of all that, I decded to go back to SQLite. Since launching Digikam (for the past two days) just causes my computer to go to a load average in the 50s and lead to an unending stream of SQL errors, I had to move the folder that contained MySQL and start from scratch. It was also an opportunity to do what they recommend and have the database reside on an SSD.
Back in October, I created a video showing my workflow with Digikam and RawTherapee. After spending lots of months working with both programs and tinkering to see what works best, I have updated my workflow. Based on the current versions of the programs, here is my updated workflow:
Back in May I posted a video of my RAW Workflow in Adobe Lightroom. Now that I’m fully on the Linux photography bandwagon, here’s a video of my current workflow with Digikam and RawTherapee:
Back when I was looking into doing all my photography on Linux I saw that whenever I would add a tag to a bunch of photos that it would crash Digikam. I filed a bug and was told it was a problem with Baloo that would be fixed in Digikam 5. I wanted my photos to have metadata that would be indexed in Dolphin and Baloo search, so I tried to deal with it as I moved to doing all my photography on Linux. But after it kept crashing as I worked on my July photos, I had enough. I turned off Digikam and Baloo integration and am no longer having crashes. Here’s what it needs to look like in the settings if you’d like to do this too:
I found one way around the situation involving a DNG going to RawTherapee and creating a JPEG image that’s missing the title and tags when read by Digikam’s Exiv2 library. It may not be perfect, or even the best way. But it’s one way around the issue that I was easily able to confirm with about 5 minutes of messing around today. First up you want to tell Digikam to make XMP files to go along with all files:
Last Fall I started considering moving away from Lightroom after having used it for nearly a decade. Back then I was making use of the student price to actually be able to afford it. Competition from Apple Aperture and other programs caused it to eventually drop to $150 per version. But Adobe seemed to be moving more and more towards a subscription-only model. Lightroom is still available standalone, but it appears the rest of the CS suite (including, for example, Photoshop) are on the treadmill now. While there are surely some benefits to being able to rent Photoshop and Adobe’s awesome video editing software when you need to do a project rather than for a thousand-plus fee, one way I’ve afforded Lightroom is not upgrading every year. So while it’s cheaper to pay monthly than buying outright (at the prices they had when they went subscription), I rarely found the upgrades worth is and so was able to save some money. I started considering alternatives. But I’d had Lightroom 5 on my wishlist and someone bought it for me for Christmas. So I figured I’d be a Lightroom user for a few more years.
As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’ve been into photography since I was five years old. That’s when I got my first Kodak Instamatic camera and started shooting photos and creating photo albums. I have about ten photo albums, with most of them coming from when I got to high school and could really afford film and developing. Ever since I got my first digital camera in my second semester of college, the number of photos I’ve taken yearly has increased nearly exponentially. Because I’m an organized person, I started off putting my photos into event-based folders. Once I realized that’d quickly get unwieldy, I decided to put them in folders by date. Eventually, software like Picassa, Lightroom, and digiKam came out which would have allowed me to continue to to organized my photos by event because they could read the metadata and reorganize them by date. However, I’ve found that my system has two main benefits 1)my photos remain organized even if my descendants don’t have access to programs that can read the metadata on the photos. 2) it’s very easy for me to very quickly find a photo. It would be somewhere like 2010->Jan 10->So and So’s Wedding.
A couple days ago, I wrote about giving KDevelop another look and posted it to reddit’s r/kde. In my post, I’d said it was annoying to have to configure the color schemas per file. Someone commented on the subreddit that if you use the View->Schema menus it’s per file while if you go into Settings->KDevelop settings you can change it for all files.
As a side effect I explored the same options in Kate and set it up like this:
When I first started programming it was just at the prompt of my Tandy computer. Then it was in the QBasic text editor on the IBM computers at school. But when I started programming again with “real” languages, I ended up going with Emacs. Although I was first annoyed at the way commands like save were prefixed, it became my favorite editor. I think that was partially because of diving headfirst into the free software movement and partially because I didn’t like vi’s different modes and how annoying that made things if you didn’t realize you weren’t in the text entry mode. Eventually, I moved on to Kate because I love KDE (been running it as my main desktop for over 10 years now) and I loved the features it enabled. Also, since vi (or vim) is found EVERYWHERE while Emacs usually requires installation, I ended up switching to vi whenever I’m ssh’d into a computer. If you add plugins like powerline, it can be pretty awesome to use. Even on my desktop if I’m editing /etc/fstab I’m more likely to pull up vi than the weight of KDE (not that it takes up THAT much RAM).
After a bit more work since my 21 July post, I’ve finally reached what I can consider to be beta status for the GUI. Things have matured to the point where it works well on both Linux and Windows and I’m now using it every time I game. I created a bunch of issues on Github to track new features I want to add in order to get to what I think will be a 1.0 release. I’m excited at the progress I’ve made and that the software continues to have interest. As always, the code is available on Github. Here are videos on how to use the GUI:
If you follow the blog, you remember I’ve been working on a GUI for the donation tracker. Part of making that work involved changing the code to be object oriented. Also, it required moving the user-defined configs to be moved out of the main code. I’ve done that and finally tested that it works (I had a silly bug involving a typo that I had to correct) and merged the code into master over on the github repo. The new code required a change in the directions, so I made new instructional videos to go along with those changes:
Three years ago I created ELDonationTracker to use the Extra Life API to provide donation alerts on my screen while I’m streaming or recording games. About a year and a half ago, I actually had to start using it because the previous donation tracker I’d been using stopped being maintained. Since then I’ve been steadily improving it, but there’s still a bit of functionality for the alerts when someone donates that I was missing by running a commandline utility. A year ago I tried creating a GUI with Tkinter, but I just found it too hard to figure out. What I really wanted anyway was to do it in QT or QML. A few months ago I saw that it appeared the company being QT was going to finally take Python seriously. While looking up some tutorials on PyQT I found out that I could use QT Designer to do a WYSIWYG design and then a simple utility to convert it to Python code. Since designing GUIs is a real drag and takes away time from doing the coding to make the GUI work, I was jazzed. So I threw this together over a couple days, copying the interface from the program that was no longer maintained:
I have been following I Fight Dragons for almost a decade now, including their journey from self-produced to being a label band and rejecting that to going back to being self-produced. I was a backer on their last album, the ambitious concept record The Near Future. That was a seemingly long five years ago. I’ve said before that I ended up enjoying the B-side of the record a lot more, and I think that’s because the lyrics resonated a bit more with me. But for a while I thought maybe the stress of the Kickstarter (in which they ended up ditching an almost completed version of the album and starting over) had split the band.
My fourth concert of 2019 was also the first one in which I had someone else go with me as Danielle went to her first concert of 2019. It was fun to have someone to share the experience with, especially her. Anberlin was the first band I introduced her to that she also came to like. Many of their albums were bonding moments for us from dating through our married life.
This year I bought LOTS of albums. I don’t know if it’s the most albums I’ve purchased in one year since writing these blog posts or even since keeping track of Scrobbles. I do know that while I listened to my music randomly, in general, I did also listen to entire albums whenever I purchased one. Sometimes I’d listen to the album a few times and other times I’d take the album purchase as an opportunity to review the artist’s previous work. I know that was the case with Five Iron Frenzy (although that was also concert prep as I mentioned a few days ago), Relient K, I Fight Dragons, and Fall Out Boy. It was a very fun year for me, musically. Kacey Musgraves, for example, was a reminder that country music doesn’t have to suck. Disclosure made me realize that I could still like loop-heavy electronic music. I hope that I can continue to explore new sounds in 2014.
This quarter I mostly listened to my music on pure random with a few variations which’ll be accounted for below. This finally allowed The Beatles to place in 2013. In the last few weeks I just listened to music that I added in this quarter to make sure I had a chance to get to know some of the newer songs.
For the second quarter in a row The Beatles have NOT made the list! But that’s easily explained: I have been listening to a lot of new music and a lot of playlists that don’t include The Beatles. But as you’ll see, they kinda snuck in sideways. This quarter I spent a lot of time listening to Jonathan Coulton and I Fight Dragons because of their Kickstarters, which I backed. I Fight Dragons released two albums as Kickstarter bonuses - a live recording of their most recent concert and a remix album of sorts in which the band members sung different arrangements of the songs. There was also the new Fall Out Boy album, Save Rock and Roll. I really enjoyed the album but it was overtaken in my mind by the previously mentioned IFD and JoCo music and I quickly forgot they had a new album out. Again, that’s a shame since I did enjoy it and while I was in Florida last week I quickly tired of “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark”. Incidentally, I was reminded of why I stopped listening to live radio - it’s far too repetitive. I think the true problem is that it’s too formulaic in its repetition. I didn’t mind hearing “The Princess Who Saved Herself” every day for a week because the songs surrounding it were always different. On a separate note, I got some music for Father’s Day and I’ll mention that below.
For this quarter I’ve gone back and forth between picking albums to listen to and having dynamic playlists determine what I listen to. For most of March I was listening to a bunch of free South by Southwest samplers with some pretty GREAT music. Not a lot of repeat among the artists there so none of them appear on this list. Some of those songs could potentially end up in the most listened song list at the end of the year.
Throughout the month of October I alternated between listening to newly acquired music (of which I had quite a bit) and a dynamic playlist that was weighted so that most of the music had auto-ratings above 90, less music above 75, and even less above 50. Any song that I listened to only once would fit in the third category. After that, if I skipped it just once it would fall out of the group. So it gave me a nice mix of music including forgotten favorites. Now that I’ve listened to a good chunk of my library since the last time the Amarok database was corrupted I may modify the playlist to include the caveat that it couldn’t have been played in the last x days. I’m not sure if I want to make the date large enough that I only hear songs once per quarter or my standard two week waiting period. Given how little time I have to listen to music nowadays I might go for the 90 days. I also spent some chunks of time listening to my music on random on Google Music. That’s completely random so I end up hearing some songs I didn’t even remember ever acquiring. A lot of my new music came from Jamendo when I got an email with the month’s most popular songs and I decided to do a search for ska. Although I really enjoy ska, I got into it rather late so I don’t have very much ska music. (Mostly just Five Iron Frenzy, Save Ferris, No Doubt, and the Orange County Supertones - who are an OK ska band - I mostly like their least ska songs)
Back to Philly and a concert for this Top 200 Photo
photo #86 is:
Taking photos during a concert is always hard. First of all, let me say that I think people should be allowed to shoot photos during concerts as long as they aren’t using flash. The point of going to a concert is to spend extra money on a band you really like in order to hear them live. You should be allowed a memento of the night. Anyway, a photo is not representative of a concert, so it’s not like I’m going to see a photo of a concert and decide not to go.
This was during a trip Danielle and I took to Philidelphia to see an Anberlin concert. We decided to also go ahead and see the sights. We saw the Liberty Bell in its new home, tried a real Philly Cheese Steak, and just enjoyed being somewhere else.
This photo is just a reminder that people won’t always say ‘no’ when you ask to take their photo. In his case, it’s because I really liked his uniform.
I just got Anberlin’s latest album, “New Surrender”. I was pretty lukewarm about “Cities” and Danielle just about hated it. We both loved “Blueprints for the Black Market” and “Never Take Friendship Personal”. This album is a return to the sounds and lyrics of those first two albums. I loved it upon first listen. Danielle summed it up best, “It’s like their first two albums, but more mature.” I’ve only started listening to it for the second time, so I’m still picking up the lyrics. What I’ve heard so far continues their tradition of poetic lyrics that take a few listens to fully appreciate. If you’ve been on the fence about this album after hearing “Cities”, definitely get “New Surrender”. If you liked “Cities” and hated the first two albums, you probably won’t like “New Surrender”.
There’s a very hackneyed saying, “don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today.” For a while now I had been putting off talking about the new Anberlin album and now Andrew beat me to it. I had been listening to “Ready Fuels” for almost six months before I got around to buying the first album, Blueprints for the Black Market. I almost immediately fell in love with the band’s music. I put it on my workout playlist and it was what I listened to for about a month and one half while working out. My fiancee said it was the first time she had heard an album where she liked every single song. When I found out they had come out with a new record in February, I set out to buy it.
My fourth concert of 2019 was also the first one in which I had someone else go with me as Danielle went to her first concert of 2019. It was fun to have someone to share the experience with, especially her. Anberlin was the first band I introduced her to that she also came to like. Many of their albums were bonding moments for us from dating through our married life.
Back in March we went to the Baltimore Zoo and I took my 120-400mm lens. I think this may be the first time I’d taken that lens to this Zoo (although I’d taken it quite a few times to the National Zoo in DC). I took lots of photos, but some didn’t come out the way I wanted and others just looked too much like they were in a zoo. I wanted (as much as I could) to have photos that could have been taken in the wild. I didn’t succeed with all the photos I chose for this post, but I was happy with the way they came out.
The weather was finally improving and so we figured it was a good time to take the twins to the zoo for the first time. When Scarlett was around the same age she didn’t care for the animals as much. She was much more interested in the kids around her. So we weren’t sure if the kids would enjoy it. The National Zoo seemed like a wise choice since it was free to enter.
This concert was at a venue that was new to me, the Oliver Brewing Company. Lots of restaurants and places call themselves a brewing company, usually to signify that they will have some of their own beer on tap. But this was literally a factory floor that had been cleared to set up a stage. I could see all the empty, unlabeled aluminum cans that would eventually hold their different brews. Perhaps because it was a factory floor and not a club or concert hall, the acoustics were pretty amplified. The venue seemed to know it was an issue because they were selling ear plugs for $1 each. (Probably from the stash they give to their factory workers during a regular day) At any rate, it was the first concert where I actually wore ear plugs because it was just too loud for me to enjoy; especially because my OSHA training kept reiterating that hearing loss is not recoverable. Surprisingly, it simply dampened the sound, but I was still able to hear the vocals everything. If anything suffered from the plugs it was a slight loss in the higher frequencies that I noticed during Lionize’s set. One other thing I noticed - of all the concerts I’ve gone to in the past few years, this is the first time I wasn’t one of the older audience members. There were a fair number of grey beards there to hear the different bands.
Concerts are certainly a funny bit of entertainment. When you go see a movie, you are going because you like the director or the actors or the idea sounded interesting. You see that movie and that’s the end of it. The same holds true for Broadway shows or Operas. But when you attended a concert, you have a few opening acts you probably don’t know. This is somewhat alleviated nowadays for the well prepared by a quick trip to Spotify or Youtube. After finally seeing The Protomen during last year’s Warped Tour, I was excited about seeing them in concert. My ticket informed me that I’d also be seeing Cowabunga Pizza Time and Lionize. Of course, the difference between concerts and other forms of entertainment is no accident. Opening bands are limpets on the bodies of larger acts, hoping to gain exposure to the fans of the main act. This works best when the organizer has paired up bands that work well together thematically. But, this is the obvious reason why you never know the time the main act is going on stage.
Red Hat Summit 2019 was my first Red Hat Summit. I heard quite a few people saying it was the largest one they’d been to yet and that it used to be a pretty small convention. That was not the case this year; it used up the entire Boston Convention Center. I’ve said before, concerning video games, that the best use of trophies and gamification of the meta-game are to get the player to take actions they wouldn’t normally take. Red Hat did a pretty good job of this during the summit. They provided points for filling out session surveys, which most wouldn’t have done otherwise. They also provided points for posting to the convention’s feed. I normally wouldn’t have, but reaching 1000 points netted the player some money towards merchandise at the RHEL store. So I posted about getting my custom t-shirt. This led others to comment on my post to find out where it was taking place and I was able to direct them there.
My second concert of 2019 was almost the exact opposite of the first one. The first one was a big outdoor concert venue (it was in Boston, but was configured like Pier VI in Baltimore) while this one was in the basement of a pizza place called Joe Squared. The first one featured pop artists that everyone has heard while this one featured niche bands that mostly nerds have heard. The first one featured full bands while the Misbehavin’ Maidens performed acapella and The Doubleclicks used an electric cello and other stringed instruments.
At the end of Red Hat Summit 2019 (post coming about that soon) there was a double-header concert with Neon Trees and Fitz & the Tantrums. Neon Trees started things off for the night. I didn’t look them up ahead of the concert, because Fitz was a huge band so I thought Neon Trees was just a local band opening for Fitz. Their section of the concert was a lot of fun even though I didn’t know any of the songs. The lead singer had lots of fun banter and seemed to really be enjoying himself.
At the end of Red Hat Summit 2019 (post coming about that soon) there was a double-header concert with Neon Trees and Fitz & the Tantrums. Neon Trees started things off for the night. I didn’t look them up ahead of the concert, because Fitz was a huge band so I thought Neon Trees was just a local band opening for Fitz. Their section of the concert was a lot of fun even though I didn’t know any of the songs. The lead singer had lots of fun banter and seemed to really be enjoying himself.
Now that I’m back from Red Hat Summit, I am ready to start upgrading my Fedora computers. Well, probably not the server or the living room HTPC - I’ll take advantage of the fact that Fedora supports the n-1 release to reduce headaches and downtime. As I’ve done for a few releases now, I used the dnf upgrade facility and it worked fine. So far things seem to be working as they should. I got a weird error that said vmlinuz-5.0….. crashed, but given that it was a .fc29 package, I’m going to let that slide for now unless it turns out that things start acting funky on the laptop.
Now that I’m back from Red Hat Summit, I am ready to start upgrading my Fedora computers. Well, probably not the server or the living room HTPC - I’ll take advantage of the fact that Fedora supports the n-1 release to reduce headaches and downtime. As I’ve done for a few releases now, I used the dnf upgrade facility and it worked fine. So far things seem to be working as they should. I got a weird error that said vmlinuz-5.0….. crashed, but given that it was a .fc29 package, I’m going to let that slide for now unless it turns out that things start acting funky on the laptop.
My main computer is now on Fedora 24. This time around I only had to uninstall HDR Merge (which was from my COPR and I hadn’t built a Fedora 24 version yet) and OBS-Studio because there isn’t a Fedora 24 package for it yet. Not bad.
After rebooting, I didn’t have graphics. Then rebooting once more kicked the akmod into gear and now things appear to be working well. 2 more computers left to upgrade to Fedora 24 - the VM server and the Kodi living room box.
Upgraded the final computer - the server host that has the VM with our Kodi stuff. It was the least complicated upgrade - didn’t have to remove anything - it just worked. And that was a great change, for once. (Not that the others were too much of a pain).
For some reason gazebo-doc the Fedora 22 version conflicted with the Fedora 23 version so I had to delete that. Also, despite the system claiming that it would not have to download the packages again, it appeared to not actually work that way - at least the second time I ran things. (After removing Kernel-debug packages to get more space in /boot)
Overall, everything went relatively well. The only bad thing is that there was not a kmod-nvidia available for my current kernel in Fedora 23 so I had to boot into my old kernel in order to have the benefits of the proprietary driver. So later today if there’s time I’m going to see if there’s a kmod-nvidia for this kernel in rpmfusion-testing that I could install. Otherwise, I’ll just keep checking every few days and stay on the older kernel until then.
Now that it seems the nvidia driver that deals with the latest Xorg is available, I decided to try and upgrade my main computer, SuperMario. I started with the dnf commands:
As usual, old packages reared their ugly heads. They’d made it this far, but it was time to banish packages from Fedora 20 and even Fedora 15 that had survived this long.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the next day, when I woke up, that plasma had loaded up despite the fact that I removed kmod-nvidia. Also, I did not have the same issue with KDM as I did with tanukimario. I was loaded in with the blue triangle background. I was greeted with the message “Your saved type “kde-plasma” is not valid any more. Please select a new one, otherwisee ‘default’ will be used.” I select “Plamsa” and am greeted with the KDE loading screen I’ve become oh-so familiar with.
Today was the big one, time to upgrade supermario, my workhorse machine. As usual I had to remove the kmod-nvidia packages. This time around, because my card was getting a little long in the tooth, it was the kmod-nvidia-340xx packages. I also had a bunch of plasmoid packages to get rid of that I didn’t need to remove on the other computers because I was only a heavy plasmoid user on this computer. Thankfully, I’d long since abandoned all the ones I had to get rid of. After running fedup 3 times (once initially, once after removing plasmoids, and once after removing kmod-nvidia packages) to make sure nothing was expected by the program to cause problems upon upgrade, I finally rebooted to upgrade. If the past is any indication, I should be able to get to a screen where I can reinstall kmod-nividia after the upgrades. I’m only a tiny bit worried that Fedora only seems to connect to the internet when a GUI comes up, but if it comes to that I’ll investigate what I need to do and be sure to publish the procedures here for anyone else in the same boat.
Today I upgraded my netbook. Interestingly, this had less problems than yesterday with the guest computer. Perhaps because I wasn’t using KDM on my netbook? Anyway, I was actually expecting a worse time, but it worked out. It appears that KDE Netbook edition didn’t make the jump to Plasma 5. But maybe it’s just a setting I need to discover. See, my netbook is a 2nd gen netbook - not a piece of garbage like our EEE Machine, but it has a sub-HD resolution and so using most programs is hard unless the Window Manager or Desktop Environment is getting rid of window decorations. So far, KDE 5 is OK. I may end up going to Fluxbox. (I did not like XFCE on this screen resolution) Here’s my desktop as of now:
Turns out that the issue was the Fedora SDDM theme. Once I changed that to the default KDE theme everything worked. I wonder what I need to do to get the Fedora theme so that works as well. At least I know for future computers what needs to be done.
Started off with the guest room computer as it’s the least used. If things go pear-shaped there’ll be less complaining. fedup had a complaint about the one of the dependencies of the Dolphin Emulator. I just uninstalled it for now. I’ll worry about reinstalling it later. Often during these upgrades it appears that the biggest source of issues are badly written dependencies; badly written in the sense that I end up having to remove the offending packages only to reinstall them post-upgrade without any issues.
The original fedup - 0.7 - did not work. Upgrade to 0.8 and then it complained about three packages - gthumb, picard-freeworld, and kipi-plugins. I THINK what happened is that my Fedora 19 version was the same or greater than the version in Fedora 20, but the dependencies were written in such a way as to not allow greater library versions. In other words, depends on library 1.0 and so version 1.1 doesn’t work. Sometimes that can be an important hedge against APIs changing, but often it can lead to annoying upgrades and updates. There are times where I couldn’t update a bunch of packages because of another. So I would remove that one and upgrade (or update) and later I could reinstall it. So I removed these packages and proceeded with the upgrade. It still complained about nvidia (which is really the only thing that is a problem after every upgrade)
Just used preupgrade to go from Fedora 14 to 15. The entire process took about 3 hours. That’s not too shabby! In the old days of disc upgrades it had to go for days. Yum upgrade often had to work overnight. This one was much faster! After the upgrade, I had to turn off my dropbox repo - apparently they don’t have a Fedora 15 repo turned on yet. That allowed me to run yum distro-sync which bought me up to more or less at least what’s in Fedora 15. Otherwise you’re just upgrading your packages, but you may be missing some new ones that were added in. That’s what messed me up on the last upgrade. I still have to work on the rpmnew thing to get my config files as close to what they should be as possible and I have to figure out if the orphan packages I have installed are programs I should get rid of to make sure they don’t potentially cause problems in the future. KDE is working just as good as before. GDM looks very different - very similar to Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell. I’ll have to sneak in there later on in the week and try Gnome Shell out. Sound works and everything else works. (I only use an Ethernet connection so it’s not too complicated of a situation)
The Gnome panel was acting a little buggy and I was going to report that, but I decided that instead I could load up KDE. I’d been wanting to check it out a little more ever since I took a look in October. But I was unable to open Kontact because akonadi was being annoying. Turns out that the version of akonadi I had installed from Fedora 13 was technically a higher version than the one with Fedora 14. I ran most of the commands on this page after getting the link as advice from fenris in the Fedora freenode IRC room. The most important one was the ??yum distribution-synchronization which fixed that akonadi problem. Kontact now loads up. It’s acting a bit funny with my gmail messages, but I’m sure that can be fixed. So I’m going to have to get back into Gnome to see if the panels are behaving a bit better now. After all, I ended up installing about half a gig of updates tonight as a result of the instructions on that page. This is why, folks, everyone always recommends just going for a fresh install. Upgrades always require a bit more work.
I just did a preupgrade upgrade from Fedora 13 to Fedora 14. The only hitch is that it didn’t find enough space to download the installer ahead of time so that had to be downloaded after the the reboot. Everything went off without a hitch. My absolute cleanest upgrade ever. Dual screen worked, nothing had to be uninstalled. None of the repos had to be disabled. All my usual programs work. I haven’t tried Blender yet, that’s tomorrow. The first thing I noticed was that the OpenOffice.org icons have changed again. This is the third time, I think,since I’ve been using Linux.
So I was unable to preupgrade to Fedora 12, even after the latest update. So I did a yum upgrade since I’ve known that to work in the past. As always, I followed the instructions here. It was very fast this time around compared to past upgrades. It only took 2 hours 40 minutes. I ended up needing to tell yum to ignore problems because of a weird package that it wanted to install, but couldn’t. But then installed anyway. I’m not sure what’s up with that. The specific package was abrt. And then when I went to install it afterwards, it said it was already installed. Go figure! So far there’s only one thing that annoys me since upgrading. All my taskbar icons are much more spread out. I tried to push them together, but I think this is as close as they get. See the images below for a comparison.
Now that I have “I’m Not Mad” caught up for the next month, I thought it was an OK time to upgrade to Fedora 10. Unlike with the Fedora 9 release, there haven’t been huge complaints of the upgrade causing the system to become unusable. (Most, though not all, of that came from the version of X.org that Fedora 9 used)
As usual, I followed instructions at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq and I started the yum upgrade command at 1852. KDE basket-contact gave me dependency errors so I had to uninstall it. It had been giving me problems with updates as well - I had just forgotten about it. 1854 - started upgrade again. This time a problem with gstreamer - I think gstreamer gives me problems every upgrade. So I remove gstreamer08-plugins. (Which was apparently hanging around from fedora 6). This also got rid of some more gstreamers packages hanging around from Fedora 5. Don’t know why I still had that kruft there, but it’s gone now… 1859 - started yum upgrade again. This time it works! 2.8 GB! Well, it’s certainly the least painful yum upgrade process I’ve gone through yet - at least from this point in the process. The download process seems to be moving along pretty quickly. I guess getting that “fastest mirror” package out with Fedora 9 really does find the fastest mirror. Also, this far out from the Fedora 10 release, there shouldn’t be too many people hogging up the mirrors. What am I looking forward to in Fedora 10? Oddly, not much. Compared to previous releases, there isn’t any one technology I’m very excited about for Fedora 10. Sure, it’ll be nice to have the latest Gnome, but that release is so incremental, I doubt I’ll notice much. The latest KDE MIGHT be enough to finally get me back to KDE. KDE 4.1 was good, but not good enough. Other than that it’ll just be nice to have the latest stuff. Something I can do every 6 months or so with Linux and only every five or more years with Windows.
I’m not 100% sure, but I think this is the longest I’ve purposely waited to upgrade to another Fedora release. I’ve been reading the Fedora user and developer mailling lists and what’s I’ve seen there has pretty much convinced me not to upgrade. First of all, there are a lot of answers to people complaining about Fedora 9 being unstable which include variations on “no one told you to stop using Fedora 8.” Some answers put it more politely and some more bluntly. And that’s ok. Just like the people who bought the iPhone last year got their pants pulled down over the price, so do those who upgrade to distros right away pay the price in instability. This happens with all distros from Fedora to Ubuntu. Sure, there’s an alpha testing period and a beta testing period, but not everyone can take part in that. I, for example, use my Fedora computer as my main computer for everything but gaming and photography. I can’t be unable to do my banking or type stuff up or work on my animations just because I’m trying the latest bleeding edge Fedora. And there are others like me, so the distro doesn’t truly get tested until it comes out. This is the argument used by the KDE team with respect to the POS that KDE 4 is, according to others - I haven’t tried it out.
Two major Linux distributions will be making releases this month and since I use both of them, I’m pretty excited! First up will be the Debian-derived Ubuntu. This distro has been the darling of users and Internet media alike for the past few years. It stole the post from Mandriva, the previous Linux distro that everyone recommended to new users. Although Mandriva was the easiest distro for new users, it also had a reputation for being so bleeding edge it was unstable. Ubuntu, however, is very stable and tends to work on more hardware out of the “box”. In fact, it was Ubuntu’s ability to work on laptops, long the Holy Grail of Linux distros, that led it to such prominence. That is the main reason why I chose to install Ubuntu onto my laptop even though I’ve been a Fedora user since I first got into Linux about five years ago. Ubuntu 4.08 aka Hardy Heron will be flapping its way to you on 24 April.
When I first started playing with Linux I had a very crappy old computer; I think it was a 286. It was painful to try and do anything in Gnome or KDE, but it ended up making a pretty good server as it was the server that ran this site until late 2005 or early 2006 (I can’t remember). Then I moved onto another machine which was slightly better, a Pentium II 400 Mhz, 128 MB RAM computer. That computer ran a little better in Gnome or KDE, but I became a huge fan of Fluxbox as it ran best and I was able to use it as my almost-primary computer. It is now Luigi, my file/print server.
It’s been a little delayed and it’s long in coming, but FreeBSD 7.0 is out now! They’ve made a LOT of updates over the 6.0 series; most importantly they’ve done a lot of work on the SMP kernel. SMP is what you use if you have more than one processor in your computer or if you have a Dual or Quard Core Processor. So they’ve made a huge step to continue FreeBSD’s place in modern hardware. The release announcement contains a lot of info and the release notes contain even more!
Since I don’t have any animation needing to be rendered for a few months, I decided it was a great time to upgrade Dr Queue to the latest version. I’d heard that a lot of improvements had been added since version 0.60. So let’s see how the upgrade process goes:
On Mario, my Fedora 8 machine, I had to install scons first as it’s now used to buld dr queue. I also had to build it on my FreeBSD machines, starting with KingKoopa, the render master. This also required python to be installed. For Mario, it was very easy, I just ran the install script and it wrote over the old stuff and appears to work. I’ll probably need to copy the new directories over to the common hard drive. Peach and BulletBill already had python installed so they didn’t need scons installed.
I had to uninstall a few more multimedia packages, but it eventually upgraded. After rebooting I arrived at GDM just fine - yay! I’m not sure if it’s just me, but the bootup time on Fedora 8 seems to a A LOT faster than it was in Fedora 7. I feel like I got to GDM a lot faster.
Compiz is working and so is dual screen - so far this live upgrade has been better than any of my DVD/CD upgrades. Due to either updates in Compiz or in Gnome or in Fedora’s changes to Gnome, I finally have something I’ve wanted since Fedora Core 6 - on the desktop switcher, when using Compiz, it would not show the dividers between the desktops. Now it does show the dividers, making for a better experience. It’s easier to click on the exact desktop I want. Then again, at least on this first boot, I seem to be missing the top-most bar on my program - where the max, min and close program button are. Not surprisingly, there are no updates to install.
Mario is my main Linux box. I had to uninstall x264 this comes from the fact that I mixed livna and freshrpms. I never intended to do so, but I started with freshrpms back in the day, but nowadays I use livna for my graphics card. That plus freshrpms relative lack of updates compared to livna means that it’s slowly sliding off my computer. The only bad thing is that livna does not carry binaries for Cinelerra. I’ll have to investigate what I should do there. So far, for dependency errors I’ve had to remove:
Review and remove all .rpmsave and .rpmnew files before and after upgrading
I basically did a locate, found them and deleted them.
for a in $(find /etc /var -name ‘*.rpm?*’); do b=${a%.rpm?*}; diff -u $a $b; done
I did this, but I didn’t really know what to do with the results. It appears not to have mattered in this case
Well, at least it worked pretty well on my future PVR. I will give a more detailed explanation/directions of my experience for others who may be wondering if this is really as scary as it sounds since it’s “unsupported”. However, my main Linux computer is much, much more complex in the number of packages installed. I’ll probably be waiting until after the Thanksgiving Holidays to tackle that one to make sure that I have the needed time to fix things if they go wrong. At least I’m happy at the prospect and I plan on letting the Fedora Live Upgrade SIG know about this so they can make it officially supported.
Well, the entire upgrade process is not yet over, so I don’t want to get too excited, but I think this may solve my problem. I started a yum upgrade on my living room computer - which will one day be my MythTv PVR (once I get the necessary hardware). It went through the dependency check in roughly 4 minutes or less. It’s now downloading 951 MB of updates, so it may be a while before it’s ready for the next phase. Still, if this works, I know what I’m going to do with my main computer. I really hope this can eventually become a supported method of upgrading. It seems to be a lot faster and doesn’t require me to uninstall all of my third party programs.
It may have been about to install or it may never have installed, but after 35 hours, I was getting a little annoyed. I’ve decided to try the unsupported yum upgrade. I’ll try it first one a guinea pig computer that’s at Fedora 7. If that works, I’ll try it on my real machine.
It’s still right at the end of that little progress bar. The HDD activity light on my compute continues so I’m hoping it’s not frozen, but just working on figuring out the dependencies on all of my packages. I’m going to give it until I get home today and maybe until I go to bed. After that I’ll have to rethink things - perhaps uninstalling those non-Fedora packages…. q:o(
Upgrading to Fedora 7 didn’t take this long and neither did Fedora 6, but that’s ok - as long as it happens. It’s nearly done with the dependency checking. It’s been getting closer and closer to the end of the bar. Part of me thinks it may be stuck, but after waiting 10 hours to get this far, I don’t want to stop if there’s a chance it will start installing tonight or even tomorrow morning. Before the next upgrade I hope to have more RAM, as I think that’s probably part of the reason why it’s taking so long. Just wanted to update how long it’s taking both for anyone else in this situation and for myself so when Fedora 9 comes out, I can remember how long Fedora 8 took.
I tried upgrading Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 a few times when it first came out and it kept getting stuck at 26% in the dependency checking phase. I went on the fedora IRC room and I was told to remove my non-Fedora repos. I didn’t listen because that’s always the first thing they tell you to do and, in my experience, it never seems to be the true culprit. Then I found out online that the update servers were swamped when Fedora 8 first came out. Also, freshrpms didn’t appear to have any RPMs yet for Feodra 8. Tried it again today and it appears to be going much better. It’s taken around 2.5 hours, but the dependency check is almost done. I’m hoping to be able to upgrade today. This last part has been especially slow, so I’m hoping that within the next hour or two I’ll be able to start the actual upgrade process. I’ll post what happens here in case others are having similar problems.
Although I’ve had a website since the mid-90s, it was 2005 or thereabouts that I first started hosting my own sites rather than relying on other sites. The first bit of hosting involved blogging and I tried a few different software packages before settling on Wordpress. And other than playing around with phpBB for my family and trying out Drupal for a bit for another site, that was it for a long time. Then Google abandoned Google reader so I moved to ttrss. And it was awesome and I didn’t have to worry it would ever go away because I was hosting it. But then this year I learned that Google Music was going to be going away and all the users were going to be pushed to Youtube Music. Unsure of whether my uploaded tracks would really migrate over (Amazon and some others have recently decided they weren’t going to host personally updated tracks), I decided to host Ampache. This had the side-benefit of actually allowing me to listen to my music collection at work since work blocks anything from Google Play. The most recent bit of self-hosting was because Google is about to get rid of Hangouts. Or rather, push all the regular Joes off in favor of making it a business tool. So that, coupled with Slack no longer working at work, led me to start up a Matrix server. That’s been plenty of fun, especially figuring out how to Federate, which allows me to access any open rooms from any other Matrix server.
Although I’ve had a website since the mid-90s, it was 2005 or thereabouts that I first started hosting my own sites rather than relying on other sites. The first bit of hosting involved blogging and I tried a few different software packages before settling on Wordpress. And other than playing around with phpBB for my family and trying out Drupal for a bit for another site, that was it for a long time. Then Google abandoned Google reader so I moved to ttrss. And it was awesome and I didn’t have to worry it would ever go away because I was hosting it. But then this year I learned that Google Music was going to be going away and all the users were going to be pushed to Youtube Music. Unsure of whether my uploaded tracks would really migrate over (Amazon and some others have recently decided they weren’t going to host personally updated tracks), I decided to host Ampache. This had the side-benefit of actually allowing me to listen to my music collection at work since work blocks anything from Google Play. The most recent bit of self-hosting was because Google is about to get rid of Hangouts. Or rather, push all the regular Joes off in favor of making it a business tool. So that, coupled with Slack no longer working at work, led me to start up a Matrix server. That’s been plenty of fun, especially figuring out how to Federate, which allows me to access any open rooms from any other Matrix server.
I’ve been on flickr nearly since it first started. It’s been a great community to learn about photography and hook up with others who are really into photography as well. I have 10 700 photos on flickr so I’ve looked on various flickr developments with fear because of how invested I am in the site. I was scared when Microsoft was going to buy them because they haven’t always been as open a company as Yahoo. Frankly, I wasn’t too happy when Yahoo bought flickr because they’ve been so stagnant and development did stall for many years there. I used to listen to a lot of photography podcasts and they were constantly talking about the fall of flickr because the largest photo repository online was now Facebook. There were two reasons I never put photos on Facebook. At first it’s because I wanted to aggregate all the comments and views in one place. Later it was because posting photos to Facebook was a bad deal copyright-wise.
I think it’s pretty awesome how Google has taken the same tactic as Wordpress and broken out key features into plugins. For Wordpress it leads to better and faster development without breaking the main program. For Google it allows them to do an end run around the stupid carriers who won’t upgrade Android in a timely manner.
It’s been three years since the last time I posted about micro-blogging. Since then Google Buzz has been killed off, Google Plus has taken its place, Tumblr has arrived on the scene, and Identica doesn’t exist in the same way as it once did. I’m also using KDE now, so I went from using Gwibber to using Choqok:
I used Tumblr for about a year but I abandoned it because it’s just animated gifs and curation of the work of others. Out of all the Tumblrs I followed (about 20) only about 3 of them produced original content. All the rest were just reblogs. Also, there’s too much porn on there to use at work.
[caption id=“attachment_6153” align=“aligncenter” width=“450”] Firefox (aka Red Panda) busy Not Spying on You[/caption]
A 1 May Ars article and 30 April Wired article mention that a UK company known as Gamma International is selling spyware that pretends to be Mozilla Firefox. Both articles mention that repressive governments have used it to spy on dissidents, but it’s unclear from the article whether the company purposely sells to evil governments or whether it sells this to anybody, including foreign governments. The Wired article mentions that Gamma markets it to governments in general and so, if pressed, would probably say that it’s not meant to be used by evil governments - just people like the FBI trying to catch criminals. Either way, Mozilla has sued for trademark infringement. I applaud them for doing so. Governments may have both legitimate and illegitimate reasons for spying on computer communications, but I don’t think they should be abusing the good will of other companies to do it. Imagine if Gamma was selling Ford cars that were bugged. No one would want to buy a Ford car for fear it might be a bugged version. Come on, guys! Figure out a solution that doesn’t screw over the folks at Mozilla.
[caption id=“attachment_2634” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“I guess it’s in Beta because they haven’t removed the Jesus module yet”] [/caption]
While looking up driving directions on Google Maps from Barcelona, Spain to Madrid, Spain, I clicked the option for “walking” directions out of curiosity’s sake. This is the quickest route they gave me for walking. I don’t think that’s the most efficient way to go. First of all, I can’t walk on water. Second, why not go straight over land. That appears to be a shorter route. What makes this hilarious is the statement in yellow: “Walking directions are in beta. Use caution - This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.” Missing is, “We may send you walking over water.”
I don’t even remember what I was going to search for in Google, but here’s what came up when I typed “why”.
This is becoming a huge “sport” on the net - to see what Google gives you when you type something into the search. It’s the first time I got something fun.
On first startup, I thought - hmm this browser looks a bit bubbly. Reminds me a bit of MSN Browser in the late 90s. Then I suddenly noticed something - no top bar on the browser! Where’s the File, Edit, Tools, menu so common to Windows programs? Even the tabs are right up in the titlebar window. But you know what? I like it - more room for viewing my websites. Tabs load up ridiculously fast. And the little things are so nice - like how there are animations when you create the tabs. They slide out from the left. Or when you close a tab, all the ones to the right of it slide over to the left. It’s pointless eye candy, but I love it! It really adds to the experience.
My Vietnamese Zodiac program is on the first page of Google when you search for the term! In fact, that about 24 people have come to my site looking for that from a search engine as of 29 February! That’s exciting because I know a lot of people don’t look past the first page of search results in Google.
According to CNN Google will begin offering a new map service to rival and surpass Mapquest. They bought this service from Keyhole, a company with a large repository of satellite pictures of people’s houses. Some people are protesting this from a privacy point of view. I don’t see why they are protesting. It’s not as though I can pull up a live picture from your house. All I can do is see a picture that was taken at some point in the past (Google claims 6 months). I don’t see how that’s a privacy issue? Right now I could pay someone to go take pictures of your house and you probably wouldn’t know. As long as they aren’t tracking people or anything (something nearly impossible with civilian satellites), it’s not a big deal. If you look at the CNN articles you will see from the pictures that the resolution isn’t all that. It’s more of a cool geek thing than anything else. Actually, the article did mention the only good use I can see for this service, checking to see just how far that hotel is from the beach when they claim they are just “minutes away from the water”. Actually, I can think of one other thing. If you are trying to figure out which houses to visit with your realtor, you can look it up on Google and see just how big the yard is, front property, etc.
Although I’ve had a website since the mid-90s, it was 2005 or thereabouts that I first started hosting my own sites rather than relying on other sites. The first bit of hosting involved blogging and I tried a few different software packages before settling on Wordpress. And other than playing around with phpBB for my family and trying out Drupal for a bit for another site, that was it for a long time. Then Google abandoned Google reader so I moved to ttrss. And it was awesome and I didn’t have to worry it would ever go away because I was hosting it. But then this year I learned that Google Music was going to be going away and all the users were going to be pushed to Youtube Music. Unsure of whether my uploaded tracks would really migrate over (Amazon and some others have recently decided they weren’t going to host personally updated tracks), I decided to host Ampache. This had the side-benefit of actually allowing me to listen to my music collection at work since work blocks anything from Google Play. The most recent bit of self-hosting was because Google is about to get rid of Hangouts. Or rather, push all the regular Joes off in favor of making it a business tool. So that, coupled with Slack no longer working at work, led me to start up a Matrix server. That’s been plenty of fun, especially figuring out how to Federate, which allows me to access any open rooms from any other Matrix server.
Although I’ve had a website since the mid-90s, it was 2005 or thereabouts that I first started hosting my own sites rather than relying on other sites. The first bit of hosting involved blogging and I tried a few different software packages before settling on Wordpress. And other than playing around with phpBB for my family and trying out Drupal for a bit for another site, that was it for a long time. Then Google abandoned Google reader so I moved to ttrss. And it was awesome and I didn’t have to worry it would ever go away because I was hosting it. But then this year I learned that Google Music was going to be going away and all the users were going to be pushed to Youtube Music. Unsure of whether my uploaded tracks would really migrate over (Amazon and some others have recently decided they weren’t going to host personally updated tracks), I decided to host Ampache. This had the side-benefit of actually allowing me to listen to my music collection at work since work blocks anything from Google Play. The most recent bit of self-hosting was because Google is about to get rid of Hangouts. Or rather, push all the regular Joes off in favor of making it a business tool. So that, coupled with Slack no longer working at work, led me to start up a Matrix server. That’s been plenty of fun, especially figuring out how to Federate, which allows me to access any open rooms from any other Matrix server.
Although I’ve had a website since the mid-90s, it was 2005 or thereabouts that I first started hosting my own sites rather than relying on other sites. The first bit of hosting involved blogging and I tried a few different software packages before settling on Wordpress. And other than playing around with phpBB for my family and trying out Drupal for a bit for another site, that was it for a long time. Then Google abandoned Google reader so I moved to ttrss. And it was awesome and I didn’t have to worry it would ever go away because I was hosting it. But then this year I learned that Google Music was going to be going away and all the users were going to be pushed to Youtube Music. Unsure of whether my uploaded tracks would really migrate over (Amazon and some others have recently decided they weren’t going to host personally updated tracks), I decided to host Ampache. This had the side-benefit of actually allowing me to listen to my music collection at work since work blocks anything from Google Play. The most recent bit of self-hosting was because Google is about to get rid of Hangouts. Or rather, push all the regular Joes off in favor of making it a business tool. So that, coupled with Slack no longer working at work, led me to start up a Matrix server. That’s been plenty of fun, especially figuring out how to Federate, which allows me to access any open rooms from any other Matrix server.
Although I’ve had a website since the mid-90s, it was 2005 or thereabouts that I first started hosting my own sites rather than relying on other sites. The first bit of hosting involved blogging and I tried a few different software packages before settling on Wordpress. And other than playing around with phpBB for my family and trying out Drupal for a bit for another site, that was it for a long time. Then Google abandoned Google reader so I moved to ttrss. And it was awesome and I didn’t have to worry it would ever go away because I was hosting it. But then this year I learned that Google Music was going to be going away and all the users were going to be pushed to Youtube Music. Unsure of whether my uploaded tracks would really migrate over (Amazon and some others have recently decided they weren’t going to host personally updated tracks), I decided to host Ampache. This had the side-benefit of actually allowing me to listen to my music collection at work since work blocks anything from Google Play. The most recent bit of self-hosting was because Google is about to get rid of Hangouts. Or rather, push all the regular Joes off in favor of making it a business tool. So that, coupled with Slack no longer working at work, led me to start up a Matrix server. That’s been plenty of fun, especially figuring out how to Federate, which allows me to access any open rooms from any other Matrix server.
Since becoming a parent it’s been a common theme of the blog that I find it fascinating experiencing the kids getting older and, therefore, more able to process the world around them. This winter was the first time the twins could be out in the snow for more than just a few minutes. Not only were they more able to weather the cold, but they were also strong enough to move around in the snow without too much frustration. They were also finally able to have a snowball fight. Although, watch Sam’s face closely from beginning to end in the following video, it’s priceless:
I’ve always loved how trees demonstrate fractals and I think that’s almost nothing so beautiful during the winder as a tree covered in a small bit of snow. It really brings out the structure of the branches and makes it easier to notice them.
We stay at Cornell for this entry in the Top 200 Photos.
photo #160 is:
This has to be in the top 3 most depressing photos I took at Cornell. There’s a certain beauty in the photo, especially now that I don’t have to deal with that weather anymore, but just remembering trudging up that hill in that unforgiving weather is enough to make me happy to have graduated.
When people find out that I’m from Florida ask me how I’m dealing with winters in Maryland, I just smile and tell them that I went to university in Ithaca, so no Maryland winter can compare with what I’ve seen. Cornell tends to be in perpetual winter from December until March. I think the lack of sun is part of what contributes to the low spirits of so many students. I didn’t mind the snow in January and February so much - after all, that’s winter. But when it snowed in March or April, it just made me feel as though this would be the year where winter never ended.
Here’s the background for February. A little shoutout to my alma mater. Click on the image and then right click to set as your desktop or save to your computer to manually set to the desktop.
[caption id=“attachment_4050” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Feb 2011 desktop for more square monitors (1024x768)”] [/caption]
The beach was covered with snow, but that didn’t seem to bother the seagulls. As I approached, they let me get really close and if I got closer they preferred to run rather than fly.
This is one of our neighbors clearing the snow out in his yard. Not sure what he was making a path to. Perhaps for his dog to be able to get to where he goes to relieve himself?
Here’s the calendar for February. Click on it to get the full size so you can make it your background. ( edit: I noticed a bug in the way the calendar appeared and fixed it on 31 Jan 2010 so just download a new version, thanks!)
It’s been a very snow-filled winter this 2009-2010 winter season compared to the last five or so years I’ve lived here. I think I’m over it. Spring couldn’t come quickly enough.
I was reading Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography books when he suggested making a background calendar to get my photos out there. A lot of people at work like to have these types of backgrounds and I follow another photographer/blogger that does the same. Here’s my January 2010 calendar. To make these your background, click on the photo and then right-click and click on “set as my background” if you’re using Windows. Linux and Mac users should be technical enough to be able to figure out what they need to do for their specific situation.
Alright, It’s 1 March so it’s time to break out the shorts and tank tops! No? Oh yeah, Ithaca is too far away to get the memo that it’s March so today I looked out and saw all this snow. In fact, it was actively snowing when I looked out the window. When I got in my car to go buy Bambi for my fiancee (it came out on DVD today) and drove to Best Buy, I was taken aback at how beautiful the snow looked. Since it was early in the morning, it hadn’t been soiled by cars driving over it or plows pushing dirty snow around. I resolved to take my camera out with me when I walked to class. It turned out that you just get a very different image from the snow on campus than you do from the snow in the mountain roads leading to the mall. I have decided to include some of the pictures I took today. Enjoy.
Often people try and dissuade you from installing CentOS onto a laptop because they say the chipsets on the laptops are so varied it’s likely you will end up unable to use your laptop because the drivers aren’t there. Well, I don’t know if it’s because this netbook is so old (I mean, netbooks as a category don’t exist anymore - having been supplanted by tablets) or just uses common chipsets, but when I ended up with some Fedora configuration error that I didn’t want to bother debugging (I hate using the netbook on an everyday basis because the keys are too small and the screen is pretty low resolution), I figured it’d be a fun time to test if I could install CentOS on there. During the installation GUI the trackpad worked fine and WiFi connected just fine as well. So if you’ve still got one of these lying around and prefer the longer support windows of CentOS / RHEL - feel free to install CentOS on there.
Continuing my LXC project, let’s list the installed containers:
lxc-ls
That just shows the name of the container - lemmy. For completion’s sake, I’m going to start it as a daemon in the background rather than being sent straight into the console:
lxc-start -n lemmy -d
As per usual Linux SOP, it produced no output. Now to jump in:
lxc-console -n lemmy
That told me I was connected to tty1, but did not present a login. Quitting out via Ctrl-a q let me go back to the VM’s tty, but trying again did not get me login. There’s some weird issue that doesn’t allow it to work, however, this did:
I’m continuing on from yesterday’s post to get the VM ready to host LXC. I’m starting with Centos 7 so the first thing I had to do was enable the epel repos:
yum install epel-release
Then, according to the guide I was following, I had to also install these package:
yum install debootstrap perl libvirt
That installed a bunch of stuff. I also get that they’re trying to break out what they’re doing, but they probably could have installed both that and the LXC stuff below in one blow:
As I mentioned before, I’m looking at Linux Containers (LXC) to have a higher density virtualization. To get ready for that, I had to create a network bridge to allow the containers to be accessible on the network.
First I installed bridge-utils:
yum install bridge-utils -y
After that, I had to create the network script:
vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-virbr0
In there I placed:
DEVICE="virbr0"
BOOTPROTO="static"
IPADDR="192.168.1.35" #IP address of the VM
NETMASK="255.255.255.0"
GATEWAY="192.168.1.1"
DNS1="192.168.1.7"
ONBOOT="yes"
TYPE="Bridge"
People often recommend using CentOS for your desktop machine if you find Fedora’s pace to be too fast. Does this even make sense? I decided to explore the idea of CentOS 7 as a desktop computer using my wife’s requirements as the benchmark. Why? Because my wife likes long term support distros. What’s more long term support than Red Hat/CentOS’s 10 years of support for each version?
My main server, Tanukimario, has a 120GB hard drive in it and it’s started to become annoying to butt up against that limit. I have an 512GB SSD that I only used for a couple years that I wanted to use as a replacement. In order to reduce the annoyances that come from setting things up from scratch, I decided to try and use Clonezilla to copy the drive over. Since the hard drive is so small, it told me it would only take 40 minutes, so I was jazzed I’d be able to do it in the afternoon while everyone was out and I wouldn’t be inconveniencing anyone.
A while back I created a copr repo for HDR Merge. I hadn’t kept up with it because there weren’t regular HDRMerge releases going on, but I noticed the git repo has been very active, so I decided to create a new RPM for Fedora 29.
And recently I learned that for the newest version of MakeMKV if you want to be able to extract Closed Captioning from older DVDs of TV shows that use an embedded CC track rather than subtitles you need ccextractor, but there wasn’t a package available for Fedora, so I made one.
It’s the intersection of three of my hobbies - computers, Linux, and photography! Ever since I learned how to compile source code from the net, about a decade ago, I’ve wanted to create RPMs to help those who aren’t comfortable with compiling or simply don’t want to bother with compiling. But, for some reason, RPM creation was always something I struggled to get right. Nearly once a year I’d try and do it, but always failed. But recently, when reading the instructions on how to do it, it just clicked.
A while back I created a copr repo for HDR Merge. I hadn’t kept up with it because there weren’t regular HDRMerge releases going on, but I noticed the git repo has been very active, so I decided to create a new RPM for Fedora 29.
And recently I learned that for the newest version of MakeMKV if you want to be able to extract Closed Captioning from older DVDs of TV shows that use an embedded CC track rather than subtitles you need ccextractor, but there wasn’t a package available for Fedora, so I made one.
It’s the intersection of three of my hobbies - computers, Linux, and photography! Ever since I learned how to compile source code from the net, about a decade ago, I’ve wanted to create RPMs to help those who aren’t comfortable with compiling or simply don’t want to bother with compiling. But, for some reason, RPM creation was always something I struggled to get right. Nearly once a year I’d try and do it, but always failed. But recently, when reading the instructions on how to do it, it just clicked.
In September I tried out four new recipes. The grilled breakfast quesadillas were surprisingly great. An egg is cracked into a ring of cheese and topped with grilled bacon and cilantro. The cauliflower gratin was WAY too rich for just Danielle and I to finish it. But I could see it working well for a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. The carnitas were a great indoor version. Finally, for the first time I grilled a full, in tact fish. My father-in-law had given me some sea bass he caught and I filled it with aromatics and then covered it in more herbs and aromatics after grilling. It was very, very good.
Last time I was in Florida my mom took me to a specialty BBQ store, Just Grillin, off of Dale Mabry in Carrollwood. I didn’t know such places existed. I thought everyone just bought their grills at a hardware store, Amazon, or direct from the company. It was a pretty great to be able to see and touch Yoders, Weber Summits, and other high-end BBQs. They also came by with some chicken they’d cooked in the back using a variety of rubs they sell. Oh yeah, the entire wall behind the register was full to the brim with rubs and sauces - most (if not all) of them local or competition group rubs. Any rub you wanted to try would be poured into a tasting cup. Sure, it’s not the same as having the rub on some food, but it’s certainly better than the blind buying we have to do with supermarket rubs. As a gift, mom said she’d get me any rub I wanted to try, so I picked up Thunderbird Chicken Scratch. Then a bunch of travel meant I had to keep waiting impatiently until I could finally try it. Last night I finally got my chance.
Continuing my summer of learning to cook new dishes, I decided to tackle steakhouse burgers. I’d already mastered diner burgers, so I wanted to work on these. I didn’t follow Meathead’s directions 100% in that I didn’t create ground beef out of a nice cut of meat. But I did follow his recipe for using 2 zone cooking to make good-tasting, thick burgers.
Now, it’s possible that it’s because I crowded my burgers (18" kettle, not much of a choice), but it took WAY too long to come up to temp. After 20 minutes it was not anywhere near 155. Since it was getting late, I just moved them to the sear side to speed up the cooking.
We were debating what to eat. There are a lot of dishes we like, but it’s easy to forget all of them when you’re constantly thinking of the half dozen foods your toddlers eat and the dozen or so foods your preschooler eats. Lamb was on sale at Costco, so I told the wife we should have lamb and I would cook it outside and we’d have gyros. Well, modified gyros because we used naan for the bread instead of pita. The image above is Danielle’s wet brine for the meat. Based on the size of the chunks Danielle chopped up, I decided to do a reverse sear.
For a long time we’d been avoiding New York Strip Steak. I’d tried to grill some a long time ago and it just couldn’t hold a candle to a Ribeye. But recently my father-in-law bought a bunch and gave us some so I gave it another shot. I took all I’d learned in the past year or so from Meathead and used my thermometer to get a prefer medium steak. Here’s where I ended up:
I’m not sure I like how the main blog page looks. While it seems to copy something like Ghost or Jekyll (some of the Wordpress competitors popular among the technical set), It has something of an unfinished look to it. I do really like the way individual posts look, particularly when they have a featured image set. And, to some degree, thanks to Facebook, Twitter, and other sites - users are much more likely to land on a blog post than on the main blog page. But right now I’m not sure I’m happy with the theme. I may switch back early next week. If I stick with Twenty Nineteen, I’ll make my usual post about changing themes that contains some screenshots to remember how the blog looked with Twenty Sixteen.
Scarlett drew this back in September when the kids were playing a lot of Spelunky. It’s interesting to see which parts of the game imprinted on her mind.
I hadn’t seen I Fight Dragons on tour since Warped Tour three or four years ago (I missed an opportunity to see them at MagFest a couple years ago), but I really enjoyed that set and I’ve been enjoying their work on their new album. They’ve been sharing the progress of songs from acoustic roughs to rhythm roughs, and so on. It’s been a lot of fun to see how the songs evolve. Tickets were only $15 and it was at the Metro Gallery in Baltimore, so I figured I’d go check it out.
Another year and the kids grow older. Last year was a disaster - the twins did NOT want their photos taken. We didn’t get any good portraits. This time everyone was game and we got good portraits - at least the first time around. When we reconvened a little later, the kids were over the idea of pumpkin photos, or at least Scarlett was.
This Easter we went to the farm so they kids could hunt for eggs there and then enjoy the farm. Unlike my childhood, Easter’s pretty cold up here as you can see.
It’s pretty ridiculous to me, considering almost my entire childhood consisted of going to the local park.
Stella’s been enjoying horseback riding for a bit now, but this was the first time she was old enough to do it on her own without me holding onto her the entire time.
Recently we went to the pumpkin patch to get a couple pumpkins for the house and for Scarlett to have some fun at the farm. Here’s a gallery of my favorite photos from that visit and aftermath:
Clarkesworld Magazine has wonderful metadata for their issues and anthologies that requires little work from me:
Tor books had an awesome DRM-free policy that I love and that allows me to go to the ebook vendor of my choice. And they give away a free book every month as long as you agree to get some marketing emails from them. But their metadata is not so great:
Come on, Tor! You publish Science Fiction! Let’s get some better metadata on those ebook files!
Just a little under five years ago, I started looking at the possibility of Ebooks again. Two months later I bought a Barnes and Noble Nook. For a long time I was very casual with my Ebook reading. I had the Cory Doctorow books and several months worth of free Nook books which more than made up for the cost of the hardware. Really, the best part of fully digital distribution of books (and games) is revolutionary in the way it can allow the purchase of giveaway of media which would be cost-prohibitive if the company had to pay for the physical object or shipping fees. I installed Calibre for the free EPUBs, but it didn’t touch my Barnes and Noble purchases.
Clarkesworld Magazine has wonderful metadata for their issues and anthologies that requires little work from me:
Tor books had an awesome DRM-free policy that I love and that allows me to go to the ebook vendor of my choice. And they give away a free book every month as long as you agree to get some marketing emails from them. But their metadata is not so great:
Come on, Tor! You publish Science Fiction! Let’s get some better metadata on those ebook files!
Clarkesworld Magazine has wonderful metadata for their issues and anthologies that requires little work from me:
Tor books had an awesome DRM-free policy that I love and that allows me to go to the ebook vendor of my choice. And they give away a free book every month as long as you agree to get some marketing emails from them. But their metadata is not so great:
Come on, Tor! You publish Science Fiction! Let’s get some better metadata on those ebook files!
We’ve been growing plants and herbs at the house for a few years now (but not as many as I wish we had in retrospect). But, as far as I could find with a cursory search, I’d never done an end of summer summary of how the growing season went for us. I know there are still somewhere between a few weeks and a couple months before first frost, but I don’t expect anything to radically change between now and then.
It’s easy to lust after photo opportunities elsewhere as I did in a recent post. But when you find that happening, just remember there’s a whole world in your backyard. If you live in an urban neighborhood like the protagonist of Pecker, you can focus on portraits and street photography - candid or otherwise. But if you live in a suburban or rural area, you’ll find a lot of naturalistic photo opportunities in your backyard. For inspiration, take a look at these photos taken in my backyard and my parents’ backyard. (I’ve stretched the definition of backyard a little to include the surrounding neighborhood that’s within a short walk - say, within a mile) (Yes, a lot of them are birds, but that’s what really interests me outside)
I was recently reading issue 15 of 125 Magazine and came across the following quote by Albert Watson.
[Americans] seemed to want fasion to be more of the people, more of the mass. Chairman Mao had all the Chinese dressing the same, and from a different base in America they arrived at something not to dissimilar. And you can take it on to looking at the success of companies like The Gap and others, where in the headquarters they make a decision that then rolls out across the country. Someone decides ’let’s do cargo pants again, we haven’t done it for a couple years….so this year we will put two buttons on every pocket.’ Then they proceed to make 16 million pairs of these … and they go all over the USA and all over the world. All the same but you can choose from six colours. there is a certain sense of Chairman Mao and his style for the masses in the American philosophy around fashion, if arrived at through capitalism rather than communism.
Some things people don’t know because they weren’t taught. Or it was taught in a way that didn’t make sense to the way their brains work. Or it was beyond them for some reason. All of this is fine. It’s the prideful ignorance that is really wreaking havok with this country. The following Daily Show clip is what inspire this mini-rant:
Last time I was in Florida my mom took me to a specialty BBQ store, Just Grillin, off of Dale Mabry in Carrollwood. I didn’t know such places existed. I thought everyone just bought their grills at a hardware store, Amazon, or direct from the company. It was a pretty great to be able to see and touch Yoders, Weber Summits, and other high-end BBQs. They also came by with some chicken they’d cooked in the back using a variety of rubs they sell. Oh yeah, the entire wall behind the register was full to the brim with rubs and sauces - most (if not all) of them local or competition group rubs. Any rub you wanted to try would be poured into a tasting cup. Sure, it’s not the same as having the rub on some food, but it’s certainly better than the blind buying we have to do with supermarket rubs. As a gift, mom said she’d get me any rub I wanted to try, so I picked up Thunderbird Chicken Scratch. Then a bunch of travel meant I had to keep waiting impatiently until I could finally try it. Last night I finally got my chance.
Last time I was in Florida my mom took me to a specialty BBQ store, Just Grillin, off of Dale Mabry in Carrollwood. I didn’t know such places existed. I thought everyone just bought their grills at a hardware store, Amazon, or direct from the company. It was a pretty great to be able to see and touch Yoders, Weber Summits, and other high-end BBQs. They also came by with some chicken they’d cooked in the back using a variety of rubs they sell. Oh yeah, the entire wall behind the register was full to the brim with rubs and sauces - most (if not all) of them local or competition group rubs. Any rub you wanted to try would be poured into a tasting cup. Sure, it’s not the same as having the rub on some food, but it’s certainly better than the blind buying we have to do with supermarket rubs. As a gift, mom said she’d get me any rub I wanted to try, so I picked up Thunderbird Chicken Scratch. Then a bunch of travel meant I had to keep waiting impatiently until I could finally try it. Last night I finally got my chance.
Part of the fun of being into BBQ has been trying new things. As I’ve mentioned before, when I was growing up “BBQ” was what we called grilling and it MOSTLY consisted of burgers and hot dogs. Very occasionally it would be something else. Lots of lighter fluid and mediocre results. But now I know about low and slow and smoking and 2-zone grilling. And once I mastered ribs, chicken, and brisket it was time to experiment. So I tried Meathead’s recipe for Alabama Birds with White Sauce.
Do you know why a lot of people don’t BBQ that often? Because they always make the same thing and that’s boring. So I’ve been going through all the recipes in Meathead’s book (and other sources) to see if anything else is tasty to my palette. This time it was smoked chicken. I cut the chicken in half.
I took the skin off because Danielle was going to take off the skin anyway and since this was a rub-based recipe, that would remove all the flavor as well.
Yesterday I was at a conference dedicated to DevOps and so Red Hat and Google were there to talk about containers, especially Docker and Kubernetes. While summarizing it to some of my employees today, I was asked about what I see as the benefits of Docker containers relative to Virtual Machines. I mentioned that one of the great things is that Docker containers are immutable. All of your data’s actually written to a folder that’s essentially mounted in the container.
Danielle and I went to Mount Vernon back when we first moved here and were exploring new things to do in our free time that were unique to the area.
We’d thought of bringing our parents to see Washington’s house and property, but the timing never quite worked out - you really want to visit in the Spring or Fall, not during the Summer or Winter. So it remained a place we’d only been to once even as we made multiple trips to the same couple Smithsonian museums and zoos.
It’s been six years in the making, but GIMP is finally out with their GEGL-enabled version. Although some pros had made use of it, it is now 90% of the way towards being a Photoshop replacement. The next+1 release with non-destructive layer edits will finally get it there. I’m also happy it can use RawTherapee as a RAW image editing plugin.
You might remember the photos from Scarlett’s birthday party. For some reason Dina wanted to hide when holding Sam. Her shoulder and back ended up being incredibly distracting in the photo. It would have been better if she would have just stood up and held him normally rather than pretend he was sitting on his own. Since we weren’t planning for this shot, I didn’t have a corresponding shot of the blank wall. Because she was not surrounded on both sides by the wall, it was hard to use the healing brush. So the guys over at Pixls.us helped me figure out this technique.
For the past couple years (ever since my mom got back into photography), I’ve been trying to get her to come in the winter to go photograph American Bald Eagles at Conowingo Dam. They tend to be there from around November to about early January and I usually go in December. This year at the semi-last moment she decided to visit and I suggested we go try and photograph some eagles. So she brought her long lens and we took off. Of course, the one day we had available to do this also happened to be the coldest day of the 2017-2018 winter so we were physically being tortured. I had told her ahead of time to make sure to get long johns, so we didn’t get hypothermia.
Well, everyone’s growing up. Dan’s the last to get married (the youngest three siblings don’t count because there’s too big a gap). Here are some photos from his engagement party.
Stella and her great-grandparents at Dan's Engagement Party
Eric and Dan at Dan's Engagement Party
Eric, Dan, and Katie at Dan and Katy's Engagement Party
Double Rainbows!
Double Rainbows!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Somewhere over the rainbow!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Scarlett and the Rainbow
Scarlett and Abuelo Roman at Dan's Engagement Party (and a rainb
Scarlett and Abuela Carmen at Dan's Engagement Party
Scarlett and Abuela Carmen at Dan's Engagement Party
For the past couple years (ever since my mom got back into photography), I’ve been trying to get her to come in the winter to go photograph American Bald Eagles at Conowingo Dam. They tend to be there from around November to about early January and I usually go in December. This year at the semi-last moment she decided to visit and I suggested we go try and photograph some eagles. So she brought her long lens and we took off. Of course, the one day we had available to do this also happened to be the coldest day of the 2017-2018 winter so we were physically being tortured. I had told her ahead of time to make sure to get long johns, so we didn’t get hypothermia.
Going back to where I was before posting Halloween costume photos, a baseball game I went to as part of Dan’s wedding festivities. Got some good shots relative to my usual luck. Had to push things a bit to be able to get the shutter speed I needed so the ISO’s a bit higher than I would have preferred.
Going back to where I was before posting Halloween costume photos, a baseball game I went to as part of Dan’s wedding festivities. Got some good shots relative to my usual luck. Had to push things a bit to be able to get the shutter speed I needed so the ISO’s a bit higher than I would have preferred.
It’s my photojojo time capsule from early to mid-April. Interestingly, the Tampa Bay Rays were playing Baltimore early in April and they did that again this year. Do they always play the same teams in the same schedule? Also, the first photo from my 365 was in the capsule.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Fun, outdoor games requiring a minimum of only two players”] [/caption]
Danielle and I went to Rockburn Branch Park today to throw a ball around and maybe ride bike. We ended up not riding bike because we didn’t like the trail too much and my water bottle holder came loose from my bike. So we grabbed our gloves and brand new baseballs (we lost our previous ball in the woods behind our house) and went out to an empty baseball field. The fact that we had a frisbee was simply due to the fact that Danielle threw it into the bag. I certainly hadn’t intended to play frisbee. It was so awesome to have a whole baseball field to ourselves. It did, at the same time, feel a bit weird to have that whole field to ourselves. It was great to just run around and throw the ball. Eventually our catching hands got really sore from having the ball slam into it. We tried our best to get the ball to end up in the part that didn’t contain our fingers or palms, but it wasn’t always easy. So I looked into the bag and we eventually switch to frisbee. It was so much fun. We were both uncannily good. I think it was mostly because we didn’t have the pressure of really awesome players to make fun of us when we did fling the disc in very wrong directions. Eventually the bugs were getting to be too much and we left. Still, yesterday’s play at the park made the weekend for me.
Time and again I’ve warned my readers of the perils of DRM. (Specifically here and here). That’s why I don’t buy music on iTunes and have given all of my digital music patronage to Amazon.com. Even my wife, who’s not as into FOSS and all that as I am, has become disgusted as she’s understood what DRM means for her - regular Jane Consumer.
I’m not the only one who’s made these claims. Yet others say, “you guys are just using that as an excuse to malign DRM. It’s necessary for protecting content from piracy and you just want to pirate stuff.” Oh yeah? Well, are you prepared to give up your rights to expect your paid content to work when you come back to it in the future?
Going back to where I was before posting Halloween costume photos, a baseball game I went to as part of Dan’s wedding festivities. Got some good shots relative to my usual luck. Had to push things a bit to be able to get the shutter speed I needed so the ISO’s a bit higher than I would have preferred.
Going back to where I was before posting Halloween costume photos, a baseball game I went to as part of Dan’s wedding festivities. Got some good shots relative to my usual luck. Had to push things a bit to be able to get the shutter speed I needed so the ISO’s a bit higher than I would have preferred.
It’s my photojojo time capsule from early to mid-April. Interestingly, the Tampa Bay Rays were playing Baltimore early in April and they did that again this year. Do they always play the same teams in the same schedule? Also, the first photo from my 365 was in the capsule.
I used to hate Hunger Games because I considered it to be yet another example of America getting credit, fame, etc from another culture’s work; Battle Royale in this case. Eventually, I got the Hunger Games Trilogy from a Humble Bundle and read it, realizing that while the plots were the same in the abstract (kids are sent to an Island to kill each other in a dystopian future) they were different in the messages they were communicating to two different cultures. In the case of Battle Royale it was a response to a growing distrust of the younger generation that led to a novel in which the youngsters are sent to compete both to sow seeds of mistrust, but also as a punishment. In Hunger Games it’s less about being able to mistrust your best friends and more about mistrusting people from other states (or districts in the parlance of the book). That youth are used is more a function of entertainment value (kids at or near their physical peak) and the first book is almost more of a satire of reality TV with a lot more of the typical YA dystopian tropes coming in the second and third entries in the series.
Ever since I moved to Baltimore, I’ve been in the city during Otakon, the annual anime convention. The first couple of times it was a complete accident. For the the past two years I’ve looked up the dates ahead of time and made sure to be there to take some photos. I haven’t yet bought a ticket, but almost all of them tend to spend some time outside and everyone’s amenable to photos. After all, they’ve spent as much as the entire last year working on their costumes in some. I usually have a great time enjoying all the awesome costumes and they usually do pretty well views-wise on flickr. So I know there are at least two more Otakon photos on the Top 200 Photos.
I used to hate Hunger Games because I considered it to be yet another example of America getting credit, fame, etc from another culture’s work; Battle Royale in this case. Eventually, I got the Hunger Games Trilogy from a Humble Bundle and read it, realizing that while the plots were the same in the abstract (kids are sent to an Island to kill each other in a dystopian future) they were different in the messages they were communicating to two different cultures. In the case of Battle Royale it was a response to a growing distrust of the younger generation that led to a novel in which the youngsters are sent to compete both to sow seeds of mistrust, but also as a punishment. In Hunger Games it’s less about being able to mistrust your best friends and more about mistrusting people from other states (or districts in the parlance of the book). That youth are used is more a function of entertainment value (kids at or near their physical peak) and the first book is almost more of a satire of reality TV with a lot more of the typical YA dystopian tropes coming in the second and third entries in the series.
I used to hate Hunger Games because I considered it to be yet another example of America getting credit, fame, etc from another culture’s work; Battle Royale in this case. Eventually, I got the Hunger Games Trilogy from a Humble Bundle and read it, realizing that while the plots were the same in the abstract (kids are sent to an Island to kill each other in a dystopian future) they were different in the messages they were communicating to two different cultures. In the case of Battle Royale it was a response to a growing distrust of the younger generation that led to a novel in which the youngsters are sent to compete both to sow seeds of mistrust, but also as a punishment. In Hunger Games it’s less about being able to mistrust your best friends and more about mistrusting people from other states (or districts in the parlance of the book). That youth are used is more a function of entertainment value (kids at or near their physical peak) and the first book is almost more of a satire of reality TV with a lot more of the typical YA dystopian tropes coming in the second and third entries in the series.
Continuing my summer of learning to cook new dishes, I decided to tackle steakhouse burgers. I’d already mastered diner burgers, so I wanted to work on these. I didn’t follow Meathead’s directions 100% in that I didn’t create ground beef out of a nice cut of meat. But I did follow his recipe for using 2 zone cooking to make good-tasting, thick burgers.
Now, it’s possible that it’s because I crowded my burgers (18" kettle, not much of a choice), but it took WAY too long to come up to temp. After 20 minutes it was not anywhere near 155. Since it was getting late, I just moved them to the sear side to speed up the cooking.
Part of the fun of being into BBQ has been trying new things. As I’ve mentioned before, when I was growing up “BBQ” was what we called grilling and it MOSTLY consisted of burgers and hot dogs. Very occasionally it would be something else. Lots of lighter fluid and mediocre results. But now I know about low and slow and smoking and 2-zone grilling. And once I mastered ribs, chicken, and brisket it was time to experiment. So I tried Meathead’s recipe for Alabama Birds with White Sauce.
Part of the fun of being into BBQ has been trying new things. As I’ve mentioned before, when I was growing up “BBQ” was what we called grilling and it MOSTLY consisted of burgers and hot dogs. Very occasionally it would be something else. Lots of lighter fluid and mediocre results. But now I know about low and slow and smoking and 2-zone grilling. And once I mastered ribs, chicken, and brisket it was time to experiment. So I tried Meathead’s recipe for Alabama Birds with White Sauce.
I’d never made bread before (not counting pizza dough), but I recently got a dutch oven on sale on Woot.com and was looking for some things to make in the device. Then I came across this recipe for No-Knead Dutch Oven Bread. It seemed really simple, so I figured it’d be a great activity to do with Scarlett. She did in fact love working on it.
Lessons learned - the crust looked fine after 45 minutes and I already cut the time with the lid off to 10 minutes. Next time I might just take it out after the 45 minutes if the crust looks good. Other than that, it’s very delicious and tastes amazing with butter.
I’d never made bread before (not counting pizza dough), but I recently got a dutch oven on sale on Woot.com and was looking for some things to make in the device. Then I came across this recipe for No-Knead Dutch Oven Bread. It seemed really simple, so I figured it’d be a great activity to do with Scarlett. She did in fact love working on it.
Lessons learned - the crust looked fine after 45 minutes and I already cut the time with the lid off to 10 minutes. Next time I might just take it out after the 45 minutes if the crust looks good. Other than that, it’s very delicious and tastes amazing with butter.
In the past few years I’ve been moving away from seeing pizza as junk food towards seeing it as another food that is sometimes made with care, skill, and love and sometimes make in a hurry for a buck. I can’t remember the exact timeline and can’t be bothered to search for photo evidence, but the two restaurants that changed my mind on pizza were Two Amys in Maryland and Grimaldi’s in Brooklyn. Two very different styles of pizza, but Grimaldi’s cooked in a fire-based pizza oven and authentic Neopolitan at Two Amys. So now there was a new measurement against which to measure all pizzas: the wood-fired pizza.
In the past few years I’ve been moving away from seeing pizza as junk food towards seeing it as another food that is sometimes made with care, skill, and love and sometimes make in a hurry for a buck. I can’t remember the exact timeline and can’t be bothered to search for photo evidence, but the two restaurants that changed my mind on pizza were Two Amys in Maryland and Grimaldi’s in Brooklyn. Two very different styles of pizza, but Grimaldi’s cooked in a fire-based pizza oven and authentic Neopolitan at Two Amys. So now there was a new measurement against which to measure all pizzas: the wood-fired pizza.
Hitting alt-F2 then typing email (contact name - eg Danielle) and enter and then it presents me with an email window to send an email. No need to navigate to gmail.com or go over to the screen running Kmail (actually, usually Kontact).
Ever since late Fedora 12 or, for sure, Fedora 13, Evolution has been annoying me. I don’t know if it’s linked or coincidental, but it appears to have started getting buggy after I noticed it was using couchdb, a database that a lot of database people in the Linux world are getting all excited about. Evolution is the Linux equivalent to Microsoft Office Outlook. I switched to it a few years ago so that I could have tasks, email, and calenders in one spot. In theory, it’s perfect - it syncs with Hotmail, Gmail, and Google Calendar. I have all my todo items in there out to April of next year. It supports GPG signing and encryption via integration with Gnome’s Seahorse keyring. In practice, it has started taking forever to start a new email or enter a new task. I click the button and then have to wait for a long time until the dialog pops up; if it pops up. A lot of the time doing this causes the program to crash. I’ve filed a bug via the auto-bug-filing program in Fedora. There’s also a bug that doesn’t bother me as much where it keeps asking me to supply the password for my Hotmail account and not accepting it until the next time I restart the program. So I decided that I’d wait and see if things improved with Gnome 2.32, included in Fedora 14.
As you can see, by trawling through this, I have gone back and forth between KDE and Gnome a lot. As I’ve mentioned many times before, I initially loved KDE over Gnome. It looked more like Windows, it had more neat options, and great programs. Not only is Amarok the best media player out there (although Rhythmbox is not far behind), but the KDE programs feel so much more tightly integrated than Gnome. That’s one part where they’ve always had a huge lead over Gnome, although Gnome has been catching up recently. Still, I hope that KDE continues to evolve its KParts and KIOSlaves infrastructures. (Or whatever they evolve into in KDE4) KDE programs also just seemed to fit together visually so much better, I don’t know why because Gnome has the HIG.
Hitting alt-F2 then typing email (contact name - eg Danielle) and enter and then it presents me with an email window to send an email. No need to navigate to gmail.com or go over to the screen running Kmail (actually, usually Kontact).
I started using KDE in November of last yea r so I figured that I’d give an update on how things are working for me four months in. First off, KDE 4.6.x has not yet hit the official Fedora repositories. Since I like to yum upgrade or preupgrade from release to release, I try to stay with the official repos and RPMFusion. So no KDE 4.6 for me. At this rate, it doesn’t seem that it’s going to make it until around Fedora 15. But, if that means they iron out any extra bugs, that’s fine with me. So, with that said, let’s get to the info.
One awesome thing that is easy to notice in free/libre software is how international it is. While proprietary software is mainly based out of the US - Windows/OSX - free/libre software comes from all over the place. Mandriva is based out of Brazil and France. SUSE was originally developed in Germany. Miguel de Icaza, one of the founders of Gnome, was born in Mexico. Choqok, the best KDE-native microblogging software is created by an Iranian. So something that Linux has always done better than Windows is support more languages. Microsoft has to pay to create language translations so they have to make a market analysis about which languages to support (and it still doesn’t cover non-Microsoft programs) With Linux, it’s all volunteer work (or paid by companies that care about localization) and if the programs are written correctly for KDE and Gnome, they will all be able to take advantage of the translation work for their program. “Save” should probably translate well across all well-written programs. I think this is one of the reason why all the regions of Spain have their own Linux distros. I don’t know this for a fact, but I would guess that Windows probably only comes out in Castillian (official or regular Spanish) and not in Catalan, Andalusian, Basque, etc
Sure, it’s a tired and cliche phrase, but hurray for the wisdom of the crowd. I’ve received comments on identi.ca, twitter, and in the comments here with answers to nearly all my problems with KDE. Let’s see if I can get them all to work. First off, I was told that my problem with Konversation not getting my password in time to keep me from being signed into the fedora-unregistered could be solved by setting the password as a server password. Alright! That worked! woohoo! Before I’d had it set to just run the /msg identify command.
So I’ve used KDE for about a work week. During that time I’ve pretty much gone to using the KDE versions of all my programs except Konqueror. I’m not sure if the Fedora 14 version of Konqueror is the one with Webkit, but last time I used Konqueror with KHTML it was mucking up a bunch of web pages including my blog. So I stuck with Google Chrome, which is what i use on Gnome, LXDE (Lubuntu on my laptop), and on my Windows 7 install. (Also, I stuck with gPodder for podcasts because that’s working perfectly) So how did it go? First of all, I love the stock screenshot tool in KDE, KSnapshot. I love that lets me choose full screen, region, window under cursor, and section of Window. With Gnome I hit print screen and then I have to edit the png in the GIMP. So it gives me less work for my Linux-related blogging.
[caption id=“attachment_3694” align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“My KDE 4.4 Desktop”] [/caption]
At first I was confused because the desktop background was not carried over to my right monitor. When I went to change the background I saw that they no longer put it all into one dialog. You need to go to each screen and manually set the background. While counterintuitive at first, it actually makes more sense this way. You can see my micro-blogging widget, calculator widget, and some folder views. The taskbar is looking nice and slick now. The KDE version of the system try is looking really nice. It has a very good slickness to it; to quote Aaron Seigo, “like something that might come out of Cupertino”. My FAVORITE part of KDE 4.4 vs Gnome 2.30 is the little “i” i the right corner. If you click there you can scroll back through all the system messages. So, whereas you might miss that in Gnome if you’re looking somewhere else or away from the computer, you can easily find and review the messages in KDE. At first the desktop was really slow and I thought “here we go again. I’m going to have to once again write off KDE 4.x as useless.” But it turns out that it was just Strigi/Nepomuk indexing my home folder. It’d be a year or more since I last loaded KDE 4, so it had a lot to index. When I also had some errors with Amarok (which I’m about to get to), I gave it a reboot in case KDE was having a fight with SELinux (as has happened in the past). Anyway, when I came back, Strigi was done and KDE was much more responsive. Konqueror had also been slow during the indexing, so I’ll want to test that in Part 2. I took a look at my old friend, Kopete. It was looking nice, if a bit cartoony compared to Pidgin. I’ll also want to take a closer look in Part 2. It didn’t support Facebook chat (as is supported in Pidgin via a plugin) which isn’t a killer, but it’s not good. Perhaps there’s a plugin there too? I’ll have to investigate that. What I was most curious about was Amarok. It was one of my biggest anchors to KDE back in the day and really my favorite music player.
Hitting alt-F2 then typing email (contact name - eg Danielle) and enter and then it presents me with an email window to send an email. No need to navigate to gmail.com or go over to the screen running Kmail (actually, usually Kontact).
It’s been a while since btrfs was first introduced to me via a Fedora version that had it as the default filesystem. At the time, it was especially brittle when it came to power outages. I ended up losing a system to one such use case. But a few years ago, I started using btrfs on my home directory. And even developed a program to manage snapshots. My two favorite features of btrfs are that Copy on Write (COW) allows me to make snapshots that only take up space when the file that was snapshot changes and the ability to dynamically set up and grow RAID levels. I was able to use this recently to get my photo hard drive on RAID1 without having to have an extra hard drive (because most RAID solutions destroy what’s on the drive).
It’s been a while since btrfs was first introduced to me via a Fedora version that had it as the default filesystem. At the time, it was especially brittle when it came to power outages. I ended up losing a system to one such use case. But a few years ago, I started using btrfs on my home directory. And even developed a program to manage snapshots. My two favorite features of btrfs are that Copy on Write (COW) allows me to make snapshots that only take up space when the file that was snapshot changes and the ability to dynamically set up and grow RAID levels. I was able to use this recently to get my photo hard drive on RAID1 without having to have an extra hard drive (because most RAID solutions destroy what’s on the drive).
I’d tackled all the major BBQ meats. It was time to try and make my own sauce. So I assembled all my ingredients and followed Meathead’s recipe. It’s supposed to be like KC Classic, which I’ve never had. I also went with the secret optional ingredient of Tamarind paste.
Then I finished cooking
And canned it while it was still hot:
So what was the verdict? Again, I’ve never had KC Classic. My favorite commercial BBQ sauce is Trader Joe’s Kansas City sauce and that’s nice and sweat. This sauce was very tangy. While it has grown on me over the past couple months, it’s definitely not my favorite and my wife doesn’t like it at all. I want to try one more time, this time tweaking it to be a sweeter sauce. Also, I want to see how it changes when caramelized, something I haven’t had a chance to do yet. Still, it was fun to make my own and add it to my other BBQ/smoke creations.
I’d tackled all the major BBQ meats. It was time to try and make my own sauce. So I assembled all my ingredients and followed Meathead’s recipe. It’s supposed to be like KC Classic, which I’ve never had. I also went with the secret optional ingredient of Tamarind paste.
Then I finished cooking
And canned it while it was still hot:
So what was the verdict? Again, I’ve never had KC Classic. My favorite commercial BBQ sauce is Trader Joe’s Kansas City sauce and that’s nice and sweat. This sauce was very tangy. While it has grown on me over the past couple months, it’s definitely not my favorite and my wife doesn’t like it at all. I want to try one more time, this time tweaking it to be a sweeter sauce. Also, I want to see how it changes when caramelized, something I haven’t had a chance to do yet. Still, it was fun to make my own and add it to my other BBQ/smoke creations.
Ever since I first took a macro photo, I’ve been drawn to the form. I think microscopic photography often turns the everyday into the abstract. Macro photography can do that at times, but more often than not, it just lets you have a good look at something that you don’t normally get such a good look at. My favorite macro shots to take and to take in are of insects. They’re skittish so it takes skill to capture it. And they look so alien compared to mammals (which is why they’re often the template for aliens in movies). This guy was resting near my front door and I ran inside to get my camera and hoped he’d still be there when I got back.
I had been wanting to do brisket for a very long time, but I couldn’t find anywhere convenient to buy a whole packer brisket. But right before I was convinced I was going to have to go to a butcher, Costco decided to carry them.
Yeah, it was 20 lbs, which is ridiculous for what was essentially going to be just 3 adults, but it was USDA Prime for only $3/lb! I had no choice. I put it in my shopping cart and resolved to deal with the consequences later.
I had been wanting to do brisket for a very long time, but I couldn’t find anywhere convenient to buy a whole packer brisket. But right before I was convinced I was going to have to go to a butcher, Costco decided to carry them.
Yeah, it was 20 lbs, which is ridiculous for what was essentially going to be just 3 adults, but it was USDA Prime for only $3/lb! I had no choice. I put it in my shopping cart and resolved to deal with the consequences later.
Long-time readers of my blog will know that while I’ve been working at mastering my grills for a few years now, it was in 2016 that I decided I would take my BBQ to the next level. Back in June I smoked baby back ribs for the first time. Then I realized that I wanted to step up my smoking game I’d need a Weber Kettle. Mom got me one for my birthday and at that time I started pining for a chance to take on one of the two kings of BBQ: Pulled Pork or Brisket. The local area made up my mind for me. Apparently it’s next to impossible to get full packer brisket in Maryland. So pulled pork it would be.
I had been wanting to do brisket for a very long time, but I couldn’t find anywhere convenient to buy a whole packer brisket. But right before I was convinced I was going to have to go to a butcher, Costco decided to carry them.
Yeah, it was 20 lbs, which is ridiculous for what was essentially going to be just 3 adults, but it was USDA Prime for only $3/lb! I had no choice. I put it in my shopping cart and resolved to deal with the consequences later.
For the first time in a few years, my mom was going to be in town for Mother’s Day. We didn’t have a ton of events to attend or anything, so I asked her what she would like for dinner if she could have anything. She said she wanted prime rib, so I figured it was the perfect time for me to try out a prime rib roast on one of my BBQs. Meathead has lots of tips for eliminating most of the hassle of making a prime rib roast. First of all, remove the ribs - they only serve to block heat and keep the roast from cooking evenly. Second, use twine to make it into a cylinder so it cooks evenly from the outside to the inside.
For the first time in a few years, my mom was going to be in town for Mother’s Day. We didn’t have a ton of events to attend or anything, so I asked her what she would like for dinner if she could have anything. She said she wanted prime rib, so I figured it was the perfect time for me to try out a prime rib roast on one of my BBQs. Meathead has lots of tips for eliminating most of the hassle of making a prime rib roast. First of all, remove the ribs - they only serve to block heat and keep the roast from cooking evenly. Second, use twine to make it into a cylinder so it cooks evenly from the outside to the inside.
You never know what’s going to happen when you try to take portraits of babies. Throw in the extra unpredictability of kids of any age and it’s a crapshoot whether a photo shoot is going to turn out to be fun with rewarding photos or a series of photos of your children crying.
One thing we have on our side with the studio being in the basement is that we can take photos when the kids are ready, not on a hope and prayer that they’ll be ready when we get to Sears, Target, or wherever people are getting portraits done nowadays. So we started off with easy portraits in the morning on the “Baby Portrait Couch”. Hey, it’s a tradition started with Scarlett!
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
I took a long time to publish the previous post, so here we are again. It’s mostly Scarlett Easter photos. As I sit here and look at a photo of this year’s Easter photo, it’s pretty awesome to see how much she’s changed. For one thing, she’s mobile now, so it was a challenge to get her to sit there while we took the photo. For another, she can actually sit on her own.
This past winter I smoked a pork shoulder for the first time. I learned some lessons, continued to work on getting better with my kettle, and decided it was time for pulled pork again.
I cut the pork shoulder into roughly equal halves. I had three things I wanted to experiment with:
Would it cook faster?
Would it be nice to have twice as much bark?
I wanted to try a Mexican-ish rub on one to have pulled pork tacos.
In my opinion, for a long Weber Kettle cook you can’t beat a snake. If it’s going to go VERY long, it can be a pain as you have to move the water pan to continue the snake. But for medium-long cooks, it’s a nice, perfect way to have a consistent temperature throughout the cook.
This past winter I smoked a pork shoulder for the first time. I learned some lessons, continued to work on getting better with my kettle, and decided it was time for pulled pork again.
I cut the pork shoulder into roughly equal halves. I had three things I wanted to experiment with:
Would it cook faster?
Would it be nice to have twice as much bark?
I wanted to try a Mexican-ish rub on one to have pulled pork tacos.
In my opinion, for a long Weber Kettle cook you can’t beat a snake. If it’s going to go VERY long, it can be a pain as you have to move the water pan to continue the snake. But for medium-long cooks, it’s a nice, perfect way to have a consistent temperature throughout the cook.
Long-time readers of my blog will know that while I’ve been working at mastering my grills for a few years now, it was in 2016 that I decided I would take my BBQ to the next level. Back in June I smoked baby back ribs for the first time. Then I realized that I wanted to step up my smoking game I’d need a Weber Kettle. Mom got me one for my birthday and at that time I started pining for a chance to take on one of the two kings of BBQ: Pulled Pork or Brisket. The local area made up my mind for me. Apparently it’s next to impossible to get full packer brisket in Maryland. So pulled pork it would be.
This past winter I smoked a pork shoulder for the first time. I learned some lessons, continued to work on getting better with my kettle, and decided it was time for pulled pork again.
I cut the pork shoulder into roughly equal halves. I had three things I wanted to experiment with:
Would it cook faster?
Would it be nice to have twice as much bark?
I wanted to try a Mexican-ish rub on one to have pulled pork tacos.
In my opinion, for a long Weber Kettle cook you can’t beat a snake. If it’s going to go VERY long, it can be a pain as you have to move the water pan to continue the snake. But for medium-long cooks, it’s a nice, perfect way to have a consistent temperature throughout the cook.
We were debating what to eat. There are a lot of dishes we like, but it’s easy to forget all of them when you’re constantly thinking of the half dozen foods your toddlers eat and the dozen or so foods your preschooler eats. Lamb was on sale at Costco, so I told the wife we should have lamb and I would cook it outside and we’d have gyros. Well, modified gyros because we used naan for the bread instead of pita. The image above is Danielle’s wet brine for the meat. Based on the size of the chunks Danielle chopped up, I decided to do a reverse sear.
We were debating what to eat. There are a lot of dishes we like, but it’s easy to forget all of them when you’re constantly thinking of the half dozen foods your toddlers eat and the dozen or so foods your preschooler eats. Lamb was on sale at Costco, so I told the wife we should have lamb and I would cook it outside and we’d have gyros. Well, modified gyros because we used naan for the bread instead of pita. The image above is Danielle’s wet brine for the meat. Based on the size of the chunks Danielle chopped up, I decided to do a reverse sear.
We were debating what to eat. There are a lot of dishes we like, but it’s easy to forget all of them when you’re constantly thinking of the half dozen foods your toddlers eat and the dozen or so foods your preschooler eats. Lamb was on sale at Costco, so I told the wife we should have lamb and I would cook it outside and we’d have gyros. Well, modified gyros because we used naan for the bread instead of pita. The image above is Danielle’s wet brine for the meat. Based on the size of the chunks Danielle chopped up, I decided to do a reverse sear.
I’ve been perfecting my diner style hamburgers (aka quarterpounders) thanks to the tips from Amazingribs.com. But there’s a guy at work I talk to about grilling, BBQ, and smoking. He was telling me about his bacon cheeseburgers. I thought about how I tend not to like bacon cheeseburgers in restaurants. Usually either the bacon or the cheese is substandard and I end up just preferring a hamburger. But then I thought about one key thing - when I make the burgers I decide all the ingredients.
I’ve been perfecting my diner style hamburgers (aka quarterpounders) thanks to the tips from Amazingribs.com. But there’s a guy at work I talk to about grilling, BBQ, and smoking. He was telling me about his bacon cheeseburgers. I thought about how I tend not to like bacon cheeseburgers in restaurants. Usually either the bacon or the cheese is substandard and I end up just preferring a hamburger. But then I thought about one key thing - when I make the burgers I decide all the ingredients.
I’ve been perfecting my diner style hamburgers (aka quarterpounders) thanks to the tips from Amazingribs.com. But there’s a guy at work I talk to about grilling, BBQ, and smoking. He was telling me about his bacon cheeseburgers. I thought about how I tend not to like bacon cheeseburgers in restaurants. Usually either the bacon or the cheese is substandard and I end up just preferring a hamburger. But then I thought about one key thing - when I make the burgers I decide all the ingredients.
With modern technology, here’s the pattern I’ve noticed since college. New tech comes out and I can see that it’s neat, but not how I can make use of it. A few years later, I finally come across the right article and it all makes sense to me. I first noticed this with VMs. I couldn’t see a reason to want to use it outside of a server context. Then I used it to review Linux distros. Then I used it to run my network’s services. The same happened with tablets, smart phones, and Docker.
With modern technology, here’s the pattern I’ve noticed since college. New tech comes out and I can see that it’s neat, but not how I can make use of it. A few years later, I finally come across the right article and it all makes sense to me. I first noticed this with VMs. I couldn’t see a reason to want to use it outside of a server context. Then I used it to review Linux distros. Then I used it to run my network’s services. The same happened with tablets, smart phones, and Docker.
The weather was finally improving and so we figured it was a good time to take the twins to the zoo for the first time. When Scarlett was around the same age she didn’t care for the animals as much. She was much more interested in the kids around her. So we weren’t sure if the kids would enjoy it. The National Zoo seemed like a wise choice since it was free to enter.
For the first time in something like 3 years I took my Sigma 120-400mm lens to the zoo. I had intended to get some Firefox (Red Panda) photos and videos, but they weren’t there. That was also a bummer for Scarlett as seeing the Red Pandas was the reason she’d asked us to take her to the zoo.
First off we saw one of the pandas:
But what was a lot of fun was taking photos of the birds; birds that would have been quite hard for me to see in the wild. I think they came out pretty nicely considering the darkness in the bird house and the fact that I was hand-holding the lens. It seems like some of the higher ISO photos didn’t even have too much noise, so I’ll explore using it in the future to get the exposure a little more correct in camera. (if the photos look blurry when you click on them, give it a little time to load)
Another photo of Tai Shan. This time he’s small enough to get on these flimsy branches without falling immediately. It was fun to watch him test the branches to see if they would hold his weight.
I mentioned Tai Shan before. This is his father, Tian Tian. My wife is always expressing how pandas should be extinct already from having such a dumb diet. They eat bamboo, but it is so nutrient deficient that they essentially have to eat non-stop or they will end up actually losing weight by just laying around and being alive.
From NYC to our nation’s Capital for today’s Top 200 Photo.
photo #166 is:
As I mentioned before, we loved to go to the National Zoo to go see the Pandas. Well, thanks to Tai Shan, the zoo got a huge injection of donations which it used to revitalize its Asian section of the zoo. Eventually they got a pair of fire foxes. The fire fox is also known as the red panda. Back when we were in college I was visiting Danielle during summer classes and we took a trip to Syracuse. While there we went to the zoo. I saw they had a sign for a red panda. Whoa! I only knew about the black and white ones! I was quite annoyed that it was just some raccoon-looking thing.
What’s black and white and #173? Today’s Top 200 Photos entry.
photo #173 is:
For about a year, we were obsessed with Tai Shan, the baby panda at The National Zoo. We went at least once a month to go photograph him and watch him act all cute. This triptych is from his first birthday. The giant pink Popsicle is his birthday “cake”.
As a manger, I’m often thinking of ways to show my employees how much I appreciate their hard work. Recently, while watching a Meathead video, I saw his quote at the end that cooking for someone is an act of love. And love is not far off from appreciation so I figured I’d ask my employees if they’d like it if I made them some smoked baby back ribs for the cost of raw materials. We settled on a half rack per person, salad, and bread for $6. So then I just had to pick a date to make the food. Thanks to my mom getting me the Weber Kettle for my birthday this year, I had enough room to smoke to the ribs across both my BBQs as long as I used rib racks. So I used the Weber 6605 rib racks (which you saw in the featured image and will see again below)
As a manger, I’m often thinking of ways to show my employees how much I appreciate their hard work. Recently, while watching a Meathead video, I saw his quote at the end that cooking for someone is an act of love. And love is not far off from appreciation so I figured I’d ask my employees if they’d like it if I made them some smoked baby back ribs for the cost of raw materials. We settled on a half rack per person, salad, and bread for $6. So then I just had to pick a date to make the food. Thanks to my mom getting me the Weber Kettle for my birthday this year, I had enough room to smoke to the ribs across both my BBQs as long as I used rib racks. So I used the Weber 6605 rib racks (which you saw in the featured image and will see again below)
Ever since I bought my house and got a BBQ/grill I’ve learned that most of what I thought of as BBQ growing up was actually grilling. The key difference is that you BBQ at a lower temperature (typically around 225 F) and that BBQ is cooked via indirect heat. Grilling is cooking directly over a fire and, typically, done at the highest heat your BBQ/grill can provide (at the very least starting around 350 F and higher). Although I’ve been cooking ribs successfully on the BBQ/Grill for the past 6ish years, I’ve never really been BBQing them. So I looked around on the web and I found the recipe for Last Meal Ribs.
As a manger, I’m often thinking of ways to show my employees how much I appreciate their hard work. Recently, while watching a Meathead video, I saw his quote at the end that cooking for someone is an act of love. And love is not far off from appreciation so I figured I’d ask my employees if they’d like it if I made them some smoked baby back ribs for the cost of raw materials. We settled on a half rack per person, salad, and bread for $6. So then I just had to pick a date to make the food. Thanks to my mom getting me the Weber Kettle for my birthday this year, I had enough room to smoke to the ribs across both my BBQs as long as I used rib racks. So I used the Weber 6605 rib racks (which you saw in the featured image and will see again below)
[root@supermario ~]# /usr/sbin/btrfs scrub start -Bd /media/Photos/
scrub device /dev/sdd1 (id 1) done
scrub started at Tue Mar 21 17:18:13 2017 and finished after 05:49:29
total bytes scrubbed: 2.31TiB with 0 errors
scrub device /dev/sda1 (id 2) done
scrub started at Tue Mar 21 17:18:13 2017 and finished after 05:20:56
total bytes scrubbed: 2.31TiB with 0 errors
I’m a bit perplexed at this information. Since this is a RAID1, I would expect it to be comparing info between disks - is this not so? If not, why? Because I would have expected both disks to end at the same time. Also, interesting to note that the 1TB/hr stopped being the case at some point.
[root@supermario ~]# btrfs scrub status /media/Photos/
scrub status for 27cc1330-c4e3-404f-98f6-f23becec76b5
scrub started at Tue Mar 21 17:18:13 2017, running for 01:05:38
total bytes scrubbed: 1.00TiB with 0 errors
So on Fedora 25 with an AMD-8323 (8 core, no hyperthreading) and 24GB of RAM with this hard drive and its 3TB brother in RAID1 , it takes about an hour per Terabyte to do a scrub. (Which seems about equal to what a coworker told me his system takes to do a zfs scrub - 40ish hours for about 40ish TB)
I went with Backblaze first because they were highly recommended by LifeHacker. Then I chose Crashplan for my main Linux computer because Backblaze doesn’t do Linux. Crashplan offers a family plan that covers 2-10 computers, but I only need to cover 2 computers (my laptops don’t have anything that needs backing up). Covering two computers on Crashplan is more expensive than doing one computer on Crashplan and one on Backblaze. So the less efficient and more complicated setup is the cheaper one; oh well.
Hard drives are relatively cheap, especially nowadays. But I still want to stay within my budget as I setup my backups and system redundancies. So, ideally, for my backup RAID I’d take advantage of btrs’ ability to change RAID types on the fly and start off with one drive. Then I’d add another and go to RAID1. Then another and RAID5. Finally, the fourth drive and RAID6. At that point I’d have to be under some sort of Job-like God/Devil curse if all my drives failed at once, negating the point of the RAID. The best thinking right now is that you want to have backups, but want to try not to have to use them because of both offline time and the fact that a restore is never as clean as you hope it’ll be.
So, back when I started this project, I laid out that one of the reasons I wanted to use btrfs on my home directory (don’t think it’s ready for / just yet) is that with RAID1, btrfs is self-healing. Obviously, magic can’t be done, but a checksum is stored as part of the data’s metadata and if the file doesn’t match the checksum on one disk, but does on the other, the file can be fixed. This can help protect against bitrot, which is the biggest thing that’s going to keep our children’s digital photos from lasting as long as the ones printed on archival paper. So, like I did the first time, I’ll first be trying it out in a Fedora VM that mostly matches my version, kernel, and btrfs-progs version. So, I went and added another virtual hard drive of the same size to my VM.
Back in August I finally had some time to do some things I’d been wanting to do with my Snap-in-Time btrfs program for a while now. First of all, I finally added the weekly code. So now my snapshots are cleaned up every three days and then every other week. Next on the docket is quarterly cleanups followed up yearly cleanups. Second, the big thing I’d wanted to do for a while now: come up with unit tests! Much more robust than my debug code and testing scripts, it helped me find corner cases. If you look at my git logs you can see that it helped me little-by-little figure out just what I needed to do as well as when my “fixes” broke other things. Yay! My first personal project with regression testing!
# btrfs sub list /home
ID 275 gen 3201 top level 5 path home
ID 1021 gen 3193 top level 275 path .snapshots
ID 1023 gen 1653 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2146
ID 1024 gen 1697 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2210
ID 1025 gen 1775 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2300
ID 1027 gen 1876 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0000
ID 1028 gen 1961 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0100
ID 1029 gen 2032 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0200
ID 1030 gen 2105 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0300
ID 1031 gen 2211 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0400
ID 1032 gen 2284 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0500
ID 1033 gen 2357 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0600
ID 1035 gen 2430 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0700
ID 1036 gen 2506 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0800
ID 1037 gen 2587 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0900
ID 1038 gen 2667 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-1700
ID 1039 gen 2774 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-1800
ID 1040 gen 2879 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-1900
ID 1041 gen 2982 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-2000
ID 1042 gen 3088 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-2100
ID 1043 gen 3193 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-2200
I got my new hard drive that would replace my old, aging /home hard drive. As you read in part 1, I wanted to put btrfs on it. This is my journey to get it up and running. Plugged it into my hard drive toaster and ran gparted.
[caption id=“attachment_7889” align=“aligncenter” width=“421”] Gparted for new drive[/caption]
[caption id=“attachment_7890” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] Gparted for new drive1[/caption]
Recently I once again came across an article about the benefits of the btrfs Linux file system. Last time I’d come across it, it was still in alpha or beta, and I also didn’t understand why I would want to use it. However, the most I’ve learned about the fragility of our modern storage systems, the more I’ve thought about how I want to protect my data. My first step was to sign up for offsite backups. I’ve done this on my Windows computer via Backblaze. They are pretty awesome because it’s a constant backup so it meets all the requirements of not forgetting to do it. The computer doesn’t even need to be on at a certain time or anything. I’ve loved using them for the past 2+ years, but one thing that makes me consider their competition is that they don’t support Linux. That’s OK for now because all my photos are on my Windows computer, but it leaves me in a sub-optimal place. I know this isn’t an incredibly influential blog and I’m just one person, but I’d like to think writing about this would help them realize that they could a) lose a customer and b) be making more money from those with Linux computers.
The latest iteration of this series I’ve been playing for the past 25 years was released and the changes have made the game more dynamic and, for the first time in the series, have really made it so that I can’t just do the same thing every game because of how much the terrain makes a difference. It’s been neat and with the reduced gameplay over the past two months, it’s displaced all over games.
Civilization III (15 minutes)
By the time I was done with February I was nearly done with XCOM: Enemy Within. It was a fun revisit of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, but I think I’m done for a while. That’s a good thing since I hear that XCOM 2 has some beefy PC and graphics card requirements.
Because I’ve staggered the publishing of new videos on Youtube, not all of them may be visible on the embeds in this blog post on the day it goes live. For example, I think I created 14 videos for Torchlight in January, but at the moment only 11 are live.
Torchlight (23 hours):
I decide to check out this spiritual successor to Diablo, having never played Diablo. It is a nice game to play after stressful day - just clicking on bad guys and traveling around without much thought.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
I wanted to finish XCOM: Enemy Unknown before 2015 was over and I succeeded. Despite being screwed over by scripting errors in the big “dungeons”, I had a lot of fun with the game. The ending was slightly anti-climactic, but then again, this game only had the barest of storylines. I’d DEFINITELY play it again….once I finished going through the hundred or so unplayed games I already own.
There are many times that The Giant Bombcast or other video game podcasts have led me to discover games I wouldn’t have otherwise considered: Peggle, Saint’s Row the Third, Assassin’s Creed, and The Witcher. But there was one time they did me wrong: XCOM: Enemy Unknown. They made it sound like it was just an exercise in frustration in which you died at every turn and it since it was made by Firaxis, I thought it was just going to look like Civ. Nothing wrong with that, but I already had Civ. But Dan got an extra copy at some point and gifted me this one. It’s been a blast and I’ve loved playing it even as it has started to kick my butt as the difficulty ramps up. If I had more time, I’d be playing this game A LOT.
I’m a seasonal Team Fortress 2 player. Although I play it here and there at any time of year, I tend to really play a lot during October for the special Halloween missions. This year Valve was busy working on a new mode that was released earlier this week so they released a community-made Halloween mode: Invasion. It’s the first time I’ve spent any money since I spent $2.50 to get a bigger backpack a few years ago. Overall, the new modes were a lot of fun and I’m glad that Valve has gone from what should be the basic level of video game company support- supporting community mods- to allowing the best of the best to make money by sharing in the profits made during community events.
Assassin’s Creed was the first game series Vinnie of Giant Bomb convinced me to try by talking about it endlessly on the Bombcast. The Witcher is the second. (This is why I miss his voice on that podcast so much) It has turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would. It’s based on the Bioware engine of the time, so it plays a lot like Mass Effect 1. The story is good so far and full of nice little jokes. You can watch my progress (I’ve been recording it for Extra Life) on this Youtube playlist.
Civilization V (30 minutes) - We got a few turns in our multiplayer games, but other important things (like planning weddings, perhaps) have kept my brothers from sending me new turns.
Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+ (38 minutes) - I got it as part of a Humble Bundle because eventually my PS3 will die or be remotely disabled. As I have just transferred my Steam library to a new hard drive (more about that in a future post), I’m more confident in my ability to be able to play these games for a long time. Played a bit on the last day of Februrary to test my new Xbox 360 for Windows controller. It’s still as much fun as I remembered.
Civilization: Beyond Earth (7 hrs): This game was a great evolution on Civ V. I enjoyed that they continued with the same sense of humor. I also thought they did a good job evolving things so that it felt different enough. It’ll probably take a few games before I get the hang of all the government options.
Super Mario Galaxy (1 hr): Just wanted to get past the opening section on my emulator so I could not have to repeat that silly story section again if I even want to play some SMG. Also wanted to test the USB sensor Dan got me for Christmas.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
Civilization V (1 hr) - Dan, Dave, and I didn’t play too much because life got in the way and then the GMR servers went offline. We hope to play some more in the following month.
Poker Night 2 (30 minutes) - Testing out Steam’s internal streaming from Windows to Linux.
I noticed Dan was on my borders right when I started having the Cho Ku Nu, my special unit. Having played civ and RTS games with Dan, I figured it was strike or be struck. So I went to war. Unfortunately, Dan fights better than AI and because of the terrain features, it became a war of attrition that favored Dan. After a stalemate war, I offered peace and Dan accepted.
Poker Night 2 (3 hrs): Before going on my recent business trip I wanted to take a small break from school work so I played PN2 the night before my trip. I reached the point where I’ve heard all the in-game dialogue so many times that I don’t even listen any more. I can generally last a while, but I wasn’t able to win any tournaments. I usually got knocked out by the last man standing.
Civilization V (7 hrs): Met Dan in Mesa Bros; Waiting in Lefties Game
May:
Civilization V (11 hrs): More of the multiplayer games.
June:
Civ V (3 hrs): More multiplayer games.
Super Meat Boy (30 min): I played a few levels until it began to get too hard for me. It is a very well-designed game, but I was never that good at platformers. Really, I just stuck to Mario and Sonic growing up. The others were often too hard for me; at times even Mario and Sonic were too much. I don’t think I ever beat a Sonic game although with one of them (3 or S&K) I used to always get to the final Robotnick.
Only Civ this month as I’ve been focused on my semester work.
Civ V ( 29 hrs):
Mesa Bros:
It was my oldest game that didn’t yet have any war, but Germany broke the peace. In general, my style seems to be OK with AI warfare. Usually I can ramp up my units quickly enough to stave them off until they exhaust their units while I build up my army. However, I’ve noticed a slightly higher aggression rate in Civilization V compared to previous Civ games so I’ve started trying to keep my unit counts high enough that most civs won’t spontaneously attack me. Didn’t work with the Germans, but after rebuffing their first advance, I may be able to steal a city. Especially since right after they attacked I was able to upgrade my catapults to trebuchets. We’ll see how this goes because at a theoretical max of 30 turns per month (usually because of our schedules I can’t do more than one turn per day and some days we miss turns), I may or may not have finished attacking the first city before April’s up.
[caption id=“attachment_7243” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civilization V - against Dave - Fighting Barbarians at the Gates - 2620 BC[/caption]
Civilization V (48.5 hrs): As is usually the case, spent a ton of time with Civilization this year. Played about 3.5 hours less than last year, but had way more fun by playing with Dan and Dave. Things have gone a little slower recently because we’ve all been away for the holidays, but I actually feel like there’s a good chance of us finishing the game. At least the one I have with Dave which is much further along.
Civilization 5 (5 hours): Still haven’t caught up on the blog posts. Still entirely consists of games with Dan and Dave. Dan gifted me the latest expansion pack during the Winter Steam Sale, so I may fire up a solo game. Time will tell - I still have a ton of indie games from Humble Bundles and even games Dan gave me for my birthday last year like LA Noire.
Skullgirls (<1hr): This game is a ridiculous fighting game that doesn’t take itself too seriously when it comes to the story. It’s a return to the fun of fighting games of the 1990s. At the same time, the mechanics of gameplay are no joke - we’ve been in a fighting game renaissance for the past five years or so and this game does not ignore that. I played it during a Steam free weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. If I had the time to dedicate to a fighting game, I’d buy it in an instant. If you enjoy games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, but think they’re a bit too self-serious, this game should definitely be checked out. Also, if you’re into anime (and I think there’s a lot of overlap between these groups), there’s a lot of poking fun at tropes of both fighting games an anime.
[caption id=“attachment_7503” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Back to the Future: The Video Game - The Pseudonym Fun of the series continues[/caption]
Back to the Future: The Video Games (5 hrs) - As is the usual situation with these types of games, I figured out I had to get to the 1920s about 2 hours before I had triggered the right series of events that would allow me to get there. Got to see the sense of humor of the writers as I ended up meeting the high school principle’s sister who’s just as crotchety as he is. Apparently Doc is in trouble for starting a fire. Other than that I don’t know much as I wasn’t able to play very much of the game beyond the first 1920s scene with the principle’s sister.
Civilization V (8 hours) - Keep following the tags ( Civ V: Lefties and Civ V: Mesa Bros ) or check out my Saturday posts (although this week I didn’t have one)
LIMBO (3 hours) - Here is my review of the game up to what I finished in September:
The order in which I play games is sometimes a little unnecessarily complicated. I’m often balancing many different variables when determining the next game to play. This time it was the fact that I wanted to listen to the LIMBO soundtrack. I’d obtained it as part of the Humble Bundle that gave me the game and because soundtracks can sometimes spoil plot elements, I didn’t want to listen to it until I’d played the game. The rest of this review will contain spoilers. The game is about 3 years old now, but if you want to play this game, go play it before you read anything about it.
If I may step out of the fictional narrative mode I’ve been using for a few weeks now, I have to say that it’s a shame these two games are my first Civ games in somewhere between 6 months and a year. Unfortunately, I didn’t listen to my brain for the first half dozen or so turns in which I wondered what in the world this Chinese-specfic building the “Paper Maker” was. Although, in my recollection, Civ IV also had the Cho Ku Nu for the Chinese Unit, it had Pagodas or some other either cultural or happiness producing building. It was only after being annoyed for Civ V not allowing me to see what it does while loading (I thought one of the older Civ games did allow you to hover over the special units and buildings to see what they do) that I went onto the Civ V Wikia during my lunch break. To quote the Bluth family, “I’ve made a huge mistake.” It’s meant to give the Chinese a huge early science boost that would help me not only combat the fact that I’m up in the arid north, but also would help me get a head start on Wonders. (I never have problems with Wonders when I’m only playing with AI, but my brothers often make it to the Wonders before me) Luckily for me, the game in which I have the biggest challenge - Dan and Dave - is also the slowest-going. So I’ve wasted less turns doing the wrong thing in that game than I have in the game with Dave.
[caption id=“attachment_7211” align=“aligncenter” width=“493”] Civilization 5 - against Dave - people from ancient ruins join the Chinese Empire - 3220 BC[/caption]
One of the ancient ruins explored by our soldiers had a group of uncivilized survivors. Seeing the awesome nature of our forces convinced them it would be in their best interest to join the Chinese Empire. Their extra labor was quite welcome.
[caption id=“attachment_7110” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civilization V game against Dave - 4000 BC[/caption]
Civilization V (31 hrs) - I’ve been playing with Dan and Dave via Giant Multiplayer Robot. You can follow posts about the game with Dave here. You can follow the posts about the game with Dan and Dave here. There will be a long overlap between those two, however, the one with Dave started a few weeks earlier and should finish earlier.
[caption id=“attachment_7159” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civilization 5 against Dave - 3460 BC - Ancient Ruins[/caption]
The first group of warriors we went out have reported back to me that they have found some ancient ruins. I have instructed them to search these ruins in the hopes that they will find the secrets of an ancient civilization or perhaps the remnants of some ancient civilization that may wish to join the Glorious Chinese Empire. These ruins are within a dense forest so it is no wonder they have been lost to time. The timber should prove useful as the empire grows. We have begun preparations for expanding the empire to a second city, but with how amazing our Empire is, it will take a while to have all the supplies ready. In the meanwhile we continue to explore this land.
[caption id=“attachment_7124” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civilization V game against Dave - 3760[/caption]
I had my KVM set to the wrong computer so I accidentally fortified my warrior on the first turn. I didn’t realize this when the second turn started (getting used to playing hot seat) so he sat around for a turn. I started moving him around and discovered that I seem to be in a resource-rich area. This is good for me in the early game as the marble will allow me to build some buildings more quickly and the gold (bottom left of the screenshot) will allow me to build more buildings before I go into debt. The dyes will be good in the mid-early game by helping my citizens be happier and giving me something to potentially trade with the AIs. I think I know where I want to put my next city, but it’s going to be quite some time before I can do that, unless my production picks up when my city grows. Speaking of that, my city will reach a size 2 population in one turn, woohoo! I assume Dave’s in a higher-growth area and that’s why he has a higher score than me - either that or he has a civilization with a high culture rate and has already expanded the culture zone around his city.
Ever since the play by email (PBEM) feature in Civilization IV, I’ve tried to play multiplayer games with my brothers. It’s pretty ridiculous in this day and age that Civilization has Nintendo-level abysmal support for asynchronous play. The games often take 40 hours to complete solo and even longer when playing live so asynchronous play is the only way that makes sense to play a game.
This time around there’s a website called Giant Multiplayer Robot to handle passing the files around. Before I’d run a program with Civ IV to make it work more easily than emailing the games around, but GMR makes it extremely easy. You just install its client and authenticate with Steam. Then it lets you know when you have a turn to play.
In addition to the game I played this month, I’ve decided from now on to include a running total of the top games to see if/how they change with time. For example, when I wasn’t paying attention, Saints Row: The Third made the Top 7. (Which, raptr, is a weird number. Usually these things are multiples of five)
First of all, a quick reminder that my Game of the Year doesn’t necessarily have to come out in 2012. Because I don’t have the time to dedicate to video games, the price premium of buying it new rarely makes sense to me. So my Game of the Year will be my favorite game that I played in 2012.
As I compiled my list I realized that I played a lot less games in 2012. I may not have played a lot less hours (I haven’t bothered comparing the totals with 2011), but I definitely had a lot less variety. A lot of that has to do with the birth of my daughter this year. Only as the year has gone on have I been able to carve out some time here and there to play story-based games. In addition, I resumed pursuing my master’s degree in the fall, right around the time I was able to have a bit more time to myself. I didn’t have any gameplay at all in March, September or October.
[caption id=“attachment_5805” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Saint’s Row The Third: The Ho Boat[/caption]
Saint’s Row the Third (14 hrs): I got a lot of video games for my birthday and Christmas (mostly on Steam). So I wanted to finish up the last narrative game I had started before playing those games. I played a few missions in Saint’s Row The Third. As I had surmised before, the loose narrative based mostly on archetypes and stereotypes made it extremely easy to jump in. It wasn’t like in Mass Effect or Final Fantasy 10 where I couldn’t remember why I should be caring about these characters. The missions with the VTOL planes (STAG missions) were pretty hard.
Civilization V (17 hrs) - I took advantage of the Steam Fall Sale to finally pick up the Gods and Kings expansion to Civ V. I have enjoyed founding my own religion, Otakuism. Religion plays a much more key role than they did in Civ IV. In the previous game, I would pretty much just found a religion because each city would pay me gold (with certain buildings or government choices) and I’d get a window into cities. In Civ V the religion plays like another level of policies. You get to choose a series of attributes for your religion such as temples giving you gold or faster territory expansion. It tends to make the expansion of religion to other cities and civs a much more important task than before. I’m still a little unsure of how cities pressure other cities to adopt religion because I seemed to have one city flipping even though I couldn’t see any reason for it. (Could have been another civ sending prophets my way) Spies are also added. The spy missions remind me of Assassin’s Creed:Brotherhood assassin missions. Unlike previous iterations of Civ, the spies aren’t on the map. You assign them to a city or city-state and then they either steal you tech (which may not be useful if you’re super advanced and/or playing normal or easier), rig elections in city states (gaining you influence), or protect your cities from being screwed over by other spies. I must admit that I haven’t done much investigating in the civclopedia, but I can’t really see how to generate more spies and so the whole system seems like a mini-game diversion. I continued my strategy of non-aggression unless another civ attacks me or denounces me. Then I drop my hammer on them and take over their capital city and, sometimes, eliminate them entirely. I like that the requirements on resources for building some units has been reconfigured. I usually ended up not using a lot of early-game siege weapons because iron tended to be too scarce. I think it’s a lot more balanced on which units need resources like oil, iron, and horses than before the expansion pack.
[caption id=“attachment_5592” align=“alignleft” width=“480”] Saints Row: The Third - My Engineer Mask[/caption]
Team Fortress 2 (5 hrs) - a lot of this time was spent testing out my new private server which I described setting up in this post.
Civilization V (1 hr) - played a little bit in the game I’m documenting at onemoreturn.ericsbinaryworld.com . Been too busy to play much more than that.
Civ V (11 Hrs) - talk of the expansion pack made me want to play some more Civ. I played a scenario and then I played a regular game. I had a blast and I can’t wait to buy the expansion pack.
Peggle Deluxe (5 hrs) - Worked on some of the challenge puzzles
Team Fortress 2 - (3 hrs) - played when the Pyro pack came out. Really enjoyed the new mode.
There aren’t any new games on here, so I’m only going to mention some quick comments on each.
Plants vs Zombies (29 hrs) - threw a bunch of hours into this game because I just had a handful of achievements left and for some reason I wanted to finish it off. 2 or 3 to go
Civilization V (9 hrs) - still love this game. I wish I had more time for it
Final Fantasy X (36 hrs) - I started playing this game again to get away from computer games. It was hurting my back to sit at the computer. I could just stand in the guest room, where the PS2 is. I hadn’t played for months or maybe even a year, but I hadn’t gone that far in the game, so I wasn’t too lost. (Unlike when I finished FF7 and didn’t even remember what the point was) I’m still not done, but it’s already knocked Assassin’s Creed II from long-time position as my #6 most played game raptr. It’s already taken me longer than Final Fantasy IX. There’ll be a review once I finish. I’m so close, but the final boss keeps kicking my butt. I may need to do some more grinding.
Civ 5 (70 hrs) - In March I fired up Civilization V for the first time since 16 Nov 2010. What was the catalyst? My wife asking what happened to all the enthusiasm for the game when it first came out. Well, as I’ve mentioned before, right after I got the game I played it for a week straight. Then I went on vacation to the Grand Canyon, to NYC for Halloween, had Thanksgiving and Christmas at my house, and a stronger focus on my webcomic. Her question reminded me of how much I loved the Civilization franchise. So I started playing and was reminded of why I loved it so much. It took me most of the first game to get back into the groove with Civ 5’s new quirks, but I really appreciated the improvements to AI. Civ V is now my most played game with 117 hours. (Finally surpassing Civ 4) Most of that time was added in March as I got sick and spent a few days home. The achievements in Civ 5 really played a key role in keeping me interested over so many hours. I did things I never would have done in order to get those achievements and now I have a much better understanding of how best to use those Civilizations.
I played a lot of games this year. Perhaps more than in any previous year since leaving high school. Since I usually don’t buy games when they first come out, the winner will not necessarily be a game that came out this year. I went to my raptr page and took a look at all the games I played this year. Following is a list of the games and a little about what I thought of them. At the end will be my pick for 2010.
I was on the phone with my dad a couple weekends ago and he asked if I was playing Civilization 5. He’d heard that Dan was playing it and was surprised that it was still around and Dan and I were still playing it. I told him I was playing it and reminded him that it was he who indirectly got us stuck on the series.
Back in the old days of the early 1990s, no one gave a second thought to sharing computer software with each other. Most people didn’t know about the public Internet or BBSes so, for the most part, there was no onerous digital restriction management (DRM) to keep people from sharing software. Some games had codes that you had to type in which were found in the manual, but manuals could be photocopied - after all, there were no authentication servers to connect to. I’ve spoken about this before, but those early “wild west” days lay the seeds for my software purchases over the last decade. A friend lent me 3.5” disks of Sim City 2000. I played that sucker everywhere. I’d take it wherever there would be computers and install it there to play until my parents said it was time to go. To this day, I’ve bought all the mainline Sim City products and expansion packs. So, who’s to say that today’s illicit software users aren’t building up affinities for software brands they’ll be loyal to when they have the cash.
The latest iteration of this series I’ve been playing for the past 25 years was released and the changes have made the game more dynamic and, for the first time in the series, have really made it so that I can’t just do the same thing every game because of how much the terrain makes a difference. It’s been neat and with the reduced gameplay over the past two months, it’s displaced all over games.
Civilization III (15 minutes)
I was on the phone with my dad a couple weekends ago and he asked if I was playing Civilization 5. He’d heard that Dan was playing it and was surprised that it was still around and Dan and I were still playing it. I told him I was playing it and reminded him that it was he who indirectly got us stuck on the series.
Back in the old days of the early 1990s, no one gave a second thought to sharing computer software with each other. Most people didn’t know about the public Internet or BBSes so, for the most part, there was no onerous digital restriction management (DRM) to keep people from sharing software. Some games had codes that you had to type in which were found in the manual, but manuals could be photocopied - after all, there were no authentication servers to connect to. I’ve spoken about this before, but those early “wild west” days lay the seeds for my software purchases over the last decade. A friend lent me 3.5” disks of Sim City 2000. I played that sucker everywhere. I’d take it wherever there would be computers and install it there to play until my parents said it was time to go. To this day, I’ve bought all the mainline Sim City products and expansion packs. So, who’s to say that today’s illicit software users aren’t building up affinities for software brands they’ll be loyal to when they have the cash.
The latest iteration of this series I’ve been playing for the past 25 years was released and the changes have made the game more dynamic and, for the first time in the series, have really made it so that I can’t just do the same thing every game because of how much the terrain makes a difference. It’s been neat and with the reduced gameplay over the past two months, it’s displaced all over games.
Civilization III (15 minutes)
I was on the phone with my dad a couple weekends ago and he asked if I was playing Civilization 5. He’d heard that Dan was playing it and was surprised that it was still around and Dan and I were still playing it. I told him I was playing it and reminded him that it was he who indirectly got us stuck on the series.
Back in the old days of the early 1990s, no one gave a second thought to sharing computer software with each other. Most people didn’t know about the public Internet or BBSes so, for the most part, there was no onerous digital restriction management (DRM) to keep people from sharing software. Some games had codes that you had to type in which were found in the manual, but manuals could be photocopied - after all, there were no authentication servers to connect to. I’ve spoken about this before, but those early “wild west” days lay the seeds for my software purchases over the last decade. A friend lent me 3.5” disks of Sim City 2000. I played that sucker everywhere. I’d take it wherever there would be computers and install it there to play until my parents said it was time to go. To this day, I’ve bought all the mainline Sim City products and expansion packs. So, who’s to say that today’s illicit software users aren’t building up affinities for software brands they’ll be loyal to when they have the cash.
I figured this might be the only year I can pick their costume, so I *had* to go with The Wonder Twins from the old Super Friends cartoon. My mother-in-law sewed up the awesome costumes.
I know this was months ago, but I started writing this back then and just got the opportunity to finish it recently.
[caption id=“attachment_7634” align=“aligncenter” width=“427”] Scarlett Trick Or Treating at Ellicott City[/caption]
This year was Scarlett’s second Halloween, but the first one where she had some kind of a clue about what was going on. The previous year we’d dressed her up as Toad, but other than the giant head-piece, I don’t think it was too different from any other day in her life. This time around, although she didn’t really see a point in collecting the candy because she doesn’t eat it - she did present her basket to each person giving out candy.
For the past week I’ve had a huge surge in people viewing the image above. I saw that it was mostly from Google and not flickr. I was wondering why and then I realized I could see the search terms brining people to the image. Here are the search terms bringing people over:
1 tweedle dee and tweedle dum costumes 19
2 tweedle dee and tweedle dum 10
3 tweedle dee and tweedle dum costume 6
4 tweedledee and tweedledum 6
5 tweedle dee hats 2
6 tweedledee and tweedledum costumes 2
7 tweedle dee 2
8 image of tweedledee and tweedledum 2
9 tweedledee tweedledum costume women 2
10 tweedle dum and tweedle dee costumes 2
11 tweedle dee and tweedle dum women costumes 1
12 tweedle dee tweedle dum costume 1
13 woman tweedle dee and tweedle dum costumes 1
14 tweedle dum tweedle dee outfits 1
15 womens tweedle dee costume 1
16 what do tweedle dee and tweedle dum say in… 1
17 “tweedle dee and tweedle dum” 1
18 tweedle dee and tweedle dumb costumes 1
19 tweddle dee and tweedle dum costumes 1
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“All of us in our costumes, ready to head out to The Village”] [/caption]
Last year after Dina and Brian went to The Village for Halloween, I did some research on this tradition and decided we would go whenever things worked out. Well, this year was that year so we decided to spend Halloween night in Greenwich Village in NYC’s Manhattan. But, first, we rewind once again to last year. Danielle’s mother made an awesome Chun-Li costume for Dina that rivals anything you can find in a US costume store. Brian was Ryu and both got lots of accolades for their costumes. Fast forward to this summer. We decided to also have Danielle’s mom make our costumes this year.
I figured this might be the only year I can pick their costume, so I *had* to go with The Wonder Twins from the old Super Friends cartoon. My mother-in-law sewed up the awesome costumes.
I discovered The Bugle from an AV Club post about podcasts. It was a very British approach to satirizing the news. At the time it was hosted by Jon Oliver and Andy Zaltzman. Then Oliver hit it big with Last Week Tonight and didn’t have time to participate in The Bugle anymore. While Andy Zaltzman was trying to figure out how he was going to relaunch the show, he played clips from his standup show Satirize This. People email him things they want satirized and he does it. I grew to really, really enjoy it and so when I heard he was actually coming to America, I knew I had to jump on the opportunity to see him live.
Continuing my LXC project, let’s list the installed containers:
lxc-ls
That just shows the name of the container - lemmy. For completion’s sake, I’m going to start it as a daemon in the background rather than being sent straight into the console:
lxc-start -n lemmy -d
As per usual Linux SOP, it produced no output. Now to jump in:
lxc-console -n lemmy
That told me I was connected to tty1, but did not present a login. Quitting out via Ctrl-a q let me go back to the VM’s tty, but trying again did not get me login. There’s some weird issue that doesn’t allow it to work, however, this did:
I’m continuing on from yesterday’s post to get the VM ready to host LXC. I’m starting with Centos 7 so the first thing I had to do was enable the epel repos:
yum install epel-release
Then, according to the guide I was following, I had to also install these package:
yum install debootstrap perl libvirt
That installed a bunch of stuff. I also get that they’re trying to break out what they’re doing, but they probably could have installed both that and the LXC stuff below in one blow:
As I mentioned before, I’m looking at Linux Containers (LXC) to have a higher density virtualization. To get ready for that, I had to create a network bridge to allow the containers to be accessible on the network.
First I installed bridge-utils:
yum install bridge-utils -y
After that, I had to create the network script:
vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-virbr0
In there I placed:
DEVICE="virbr0"
BOOTPROTO="static"
IPADDR="192.168.1.35" #IP address of the VM
NETMASK="255.255.255.0"
GATEWAY="192.168.1.1"
DNS1="192.168.1.7"
ONBOOT="yes"
TYPE="Bridge"
Back when I first was working on replacing my Pogoplug (the original BabyLuigi), I was looking at potentially using it to learn about Docker in addition to creating virtual machines that were actually useful instead of just playing around with VMs for looking at Linux distros. The benefit of Docker was to have the isolation of VMs without the overhead of VMs. Also, since it was trending pretty hard, I figured it’d be good for my career to have some experience with it. So I spent a few weeks researching Docker and playing around with some of the online demos. I read lots about how it was used and how to avoid the usual pitfalls. But in the end I went with a VM that did a bit more than I wanted; I’d wanted to separate services so that updating one thing wouldn’t cause me to lose everything. However, the more I looked into it, the more it looked like unnecessary headache without enough of a benefit. Dockers were SO isolated that if you wanted to run a LAMP stack you had to run at least 3 Docker containers and find a way to string them together and have a separate pool of storage they could all access.
Continuing my LXC project, let’s list the installed containers:
lxc-ls
That just shows the name of the container - lemmy. For completion’s sake, I’m going to start it as a daemon in the background rather than being sent straight into the console:
lxc-start -n lemmy -d
As per usual Linux SOP, it produced no output. Now to jump in:
lxc-console -n lemmy
That told me I was connected to tty1, but did not present a login. Quitting out via Ctrl-a q let me go back to the VM’s tty, but trying again did not get me login. There’s some weird issue that doesn’t allow it to work, however, this did:
I’m continuing on from yesterday’s post to get the VM ready to host LXC. I’m starting with Centos 7 so the first thing I had to do was enable the epel repos:
yum install epel-release
Then, according to the guide I was following, I had to also install these package:
yum install debootstrap perl libvirt
That installed a bunch of stuff. I also get that they’re trying to break out what they’re doing, but they probably could have installed both that and the LXC stuff below in one blow:
As I mentioned before, I’m looking at Linux Containers (LXC) to have a higher density virtualization. To get ready for that, I had to create a network bridge to allow the containers to be accessible on the network.
First I installed bridge-utils:
yum install bridge-utils -y
After that, I had to create the network script:
vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-virbr0
In there I placed:
DEVICE="virbr0"
BOOTPROTO="static"
IPADDR="192.168.1.35" #IP address of the VM
NETMASK="255.255.255.0"
GATEWAY="192.168.1.1"
DNS1="192.168.1.7"
ONBOOT="yes"
TYPE="Bridge"
Back when I first was working on replacing my Pogoplug (the original BabyLuigi), I was looking at potentially using it to learn about Docker in addition to creating virtual machines that were actually useful instead of just playing around with VMs for looking at Linux distros. The benefit of Docker was to have the isolation of VMs without the overhead of VMs. Also, since it was trending pretty hard, I figured it’d be good for my career to have some experience with it. So I spent a few weeks researching Docker and playing around with some of the online demos. I read lots about how it was used and how to avoid the usual pitfalls. But in the end I went with a VM that did a bit more than I wanted; I’d wanted to separate services so that updating one thing wouldn’t cause me to lose everything. However, the more I looked into it, the more it looked like unnecessary headache without enough of a benefit. Dockers were SO isolated that if you wanted to run a LAMP stack you had to run at least 3 Docker containers and find a way to string them together and have a separate pool of storage they could all access.
I have VM running Emby that I set up a while ago on an low spec machine that had been the guest computer before everyone got Chromebooks and tablets. But it only had 2GB of RAM and I gave 1GB to the VM. So I added some new RAM to bring the system up to 8GB and wanted to start off by giving the VM 4GB to see if that improved performance.
For once I found a way to run Windows for free that wasn’t a scam! Turns out the Microsoft makes VMs of Windows XP through Windows 8 available for free. The point is for you to be able to test how your websites will look in different versions of IE and different versions of Windows. Now, because of this, they’re time-limited - you can renew them ever 30 days until 90 days and then you need to regenerate them. So you can’t really use it as a complete replacement for buying a Windows license. However, if you wanted to test how well Windows would run on your Linux computer it’s perfect for that. My short-term goal is to be able to run Windows within a VM for everything but video games and therefore not have to run two computers if I want to, say, work on my photos. (I use Lightroom although Digikam is pretty awesome if you don’t already have your workflow setup in Lightroom) So to me this is the perfect way to make sure all the programs I want to run on Windows (mostly Lightroom, but occasionally some others) will work well in a VM with my current hardware (before I spend the money to buy a Windows license). Another nice thing about running windows in a VM instead of its own computer is that it’s easy to create a new VM when a new version of Windows comes out and then have the VMs side-by-side as you migrate over to a fresh install. It actually wouldn’t be a horrible idea for my main Linux distro either, but then I wouldn’t have ANY OS taking advantage of being the main OS that’s not virtualized.
I’ve been using Virtualbox for a long time to run virtual machines when I want to check out other distros before I install them on one of my computers or to review them. It’s MOSTLY open source, although some of the key parts like USB 2.0 are free to use, but not open source. So now that Red Hat’s Virtual Machine Manager is starting to look pretty useful I figured I should check it out. That way I could be using a FLOSS virtual machine program - assuming the features were good enough to match Oracle’s offerings. Also, Virtualbox requires a kernel module that has to be recompiled every time a new kernel is installed and that’s annoying. I figured I’d test out both programs by installed a VM of Centos.
I am flabbergasted at the level of detail in the items created for the Calico Critters toy franchise. I’m not surprised it’s Japanese (although I wouldn’t have been surprised if it were German either). But what fascinates me more is how Scarlett uses the toys to approximate her life. It reveals what she pays attention to and what she imagines is going on in the heads of the adults around her.
Scarlett’s first time at the beach was much younger - five or six months - but with the twins it was just a lot harder to go on vacation. There are two of them to deal with, to pack formula for, etc. Also, for a long time Stella would spontaneously throw up. We’d dealt with that with Scarlett when we went on the trip to her first Christmas - where she kept throwing up in the car. It’s not fun.
Summer is here and for many of us that means going to a beach - whether it’s just a drive away or a cross-country flight. But that doesn’t mean you have to give up on photography! There are great opportunities whether you want to do landscape photography, wildlife photography, or portrait photography. Let’s start by talking about equipment. The equipment you bring to the beach depends on your purpose for being at the beach that day or that session. If you’re going specifically to take photos, then you’re probably OK bringing your dSLR and, optionally, flash. If you’re going to the beach to enjoy it and also want to take photos, you’re best off getting an underwater housing for your camera or getting a weatherproofed camera. Sand and sea salt (which is in the air at the beach) are both VERY bad for cameras and could wreck your expensive camera. If you will be having fun you don’t want to take the chance that someone who’s with you or a stranger kicks sand onto your camera accidentally. Also, sometimes waves can come up farther than you realized at first. An underwater housing or weatherproof camera is protected from the elements. It also has the bonus of allowing you to carry it with you into the water (should you happen to be at a beach where you can get into the water) and lessens the chances of your camera being stolen.
Alex would, at least in 2009, try and get right up in front of the camera if he noticed you taking a photo. It could spoil the photo you were trying to get a candid shot of, but it certainly made for a dynamic spontaneity that’s harder to capture as kids get older and self-conscious of their image.
I wanted to play a bit with Fedora Rawhide so I installed Fedora 23 to a VM. I named it Blargg after the Fire Dragon in Super Mario World. (See video below) I used the following commands from the Fedora wiki:
# dnf upgrade dnf
# dnf install dnf-plugins-core fedora-repos-rawhide
# dnf config-manager --set-disabled fedora updates updates-testing
# dnf config-manager --set-enabled rawhide
# dnf clean -q dbcache plugins metadata
# dnf --releasever=rawhide --setopt=deltarpm=false distro-sync --nogpgcheck
## Optional: it is generally advised to do a selinux autorelabel and reboot
# touch /.autorelabel
Breaded steak was probably my favorite Cuban food growing up. More than pork shoulder sandwiches and other things my mother made. I often helped her prepare it at home, but never got a chance to cook it as a kid. I’ve tried it a few times since growing up, but it’s hard to get the right thickness. Butchers here don’t know what it is, so they have a hard time helping me. But this time I got through to a butcher at Wegmans - who let me in on the secret - using a mallet to squish the meat skinnier than it can be cut on a steak slicer. The only thing that sucks is that my example of thinness was some Korean meat so he thought I wanted it cut into little strips. Still, I finally was successful at making a very tasty breaded steak:
Breaded steak was probably my favorite Cuban food growing up. More than pork shoulder sandwiches and other things my mother made. I often helped her prepare it at home, but never got a chance to cook it as a kid. I’ve tried it a few times since growing up, but it’s hard to get the right thickness. Butchers here don’t know what it is, so they have a hard time helping me. But this time I got through to a butcher at Wegmans - who let me in on the secret - using a mallet to squish the meat skinnier than it can be cut on a steak slicer. The only thing that sucks is that my example of thinness was some Korean meat so he thought I wanted it cut into little strips. Still, I finally was successful at making a very tasty breaded steak:
When I really got into animation a few years ago, I started appreciating a lot of the aspects of animation that people don’t even realize took work. For example, in a live action movie the set designers can go buy chairs and lamps and lights. Everything in an animated work has to be created from scratch. Although Disney feature films tend to put a lot of emphasis on the voice actors, most TV cartoons are voiced by people who only we animation geeks know. Giant Bomb brought video game voice acting to my attention with their discussions over the last three years or so about how Nolan North is in so many video games that they were able to have an entire Game of the Year section called The Northies in which they decide which of his roles was best acted. (Unfortunately, the joke wore thin and it won’t be there this year.) Giant Bomb was at it again in this clip in which they consider baby/kids toy voice acting. ( at the time I’m writing this, there’s a bug that doesn’t show the play button. Click left of the left-most numbers)
I don’t know how easy or hard it is to get a door frame in where all the pieces are at right angles to each other. The previous home owners failed at that and so the door could never close correctly. My father-in-law tried to fix it, but he shaved the wrong side. So when my parents and grandparents came, they decided to fix the door. And that’s a great thing because I’d always thought it’d just be something that would take an hour or 2. No, this door took an entire workday’s worth of hours to get to a point where it would correctly fit in this not-quite-rectangular frame that the previous home owners had put up. But thanks to my grandfather and father’s hard work, we now have a door that properly closes and can be locked.
Ever since Sam was born, I’ve been looking forward to a 4 generation male portrait. I’d done a female line portrait with Scarlett up to her great-grandmother. It was finally time to do the same for me. While we were out there and dressed up, we took a few other configurations of family photos. All the males are wearing guayaberas, a traditional shirt worn in the Caribbean, especially in Cuba.
I don’t know how easy or hard it is to get a door frame in where all the pieces are at right angles to each other. The previous home owners failed at that and so the door could never close correctly. My father-in-law tried to fix it, but he shaved the wrong side. So when my parents and grandparents came, they decided to fix the door. And that’s a great thing because I’d always thought it’d just be something that would take an hour or 2. No, this door took an entire workday’s worth of hours to get to a point where it would correctly fit in this not-quite-rectangular frame that the previous home owners had put up. But thanks to my grandfather and father’s hard work, we now have a door that properly closes and can be locked.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
Between the last post and this one is one photo that didn’t turn out. I’d taken a photo in the woods during my Nude in Nature photo shoot that, unfortunately, was severely underexposed. For a year the camera sat untouched. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to shoot. There isn’t as big a street photography scene here as there is in NYC. Because I had ISO 160 film in the camera, I couldn’t use it for indoor shots. So what to do? Well, I started talking photography with one of Katie’s aunts and so I decided to bring the Yashica to Dan and Katie’s Engagement Brunch. And, who better to take a photo of than my grandfather. He’d probably been photographed with 120 film when he was young. It’s not a technically great photo what with the leaf shadows. But I like it. Still, this is what shooting film helps you remember - you need to look at all the detail before you shoot. You don’t get a redo by the time you have the film developed.
Well, everyone’s growing up. Dan’s the last to get married (the youngest three siblings don’t count because there’s too big a gap). Here are some photos from his engagement party.
Stella and her great-grandparents at Dan's Engagement Party
Eric and Dan at Dan's Engagement Party
Eric, Dan, and Katie at Dan and Katy's Engagement Party
Double Rainbows!
Double Rainbows!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Somewhere over the rainbow!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Scarlett and the Rainbow
Scarlett and Abuelo Roman at Dan's Engagement Party (and a rainb
Scarlett and Abuela Carmen at Dan's Engagement Party
Scarlett and Abuela Carmen at Dan's Engagement Party
Ever since Sam was born, I’ve been looking forward to a 4 generation male portrait. I’d done a female line portrait with Scarlett up to her great-grandmother. It was finally time to do the same for me. While we were out there and dressed up, we took a few other configurations of family photos. All the males are wearing guayaberas, a traditional shirt worn in the Caribbean, especially in Cuba.
[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“368” caption=“My grandfather smoking a cigar - the way I will remember him for all of my life”] [/caption]
It really sucks that I’m so far from my family. My sole living grandfather, pictured here, is turning 70 this year. Although I’ve always been closer to my mom’s family - I really, really love my grandfather. His humor, which was passed on to my father and which I hope to pass on to my son(s), has always cracked me up. In different circumstances I think he would have liked all the same comedies I do.
When I saw this happening by my garage it freakin’ BLEW MY MIND! As a kid who grew up in America, I’d heard about spiders and their proclivities for climbing water spouts via kiddie propaganda - aka Nursery Rhymes. But I’d NEVER, in my 30+ years of life, actually seen a spider climbing a water spout before.
I did not stay long enough to see if the rain would wash the spider out and if he would climb again if the sun came back out. I’ve got stuff to do, I’m a grown up! WITH KIDS, EVEN!
When I saw this happening by my garage it freakin’ BLEW MY MIND! As a kid who grew up in America, I’d heard about spiders and their proclivities for climbing water spouts via kiddie propaganda - aka Nursery Rhymes. But I’d NEVER, in my 30+ years of life, actually seen a spider climbing a water spout before.
I did not stay long enough to see if the rain would wash the spider out and if he would climb again if the sun came back out. I’ve got stuff to do, I’m a grown up! WITH KIDS, EVEN!
I used to have a Team Fortress 2 server on CentOS 6 with Virtual Box. Now that I’m using KVM/QEMU/Libvirt, I wanted to set up a new one. Also, Valve somewhat changed how they worked a few years ago and I wanted a clean slate. I started with a VM with 40GB. It’s not supposed to take that much, but I remember last time it took much more than the 10GB I’d given the VM and I don’t want to have to increase the disk size again.
So, the current solution for bridging with KVM/QEMU/Libvirt involves macvtap. This allows your VM to be seen by computers on the network which is key if you want to, say, run a server or DNS on a VM. However, there’s a catch - the host can’t reach the VM. Sometimes this doesn’t matter and sometimes it does. For example, if the guest is running DNS and you want the host to be able to use it for DNS, this is an issue. There is another way to do it, but it involves ditching Network Manager. I actually like Network Manager. So what am I to do?
I’ve been looking at NAS implementations for a long time. I looked at FreeNAS for a while then OpenMediaVault. But what I really wanted was to be able to take advantage of btrfs and its great RAID abilities - especially its ability to dynamically expand. So I was happy when I discovered Rockstor on Reddit. Here are some videos in which I explore the interface and how to work with Rockstor using a VM before setting it up on bare metal.
I used to have a Team Fortress 2 server on CentOS 6 with Virtual Box. Now that I’m using KVM/QEMU/Libvirt, I wanted to set up a new one. Also, Valve somewhat changed how they worked a few years ago and I wanted a clean slate. I started with a VM with 40GB. It’s not supposed to take that much, but I remember last time it took much more than the 10GB I’d given the VM and I don’t want to have to increase the disk size again.
So, the current solution for bridging with KVM/QEMU/Libvirt involves macvtap. This allows your VM to be seen by computers on the network which is key if you want to, say, run a server or DNS on a VM. However, there’s a catch - the host can’t reach the VM. Sometimes this doesn’t matter and sometimes it does. For example, if the guest is running DNS and you want the host to be able to use it for DNS, this is an issue. There is another way to do it, but it involves ditching Network Manager. I actually like Network Manager. So what am I to do?
I have VM running Emby that I set up a while ago on an low spec machine that had been the guest computer before everyone got Chromebooks and tablets. But it only had 2GB of RAM and I gave 1GB to the VM. So I added some new RAM to bring the system up to 8GB and wanted to start off by giving the VM 4GB to see if that improved performance.
I’ve been dreaming (no foolin’) about this for two or more years now - having one computer running Linux with a Windows VM for gaming when there aren’t Linux ports. Less hardware overhead for me. But until now VMs haven’t been able to gain native use of the graphics card. This guy figured out how to do it and it’s great. I’m likely going to do this next time I do a CPU/Motherboard refresh.
I’ve been using Virtualbox for a long time to run virtual machines when I want to check out other distros before I install them on one of my computers or to review them. It’s MOSTLY open source, although some of the key parts like USB 2.0 are free to use, but not open source. So now that Red Hat’s Virtual Machine Manager is starting to look pretty useful I figured I should check it out. That way I could be using a FLOSS virtual machine program - assuming the features were good enough to match Oracle’s offerings. Also, Virtualbox requires a kernel module that has to be recompiled every time a new kernel is installed and that’s annoying. I figured I’d test out both programs by installed a VM of Centos.
As I documented before, I’ve had problems with Pogoplug and Arch Linux running my servers. Recently I’ve been having problems logging in via SSH on my updated Fedora computers. From what I can tell from a little research, it seems the old way of connecting had a flaw so updated SSH doesn’t want talk to unupdated SSH. So I tried to update Arch Linux and once again ended up with a borked computer. And it’s not something I did wrong - everyone had complaints of the change from /usr/bin (and some other bins) bricking systems. If Pogoplug had a display, I’d have been able to fix it. I tried reinstalling, but something has changed that makes the Pogoplug no longer work. Sick of having stuff go wrong every time I update, I decided this was the time to implement the Home Server Project.
I’m catching up on my photos before I get further than 2 months behind and I came across this panorama that I didn’t even remember creating.
It’s interesting that, at least to my eyes, it’s easier to see the second rainbow on the left and I don’t even see it on the right. Also, this What If is particularly relevant and I’d read it just before going to the party.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
Between the last post and this one is one photo that didn’t turn out. I’d taken a photo in the woods during my Nude in Nature photo shoot that, unfortunately, was severely underexposed. For a year the camera sat untouched. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to shoot. There isn’t as big a street photography scene here as there is in NYC. Because I had ISO 160 film in the camera, I couldn’t use it for indoor shots. So what to do? Well, I started talking photography with one of Katie’s aunts and so I decided to bring the Yashica to Dan and Katie’s Engagement Brunch. And, who better to take a photo of than my grandfather. He’d probably been photographed with 120 film when he was young. It’s not a technically great photo what with the leaf shadows. But I like it. Still, this is what shooting film helps you remember - you need to look at all the detail before you shoot. You don’t get a redo by the time you have the film developed.
Well, everyone’s growing up. Dan’s the last to get married (the youngest three siblings don’t count because there’s too big a gap). Here are some photos from his engagement party.
Stella and her great-grandparents at Dan's Engagement Party
Eric and Dan at Dan's Engagement Party
Eric, Dan, and Katie at Dan and Katy's Engagement Party
Double Rainbows!
Double Rainbows!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Somewhere over the rainbow!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Scarlett and the Rainbow
Scarlett and Abuelo Roman at Dan's Engagement Party (and a rainb
Scarlett and Abuela Carmen at Dan's Engagement Party
Scarlett and Abuela Carmen at Dan's Engagement Party
Nearly a year ago I did a comparison of Virtualbox and Red Hat’s virt-manager. Although I was pretty happy with virt-manager, I’ve had to continue using Virtualbox because so far virt-manager isn’t able to do a bridged ethernet connection without having to ditch NetworkManager and/or do some weird stuff. I’d given up on VMWare a long time ago because it used to be very cumbersome to install on Linux. However, I recently found out that I might be able to one day run Windows inside VMWare on my Linux computer and have 3D accelerated graphics work well enough to allow me to play games. It’s already made huge strides in that direction. So I figured I’d check it out and see how it compares to using the other two programs. I’ll be installing Fedora 18 XFCE beta (which I’m currently using on my netbook). Here’s the first dialog I got:
I’ve been using Virtualbox for a long time to run virtual machines when I want to check out other distros before I install them on one of my computers or to review them. It’s MOSTLY open source, although some of the key parts like USB 2.0 are free to use, but not open source. So now that Red Hat’s Virtual Machine Manager is starting to look pretty useful I figured I should check it out. That way I could be using a FLOSS virtual machine program - assuming the features were good enough to match Oracle’s offerings. Also, Virtualbox requires a kernel module that has to be recompiled every time a new kernel is installed and that’s annoying. I figured I’d test out both programs by installed a VM of Centos.
As I documented before, I’ve had problems with Pogoplug and Arch Linux running my servers. Recently I’ve been having problems logging in via SSH on my updated Fedora computers. From what I can tell from a little research, it seems the old way of connecting had a flaw so updated SSH doesn’t want talk to unupdated SSH. So I tried to update Arch Linux and once again ended up with a borked computer. And it’s not something I did wrong - everyone had complaints of the change from /usr/bin (and some other bins) bricking systems. If Pogoplug had a display, I’d have been able to fix it. I tried reinstalling, but something has changed that makes the Pogoplug no longer work. Sick of having stuff go wrong every time I update, I decided this was the time to implement the Home Server Project.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
Between the last post and this one is one photo that didn’t turn out. I’d taken a photo in the woods during my Nude in Nature photo shoot that, unfortunately, was severely underexposed. For a year the camera sat untouched. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to shoot. There isn’t as big a street photography scene here as there is in NYC. Because I had ISO 160 film in the camera, I couldn’t use it for indoor shots. So what to do? Well, I started talking photography with one of Katie’s aunts and so I decided to bring the Yashica to Dan and Katie’s Engagement Brunch. And, who better to take a photo of than my grandfather. He’d probably been photographed with 120 film when he was young. It’s not a technically great photo what with the leaf shadows. But I like it. Still, this is what shooting film helps you remember - you need to look at all the detail before you shoot. You don’t get a redo by the time you have the film developed.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
It’s interesting that after the photos I took at the park, I put the camera away for almost exactly 4 years - these photos are from 13 April 2015. We don’t go to the Cherry Blossom Festival every year because it seems pretty pointless. The same trees and masses of people do not make for the best of times. But, with Scarlett finally 3 years old we figured she might enjoy it this time around.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
These photos were taken on 30 April 2011 when Danielle and I went to Centennial Park. I tend not to be an absolutist with most things. I am neither of the opinion that digital is the only way nor that film cameras are some magical instrument capable of some authentic capture that cannot happen with digital. Instead I cherish each for their different properties. One of the neat things with film cameras (especially given that we have digital cameras and film is just extra), is forgetting what you shot and being pleasantly surprised when you get your roll back.
Last time I wrote about my dabbling in the film world I had had 3 Holga rolls developed. My Yashica and Franka Solida III had arrived after my trip to NYC so I had yet to run any film through them. I shot a few frames with each camera when Danny and Dina came to visit in April and then let the cameras lay dormant. As I explained in a previous post, with the cost of film and development so high, these cameras were somewhat for special occasions. I took the cameras with me to Delaware (a trip I have yet to blog about), and shot with the Holga and Yashica.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
Between the last post and this one is one photo that didn’t turn out. I’d taken a photo in the woods during my Nude in Nature photo shoot that, unfortunately, was severely underexposed. For a year the camera sat untouched. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to shoot. There isn’t as big a street photography scene here as there is in NYC. Because I had ISO 160 film in the camera, I couldn’t use it for indoor shots. So what to do? Well, I started talking photography with one of Katie’s aunts and so I decided to bring the Yashica to Dan and Katie’s Engagement Brunch. And, who better to take a photo of than my grandfather. He’d probably been photographed with 120 film when he was young. It’s not a technically great photo what with the leaf shadows. But I like it. Still, this is what shooting film helps you remember - you need to look at all the detail before you shoot. You don’t get a redo by the time you have the film developed.
Well, everyone’s growing up. Dan’s the last to get married (the youngest three siblings don’t count because there’s too big a gap). Here are some photos from his engagement party.
Stella and her great-grandparents at Dan's Engagement Party
Eric and Dan at Dan's Engagement Party
Eric, Dan, and Katie at Dan and Katy's Engagement Party
Double Rainbows!
Double Rainbows!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Somewhere over the rainbow!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Scarlett and the Rainbow
Scarlett and Abuelo Roman at Dan's Engagement Party (and a rainb
Scarlett and Abuela Carmen at Dan's Engagement Party
Scarlett and Abuela Carmen at Dan's Engagement Party
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
Between the last post and this one is one photo that didn’t turn out. I’d taken a photo in the woods during my Nude in Nature photo shoot that, unfortunately, was severely underexposed. For a year the camera sat untouched. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to shoot. There isn’t as big a street photography scene here as there is in NYC. Because I had ISO 160 film in the camera, I couldn’t use it for indoor shots. So what to do? Well, I started talking photography with one of Katie’s aunts and so I decided to bring the Yashica to Dan and Katie’s Engagement Brunch. And, who better to take a photo of than my grandfather. He’d probably been photographed with 120 film when he was young. It’s not a technically great photo what with the leaf shadows. But I like it. Still, this is what shooting film helps you remember - you need to look at all the detail before you shoot. You don’t get a redo by the time you have the film developed.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
It’s interesting that after the photos I took at the park, I put the camera away for almost exactly 4 years - these photos are from 13 April 2015. We don’t go to the Cherry Blossom Festival every year because it seems pretty pointless. The same trees and masses of people do not make for the best of times. But, with Scarlett finally 3 years old we figured she might enjoy it this time around.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
These photos were taken on 30 April 2011 when Danielle and I went to Centennial Park. I tend not to be an absolutist with most things. I am neither of the opinion that digital is the only way nor that film cameras are some magical instrument capable of some authentic capture that cannot happen with digital. Instead I cherish each for their different properties. One of the neat things with film cameras (especially given that we have digital cameras and film is just extra), is forgetting what you shot and being pleasantly surprised when you get your roll back.
[caption id=“attachment_6300” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] Aida at the Park back before digital[/caption]
I have mentioned many times before how much I was into photography back before digital existed. Despite film and developing costs subsuming all my allowance money, I still took tons of photos. Three years ago, I decided to check out the film photography renaissance. In April I got my first batch of film and a Holga. And soon I had shot some photos. And a few weeks later I had my Holga and Yashica film back. And since then I’ve … not shot very many more rolls of film. There are a few reasons for this; some of them don’t even have to do directly with film. For example, I’m just taking less photos in general. A lot of that has to do with Scarlett. I have lots of photos of other kids in the family because you can hang back when it’s not your kid. You don’t have to worry about anything- someone else is taking care of him or her. But children, at least at the toddler and below stage, require a lot of attention. Also, I want to be present in her life. In order to photograph you have to withdraw a bit. And that’s fine when they’re five or six and off playing on the playground on their own. But Scarlett needs our assistance and attention to be able to use pretty much any part of the playground. Indirectly, because I have a desire to play with her in a way that my father couldn’t (his 9-5 rarely ended at 5), I have to be a better manager of my time. And I have committed to writing more this year. And there are some games I want to play. And there’s TV and time with the wife. Also, I am traveling less and I don’t happen to find Baltimore anywhere near as photogenic as New York city or Oahu.
Thursday (22 Apr) as I drove into work, I knew the first few hours would be unbearable. My photos were waiting to be picked up from L’Imagerie, but they weren’t open until 1000. So I had to wait until my lunch break to go pick them up. The whole day I didn’t know what to expect. I’d never had medium format film developed and, while I’d had contact sheets with my APS film, it was not a true contact sheet.
At the time that I write this (about two weeks ago), I have run three rolls of film through my Holga, my Yashica A has arrived (unfortunately, too late for the wedding), and I have taken my film to L’Imagerie in Bethesda, MD to be developed. I used the Holga, along with my DSLRs, at Ho and Lauren’s wedding and I took some photos on the Brighton Beach/Coney Island Boardwalk. I also took some outdoor candids of Danielle’s family. One question was asked constantly: why are you using film?
As I researched medium format photography in deciding whether or not to participate , I came face-to-face with a trend I’ve seen in other fields. As the technology has “progressed”, users have actually found themselves with worse and worse results. And, just as in other technologies, it is a tale of choosing convenience or cost in favor of quality.
As I write this I have shot 3 frames on my Holga 120N . It’s been a long time since I had to wait to see the results of a photo. One of my favorite aspects of film photography in the olden days was to get my roll(s) of film back from the drug store and being surprised at all the photos I had forgotten taking. But now I really want to see what’s on the rolls! Digital has spoiled me! Also, I’m curious to see the Holga work its magic!
Boy have we become spoiled in the digital age. I’m not sure when this will be posted, but at the time of writing this, I have a Holga 120N and a bunch of film at my desk. I bought a couple rolls each of colour and black and white film in ISO speeds of 160 and 400. I have no idea what to load into my Holga! With my digital camera I can change ISO on the fly. Dark outside? Increase the ISO. Want a slower shutter speed when it’s bright outside? Decrease the ISO. But with film I’m stuck for 12 frames with whatever I put in there!
It would seem insane to even consider getting into analog photography in 2010. But, as I wrote in my tet travelogue, I’ve been bitten by the bug. I think, had I been able to take photography classes and develop my own negatives and learn about aperture and shutter speed and all that with analog cameras, I might not feel such a need to discover the past now. But, when I get an idea into my head it’s pretty hard to dislodge it. Additionally, I see all these photographers on flickr waxing about how they have discovered or rediscovered film photography. Another photographer whose blog I have been reading recently wrote an ebook about how he has rediscovered film and will now shoot both film and digital. All this conspired such that recently I went through another round of deciding whether I wanted to do some film photography.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
Between the last post and this one is one photo that didn’t turn out. I’d taken a photo in the woods during my Nude in Nature photo shoot that, unfortunately, was severely underexposed. For a year the camera sat untouched. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to shoot. There isn’t as big a street photography scene here as there is in NYC. Because I had ISO 160 film in the camera, I couldn’t use it for indoor shots. So what to do? Well, I started talking photography with one of Katie’s aunts and so I decided to bring the Yashica to Dan and Katie’s Engagement Brunch. And, who better to take a photo of than my grandfather. He’d probably been photographed with 120 film when he was young. It’s not a technically great photo what with the leaf shadows. But I like it. Still, this is what shooting film helps you remember - you need to look at all the detail before you shoot. You don’t get a redo by the time you have the film developed.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
Between the last post and this one is one photo that didn’t turn out. I’d taken a photo in the woods during my Nude in Nature photo shoot that, unfortunately, was severely underexposed. For a year the camera sat untouched. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to shoot. There isn’t as big a street photography scene here as there is in NYC. Because I had ISO 160 film in the camera, I couldn’t use it for indoor shots. So what to do? Well, I started talking photography with one of Katie’s aunts and so I decided to bring the Yashica to Dan and Katie’s Engagement Brunch. And, who better to take a photo of than my grandfather. He’d probably been photographed with 120 film when he was young. It’s not a technically great photo what with the leaf shadows. But I like it. Still, this is what shooting film helps you remember - you need to look at all the detail before you shoot. You don’t get a redo by the time you have the film developed.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
It’s interesting that after the photos I took at the park, I put the camera away for almost exactly 4 years - these photos are from 13 April 2015. We don’t go to the Cherry Blossom Festival every year because it seems pretty pointless. The same trees and masses of people do not make for the best of times. But, with Scarlett finally 3 years old we figured she might enjoy it this time around.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
These photos were taken on 30 April 2011 when Danielle and I went to Centennial Park. I tend not to be an absolutist with most things. I am neither of the opinion that digital is the only way nor that film cameras are some magical instrument capable of some authentic capture that cannot happen with digital. Instead I cherish each for their different properties. One of the neat things with film cameras (especially given that we have digital cameras and film is just extra), is forgetting what you shot and being pleasantly surprised when you get your roll back.
Last time I wrote about my dabbling in the film world I had had 3 Holga rolls developed. My Yashica and Franka Solida III had arrived after my trip to NYC so I had yet to run any film through them. I shot a few frames with each camera when Danny and Dina came to visit in April and then let the cameras lay dormant. As I explained in a previous post, with the cost of film and development so high, these cameras were somewhat for special occasions. I took the cameras with me to Delaware (a trip I have yet to blog about), and shot with the Holga and Yashica.
Thursday (22 Apr) as I drove into work, I knew the first few hours would be unbearable. My photos were waiting to be picked up from L’Imagerie, but they weren’t open until 1000. So I had to wait until my lunch break to go pick them up. The whole day I didn’t know what to expect. I’d never had medium format film developed and, while I’d had contact sheets with my APS film, it was not a true contact sheet.
At the time that I write this (about two weeks ago), I have run three rolls of film through my Holga, my Yashica A has arrived (unfortunately, too late for the wedding), and I have taken my film to L’Imagerie in Bethesda, MD to be developed. I used the Holga, along with my DSLRs, at Ho and Lauren’s wedding and I took some photos on the Brighton Beach/Coney Island Boardwalk. I also took some outdoor candids of Danielle’s family. One question was asked constantly: why are you using film?
It would seem insane to even consider getting into analog photography in 2010. But, as I wrote in my tet travelogue, I’ve been bitten by the bug. I think, had I been able to take photography classes and develop my own negatives and learn about aperture and shutter speed and all that with analog cameras, I might not feel such a need to discover the past now. But, when I get an idea into my head it’s pretty hard to dislodge it. Additionally, I see all these photographers on flickr waxing about how they have discovered or rediscovered film photography. Another photographer whose blog I have been reading recently wrote an ebook about how he has rediscovered film and will now shoot both film and digital. All this conspired such that recently I went through another round of deciding whether I wanted to do some film photography.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
It’s interesting that after the photos I took at the park, I put the camera away for almost exactly 4 years - these photos are from 13 April 2015. We don’t go to the Cherry Blossom Festival every year because it seems pretty pointless. The same trees and masses of people do not make for the best of times. But, with Scarlett finally 3 years old we figured she might enjoy it this time around.
We’re hardly ever dressed up so nicely. So when we all got dressed up for Dan’s engagement party, I wanted to get a quick family portrait before we left. The pose wasn’t perfect due to the rush, and I’ll be elaborating a bit more on that in a future blog post, but I do like it as a bit of record keeping. Slightly more than a snapshot, but not how I’d have done it if we weren’t in a hurry.
Back when I compiled the Top 200 Photos feature, this was #10:
and now it’s:
which was not in the top 20 before, so it has really gained a lot of views. That comes from the fact that it’s on Pixel-Peer as an example of that lens’ abilities.
Which is weird because, at the time, it was my favorite photo of Danielle and she hated it. And the weird thing is that, looking at it nearly 4 years later, I’m not as keen on it as I once was. I can’t figure out what I loved so much then. It’s so weird to have feelings associated with a photo change that much in just a few years.
Just like the reflection of love photos, this was born of a boring weekend in Maryland. Danielle wanted to try some photographic ideas. She was partially inspired by a photo shoot she’d recently seen with Quentin Tarantino, but when those photos didn’t really come through, we went for some herion chic photos. The effect from the blinds started off as an accident, but ended up being something we really liked and tweaked to get just right.
I got my first digital camera over Christmas of my freshman year. It changed my photography forever. Since the photos were essentially free, I took my camera EVERYWHERE on campus. A lot of my photos, especially one of my favorite ones from my top 10, came from this impulse. I am able to look back fondly on nearly every single one of my Cornell memories because if something was going on, I probably had my camera there.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
It’s interesting that after the photos I took at the park, I put the camera away for almost exactly 4 years - these photos are from 13 April 2015. We don’t go to the Cherry Blossom Festival every year because it seems pretty pointless. The same trees and masses of people do not make for the best of times. But, with Scarlett finally 3 years old we figured she might enjoy it this time around.
I don’t remember if he’s messing up while doing a jump or coming off the ledge. I know this might sound racist or something, but it’s more a case of being ignorant - until I came to the Maryland/DC area, I never knew there was a skateboarding African American sub-culture. I lived in Miami and in Portland, OR. Both places were pretty devoid of African Americans. Sure, there were people of African descent in Miami, but most of them tended to be Latin American - and that’s a VERY different culture from Africans who’ve been here for generations. And in Oregon, there just wasn’t a strong presence. In fact, as we lost our tans from not being out in the sun 365 days of the year like in Florida, Dave, who was like 6 years old, said, “I know why there aren’t any black people in Oregon! They all lost their tans!”
Once again we arrive at the USA’s Capital for today’s Top 200 Photo.
photo #94 is:
I spoke about the Cherry Blossom Festival early in this project (/2011/02/09/top-200-photos-195/). This is a panorama I constructed of about a quarter of the tidal basin that gives a good idea of what the cherry blossoms look like.
Wedding bells are ringing in today’s Top 200 Photo.
photo #125 is:
I saw this photo when I went to DC with Danielle’s parents to see the Cherry Blossoms. When we were waiting to cross the street back towards the mall I saw this awesome wedding limo. I’m sure they got some awesome photos for their wedding.
This terrifying photo is from a bee box in one of the Smithsonian museums. It was scary being so close to a box stuffed with bees. I just kept thinking about what would happen if they got loose.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Dina on the DC Train”] [/caption]
Danielle’s family came to visit so we did what we always do when company comes, we went to Washington, DC. Seriously, I don’t really know what else to do. If it were Florida I would have taken them to the beach. In NYC I’d take them to Manhattan and either just walk around or go to a show. But around here I don’t really know what to do with visitors. Inner Harbor is really too small for just an hour or so. And not everyone likes the museums from DC. So if you know something to do around here, let me know.
Last time I checked on that picture it had 25 Views. As of this writing it has 230 Views. That’s not a very high number of views, but for the amount of time it’s been up (about 5 months), the subject matter (a plain view of The White House), and lack of groups (when I wrote this it was in just three groups - although I’ll be adding it into more now) it IS indeed a high number of views. Which just goes to show that you don’t need pictures of naked women to get views on Flickr (as some have argued).
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
It’s interesting that after the photos I took at the park, I put the camera away for almost exactly 4 years - these photos are from 13 April 2015. We don’t go to the Cherry Blossom Festival every year because it seems pretty pointless. The same trees and masses of people do not make for the best of times. But, with Scarlett finally 3 years old we figured she might enjoy it this time around.
This is a short series I’m going to run here on the blog featuring photos from my most recently developed roll of medium format 120 film taken with my Yashica A twin reflex lens camera. I’m grouping photos together by subject.
These photos were taken on 30 April 2011 when Danielle and I went to Centennial Park. I tend not to be an absolutist with most things. I am neither of the opinion that digital is the only way nor that film cameras are some magical instrument capable of some authentic capture that cannot happen with digital. Instead I cherish each for their different properties. One of the neat things with film cameras (especially given that we have digital cameras and film is just extra), is forgetting what you shot and being pleasantly surprised when you get your roll back.
Last time I wrote about my dabbling in the film world I had had 3 Holga rolls developed. My Yashica and Franka Solida III had arrived after my trip to NYC so I had yet to run any film through them. I shot a few frames with each camera when Danny and Dina came to visit in April and then let the cameras lay dormant. As I explained in a previous post, with the cost of film and development so high, these cameras were somewhat for special occasions. I took the cameras with me to Delaware (a trip I have yet to blog about), and shot with the Holga and Yashica.
Stevens researchers discovered that the motions of your hands as you use PIN pads, which is continually and automatically recorded by your device, can be hacked in real time and used to guess your PIN with more than 90 percent accuracy within a few attempts.
The Stevens team outfitted 20 volunteers with an array of fitness wristbands and smart watches, then asked them to make some 5,000 sample PIN entries on keypads or laptop keyboards while “sniffing” the packets of Bluetooth low energy (BLE) data transmitted by sensors in those devices to paired smartphones.
Well, everyone’s growing up. Dan’s the last to get married (the youngest three siblings don’t count because there’s too big a gap). Here are some photos from his engagement party.
Stella and her great-grandparents at Dan's Engagement Party
Eric and Dan at Dan's Engagement Party
Eric, Dan, and Katie at Dan and Katy's Engagement Party
Double Rainbows!
Double Rainbows!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Somewhere over the rainbow!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Scarlett and the Rainbow
Scarlett and Abuelo Roman at Dan's Engagement Party (and a rainb
Scarlett and Abuela Carmen at Dan's Engagement Party
Scarlett and Abuela Carmen at Dan's Engagement Party
We’re hardly ever dressed up so nicely. So when we all got dressed up for Dan’s engagement party, I wanted to get a quick family portrait before we left. The pose wasn’t perfect due to the rush, and I’ll be elaborating a bit more on that in a future blog post, but I do like it as a bit of record keeping. Slightly more than a snapshot, but not how I’d have done it if we weren’t in a hurry.
Just like the reflection of love photos, this was born of a boring weekend in Maryland. Danielle wanted to try some photographic ideas. She was partially inspired by a photo shoot she’d recently seen with Quentin Tarantino, but when those photos didn’t really come through, we went for some herion chic photos. The effect from the blinds started off as an accident, but ended up being something we really liked and tweaked to get just right.
This photo was taken when I was taking one photo a day, but before I’d heard of the 365 project. So sometimes I’d be the subject and sometimes it would be squirrels, inanimate objects, or insects. I was going for the look and feel of something out of a movie.
I got my first digital camera over Christmas of my freshman year. It changed my photography forever. Since the photos were essentially free, I took my camera EVERYWHERE on campus. A lot of my photos, especially one of my favorite ones from my top 10, came from this impulse. I am able to look back fondly on nearly every single one of my Cornell memories because if something was going on, I probably had my camera there.
Well, everyone’s growing up. Dan’s the last to get married (the youngest three siblings don’t count because there’s too big a gap). Here are some photos from his engagement party.
Stella and her great-grandparents at Dan's Engagement Party
Eric and Dan at Dan's Engagement Party
Eric, Dan, and Katie at Dan and Katy's Engagement Party
Double Rainbows!
Double Rainbows!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Somewhere over the rainbow!
Dan, Katie, and Rainbows!
Scarlett and the Rainbow
Scarlett and Abuelo Roman at Dan's Engagement Party (and a rainb
Scarlett and Abuela Carmen at Dan's Engagement Party
Scarlett and Abuela Carmen at Dan's Engagement Party
Ever since Sam was born, I’ve been looking forward to a 4 generation male portrait. I’d done a female line portrait with Scarlett up to her great-grandmother. It was finally time to do the same for me. While we were out there and dressed up, we took a few other configurations of family photos. All the males are wearing guayaberas, a traditional shirt worn in the Caribbean, especially in Cuba.
A great photo doesn’t necessarily need good planned posing. Take a look at this shot of Tony, Alex, and Scarlett:
I didn’t plan it, but I did have to wait for the right pose to present itself. It would be a tighter story without Scarlett, but I think it still conveys a coherent message: kids enjoying ice cream and conversing. A kiddie version of going to the bar, essentially.
Issues with tags and titles aside, I am really liking RawTherapee so far as my Lightroom RAW processing replacement. I wanted to document my process for getting to a black and white photo that I like both as a tutorial of sorts, but also to document for myself how it works with RawTherapee.
I’ve activated here one of my favorite features RawTherapee has that Lightroom does not, two windows showing just a small region up close. Too often I’m stuck zooming in and out of an image to check various parts of the image as I make changes. It’s not as crucial with this image, but I just wanted to test out the feature.
No #180 because that photo was already covered and it ended up moving up the rankings before I could get to #180.
photo #179 is:
From the date, I must have been at my parents’ house for my dad’s birthday. Anyway, as I’ve mentioned before, whenever I get a little bored I start taking candid photos. So I ended up with this good one of Dave working on a puzzle. This photo actually ended up inspiring a flickr friend of mine to do a painting of the photo.
Lots and lots of people ask on Reddit every single day how to get photos that look like they were created with VSCO. Basically - crushed blacks and split-toned. Everyone always gives instructions on how to do it in Lightroom. But no one ever talks about how to do it in RawTherapee, so I decided to create this little tutorial.
Take what you learn here and adapt it to fit your style.
Lots and lots of people ask on Reddit every single day how to get photos that look like they were created with VSCO. Basically - crushed blacks and split-toned. Everyone always gives instructions on how to do it in Lightroom. But no one ever talks about how to do it in RawTherapee, so I decided to create this little tutorial.
Take what you learn here and adapt it to fit your style.
Lots and lots of people ask on Reddit every single day how to get photos that look like they were created with VSCO. Basically - crushed blacks and split-toned. Everyone always gives instructions on how to do it in Lightroom. But no one ever talks about how to do it in RawTherapee, so I decided to create this little tutorial.
Take what you learn here and adapt it to fit your style.
After someone told me that a PDF I’d created in Calligra Office was illegible and having issues with spreadsheets loading slowly, I decided to install LibreOffice. However, rather than go with the version in the repos, I decided to go with Flatpak - which allows for a more advanced version via the usage of runtimes. First, I had to install Flatpak:
sudo dnf install flatpak
Then I needed to install the runtimes. The LibreOffice page uses the –user tag, but I think that is just for installing it just to yourself rather than for the whole system. So I am omitting that.
My main computer is now on Fedora 24. This time around I only had to uninstall HDR Merge (which was from my COPR and I hadn’t built a Fedora 24 version yet) and OBS-Studio because there isn’t a Fedora 24 package for it yet. Not bad.
After rebooting, I didn’t have graphics. Then rebooting once more kicked the akmod into gear and now things appear to be working well. 2 more computers left to upgrade to Fedora 24 - the VM server and the Kodi living room box.
Fedora 24 was released yesterday. I updated Daisy, my big laptop, first since it’s not critical. If the update broke something I wouldn’t care. The only hitch it had was that I had to reinstall the RPMFusion repos from the RPM for Fedora 24. Otherwise it was saying that one of the packages wasn’t signed and refused to do the upgrade. Probably has something to do with the fact that for the last release or two, RPMFusion wasn’t exactly in the best of conditions. I’m currently updating my netbook (Kuribo), but that’s more of an all-evening affair since it’s just running on an Intel Atom. There are three more Fedora machines in the house - SuperMario, TanukiMario, and BlueYoshi. I’ll probably save the livingroom Kodi (BY) for last since everyone in the house uses that to watch TV.
After someone told me that a PDF I’d created in Calligra Office was illegible and having issues with spreadsheets loading slowly, I decided to install LibreOffice. However, rather than go with the version in the repos, I decided to go with Flatpak - which allows for a more advanced version via the usage of runtimes. First, I had to install Flatpak:
sudo dnf install flatpak
Then I needed to install the runtimes. The LibreOffice page uses the –user tag, but I think that is just for installing it just to yourself rather than for the whole system. So I am omitting that.
After someone told me that a PDF I’d created in Calligra Office was illegible and having issues with spreadsheets loading slowly, I decided to install LibreOffice. However, rather than go with the version in the repos, I decided to go with Flatpak - which allows for a more advanced version via the usage of runtimes. First, I had to install Flatpak:
sudo dnf install flatpak
Then I needed to install the runtimes. The LibreOffice page uses the –user tag, but I think that is just for installing it just to yourself rather than for the whole system. So I am omitting that.
Ever since Sam was born, I’ve been looking forward to a 4 generation male portrait. I’d done a female line portrait with Scarlett up to her great-grandmother. It was finally time to do the same for me. While we were out there and dressed up, we took a few other configurations of family photos. All the males are wearing guayaberas, a traditional shirt worn in the Caribbean, especially in Cuba.
Alex would, at least in 2009, try and get right up in front of the camera if he noticed you taking a photo. It could spoil the photo you were trying to get a candid shot of, but it certainly made for a dynamic spontaneity that’s harder to capture as kids get older and self-conscious of their image.
Ever since Sam was born, I’ve been looking forward to a 4 generation male portrait. I’d done a female line portrait with Scarlett up to her great-grandmother. It was finally time to do the same for me. While we were out there and dressed up, we took a few other configurations of family photos. All the males are wearing guayaberas, a traditional shirt worn in the Caribbean, especially in Cuba.
It was raining and a solitary flower had bloomed in anticipation of a spring that ended up being delayed by a sudden cold front and snow just before the first day of spring. I went out with my macro lens and the ring flash mom got me recently for Christmas.
I meant to write about the lighting setup in the blog post in which I uploaded the photos from the 7 Month photo shoot, but with twin 7 month olds, there’s never enough time for anything - even with my mother-in-law in town helping us out. Oh well, at least I don’t have to pay per post.
First of all, I’d like to discuss the concept I wanted to go for. For the Five Month photos, I went with the balloon theme I posted about here. For month six, I didn’t do anything special. Danielle did her usual couch portraits. But this time around I had a bit more time for the photos and I started thinking about it a week or two in advance. Unlike 2 months ago, both children were able to sit on their own now for extended periods of time. As of when I took the 7 month photos, the only thing that made them tip over was when they got over-excited and tipped back. It’d been a while since I had done portraits with the black background and I wanted to switch it up a bit. Because I don’t have any formal photography training, I like to browse the work of other photographers to get ideas I can take and make my own. Gavin Hooey, who has a great series of videos on Youtube through the photography store Adorama, has a dark grey background at his studio. He likes to have a highlight behind the model rather than just a plain dark background. If you look at his photos, he does it more often than he doesn’t. I figured it might help with the look of the photos. If you don’t do it, then you really do need to use a light as a hair light in order to keep dark-haired subjects from merging into a black background.
Ever since I bought my house and got a BBQ/grill I’ve learned that most of what I thought of as BBQ growing up was actually grilling. The key difference is that you BBQ at a lower temperature (typically around 225 F) and that BBQ is cooked via indirect heat. Grilling is cooking directly over a fire and, typically, done at the highest heat your BBQ/grill can provide (at the very least starting around 350 F and higher). Although I’ve been cooking ribs successfully on the BBQ/Grill for the past 6ish years, I’ve never really been BBQing them. So I looked around on the web and I found the recipe for Last Meal Ribs.
I started off playing the same multi-player games we’ve been playing for years now. Then I heard Civ VI comes out this year and so that inspired me to play a solo game.
I started off playing the same multi-player games we’ve been playing for years now. Then I heard Civ VI comes out this year and so that inspired me to play a solo game.
I started off playing the same multi-player games we’ve been playing for years now. Then I heard Civ VI comes out this year and so that inspired me to play a solo game.
I started off playing the same multi-player games we’ve been playing for years now. Then I heard Civ VI comes out this year and so that inspired me to play a solo game.
It’s been a long time since I last took a look at an innovative music player. Back in 2006 I explored Songbird and in 2008 I looked at some of the unique features over two posts: Taking Another Look at Songbird and Play the Web. The ability to grab MP3s off of sites, in particular seemed to be a great way to take advantage of the music blogs as a way to discover new music. Some of this has been superseded by certain browser plugins that can grab all files off a webpage based on regular expressions. In the last decade, there has been a big change in the way most people experience digital music. Most people have stopped buying music in favor of either using Youtube or a subscription service like Spotify, Rdio, Amazon Prime Music, or Google Music.
It’s been a long time since I last took a look at an innovative music player. Back in 2006 I explored Songbird and in 2008 I looked at some of the unique features over two posts: Taking Another Look at Songbird and Play the Web. The ability to grab MP3s off of sites, in particular seemed to be a great way to take advantage of the music blogs as a way to discover new music. Some of this has been superseded by certain browser plugins that can grab all files off a webpage based on regular expressions. In the last decade, there has been a big change in the way most people experience digital music. Most people have stopped buying music in favor of either using Youtube or a subscription service like Spotify, Rdio, Amazon Prime Music, or Google Music.
I’ve been looking at NAS implementations for a long time. I looked at FreeNAS for a while then OpenMediaVault. But what I really wanted was to be able to take advantage of btrfs and its great RAID abilities - especially its ability to dynamically expand. So I was happy when I discovered Rockstor on Reddit. Here are some videos in which I explore the interface and how to work with Rockstor using a VM before setting it up on bare metal.
I’ve been looking at NAS implementations for a long time. I looked at FreeNAS for a while then OpenMediaVault. But what I really wanted was to be able to take advantage of btrfs and its great RAID abilities - especially its ability to dynamically expand. So I was happy when I discovered Rockstor on Reddit. Here are some videos in which I explore the interface and how to work with Rockstor using a VM before setting it up on bare metal.
This book had a lot of great scenes - my favorite scenes from the TV show and more. (view spoiler)[I’m INCREDIBLY surprised that the TV show thus far has not incorporated resurrected Catlyn (hide spoiler)] This was where the two versions of this story began to diverge wildly. Overall, I continue to understand why various choices were made given that HBO only has 10 hours a season to get their story told. However, I also now completely understand why people got so upset about the extra rape and anti-women stuff. The reunion scene between Jaime and Cersei in particular was quite a different tone.
This book had a lot of great scenes - my favorite scenes from the TV show and more. (view spoiler)[I’m INCREDIBLY surprised that the TV show thus far has not incorporated resurrected Catlyn (hide spoiler)] This was where the two versions of this story began to diverge wildly. Overall, I continue to understand why various choices were made given that HBO only has 10 hours a season to get their story told. However, I also now completely understand why people got so upset about the extra rape and anti-women stuff. The reunion scene between Jaime and Cersei in particular was quite a different tone.
Last night I had a dream that combined Games of Thrones and Perl programming. Like it was in the GoT world, but we had to do some Perl programming to defeat the Lannisters.
Today’s post is facetious - I know the answer is that men and men’s desires control Hollywood. But, as I watch Game of Thrones, I end up seeing so many breasts and so much female pubic area that it just ends up making the ridiculous absence of penises pretty abundant. Especially in the scene in which a guy is purposely taunted to get hard ….. no wait…this happens twice and both times with bad results. One time, the dude’s penis gets cut off and the other time a leech is attached to it. Neither time is it shown. Yet during a scene at a whorehouse, we see an acrobatic girl essentially put her vagina right into the camera.
A bit of a news roundup for this week’s political post.
[caption id=“attachment_6120” align=“aligncenter” width=“450”] Game of Thrones - coveted by Australians[/caption]
Apparently, illicit acquisition of the Game of Thrones is making things awkward for the United States Ambassador to Australia. He’s asking Australians to please stop getting the show off the Internet. After all, the US is quick to put (or threaten to put) other countries like Spain onto their special list if they start grabbing TV shows off the net. But Australia is an important ally so it’s embarrassing for them to be pushing the US’s buttons. Here’s where they could have done better by listening to something I’m constantly complaining about. See, according to the linked article, the issue is that for seasons 1 and 2 of Game of Thrones it was not available until a few weeks after it had aired in the US. There’s no reason for that. It’s not like the days before current technology where physical objects need to be ferried around the world. It’s all digital - all parts of the world should be able to watch all programs at the same time. Because NOW that it’s available a few hours after it shows in the US, the people in Australia don’t care - they’re already used to getting it for free online. So - the whole cliche about the genie being put back in the bottle.
This book had a lot of great scenes - my favorite scenes from the TV show and more. (view spoiler)[I’m INCREDIBLY surprised that the TV show thus far has not incorporated resurrected Catlyn (hide spoiler)] This was where the two versions of this story began to diverge wildly. Overall, I continue to understand why various choices were made given that HBO only has 10 hours a season to get their story told. However, I also now completely understand why people got so upset about the extra rape and anti-women stuff. The reunion scene between Jaime and Cersei in particular was quite a different tone.
I will not be having a Star Wars day today on May the Fourth and it’s thanks to Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). For people who wonder why I often blog about DRM - this is why we need to fight it. I bought LEGO Star Wars five or more years ago. It was OK, but I needed someone else to play with me because the game is pretty crap with just one player. So I couldn’t wait until I could share the game with one of my children. Scarlett saw a LEGO computer game on Youtube and wanted to play. PERFECT! I went to load it and, because Microsoft no longer supports SecuROM, I can no longer play this game that I paid money for! This is why I only buy books without DRM; why I only buy movies on BluRay, not Amazon - because the DRM is trivially removed. And now I buy games on GOG whenever possible because they sell games without DRM. Don’t flush your money in the toilet! Buy DRM-free!
Why is this an issue? Because the books you read can be used to discriminate against you or, in some countries, land you in jail. In the USA it could put you on the no-fly list. As soon as I get home I’m uninstalling ADE - I’d installed it for the possibility of checking out digital books from the library. Forget it! I’m sticking to the no-DRM books and physical books at the library.
In a lot of ways I really don’t care what happens in the video game console world. In the last 2-3 years I have rediscovered computer gaming. Actually, to be more accurate, game publishers have rediscovered computer gaming. I remember in my youth when the best of the best games came out for computers and the consoles were mostly just arcade ports. At some point the pendulum swung the other way and, other than the Civilization and Blizard’s franchises, gaming had mostly died. Whatever games were released on computers were an afterthought and pretty poor quality. I don’t know if it was the unusually long console cycle leading to a lack of graphics innovation or the success of Steam making publishers realize they couldn’t afford to leave money on the table or a combination of the two, but computer gaming is back in a big way. (And, I’ve been saying computer gaming because Apple has seen a resurgence in gaming unlike any it has seen since the early to mid-90s and, thanks to Steam, Linux gaming is finally becoming a thing that doesn’t need WINE) So everything but the console exclusives - Halo, Mario, Uncharted - now come to computers. If I’m going to have a computer anyway (and I will), why ALSO play $300-400 for a gaming console? In the years since I’ve bought my Playstation 3 it’s been used WAY more often for Netflix than anything else. A Roku box serves that purpose a lot cheaper.
As 2008 has proven - draconian digital restrictions management (DRM) does not stop people from illicitly using computer games. Spore, whose DRM was so bad they got ratings bombed on Amazon.com, was the most pirated game of 2008. The DRM caused hassles for legitimate users and did nothing to stop illicit use. This is always the case. Ever since the beginning of DRM on video games there have been people getting around it. These DRM schemes are not cheap. They are licensed from companies who tell the video game companies that this is the only way to protect their games.
I will not be having a Star Wars day today on May the Fourth and it’s thanks to Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). For people who wonder why I often blog about DRM - this is why we need to fight it. I bought LEGO Star Wars five or more years ago. It was OK, but I needed someone else to play with me because the game is pretty crap with just one player. So I couldn’t wait until I could share the game with one of my children. Scarlett saw a LEGO computer game on Youtube and wanted to play. PERFECT! I went to load it and, because Microsoft no longer supports SecuROM, I can no longer play this game that I paid money for! This is why I only buy books without DRM; why I only buy movies on BluRay, not Amazon - because the DRM is trivially removed. And now I buy games on GOG whenever possible because they sell games without DRM. Don’t flush your money in the toilet! Buy DRM-free!
Why is this an issue? Because the books you read can be used to discriminate against you or, in some countries, land you in jail. In the USA it could put you on the no-fly list. As soon as I get home I’m uninstalling ADE - I’d installed it for the possibility of checking out digital books from the library. Forget it! I’m sticking to the no-DRM books and physical books at the library.
In a lot of ways I really don’t care what happens in the video game console world. In the last 2-3 years I have rediscovered computer gaming. Actually, to be more accurate, game publishers have rediscovered computer gaming. I remember in my youth when the best of the best games came out for computers and the consoles were mostly just arcade ports. At some point the pendulum swung the other way and, other than the Civilization and Blizard’s franchises, gaming had mostly died. Whatever games were released on computers were an afterthought and pretty poor quality. I don’t know if it was the unusually long console cycle leading to a lack of graphics innovation or the success of Steam making publishers realize they couldn’t afford to leave money on the table or a combination of the two, but computer gaming is back in a big way. (And, I’ve been saying computer gaming because Apple has seen a resurgence in gaming unlike any it has seen since the early to mid-90s and, thanks to Steam, Linux gaming is finally becoming a thing that doesn’t need WINE) So everything but the console exclusives - Halo, Mario, Uncharted - now come to computers. If I’m going to have a computer anyway (and I will), why ALSO play $300-400 for a gaming console? In the years since I’ve bought my Playstation 3 it’s been used WAY more often for Netflix than anything else. A Roku box serves that purpose a lot cheaper.
Until now I’ve been quite against ebooks. Back when I was in college I had an iPaq and I downloaded the Microsoft reader to it. I bought about 3 - 5 books for it and, at first, I thought it was great. It would allow you to annotate the book and highlight passages. And it was electronic so I could carry a bunch of books in the space of my PDA. But it was one of the first times I was bitten by digital restrictions management (DRM). I had to reset my PDA because it got into a locked state. After that, I couldn’t read my books until I reauthenticated the PDA. After all, everyone out there is out to destroy authors and steal digital books, so they need to make sure I’m the one who paid for it. This worked the first time around, but the second time I needed to authenticate, the server refused to authenticate the device and I could no longer read the books. So I was out around $20. Imagine buying a regular physical book and then having it no longer work because it wasn’t sure if you were the person who bought it. Yeah, it’s pretty ridiculous.
As 2008 has proven - draconian digital restrictions management (DRM) does not stop people from illicitly using computer games. Spore, whose DRM was so bad they got ratings bombed on Amazon.com, was the most pirated game of 2008. The DRM caused hassles for legitimate users and did nothing to stop illicit use. This is always the case. Ever since the beginning of DRM on video games there have been people getting around it. These DRM schemes are not cheap. They are licensed from companies who tell the video game companies that this is the only way to protect their games.
I will not be having a Star Wars day today on May the Fourth and it’s thanks to Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). For people who wonder why I often blog about DRM - this is why we need to fight it. I bought LEGO Star Wars five or more years ago. It was OK, but I needed someone else to play with me because the game is pretty crap with just one player. So I couldn’t wait until I could share the game with one of my children. Scarlett saw a LEGO computer game on Youtube and wanted to play. PERFECT! I went to load it and, because Microsoft no longer supports SecuROM, I can no longer play this game that I paid money for! This is why I only buy books without DRM; why I only buy movies on BluRay, not Amazon - because the DRM is trivially removed. And now I buy games on GOG whenever possible because they sell games without DRM. Don’t flush your money in the toilet! Buy DRM-free!
I will not be having a Star Wars day today on May the Fourth and it’s thanks to Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). For people who wonder why I often blog about DRM - this is why we need to fight it. I bought LEGO Star Wars five or more years ago. It was OK, but I needed someone else to play with me because the game is pretty crap with just one player. So I couldn’t wait until I could share the game with one of my children. Scarlett saw a LEGO computer game on Youtube and wanted to play. PERFECT! I went to load it and, because Microsoft no longer supports SecuROM, I can no longer play this game that I paid money for! This is why I only buy books without DRM; why I only buy movies on BluRay, not Amazon - because the DRM is trivially removed. And now I buy games on GOG whenever possible because they sell games without DRM. Don’t flush your money in the toilet! Buy DRM-free!
As an adult I have discovered a love of cooking. Sure, it can get mundane on a day-to-day basis, but I enjoy creating something tasty. I especially enjoy learning how to cook food that is much more expensive to eat out. Recently when I went to Costco, I was in the pork section and noticed they had pork bellies. So I wanted to try and recreate a Samgyeopsal-gui dish. So I found a recipe that included the sauces that go along with the dish and tried it out. It was a hit on the first try. Enjoy some images of my cooking:
I’ve been watching Gavin Hoey’s GREAT series on studio lighting. While he has a better studio than I do, he still has a small home studio so I find his advice and tutorials match what I’m able to accomplish. When I saw this video ( https://youtu.be/PIoWwx-elCE) I really wanted to try it out.
I’ve been watching Gavin Hoey’s GREAT series on studio lighting. While he has a better studio than I do, he still has a small home studio so I find his advice and tutorials match what I’m able to accomplish. When I saw this video ( https://youtu.be/PIoWwx-elCE) I really wanted to try it out.
I’ve been watching Gavin Hoey’s GREAT series on studio lighting. While he has a better studio than I do, he still has a small home studio so I find his advice and tutorials match what I’m able to accomplish. When I saw this video ( https://youtu.be/PIoWwx-elCE) I really wanted to try it out.
I’ve been watching Gavin Hoey’s GREAT series on studio lighting. While he has a better studio than I do, he still has a small home studio so I find his advice and tutorials match what I’m able to accomplish. When I saw this video ( https://youtu.be/PIoWwx-elCE) I really wanted to try it out.
Just in case the captions for the photos don’t appear on your RSS reader or on Facebook, here’s what I wrote as the caption to the photos:
“Inspired by title I chose for my photo for the twins’ four month photo which didn’t come out quite the way I wanted it to, I decided to do this image. I love how it came out.”
I also usually don’t post more than one version of a photo - I have a definitive version and just go with that, but this time Scarlett came up while I was trying to to figure out which one I preferred and she insisted on a different one than I would have chosen, so I decided to share them all.
I wanted to do this earlier - somewhere around 2 month portraits. I was re-energized to try the idea after seeing someone do a photo that made it look like their kid was bounding out of the crib with her stuffed animals. I did not take the Sam and Stella images from some other random image. They were right there where you see them. All I did was erase my body (or I’d be in here thrice). Still, if I were to do it again, I’d have Sam and Stella flying near me rather than against the wall. They end up too small and it lessens the impact of the shot. Well, there’s always next time. (And there’s always less edited shots!)
Back when I compiled the Top 200 Photos feature, this was #10:
and now it’s:
which was not in the top 20 before, so it has really gained a lot of views. That comes from the fact that it’s on Pixel-Peer as an example of that lens’ abilities.
The original Top 200 Photo in the #18th spot was:
and the current #18 photos is:
this photo has been on the rise ever since Bradley Manning’s trial started up.
Since it took about a year for my Top 200 photos feature to run its course, I wanted to go back and see how things changed within the Top 20 in that year. When I posted the feature, this was #20:
This photo was taken when I was taking one photo a day, but before I’d heard of the 365 project. So sometimes I’d be the subject and sometimes it would be squirrels, inanimate objects, or insects. I was going for the look and feel of something out of a movie.
Been silent on the blog because I’ve been very busy with other things. Mostly I’ve been busy going through the 800+ pictures I took on my recent trip to Oahu, HI. Expect to see a fully illustrated blog post about my trip once I’m done uploading the pictures to flickr. And I’ve been doing this in Adobe Lightroom 2, which I recently gave my first impressions of. I’ve been doing a live blog which I’ll be publishing later. I’ve also been working on “I’m Not Mad”. I hope to have some more tech and political posts soon, but even sooner I’ll have an entertainment post.
Welcome to a new set of posts in which I take a look at the t-shirts I’ve accumulated and comment on why I have them and what they mean to me.
It was the 1990s. I was fully into my Christian revival and the USA was into swing music. I was at a concert to see my new, favorite ska band, Five Iron Frenzy.
I finally figured out the right number of flash pulses so that the separate images of David could be distinguished. I think it was the best photo we came up with that night.
And so, we as are about to enter the top 20 images, this image has, as the time of this writing, 1151 views.
I wanted to capture Dave doing karate for a long time. But he wouldn’t let me go to a practice or anything, so we did some photography in my parents’ yard. I’d love to get him and Kendra in some more neat shots. But I really like this one. (Except for the fact that he’s trying not to laugh)
Since I have family (in-laws) in NYC, I’ve tried, on occasion, to take my brothers to experience parts of NYC that we never got to see in the brief time my family rolled through before. On this trip, Dave got to ride a NYC subway for the first time.
No #180 because that photo was already covered and it ended up moving up the rankings before I could get to #180.
photo #179 is:
From the date, I must have been at my parents’ house for my dad’s birthday. Anyway, as I’ve mentioned before, whenever I get a little bored I start taking candid photos. So I ended up with this good one of Dave working on a puzzle. This photo actually ended up inspiring a flickr friend of mine to do a painting of the photo.
It’s been a long time since I looked at a new Linux distro. Long time readers know I used to review Linux distros a few years ago. But one of the maintainers of Korora posts to the Fedora Planet feed. (They may say constantly that RSS feeds are dead, but some of us still use them!) Korora (which used to be based on Gentoo) aims to create the ultimate desktop user’s Fedora setup. So they tweak Fedora a bit and add some repos like RPMFusion out of the box. Since I do a lot of this every time I install Fedora anyway, I may want to just install Korora next time I do an install. So I wanted to look at Korora and also use it as a chance to take a look at what’s going on nowadays in the non-KDE/Plasma desktops. Also, since Korora 23 should be coming out within the next month or so, it should help me see how Korora upgrades compare to Fedora (*should* be the same). First the install:
It’s been a long time since I looked at a new Linux distro. Long time readers know I used to review Linux distros a few years ago. But one of the maintainers of Korora posts to the Fedora Planet feed. (They may say constantly that RSS feeds are dead, but some of us still use them!) Korora (which used to be based on Gentoo) aims to create the ultimate desktop user’s Fedora setup. So they tweak Fedora a bit and add some repos like RPMFusion out of the box. Since I do a lot of this every time I install Fedora anyway, I may want to just install Korora next time I do an install. So I wanted to look at Korora and also use it as a chance to take a look at what’s going on nowadays in the non-KDE/Plasma desktops. Also, since Korora 23 should be coming out within the next month or so, it should help me see how Korora upgrades compare to Fedora (*should* be the same). First the install:
By the time I was done with February I was nearly done with XCOM: Enemy Within. It was a fun revisit of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, but I think I’m done for a while. That’s a good thing since I hear that XCOM 2 has some beefy PC and graphics card requirements.
Because I’ve staggered the publishing of new videos on Youtube, not all of them may be visible on the embeds in this blog post on the day it goes live. For example, I think I created 14 videos for Torchlight in January, but at the moment only 11 are live.
Torchlight (23 hours):
I decide to check out this spiritual successor to Diablo, having never played Diablo. It is a nice game to play after stressful day - just clicking on bad guys and traveling around without much thought.
Since it took about a year for my Top 200 photos feature to run its course, I wanted to go back and see how things changed within the Top 20 in that year. When I posted the feature, this was #20:
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Dina, Daniel, Ho, Beo, and Lauren put a lot of work into the decorations”] [/caption]
Last weekend I went to a graduation party Dina and Daniel organized to celebrate Dina, Ho, and Lauren’s graduation this year. It was a great BBQ event and I had a lot of fun. I only knew about 1/10th of all the people there, so I kept entertained mainly by ecording the events of the night with my cameras. I did end up speaking at length with some interesting people.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Dina, a new graduate!”] [/caption]
A few weeks ago I attended Dina’s Bachelor’s Graduation. After having attended my own as well as Daniel’s, I had some idea of what to expect, but this was the first college graduation I had attended outside of Cornell. (Not counting my dad’s graduation when I was young) I have have come to believe that all college graduations are the same everywhere. It is a bit odd that Stony Brook used red gowns instead of black ones. The was also my first long outing with my GPS unit. Here’s where I ran around that day. First as a static PNG:
Been taking lots of shots of the kids, but one finally came out nice!
(edit: Ah, I figured it out, I can’t let the blog create resized versions of my giant files. To get the original size file (for printing) click here! It will look horrible in your web browser)
Sometimes when I was at functions with Danielle’s family (especially before Dina and Daniel started dating (others, not each other)), I’d get bored because everyone was speaking all Vietnamese, so I’d just grab my camera and wander around taking candid shots. And I’d often get gems like this one. After all, most people look better when they aren’t posed. By the way, this is Danielle’s cousin, Mai, and she’ll be featured a couple more times, I’m pretty sure.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“What emotion does this photo invoke in you?”] [/caption]
A few days ago, Mai told me that photos of landscapes make her feel lonely. That really caught me by surprise. The usual response to photos such as the one above is one of awe. People usually feel a new appreciation for nature and/or that spot. And, sometimes, people express a desire to visit that place too in order to experience it themselves. But I never thought someone could look at a landscape and feel a sense of loneliness. (Unless, of course, the photographer meant to invoke loneliness by selecting a certain type of photo or white balance)
It’s the year of the cat for the Vietnamese Zodiac. Here’s wishing you happiness, prosperity, and health. If you want to find out your animal, just visit my Vietnamese Zodiac web app.
It’s the intersection of three of my hobbies - computers, Linux, and photography! Ever since I learned how to compile source code from the net, about a decade ago, I’ve wanted to create RPMs to help those who aren’t comfortable with compiling or simply don’t want to bother with compiling. But, for some reason, RPM creation was always something I struggled to get right. Nearly once a year I’d try and do it, but always failed. But recently, when reading the instructions on how to do it, it just clicked.
After daydreaming about running my Linux computer from an SSD for years (ever since I saw how fast it made my wife’s Linux install), I finally did it on the main Linux computer (SuperMario) as the root hard drive was getting old and was liable to die at any moment. The last time I’d installed my main Linux computer from scratch was in 2009 when I went from an old eMachine to the computer I’d built for my wife when I was going to ease her from Windows on her Dell computer over to Linux on a custom built computer. Lots had changed since then (like going to SystemD, for example) and I also wanted to move to a larger hard drive. So just copying everything over was out of the question. I figured a fresh install would get rid of a lot of the cruft I’d picked up in the last 7 years. Additionally, this time I would start with an install of the KDE spin of Fedora and I’m not planning on adding in other desktop environments or Window managers unless I am ready to ditch KDE. If I want to dabble in other desktops, I can always run a VM.
Upgraded the final computer - the server host that has the VM with our Kodi stuff. It was the least complicated upgrade - didn’t have to remove anything - it just worked. And that was a great change, for once. (Not that the others were too much of a pain).
For some reason gazebo-doc the Fedora 22 version conflicted with the Fedora 23 version so I had to delete that. Also, despite the system claiming that it would not have to download the packages again, it appeared to not actually work that way - at least the second time I ran things. (After removing Kernel-debug packages to get more space in /boot)
Overall, everything went relatively well. The only bad thing is that there was not a kmod-nvidia available for my current kernel in Fedora 23 so I had to boot into my old kernel in order to have the benefits of the proprietary driver. So later today if there’s time I’m going to see if there’s a kmod-nvidia for this kernel in rpmfusion-testing that I could install. Otherwise, I’ll just keep checking every few days and stay on the older kernel until then.
Now that it seems the nvidia driver that deals with the latest Xorg is available, I decided to try and upgrade my main computer, SuperMario. I started with the dnf commands:
As usual, old packages reared their ugly heads. They’d made it this far, but it was time to banish packages from Fedora 20 and even Fedora 15 that had survived this long.
I was able to get Kurio, my netbook, to upgrade to Fedora 23 without issue. BlueYoshi, the living computer, is still unable to upgrade. So far it’s tripping up on dolphin-emu, OBS-MP, and some Gnome package. I’m not sure if that’s something that’ll be fixed as RPMFusion continues to update their Fedora 23 packages or if I’ll have to do the old uninstall/reinstall dance that I sometimes have to do with these non-free packages that don’t get QA’d for a Fedora release. Not going to be doing my main computer any time soon.
Tried to upgrade the living room computer to Fedora 23. As of the time when I tried, because the RPMFusion repo wasn’t ready for Fedora 23, it couldn’t upgrade. I’ll try again in a day or two if the repo is up.
I recently had to reinstall an OS on the wife’s Dell Inspiron 17. I was unable to complete an install for Fedora 22, but Fedora 21 and Fedora 23 beta were able to install. It would always freeze mid-install - usually around 70 or 80%. From what I could gleam on the net, it has to do with a kernel issue. But I’m not 100% sure. Anyway, just putting this out there for anyone trying to get Fedora 22 on a Dell Inspiron 17.
Back in October, I created a video showing my workflow with Digikam and RawTherapee. After spending lots of months working with both programs and tinkering to see what works best, I have updated my workflow. Based on the current versions of the programs, here is my updated workflow:
There was a good chunk of time where I was converting all my Canon Raw files into DNG files on the thought that it would be better and make them more readable in the future. But with KDE able to read Canon files as well as the libRaw in Linux - it seemed a waste of time.
This article by a professional photographer gives another reason. Certain software may not be able to produce as good a result from DNG as when the files come unadulterated from the camera.
For quite some time I’ve been been struggling with the point of Adobe’s Lightroom. Other than competing with Apple’s Aperture, it appears not to have a purpose. Of course, right around the time Lightroom (LR) was hitting its stride, I stopped reading photography magazines. The zine I loved the most was a British one published by the same company that puts out Linux Format Magazine. Unfortunately, even with an exchange rate of $1:1 Britsh Pound (which isn’t the case), it’s still $90 per year. So I may have missed lots of tutorial and explainer articles talking about why LR is such a great program. My impression of it was of a Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw. So I didn’t really see the point of paying $200 for that when those programs work just fine for me. It also seemed to straddle some Photoshop territory and I just couldn’t figure it out.
Back in October, I created a video showing my workflow with Digikam and RawTherapee. After spending lots of months working with both programs and tinkering to see what works best, I have updated my workflow. Based on the current versions of the programs, here is my updated workflow:
There was a good chunk of time where I was converting all my Canon Raw files into DNG files on the thought that it would be better and make them more readable in the future. But with KDE able to read Canon files as well as the libRaw in Linux - it seemed a waste of time.
This article by a professional photographer gives another reason. Certain software may not be able to produce as good a result from DNG as when the files come unadulterated from the camera.
Issues with tags and titles aside, I am really liking RawTherapee so far as my Lightroom RAW processing replacement. I wanted to document my process for getting to a black and white photo that I like both as a tutorial of sorts, but also to document for myself how it works with RawTherapee.
I’ve activated here one of my favorite features RawTherapee has that Lightroom does not, two windows showing just a small region up close. Too often I’m stuck zooming in and out of an image to check various parts of the image as I make changes. It’s not as crucial with this image, but I just wanted to test out the feature.
The more I’ve been learning about Lightroom 2 (technically now at 2.3), the more I’ve been liking it! First of all, I learned that - thanks to new camera profiles (also available in the latest camera raw software) - I can get my photos to start from where Canon’s own RAW software would have started. I never realized it was a better choice than photoshop because I liked the photoshop workflow so much. But now that I’ve played with the camera profiles in Lightroom, I realize that I’ve been selling my images short.
I just wanted to really elaborate on why I think Adobe Lightroom is a program any enthusiast to pro user should own. Although, as I related here, LR has grown on me, going through the photos I shot at my cousin’s wedding has really cemented my love for Adobe’s product. Here are my two favorite features. You may want to open up the images in a new tab at full size so you can follow along.
So I did a test and found that as long as I save the metadata to the file, Adobe Bridge (even with CS2) can correctly read the changes. So I decided to work in Lightroom to see if it was worth buying. I can say that I am really loving it! I’ve been able to adopt my usual RAW workflow with only some small changes. Now I can’t see how I could ever work without LR!! (It’s no wonder why Adobe gives a 30 day free trial!)
For quite some time I’ve been been struggling with the point of Adobe’s Lightroom. Other than competing with Apple’s Aperture, it appears not to have a purpose. Of course, right around the time Lightroom (LR) was hitting its stride, I stopped reading photography magazines. The zine I loved the most was a British one published by the same company that puts out Linux Format Magazine. Unfortunately, even with an exchange rate of $1:1 Britsh Pound (which isn’t the case), it’s still $90 per year. So I may have missed lots of tutorial and explainer articles talking about why LR is such a great program. My impression of it was of a Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw. So I didn’t really see the point of paying $200 for that when those programs work just fine for me. It also seemed to straddle some Photoshop territory and I just couldn’t figure it out.
Back in October, I created a video showing my workflow with Digikam and RawTherapee. After spending lots of months working with both programs and tinkering to see what works best, I have updated my workflow. Based on the current versions of the programs, here is my updated workflow:
Back in May I posted a video of my RAW Workflow in Adobe Lightroom. Now that I’m fully on the Linux photography bandwagon, here’s a video of my current workflow with Digikam and RawTherapee:
I found one way around the situation involving a DNG going to RawTherapee and creating a JPEG image that’s missing the title and tags when read by Digikam’s Exiv2 library. It may not be perfect, or even the best way. But it’s one way around the issue that I was easily able to confirm with about 5 minutes of messing around today. First up you want to tell Digikam to make XMP files to go along with all files:
Issues with tags and titles aside, I am really liking RawTherapee so far as my Lightroom RAW processing replacement. I wanted to document my process for getting to a black and white photo that I like both as a tutorial of sorts, but also to document for myself how it works with RawTherapee.
I’ve activated here one of my favorite features RawTherapee has that Lightroom does not, two windows showing just a small region up close. Too often I’m stuck zooming in and out of an image to check various parts of the image as I make changes. It’s not as crucial with this image, but I just wanted to test out the feature.
After having filed some bugs and spent a bit of time trying to figure out what’s going on, it appears that the issue with the metadata not carrying over from my DNG and CR2 files to the JPEG is not in any way RawTherapee’s fault. The problem is where Exiv2, the library used by Digikam, is expecting to look for this data. Of course, what I don’t understand about this is that Exiv2 is what wrote the data to begin with. Why write it to a location they were not going to be able to read from? Or maybe they only expect it to be there in DNG and CR2 files, but not JPEGs?
Two redeeming bits of news for RawTherapee (even though one of them means there’s still something to be solved before I can switch completely to this new bit of software).
When updated to the latest RawTherapee (the version in Fedora 21’s official repositories is old), the issue with pink images disappears
RawTherapee is indeed preserving the metadata in the JPEG. The problem is that it’s doing so in a manner that Digikam does not read through the exiv2 library. I’ve filed a bug report and hopefully this can be resolved. Once that’s done, I’d be able to leave Adobe Lightroom behind. If I wanted to, I could use the new software now, safe in the knowledge that the metadata was being written, but until it’s time to replace my photo hard drive (later this year), I won’t be moving the photos over to Linux.
Last Fall I started considering moving away from Lightroom after having used it for nearly a decade. Back then I was making use of the student price to actually be able to afford it. Competition from Apple Aperture and other programs caused it to eventually drop to $150 per version. But Adobe seemed to be moving more and more towards a subscription-only model. Lightroom is still available standalone, but it appears the rest of the CS suite (including, for example, Photoshop) are on the treadmill now. While there are surely some benefits to being able to rent Photoshop and Adobe’s awesome video editing software when you need to do a project rather than for a thousand-plus fee, one way I’ve afforded Lightroom is not upgrading every year. So while it’s cheaper to pay monthly than buying outright (at the prices they had when they went subscription), I rarely found the upgrades worth is and so was able to save some money. I started considering alternatives. But I’d had Lightroom 5 on my wishlist and someone bought it for me for Christmas. So I figured I’d be a Lightroom user for a few more years.
A quick thank you to the developers of OBS for adding the latest features in OBS Multiplatform 0.13.1. It was already a great platform, but with Studio Mode and video sources starting anew when going to a scene, it is near perfect for my use. All this by volunteers and for all three major OS platforms: Windows, Mac, and Linux! It is now extremely competitive against XSplit and competition among software devs always leads to better stuff for users!
Because I’ve staggered the publishing of new videos on Youtube, not all of them may be visible on the embeds in this blog post on the day it goes live. For example, I think I created 14 videos for Torchlight in January, but at the moment only 11 are live.
Torchlight (23 hours):
I decide to check out this spiritual successor to Diablo, having never played Diablo. It is a nice game to play after stressful day - just clicking on bad guys and traveling around without much thought.
Because I’ve staggered the publishing of new videos on Youtube, not all of them may be visible on the embeds in this blog post on the day it goes live. For example, I think I created 14 videos for Torchlight in January, but at the moment only 11 are live.
Torchlight (23 hours):
I decide to check out this spiritual successor to Diablo, having never played Diablo. It is a nice game to play after stressful day - just clicking on bad guys and traveling around without much thought.
Civilization: Beyond Earth (7 hrs): This game was a great evolution on Civ V. I enjoyed that they continued with the same sense of humor. I also thought they did a good job evolving things so that it felt different enough. It’ll probably take a few games before I get the hang of all the government options.
Super Mario Galaxy (1 hr): Just wanted to get past the opening section on my emulator so I could not have to repeat that silly story section again if I even want to play some SMG. Also wanted to test the USB sensor Dan got me for Christmas.
Because I’ve staggered the publishing of new videos on Youtube, not all of them may be visible on the embeds in this blog post on the day it goes live. For example, I think I created 14 videos for Torchlight in January, but at the moment only 11 are live.
Torchlight (23 hours):
I decide to check out this spiritual successor to Diablo, having never played Diablo. It is a nice game to play after stressful day - just clicking on bad guys and traveling around without much thought.
Because I’ve staggered the publishing of new videos on Youtube, not all of them may be visible on the embeds in this blog post on the day it goes live. For example, I think I created 14 videos for Torchlight in January, but at the moment only 11 are live.
Torchlight (23 hours):
I decide to check out this spiritual successor to Diablo, having never played Diablo. It is a nice game to play after stressful day - just clicking on bad guys and traveling around without much thought.
Because I’ve staggered the publishing of new videos on Youtube, not all of them may be visible on the embeds in this blog post on the day it goes live. For example, I think I created 14 videos for Torchlight in January, but at the moment only 11 are live.
Torchlight (23 hours):
I decide to check out this spiritual successor to Diablo, having never played Diablo. It is a nice game to play after stressful day - just clicking on bad guys and traveling around without much thought.
Because I’ve staggered the publishing of new videos on Youtube, not all of them may be visible on the embeds in this blog post on the day it goes live. For example, I think I created 14 videos for Torchlight in January, but at the moment only 11 are live.
Torchlight (23 hours):
I decide to check out this spiritual successor to Diablo, having never played Diablo. It is a nice game to play after stressful day - just clicking on bad guys and traveling around without much thought.
Because I’ve staggered the publishing of new videos on Youtube, not all of them may be visible on the embeds in this blog post on the day it goes live. For example, I think I created 14 videos for Torchlight in January, but at the moment only 11 are live.
Torchlight (23 hours):
I decide to check out this spiritual successor to Diablo, having never played Diablo. It is a nice game to play after stressful day - just clicking on bad guys and traveling around without much thought.
One of the great things about Steam and the internet is the cloud save. It means that you can go from computer to computer and, as long as it’s connected to the Internet, you can pick up your game where you left off. In my case, I have a Windows computer and a Linux computer both capable of running games from Steam. I wanted to see how well XCOM was ported to Linux so I launched it and didn’t have any of my saves! It turns out that the saves are in a folder called SaveData on Windows and savedata on Linux. (In the path: ~/.local/share/feral-interactive/XCOM/XEW - remove XEW if it’s not Enemy Within) Those aren’t the same thing in Linux. So you need to delete the folder savedata and then make a symlink to SaveData where the symlink is savedata. Once you do that it works perfectly. To give credit where it’s due, here’s the forum post where I fond the info.
One of the great things about Steam and the internet is the cloud save. It means that you can go from computer to computer and, as long as it’s connected to the Internet, you can pick up your game where you left off. In my case, I have a Windows computer and a Linux computer both capable of running games from Steam. I wanted to see how well XCOM was ported to Linux so I launched it and didn’t have any of my saves! It turns out that the saves are in a folder called SaveData on Windows and savedata on Linux. (In the path: ~/.local/share/feral-interactive/XCOM/XEW - remove XEW if it’s not Enemy Within) Those aren’t the same thing in Linux. So you need to delete the folder savedata and then make a symlink to SaveData where the symlink is savedata. Once you do that it works perfectly. To give credit where it’s due, here’s the forum post where I fond the info.
I still love the innovation coming out of Valve (like their VR and controller work), but today I listened to the Beastcast Episode 2 and saw that Steam is implementing game refunds. This is something GOG has offered for quite some time now. It appears that GOG is starting to eat Valve’s lunch as it’s getting more Triple A games DRM-Free! I have no issues with Valve and I don’t consider them evil or anything hyperbolic, but here’s how healthy competition helps. Now Valve has to match GOG for refunds just as GOG has had to create GOG Galaxy to match the Steam client. I hope they continue to challenge each other in the market and create a good environment for us that is pro-consumer since digital has been anti-consumer for so long. (DRM, games/books/movies/etc being pulled without notice)
I still really love using Linux, but I don’t follow the Linux press like I used to. I’ve settled into a comfortable zone where I only follow Fedora and KDE news since that’s what I use. But I followed it very closely for nearly 10 years. Every year there’d be multiple articles asking whether this was the year of the Linux desktop, meaning people would finally see the Microsoft hegemony for what it was and throw off the shackles of proprietary software. It never came. Thanks to Ubuntu and Vista, we almost got there. Then there were the Netbooks, but the manufacturers chose horrible versions of Linux and underpowered machines and Microsoft came out with Windows 7 starter edition. And people went to Macs instead of Linux in the biggest tech comeback of … ever.
[caption id=“attachment_5805” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Saint’s Row The Third: The Ho Boat[/caption]
Saint’s Row the Third (14 hrs): I got a lot of video games for my birthday and Christmas (mostly on Steam). So I wanted to finish up the last narrative game I had started before playing those games. I played a few missions in Saint’s Row The Third. As I had surmised before, the loose narrative based mostly on archetypes and stereotypes made it extremely easy to jump in. It wasn’t like in Mass Effect or Final Fantasy 10 where I couldn’t remember why I should be caring about these characters. The missions with the VTOL planes (STAG missions) were pretty hard.
I first heard about virtual machines about six to seven years ago. I couldn’t see a point in wanting to run another computer inside your computer. A few years ago I used VMs to test and blog about Linux distros. In the past year I’ve used it to preview new features in Fedora while the next version was in beta. This week I used them in the most useful way yet: to test server software before implementing them on my public, paid server. These were some of easiest installs I’ve ever done - even easier than Wordpress’ famous Five Minute Install.
I write this to you because you are the largest and most powerful companies in your ecosystems. The digital world has become ridiculous and you need to be leaders in rectifying the situation. Let’s start with Amazon. The two biggest digital things you sell are books and music. Back in the analog world before commerce became a Wonderland distortion, if I bought a book or CD, any member in my household could access this item. It didn’t matter if I bought the book or my wife bought the book. We could both read it. The same went with a CD. Either of us could grab the CD off the shelf and put it into our portable CD player. But now go to the Kindle (or any other e-reader system) and Amazon CloudPlayer. Sure, either of us could pick up the e-reader to read a book. But what if we both want to read a different book at the same time. How can we access each other’s libraries? What about if we each want to listen to the same music library from Amazon CloudPlayer on our smart phones or other devices? For various reasons, like Amazon recommendations, it makes sense for us to have different accounts instead of a family account.
This game that’s been capturing nearly all my free time in February was an impulse buy. At $10 I might have passed it up, but in a midweek sale it was $5 and I decided it looked interesting enough to pick up. This is a great example of what I spoke about here with respect to getting more people to buy a digital good by putting it on sale even if they don’t have shelf space to clear. Part of what drew me to the game was the decidedly retro-futuristic art style. It gives the game a very unique set of visuals. The 1920-40s music (I’m not 100% sure which decade) also helps add to the atmosphere.
There’s a new system of exchange of goods and services that threatens to rock the economic system and it’s not some new form of derivatives. Digital goods and services are growing larger and larger, but economics has not yet caught up. This is scary because more and more of our economy is based upon digital goods. In order to understand why I’m raising a fuss about this, we have to do a quick review of economics 101.
warning: The following contains many spoilers about Braid. I, personally, feel that your enjoyment of the game will be greatly reduced by reading this ahead of time. You have been warned!
I finished Braid last night. I did cheat a little. Of the 60 possible puzzle pieces, I used a walkthrough to get about 10 of them. Each of the ones that I used the walkthrough for (and I did not do this until I had spent a good chunk of time trying everything I had learned up to that point and even afterwards (since you could revisit worlds) were puzzles I would have NEVER solved. For example, the puzzle piece that is accessed by moving around the giant replica of the puzzle in the level would never, ever have occurred to me. Someone of a certain type of mind would surely have realized that the puzzles would not exist in the world if they did not have a purpose, but I could not figure this one out. And the fact that most of the puzzles are one-offs means that you never do this again.
That a game like Braid can exist is a statement on where video games are as an art form with a well-established history and canon. To make a parallel in the paint world: without a long canon of traditional paintings of tables with fruit and bread, people wouldn’t have really understood the “parody” or “remix” of a Cubist rendition of such a painting. In the same way, Braid is most enjoyable to those of us who have been playing video games for the past 20 years, growing up with Super Mario Bros. as our first video game experience. In fact, Braid does indeed make a few callbacks to this classic game which has almost become a scripture to us. Any game that allows users to design levels (eg Little Big Planet) cannot exist for more than a femptosecond before at least four people have recreated Super Mario Bros. World 1-1. Braid does nothing so brash and that’s where the game design genius begins to show. The game designer does not ape Mario, but hints at it here and there. One can almost see the developer giving you a knowing look and a nudge in the ribs. “Look here, I’ve made this or that subtle reference.” I don’t want to ruin it by speaking of it even though this game has been out for ~ a year already. It would ruin the delight of experiencing it.
I heard this on The Linux Outlaws Episode 42 and I thought it was a pretty awesome idea. Up until now Valve has been pretty hostile towards people asking them to release onto Linux, even threatening to ban anyone who brought it up in the forums. Apparently someone has convinced them of the merits because here’s the story that led Linux Outlaws to report the headline.
My brother, who is really into video games, has informed me that pretty much every computer game developer plans to release via Steam in the near future. This means that most people, who are always mentioning their only reason for keeping Windows around is to play games, can finally get rid of Windows for good!
So, the current solution for bridging with KVM/QEMU/Libvirt involves macvtap. This allows your VM to be seen by computers on the network which is key if you want to, say, run a server or DNS on a VM. However, there’s a catch - the host can’t reach the VM. Sometimes this doesn’t matter and sometimes it does. For example, if the guest is running DNS and you want the host to be able to use it for DNS, this is an issue. There is another way to do it, but it involves ditching Network Manager. I actually like Network Manager. So what am I to do?
I’ve never seen it this empty before, but it still had more food than most grocery stores, including Trader Joe. (Last image will be Trader Joe chips aisle)
I’ve never seen it this empty before, but it still had more food than most grocery stores, including Trader Joe. (Last image will be Trader Joe chips aisle)
I have VM running Emby that I set up a while ago on an low spec machine that had been the guest computer before everyone got Chromebooks and tablets. But it only had 2GB of RAM and I gave 1GB to the VM. So I added some new RAM to bring the system up to 8GB and wanted to start off by giving the VM 4GB to see if that improved performance.
I came across this in Target during Christmas time. Now, I am not a fan of the concept of the Elf on the Shelf and I’ve heard quite a few anecdotes of kids becoming freaked out - like the girl who called 911 because it fell and she didn’t want to touch it because kids are told that if they touch it they won’t get any presents. But between companies looking for a cash grab and those Jewish families who want to celebrate not-Christmas (like the ones where I went to high school that had Hanukkah Bushes (Christmas Trees with blue lights) and Hanukkah outside decorations), I guess this was inevitable.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post (ok, I think this’ll probably be the last one in a row…I’ve been busy!) . For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
The National Christmas Tree (it’s too bad that because of my schedule I won’t get to see it this year) and a few other random shots from last year’s period just before Christmas.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post (yeah, they’re back to back this time). For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
More Scarlett - this time getting the Christmas tree. It made me sad that we didn’t do the lights on her again this year. Then again, she might have wanted to do it all the time - so maybe that’s a good thing.
Here’s the desktop background for December. I know it’s Western-centric - perhaps next year will be more neutral. To use as your background just left-click on the appropriate image for your monitor size. Then right-click on the image and your browser will probably have an option called “set as desktop background”. If it doesn’t, you can save it to your computer and manually set it.
Kids at Christmas are awesome! Nearly every present that Anthony, Alex, and Lizzie got received a loud, “This is the best present ever! This is all I ever wanted!”
My mom usually sets this up under the tree (although never this elaborately). By moving it to a table in the living room she was able to do a really amazing job. Also kudos to Denny who helped her with the landscaping.
This is over a decade old, but I just discovered it.
‘Twas the night before Christmas and Santa’s a wreck…
How to live in a world that’s politically correct?
His workers no longer would answer to “Elves”,
“Vertically Challenged” they were calling themselves.
And labor conditions at the North Pole
Were alleged by the union to stifle the soul.
Four reindeer had vanished, without much propriety,
Released to the wilds by the Humane Society.
I wanted to wish a Merry Christmas to my readers, however many (or few) of you there are.
I hope this is a time of happiness and family fun for you. And, if you’re Christian, I hope this can also be a time of reflection for you upon the sacrifices Jesus made for you so that you don’t have to go to hell.
I came across this in Target during Christmas time. Now, I am not a fan of the concept of the Elf on the Shelf and I’ve heard quite a few anecdotes of kids becoming freaked out - like the girl who called 911 because it fell and she didn’t want to touch it because kids are told that if they touch it they won’t get any presents. But between companies looking for a cash grab and those Jewish families who want to celebrate not-Christmas (like the ones where I went to high school that had Hanukkah Bushes (Christmas Trees with blue lights) and Hanukkah outside decorations), I guess this was inevitable.
I came across this in Target during Christmas time. Now, I am not a fan of the concept of the Elf on the Shelf and I’ve heard quite a few anecdotes of kids becoming freaked out - like the girl who called 911 because it fell and she didn’t want to touch it because kids are told that if they touch it they won’t get any presents. But between companies looking for a cash grab and those Jewish families who want to celebrate not-Christmas (like the ones where I went to high school that had Hanukkah Bushes (Christmas Trees with blue lights) and Hanukkah outside decorations), I guess this was inevitable.
I came across this in Target during Christmas time. Now, I am not a fan of the concept of the Elf on the Shelf and I’ve heard quite a few anecdotes of kids becoming freaked out - like the girl who called 911 because it fell and she didn’t want to touch it because kids are told that if they touch it they won’t get any presents. But between companies looking for a cash grab and those Jewish families who want to celebrate not-Christmas (like the ones where I went to high school that had Hanukkah Bushes (Christmas Trees with blue lights) and Hanukkah outside decorations), I guess this was inevitable.
Recently I’ve been having a problem where the Emby server kept dying. I haven’t been able to figure out what is causing it. So while I’ve been trying to figure it out with the Emby folks, I fixed up the systemd script for Emby so that it would restart itself whenever it died. It was incredibly simple to do this. Here’s the original script:
[Unit]
Description=Emby Media Server
After=network.target
[Service]
EnvironmentFile=/etc/emby-server.conf
ExecStart=/usr/lib/emby-server/emby-server.sh start
Restart=on-abort
TimeoutSec=20
ExecStopPost=/usr/lib/emby-server/emby-server.sh clear
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
In my ideal home setup, I’d have computers in every room. I’m not horribly far off, but it’s mostly via old laptops and computers that I’ve retired from regular use or had donated from family members. As more of our movie purchases become BluRay (and with 4k video around the corner), some of those old computers just aren’t up to snuff when it comes to 720P and higher. I have a Roku 3 in the basement for running on the treadmill and that’s capable of handling higher quality video, but it’s not compatible with the way I’ve ripped my media. After a bit of investigation, it looked like Emby might be the right choice for me. So I installed it on the CentOS VM that runs my homeserver. The first thing I had to do to get it to work well was to change the Mono garbage collection.
Recently I’ve been having a problem where the Emby server kept dying. I haven’t been able to figure out what is causing it. So while I’ve been trying to figure it out with the Emby folks, I fixed up the systemd script for Emby so that it would restart itself whenever it died. It was incredibly simple to do this. Here’s the original script:
[Unit]
Description=Emby Media Server
After=network.target
[Service]
EnvironmentFile=/etc/emby-server.conf
ExecStart=/usr/lib/emby-server/emby-server.sh start
Restart=on-abort
TimeoutSec=20
ExecStopPost=/usr/lib/emby-server/emby-server.sh clear
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
I spent the weekend trying to figure out why SuperMario boots so slowly. I ended up overturning my ideas about what the problem was and learned a lot of new techniques. The only bad thing is that while I’m a lot closer to the problem, I’m still unsure of the root cause. So that the proper helpers can get credit, let me point you to the LinuxQuestions.org thread in which I worked this out. If you haven’t already clicked, don’t worry, I’m going to bring the relevant info over.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
Assassin’s Creed was the first game series Vinnie of Giant Bomb convinced me to try by talking about it endlessly on the Bombcast. The Witcher is the second. (This is why I miss his voice on that podcast so much) It has turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would. It’s based on the Bioware engine of the time, so it plays a lot like Mass Effect 1. The story is good so far and full of nice little jokes. You can watch my progress (I’ve been recording it for Extra Life) on this Youtube playlist.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
First of all, a quick reminder that my Game of the Year doesn’t necessarily have to come out in 2012. Because I don’t have the time to dedicate to video games, the price premium of buying it new rarely makes sense to me. So my Game of the Year will be my favorite game that I played in 2012.
As I compiled my list I realized that I played a lot less games in 2012. I may not have played a lot less hours (I haven’t bothered comparing the totals with 2011), but I definitely had a lot less variety. A lot of that has to do with the birth of my daughter this year. Only as the year has gone on have I been able to carve out some time here and there to play story-based games. In addition, I resumed pursuing my master’s degree in the fall, right around the time I was able to have a bit more time to myself. I didn’t have any gameplay at all in March, September or October.
[caption id=“attachment_5482” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Mass Effect 2 Space Graves”] [/caption]
Mass Effect 2 (19 hrs) - I knew my wife was getting close to delivering our first child, so I was rushing as quickly as I could to save the galaxy. I got to it with one week to spare. Phew! I didn’t enjoy the story as much as Mass Effect 1, but the gameplay was orders of magnitude better. For one thing I didn’t have to worry about having too many guns. (A frequent problem in the first entry) I also enjoyed the characters a little more (some of them, anyway). I ended up doing a lot more side missions and I felt they were well designed. If too much time doesn’t pass between when I finished the game and when I get free time to blog, I’ll do a writeup on Mass Effect 2 and how I liked it vs the first one. However, it would mostly be a long-winded version of what I said above and with the baby…. well, don’t hold your breath.
There aren’t any new games on here, so I’m only going to mention some quick comments on each.
Plants vs Zombies (29 hrs) - threw a bunch of hours into this game because I just had a handful of achievements left and for some reason I wanted to finish it off. 2 or 3 to go
Civilization V (9 hrs) - still love this game. I wish I had more time for it
[caption id=“attachment_5231” align=“alignleft” width=“150” caption=“A new level in Bastion”] [/caption]
While I’m not some video game hipster that doesn’t enjoy the Triple-A games, I have found myself increasingly having my most compelling game experiences on games created by indie or small studios. I think this is because indie studios are no different from starups, indie bands, and indie film makers in their willingness and ability to explore risky and new ideas. I felt the same way about Braid when I played it in 2009 as I do about Bastion this year.
Civilization V (75 hrs) - What can I say about this game that I haven’tsaidalready? This is the series that made “One More More Turn…” famous and it still works today. If I were to start a game tonight, I would not go to bed at a reasonable time.
With school over I had plenty of time to get back into video games last month. I had a blast!
Team Fortress 2 (6 hrs) - Got back into this game because my brother-in-law wanted to play it. I’d forgotten how awesomely fun it is to play this game!
Plants vs Zombies (5 hrs) - I wanted a quick game of fun so I went after some achievements in PvZ. I also found this game to be a blast.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
I’m a seasonal Team Fortress 2 player. Although I play it here and there at any time of year, I tend to really play a lot during October for the special Halloween missions. This year Valve was busy working on a new mode that was released earlier this week so they released a community-made Halloween mode: Invasion. It’s the first time I’ve spent any money since I spent $2.50 to get a bigger backpack a few years ago. Overall, the new modes were a lot of fun and I’m glad that Valve has gone from what should be the basic level of video game company support- supporting community mods- to allowing the best of the best to make money by sharing in the profits made during community events.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
I’m a seasonal Team Fortress 2 player. Although I play it here and there at any time of year, I tend to really play a lot during October for the special Halloween missions. This year Valve was busy working on a new mode that was released earlier this week so they released a community-made Halloween mode: Invasion. It’s the first time I’ve spent any money since I spent $2.50 to get a bigger backpack a few years ago. Overall, the new modes were a lot of fun and I’m glad that Valve has gone from what should be the basic level of video game company support- supporting community mods- to allowing the best of the best to make money by sharing in the profits made during community events.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
[caption id=“attachment_7243” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civilization V - against Dave - Fighting Barbarians at the Gates - 2620 BC[/caption]
Civilization V (48.5 hrs): As is usually the case, spent a ton of time with Civilization this year. Played about 3.5 hours less than last year, but had way more fun by playing with Dan and Dave. Things have gone a little slower recently because we’ve all been away for the holidays, but I actually feel like there’s a good chance of us finishing the game. At least the one I have with Dave which is much further along.
First of all, a quick reminder that my Game of the Year doesn’t necessarily have to come out in 2012. Because I don’t have the time to dedicate to video games, the price premium of buying it new rarely makes sense to me. So my Game of the Year will be my favorite game that I played in 2012.
As I compiled my list I realized that I played a lot less games in 2012. I may not have played a lot less hours (I haven’t bothered comparing the totals with 2011), but I definitely had a lot less variety. A lot of that has to do with the birth of my daughter this year. Only as the year has gone on have I been able to carve out some time here and there to play story-based games. In addition, I resumed pursuing my master’s degree in the fall, right around the time I was able to have a bit more time to myself. I didn’t have any gameplay at all in March, September or October.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
I’m a seasonal Team Fortress 2 player. Although I play it here and there at any time of year, I tend to really play a lot during October for the special Halloween missions. This year Valve was busy working on a new mode that was released earlier this week so they released a community-made Halloween mode: Invasion. It’s the first time I’ve spent any money since I spent $2.50 to get a bigger backpack a few years ago. Overall, the new modes were a lot of fun and I’m glad that Valve has gone from what should be the basic level of video game company support- supporting community mods- to allowing the best of the best to make money by sharing in the profits made during community events.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
First of all, a quick reminder that my Game of the Year doesn’t necessarily have to come out in 2012. Because I don’t have the time to dedicate to video games, the price premium of buying it new rarely makes sense to me. So my Game of the Year will be my favorite game that I played in 2012.
As I compiled my list I realized that I played a lot less games in 2012. I may not have played a lot less hours (I haven’t bothered comparing the totals with 2011), but I definitely had a lot less variety. A lot of that has to do with the birth of my daughter this year. Only as the year has gone on have I been able to carve out some time here and there to play story-based games. In addition, I resumed pursuing my master’s degree in the fall, right around the time I was able to have a bit more time to myself. I didn’t have any gameplay at all in March, September or October.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
Assassin’s Creed was the first game series Vinnie of Giant Bomb convinced me to try by talking about it endlessly on the Bombcast. The Witcher is the second. (This is why I miss his voice on that podcast so much) It has turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would. It’s based on the Bioware engine of the time, so it plays a lot like Mass Effect 1. The story is good so far and full of nice little jokes. You can watch my progress (I’ve been recording it for Extra Life) on this Youtube playlist.
[caption id=“attachment_7243” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civilization V - against Dave - Fighting Barbarians at the Gates - 2620 BC[/caption]
Civilization V (48.5 hrs): As is usually the case, spent a ton of time with Civilization this year. Played about 3.5 hours less than last year, but had way more fun by playing with Dan and Dave. Things have gone a little slower recently because we’ve all been away for the holidays, but I actually feel like there’s a good chance of us finishing the game. At least the one I have with Dave which is much further along.
[caption id=“attachment_7503” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Back to the Future: The Video Game - The Pseudonym Fun of the series continues[/caption]
Back to the Future: The Video Games (5 hrs) - As is the usual situation with these types of games, I figured out I had to get to the 1920s about 2 hours before I had triggered the right series of events that would allow me to get there. Got to see the sense of humor of the writers as I ended up meeting the high school principle’s sister who’s just as crotchety as he is. Apparently Doc is in trouble for starting a fire. Other than that I don’t know much as I wasn’t able to play very much of the game beyond the first 1920s scene with the principle’s sister.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
Yeah, so the first video I recorded in September is missing the video game footage. Whoops! Either way, I finished The Witcher this month. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, this is another game I tried thanks to the Giant Bomb guys - specifically Vinnie. I thought the game was overall a lot of fun. I feel like the throughline of the story could probably have been done a little better. Even before I spent a couple months away from the game, I was only tenuously connected to how my actions were leading to anything being done other than being against the Salamandra. Still, the story was neat and the twist at the end was pretty crazy in a good way. I look forward to The Witcher 2, but I probably won’t get to it until 2016 due to some family stuff coming up over the next few months.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
Civilization V (17 hrs) - I took advantage of the Steam Fall Sale to finally pick up the Gods and Kings expansion to Civ V. I have enjoyed founding my own religion, Otakuism. Religion plays a much more key role than they did in Civ IV. In the previous game, I would pretty much just found a religion because each city would pay me gold (with certain buildings or government choices) and I’d get a window into cities. In Civ V the religion plays like another level of policies. You get to choose a series of attributes for your religion such as temples giving you gold or faster territory expansion. It tends to make the expansion of religion to other cities and civs a much more important task than before. I’m still a little unsure of how cities pressure other cities to adopt religion because I seemed to have one city flipping even though I couldn’t see any reason for it. (Could have been another civ sending prophets my way) Spies are also added. The spy missions remind me of Assassin’s Creed:Brotherhood assassin missions. Unlike previous iterations of Civ, the spies aren’t on the map. You assign them to a city or city-state and then they either steal you tech (which may not be useful if you’re super advanced and/or playing normal or easier), rig elections in city states (gaining you influence), or protect your cities from being screwed over by other spies. I must admit that I haven’t done much investigating in the civclopedia, but I can’t really see how to generate more spies and so the whole system seems like a mini-game diversion. I continued my strategy of non-aggression unless another civ attacks me or denounces me. Then I drop my hammer on them and take over their capital city and, sometimes, eliminate them entirely. I like that the requirements on resources for building some units has been reconfigured. I usually ended up not using a lot of early-game siege weapons because iron tended to be too scarce. I think it’s a lot more balanced on which units need resources like oil, iron, and horses than before the expansion pack.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
I wanted to finish XCOM: Enemy Unknown before 2015 was over and I succeeded. Despite being screwed over by scripting errors in the big “dungeons”, I had a lot of fun with the game. The ending was slightly anti-climactic, but then again, this game only had the barest of storylines. I’d DEFINITELY play it again….once I finished going through the hundred or so unplayed games I already own.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
Civilization V (1 hr) - Dan, Dave, and I didn’t play too much because life got in the way and then the GMR servers went offline. We hope to play some more in the following month.
Poker Night 2 (30 minutes) - Testing out Steam’s internal streaming from Windows to Linux.
Poker Night 2 (3 hrs): Before going on my recent business trip I wanted to take a small break from school work so I played PN2 the night before my trip. I reached the point where I’ve heard all the in-game dialogue so many times that I don’t even listen any more. I can generally last a while, but I wasn’t able to win any tournaments. I usually got knocked out by the last man standing.
[caption id=“attachment_7750” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Poker Night 2[/caption]
Poker Night 2 (8 hrs) - I find Poker Night 2 to be a bit harder than the original. Not sure if they upped the AI or changed anything about it, but I find it a lot harder to win Texas Hold ‘Em in PN2. Luckily, this game also includes Omaha Hold ‘Em and I have been doing a lot better with that game. While I enjoy Samson, I find the Banter to be a little lacking compared to the original. I think the developers did a better job of defining the player’s relationships with each other in the previous game and that led to somewhat better banter. Still, it’s fun to play Poker without worrying about real money and it’s a lot of fun so I’ll probably put some more time into the game later in the year.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
Recently I was thinking about cataloguing my comic books. Recent family events convinced me to get on with it and so I spent all weekend putting the information into the KDE collection database Tellico. It had lots of useful fields to fill out, so I figured I was probably only going to do this once and so I may as well do it correctly. I entered in the names of the writers, pencillers, inkers, and so on. And I learned some interesting stuff.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
Civilization: Beyond Earth (7 hrs): This game was a great evolution on Civ V. I enjoyed that they continued with the same sense of humor. I also thought they did a good job evolving things so that it felt different enough. It’ll probably take a few games before I get the hang of all the government options.
Super Mario Galaxy (1 hr): Just wanted to get past the opening section on my emulator so I could not have to repeat that silly story section again if I even want to play some SMG. Also wanted to test the USB sensor Dan got me for Christmas.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
There are many times that The Giant Bombcast or other video game podcasts have led me to discover games I wouldn’t have otherwise considered: Peggle, Saint’s Row the Third, Assassin’s Creed, and The Witcher. But there was one time they did me wrong: XCOM: Enemy Unknown. They made it sound like it was just an exercise in frustration in which you died at every turn and it since it was made by Firaxis, I thought it was just going to look like Civ. Nothing wrong with that, but I already had Civ. But Dan got an extra copy at some point and gifted me this one. It’s been a blast and I’ve loved playing it even as it has started to kick my butt as the difficulty ramps up. If I had more time, I’d be playing this game A LOT.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
Yeah, so the first video I recorded in September is missing the video game footage. Whoops! Either way, I finished The Witcher this month. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, this is another game I tried thanks to the Giant Bomb guys - specifically Vinnie. I thought the game was overall a lot of fun. I feel like the throughline of the story could probably have been done a little better. Even before I spent a couple months away from the game, I was only tenuously connected to how my actions were leading to anything being done other than being against the Salamandra. Still, the story was neat and the twist at the end was pretty crazy in a good way. I look forward to The Witcher 2, but I probably won’t get to it until 2016 due to some family stuff coming up over the next few months.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
Yeah, so the first video I recorded in September is missing the video game footage. Whoops! Either way, I finished The Witcher this month. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, this is another game I tried thanks to the Giant Bomb guys - specifically Vinnie. I thought the game was overall a lot of fun. I feel like the throughline of the story could probably have been done a little better. Even before I spent a couple months away from the game, I was only tenuously connected to how my actions were leading to anything being done other than being against the Salamandra. Still, the story was neat and the twist at the end was pretty crazy in a good way. I look forward to The Witcher 2, but I probably won’t get to it until 2016 due to some family stuff coming up over the next few months.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
Yeah, so the first video I recorded in September is missing the video game footage. Whoops! Either way, I finished The Witcher this month. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, this is another game I tried thanks to the Giant Bomb guys - specifically Vinnie. I thought the game was overall a lot of fun. I feel like the throughline of the story could probably have been done a little better. Even before I spent a couple months away from the game, I was only tenuously connected to how my actions were leading to anything being done other than being against the Salamandra. Still, the story was neat and the twist at the end was pretty crazy in a good way. I look forward to The Witcher 2, but I probably won’t get to it until 2016 due to some family stuff coming up over the next few months.
The Witcher (3 hours): Finally had some time to get back to The Witcher. It definitely isn’t the type of game where you want to have long gaps between playthroughs. But there isn’t much I can do about it.
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (30 minutes): Scarlett just asked me if we could play Sonic. So we tried to get past the third world for a while, but I kept slipping up.
Assassin’s Creed was the first game series Vinnie of Giant Bomb convinced me to try by talking about it endlessly on the Bombcast. The Witcher is the second. (This is why I miss his voice on that podcast so much) It has turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would. It’s based on the Bioware engine of the time, so it plays a lot like Mass Effect 1. The story is good so far and full of nice little jokes. You can watch my progress (I’ve been recording it for Extra Life) on this Youtube playlist.
2015 turned out to be an incredible year for videos games for me. That’s a good thing because I was playing for the Extra Life charity to raise money for Johns Hopkins. I’d heard about it when the Giant Bomb guys spoke about it, but this year I had a reason - Johns Hopkins had saved Scarlett’s life twice! I’d experimented with recording myself playing video games when Dan started his Let’s Plays and used Camtasia. But there was no way I could justify paying $100 to record myself playing games. Then I discovered OBS which was, in typical FLOSS fashion, impossible to figure out. But then I found XSplit which had recently gone to having a freemium model. Once I learned what all the terminology was in XSplit I was able to go back to OBS - which I did because they actually catered to Linux in addition to Windows. The most fun moments have been when people have stepped into my Twitch or Youtube Gaming channels and chatted during the game. It brings back the social aspect that I grew up with back before everyone had internet.
I wanted to finish XCOM: Enemy Unknown before 2015 was over and I succeeded. Despite being screwed over by scripting errors in the big “dungeons”, I had a lot of fun with the game. The ending was slightly anti-climactic, but then again, this game only had the barest of storylines. I’d DEFINITELY play it again….once I finished going through the hundred or so unplayed games I already own.
I’m a seasonal Team Fortress 2 player. Although I play it here and there at any time of year, I tend to really play a lot during October for the special Halloween missions. This year Valve was busy working on a new mode that was released earlier this week so they released a community-made Halloween mode: Invasion. It’s the first time I’ve spent any money since I spent $2.50 to get a bigger backpack a few years ago. Overall, the new modes were a lot of fun and I’m glad that Valve has gone from what should be the basic level of video game company support- supporting community mods- to allowing the best of the best to make money by sharing in the profits made during community events.
Yeah, so the first video I recorded in September is missing the video game footage. Whoops! Either way, I finished The Witcher this month. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, this is another game I tried thanks to the Giant Bomb guys - specifically Vinnie. I thought the game was overall a lot of fun. I feel like the throughline of the story could probably have been done a little better. Even before I spent a couple months away from the game, I was only tenuously connected to how my actions were leading to anything being done other than being against the Salamandra. Still, the story was neat and the twist at the end was pretty crazy in a good way. I look forward to The Witcher 2, but I probably won’t get to it until 2016 due to some family stuff coming up over the next few months.
Assassin’s Creed was the first game series Vinnie of Giant Bomb convinced me to try by talking about it endlessly on the Bombcast. The Witcher is the second. (This is why I miss his voice on that podcast so much) It has turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would. It’s based on the Bioware engine of the time, so it plays a lot like Mass Effect 1. The story is good so far and full of nice little jokes. You can watch my progress (I’ve been recording it for Extra Life) on this Youtube playlist.
Civilization V (30 minutes) - We got a few turns in our multiplayer games, but other important things (like planning weddings, perhaps) have kept my brothers from sending me new turns.
Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+ (38 minutes) - I got it as part of a Humble Bundle because eventually my PS3 will die or be remotely disabled. As I have just transferred my Steam library to a new hard drive (more about that in a future post), I’m more confident in my ability to be able to play these games for a long time. Played a bit on the last day of Februrary to test my new Xbox 360 for Windows controller. It’s still as much fun as I remembered.
Civilization: Beyond Earth (7 hrs): This game was a great evolution on Civ V. I enjoyed that they continued with the same sense of humor. I also thought they did a good job evolving things so that it felt different enough. It’ll probably take a few games before I get the hang of all the government options.
Super Mario Galaxy (1 hr): Just wanted to get past the opening section on my emulator so I could not have to repeat that silly story section again if I even want to play some SMG. Also wanted to test the USB sensor Dan got me for Christmas.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
Civilization V (1 hr) - Dan, Dave, and I didn’t play too much because life got in the way and then the GMR servers went offline. We hope to play some more in the following month.
Poker Night 2 (30 minutes) - Testing out Steam’s internal streaming from Windows to Linux.
I noticed Dan was on my borders right when I started having the Cho Ku Nu, my special unit. Having played civ and RTS games with Dan, I figured it was strike or be struck. So I went to war. Unfortunately, Dan fights better than AI and because of the terrain features, it became a war of attrition that favored Dan. After a stalemate war, I offered peace and Dan accepted.
Dido tried to be opportunistic and attack me while I was at war with the Celts. Now she is facing my wrath. I will not stop until she has been wiped off the map.
[caption id=“attachment_7750” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Poker Night 2[/caption]
Poker Night 2 (8 hrs) - I find Poker Night 2 to be a bit harder than the original. Not sure if they upped the AI or changed anything about it, but I find it a lot harder to win Texas Hold ‘Em in PN2. Luckily, this game also includes Omaha Hold ‘Em and I have been doing a lot better with that game. While I enjoy Samson, I find the Banter to be a little lacking compared to the original. I think the developers did a better job of defining the player’s relationships with each other in the previous game and that led to somewhat better banter. Still, it’s fun to play Poker without worrying about real money and it’s a lot of fun so I’ll probably put some more time into the game later in the year.
Civilization 5 (5 hours): Still haven’t caught up on the blog posts. Still entirely consists of games with Dan and Dave. Dan gifted me the latest expansion pack during the Winter Steam Sale, so I may fire up a solo game. Time will tell - I still have a ton of indie games from Humble Bundles and even games Dan gave me for my birthday last year like LA Noire.
Skullgirls (<1hr): This game is a ridiculous fighting game that doesn’t take itself too seriously when it comes to the story. It’s a return to the fun of fighting games of the 1990s. At the same time, the mechanics of gameplay are no joke - we’ve been in a fighting game renaissance for the past five years or so and this game does not ignore that. I played it during a Steam free weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. If I had the time to dedicate to a fighting game, I’d buy it in an instant. If you enjoy games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, but think they’re a bit too self-serious, this game should definitely be checked out. Also, if you’re into anime (and I think there’s a lot of overlap between these groups), there’s a lot of poking fun at tropes of both fighting games an anime.
Civilization V (8 hours) - Keep following the tags ( Civ V: Lefties and Civ V: Mesa Bros ) or check out my Saturday posts (although this week I didn’t have one)
LIMBO (3 hours) - Here is my review of the game up to what I finished in September:
The order in which I play games is sometimes a little unnecessarily complicated. I’m often balancing many different variables when determining the next game to play. This time it was the fact that I wanted to listen to the LIMBO soundtrack. I’d obtained it as part of the Humble Bundle that gave me the game and because soundtracks can sometimes spoil plot elements, I didn’t want to listen to it until I’d played the game. The rest of this review will contain spoilers. The game is about 3 years old now, but if you want to play this game, go play it before you read anything about it.
[caption id=“attachment_7342” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civ 5 - Against Dave - Choosing Meritocracy[/caption]
Once again we made a choice to go with a new guiding principle in our governance. This time it was Meritocracy. By rewarding those who do the best work, our citizens become happier.
[caption id=“attachment_7347” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civ 5 - Against Dave - Trade Route[/caption]
If I may step out of the fictional narrative mode I’ve been using for a few weeks now, I have to say that it’s a shame these two games are my first Civ games in somewhere between 6 months and a year. Unfortunately, I didn’t listen to my brain for the first half dozen or so turns in which I wondered what in the world this Chinese-specfic building the “Paper Maker” was. Although, in my recollection, Civ IV also had the Cho Ku Nu for the Chinese Unit, it had Pagodas or some other either cultural or happiness producing building. It was only after being annoyed for Civ V not allowing me to see what it does while loading (I thought one of the older Civ games did allow you to hover over the special units and buildings to see what they do) that I went onto the Civ V Wikia during my lunch break. To quote the Bluth family, “I’ve made a huge mistake.” It’s meant to give the Chinese a huge early science boost that would help me not only combat the fact that I’m up in the arid north, but also would help me get a head start on Wonders. (I never have problems with Wonders when I’m only playing with AI, but my brothers often make it to the Wonders before me) Luckily for me, the game in which I have the biggest challenge - Dan and Dave - is also the slowest-going. So I’ve wasted less turns doing the wrong thing in that game than I have in the game with Dave.
[caption id=“attachment_7211” align=“aligncenter” width=“493”] Civilization 5 - against Dave - people from ancient ruins join the Chinese Empire - 3220 BC[/caption]
One of the ancient ruins explored by our soldiers had a group of uncivilized survivors. Seeing the awesome nature of our forces convinced them it would be in their best interest to join the Chinese Empire. Their extra labor was quite welcome.
[caption id=“attachment_7110” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civilization V game against Dave - 4000 BC[/caption]
Civilization V (31 hrs) - I’ve been playing with Dan and Dave via Giant Multiplayer Robot. You can follow posts about the game with Dave here. You can follow the posts about the game with Dan and Dave here. There will be a long overlap between those two, however, the one with Dave started a few weeks earlier and should finish earlier.
[caption id=“attachment_7159” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civilization 5 against Dave - 3460 BC - Ancient Ruins[/caption]
The first group of warriors we went out have reported back to me that they have found some ancient ruins. I have instructed them to search these ruins in the hopes that they will find the secrets of an ancient civilization or perhaps the remnants of some ancient civilization that may wish to join the Glorious Chinese Empire. These ruins are within a dense forest so it is no wonder they have been lost to time. The timber should prove useful as the empire grows. We have begun preparations for expanding the empire to a second city, but with how amazing our Empire is, it will take a while to have all the supplies ready. In the meanwhile we continue to explore this land.
[caption id=“attachment_7140” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civilization V against Dave - 3700 BC[/caption]
As I continue exploring, I discover that I have a City-State to the South. That’s going to put a damper on my expansion south unless I destroy them. Also, if they end up best buds with someone else that’s an enemy on my doorstep. They may be the first casualty of living near the Great Chinese Empire! I’m now beating Dave by one point! Yes! Even when I play on my own, I tend to use the last turn to queue up all my production so I don’t have to remember what my plans were. That’s extra important when I’m playing 1-2 turns per day. So I finally got around to that in this game.
Ever since the play by email (PBEM) feature in Civilization IV, I’ve tried to play multiplayer games with my brothers. It’s pretty ridiculous in this day and age that Civilization has Nintendo-level abysmal support for asynchronous play. The games often take 40 hours to complete solo and even longer when playing live so asynchronous play is the only way that makes sense to play a game.
This time around there’s a website called Giant Multiplayer Robot to handle passing the files around. Before I’d run a program with Civ IV to make it work more easily than emailing the games around, but GMR makes it extremely easy. You just install its client and authenticate with Steam. Then it lets you know when you have a turn to play.
First of all, a quick reminder that my Game of the Year doesn’t necessarily have to come out in 2012. Because I don’t have the time to dedicate to video games, the price premium of buying it new rarely makes sense to me. So my Game of the Year will be my favorite game that I played in 2012.
As I compiled my list I realized that I played a lot less games in 2012. I may not have played a lot less hours (I haven’t bothered comparing the totals with 2011), but I definitely had a lot less variety. A lot of that has to do with the birth of my daughter this year. Only as the year has gone on have I been able to carve out some time here and there to play story-based games. In addition, I resumed pursuing my master’s degree in the fall, right around the time I was able to have a bit more time to myself. I didn’t have any gameplay at all in March, September or October.
Civ V (11 Hrs) - talk of the expansion pack made me want to play some more Civ. I played a scenario and then I played a regular game. I had a blast and I can’t wait to buy the expansion pack.
Peggle Deluxe (5 hrs) - Worked on some of the challenge puzzles
Team Fortress 2 - (3 hrs) - played when the Pyro pack came out. Really enjoyed the new mode.
Got a little bit of time to play games while waiting to do midnight feeds. I’ve already spoken about these games a bunch of times, so it’s going to be a short post.
Civilization V (2 hrs)
Team Fortress 2 (2 hrs)
Cities XL (1 hr) - fun, but I can’t wait for Sim City 5 to come out!
Final Fantasy X (36 hrs) - I started playing this game again to get away from computer games. It was hurting my back to sit at the computer. I could just stand in the guest room, where the PS2 is. I hadn’t played for months or maybe even a year, but I hadn’t gone that far in the game, so I wasn’t too lost. (Unlike when I finished FF7 and didn’t even remember what the point was) I’m still not done, but it’s already knocked Assassin’s Creed II from long-time position as my #6 most played game raptr. It’s already taken me longer than Final Fantasy IX. There’ll be a review once I finish. I’m so close, but the final boss keeps kicking my butt. I may need to do some more grinding.
Civ 5 (70 hrs) - In March I fired up Civilization V for the first time since 16 Nov 2010. What was the catalyst? My wife asking what happened to all the enthusiasm for the game when it first came out. Well, as I’ve mentioned before, right after I got the game I played it for a week straight. Then I went on vacation to the Grand Canyon, to NYC for Halloween, had Thanksgiving and Christmas at my house, and a stronger focus on my webcomic. Her question reminded me of how much I loved the Civilization franchise. So I started playing and was reminded of why I loved it so much. It took me most of the first game to get back into the groove with Civ 5’s new quirks, but I really appreciated the improvements to AI. Civ V is now my most played game with 117 hours. (Finally surpassing Civ 4) Most of that time was added in March as I got sick and spent a few days home. The achievements in Civ 5 really played a key role in keeping me interested over so many hours. I did things I never would have done in order to get those achievements and now I have a much better understanding of how best to use those Civilizations.
I was on the phone with my dad a couple weekends ago and he asked if I was playing Civilization 5. He’d heard that Dan was playing it and was surprised that it was still around and Dan and I were still playing it. I told him I was playing it and reminded him that it was he who indirectly got us stuck on the series.
Back in the old days of the early 1990s, no one gave a second thought to sharing computer software with each other. Most people didn’t know about the public Internet or BBSes so, for the most part, there was no onerous digital restriction management (DRM) to keep people from sharing software. Some games had codes that you had to type in which were found in the manual, but manuals could be photocopied - after all, there were no authentication servers to connect to. I’ve spoken about this before, but those early “wild west” days lay the seeds for my software purchases over the last decade. A friend lent me 3.5” disks of Sim City 2000. I played that sucker everywhere. I’d take it wherever there would be computers and install it there to play until my parents said it was time to go. To this day, I’ve bought all the mainline Sim City products and expansion packs. So, who’s to say that today’s illicit software users aren’t building up affinities for software brands they’ll be loyal to when they have the cash.
To finish up talking about the game I left off in my last post, I won my first civ 5 game via conquest - a new one for me. I usually turtle and do a culture victory or science victory. It was only near the end of my time playing Civ IV that I started to become comfortable with domination victories. I ended up with a score of 2679, a score I have yet to best. The way the ending is now structured makes it easy to miss the old charts and graphs they’d always make you click through. So on that first game I missed out on finding out what historical leader I compared with. And, there doesn’t seem to be a way to access that. Other thoughts from this first game include that the construction pace feels a bit slower (like less buildings units built in a game) and Dan concurred once he played his own games. Great people now make their buildings outisde the city. This makes using them to make their special building more of a strategic process than in Civ IV. Great artists make monuments and those could end up obliterating a farm or some other tile modification. A final fun bit of art imitating life: in this game the Americans had taken over middle east.
I wanted to finish XCOM: Enemy Unknown before 2015 was over and I succeeded. Despite being screwed over by scripting errors in the big “dungeons”, I had a lot of fun with the game. The ending was slightly anti-climactic, but then again, this game only had the barest of storylines. I’d DEFINITELY play it again….once I finished going through the hundred or so unplayed games I already own.
There are many times that The Giant Bombcast or other video game podcasts have led me to discover games I wouldn’t have otherwise considered: Peggle, Saint’s Row the Third, Assassin’s Creed, and The Witcher. But there was one time they did me wrong: XCOM: Enemy Unknown. They made it sound like it was just an exercise in frustration in which you died at every turn and it since it was made by Firaxis, I thought it was just going to look like Civ. Nothing wrong with that, but I already had Civ. But Dan got an extra copy at some point and gifted me this one. It’s been a blast and I’ve loved playing it even as it has started to kick my butt as the difficulty ramps up. If I had more time, I’d be playing this game A LOT.
First of all, I strongly recommend reading this right after The Last Colony. It’s been as long time since I read it and so it took some effort for me to remember the original story beats this was supposed to be referencing.
Second, Scalzi does a great job retelling the story and adding lots of depth to it. It brought a new perspective to events from the last book. The contrast between the way adults and teens handled things seemed spot on.
I have rapidly become a Scalzi fanboy. I’m proof of the sentiment behind Scalzi’s new $3 million deal - when someone reads one Scalzi book, they read them all. I don’t believe it discounts what I’m going to say, but it’s worth noting up front. Starting with The God Engines and going through Red Shirts, I’ve built up a huge enjoyment for Scalzi’s style. What style is that? I’ve had a hard time articulating it to friends and family. Here’s my best shot - Old Man’s War is not a comedy, but it’s funny. It’s an like action movie, but it’s not dumb. The humor mostly comes from witty or sarcastic responses by the main characters. Even though it’s framed as a military action book, it’s mostly a series of character studies. I also enjoy that both within a book and within the series, Scalzi only doles out information as needed. This has two good effects. First, there are no info dumps - or if there’s more than one paragraph of explanation, it’s the only way Scalzi has of conveying it Second, as we learn more of the universe - either through our POV characters learning more or by going from regular army to special forces, it forces us to re-evaluate what we learned before in a new light. Most apt in that comparison is the scientist telling our main character early in the first book about how the space elevator is designed in such a way as to be a symbol of how much more advanced the Colonial Union is than Earth without revealing just how advanced. With all that’s learned (mostly in the second two books), the scale of that deception is truly realized.
This is a very short book. Well, technically it’s a novella - it even says so on the jacket flap. The MSRP is $25 and I think it’s not worth all that for how short it is. However, it’s $9 for hardcover or $5 on Kindle right now and I think that’s a fair price. Because it is so short, I finished it in one day over about two hours, but that’s actually an indication of how good I found it. Last night, just before bed I planned to read 2 more pages to finish the chapter I was on. But I was very intrigued by what had just happened in the book. I didn’t want to stop reading. I look at at how many pages I had left and spent the next half hour finishing the book. Had it been a longer book I would have put it aside and gone to bed.
(warning: This whole review is full of spoilers!) When I first heard about this book I thought about it in the same way that I thought of the Battleship movie. The Red Shirt joke is a fun joke that’s been parodied endlessly. But is it enough to sustain a book? Yes, and it works because of the way that Scalzi does it. He essentially turns it into a space version of Stranger than Fiction. The characters learn quite quickly that things are a little off and that some of the individuals on their ship appear to be impervious to death. They act with a realistic amount of skepticism until too much evidence mounts for them to be able to ignore the idea that something screwy is going on.
First of all, I strongly recommend reading this right after The Last Colony. It’s been as long time since I read it and so it took some effort for me to remember the original story beats this was supposed to be referencing.
Second, Scalzi does a great job retelling the story and adding lots of depth to it. It brought a new perspective to events from the last book. The contrast between the way adults and teens handled things seemed spot on.
I have not been a part of the Harry Potter fandom, so I don’t know if anything I’m going to mention here has been answered in interviews or wikis, etc. I doubt Ms Rowling had the entire seven book series planned from the beginning. However, it’s pretty clear that sometime around book 2 or 3 she did a general outline of the rest of the series because it has all fight together so nicely - and not in a cheap way. Again, not having been a part of the fandom, I’m unaware if there’s some glaring plot hole, but overall it seems to fit quite, quite well. Each book matured not just in the tone of the prose and the subject matter, but also in the lifting of the veil of protection kids feel from adults. The adults were revealed to be selfish and have impure motives and, in the case of the worst of them, no problems being violent to children.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a character study; a respite from the almost non-stop action of the last five books and the action that must follow in the next one. Therefore, barely anything happens in this book. It even has the delightful audacity to begin with a very British comedy scene involving the [metaphorical] heartburn suffered by the Prime Minister of England when visited by the Minister of Magic.
Harry’s always been wary of his celebrity status, but this book is the first time he’d really rather not be Harry Potter anymore. We learn more than ever about the wizarding world and finally see the Ministry of Magic. In an earlier book this would have been a whimsical journey of wonder. Here Harry learns a dark truth - the adult world is petty and unconcerned with justice. But let’s back a up a bit. The last book tore the last bit of the mask of a children’s story off as Harry had to watch a classmate die and come face to face with Voldemort and his top Death Eaters. It still came as quite a shock to find that Death Eaters had made their way to Uncle Vernon’s suburb and terrorize Dudley.
Everything Ms Rowling’s been setting up since at least book two came to a head in this book. Death Eaters, Dementors, the return of Lord Voldemort, why Snape is trusted by Dumbledore, and more. She had me on the look out for red herrings and I STILL got surprised by the villain (outside of Voldemort). The level of tragedy she allows to befall the characters continues to grow as her presumed audience continued to grow in age. This raises the stakes on Harry Potter and his allies as they are even more likely to run into trouble.
[caption id=“attachment_6598” align=“aligncenter” width=“443”] Rock the Universe (1999)[/caption]
The last time I went to Universal Studios Orlando was nearly 20 years ago for Rock the Universe 1999. It was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done - enjoying the park by day with all my close friends and then a series of concerts at night. Despite getting soaked by the night-time storms we had a blast.
This annoyingly catchy rap song with crazy dance moves (there’s even a video online by the rapper to show you how to do the dance) is being put into all kinds of mashups. For some reason, these all seem to involve kiddie movies and Tv shows. Anyway, this gave me a pretty good laugh for a while. So, even though I hate linking to youtube videos (since they have an annoying tendency to be taken off), check these out while they last. First, check out the original, so you know what they’re parodying.
For some reason gazebo-doc the Fedora 22 version conflicted with the Fedora 23 version so I had to delete that. Also, despite the system claiming that it would not have to download the packages again, it appeared to not actually work that way - at least the second time I ran things. (After removing Kernel-debug packages to get more space in /boot)
Overall, everything went relatively well. The only bad thing is that there was not a kmod-nvidia available for my current kernel in Fedora 23 so I had to boot into my old kernel in order to have the benefits of the proprietary driver. So later today if there’s time I’m going to see if there’s a kmod-nvidia for this kernel in rpmfusion-testing that I could install. Otherwise, I’ll just keep checking every few days and stay on the older kernel until then.
Now that it seems the nvidia driver that deals with the latest Xorg is available, I decided to try and upgrade my main computer, SuperMario. I started with the dnf commands:
As usual, old packages reared their ugly heads. They’d made it this far, but it was time to banish packages from Fedora 20 and even Fedora 15 that had survived this long.
There are many times that The Giant Bombcast or other video game podcasts have led me to discover games I wouldn’t have otherwise considered: Peggle, Saint’s Row the Third, Assassin’s Creed, and The Witcher. But there was one time they did me wrong: XCOM: Enemy Unknown. They made it sound like it was just an exercise in frustration in which you died at every turn and it since it was made by Firaxis, I thought it was just going to look like Civ. Nothing wrong with that, but I already had Civ. But Dan got an extra copy at some point and gifted me this one. It’s been a blast and I’ve loved playing it even as it has started to kick my butt as the difficulty ramps up. If I had more time, I’d be playing this game A LOT.
I’m a seasonal Team Fortress 2 player. Although I play it here and there at any time of year, I tend to really play a lot during October for the special Halloween missions. This year Valve was busy working on a new mode that was released earlier this week so they released a community-made Halloween mode: Invasion. It’s the first time I’ve spent any money since I spent $2.50 to get a bigger backpack a few years ago. Overall, the new modes were a lot of fun and I’m glad that Valve has gone from what should be the basic level of video game company support- supporting community mods- to allowing the best of the best to make money by sharing in the profits made during community events.
Assassin’s Creed was the first game series Vinnie of Giant Bomb convinced me to try by talking about it endlessly on the Bombcast. The Witcher is the second. (This is why I miss his voice on that podcast so much) It has turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would. It’s based on the Bioware engine of the time, so it plays a lot like Mass Effect 1. The story is good so far and full of nice little jokes. You can watch my progress (I’ve been recording it for Extra Life) on this Youtube playlist.
Civilization: Beyond Earth (7 hrs): This game was a great evolution on Civ V. I enjoyed that they continued with the same sense of humor. I also thought they did a good job evolving things so that it felt different enough. It’ll probably take a few games before I get the hang of all the government options.
Super Mario Galaxy (1 hr): Just wanted to get past the opening section on my emulator so I could not have to repeat that silly story section again if I even want to play some SMG. Also wanted to test the USB sensor Dan got me for Christmas.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
Civilization V (1 hr) - Dan, Dave, and I didn’t play too much because life got in the way and then the GMR servers went offline. We hope to play some more in the following month.
Poker Night 2 (30 minutes) - Testing out Steam’s internal streaming from Windows to Linux.
[caption id=“attachment_5805” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Saint’s Row The Third: The Ho Boat[/caption]
Saint’s Row the Third (14 hrs): I got a lot of video games for my birthday and Christmas (mostly on Steam). So I wanted to finish up the last narrative game I had started before playing those games. I played a few missions in Saint’s Row The Third. As I had surmised before, the loose narrative based mostly on archetypes and stereotypes made it extremely easy to jump in. It wasn’t like in Mass Effect or Final Fantasy 10 where I couldn’t remember why I should be caring about these characters. The missions with the VTOL planes (STAG missions) were pretty hard.
Civ V (11 Hrs) - talk of the expansion pack made me want to play some more Civ. I played a scenario and then I played a regular game. I had a blast and I can’t wait to buy the expansion pack.
Peggle Deluxe (5 hrs) - Worked on some of the challenge puzzles
Team Fortress 2 - (3 hrs) - played when the Pyro pack came out. Really enjoyed the new mode.
Got a little bit of time to play games while waiting to do midnight feeds. I’ve already spoken about these games a bunch of times, so it’s going to be a short post.
Civilization V (2 hrs)
Team Fortress 2 (2 hrs)
Cities XL (1 hr) - fun, but I can’t wait for Sim City 5 to come out!
[caption id=“attachment_5482” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Mass Effect 2 Space Graves”] [/caption]
Mass Effect 2 (19 hrs) - I knew my wife was getting close to delivering our first child, so I was rushing as quickly as I could to save the galaxy. I got to it with one week to spare. Phew! I didn’t enjoy the story as much as Mass Effect 1, but the gameplay was orders of magnitude better. For one thing I didn’t have to worry about having too many guns. (A frequent problem in the first entry) I also enjoyed the characters a little more (some of them, anyway). I ended up doing a lot more side missions and I felt they were well designed. If too much time doesn’t pass between when I finished the game and when I get free time to blog, I’ll do a writeup on Mass Effect 2 and how I liked it vs the first one. However, it would mostly be a long-winded version of what I said above and with the baby…. well, don’t hold your breath.
Civ 5 (70 hrs) - In March I fired up Civilization V for the first time since 16 Nov 2010. What was the catalyst? My wife asking what happened to all the enthusiasm for the game when it first came out. Well, as I’ve mentioned before, right after I got the game I played it for a week straight. Then I went on vacation to the Grand Canyon, to NYC for Halloween, had Thanksgiving and Christmas at my house, and a stronger focus on my webcomic. Her question reminded me of how much I loved the Civilization franchise. So I started playing and was reminded of why I loved it so much. It took me most of the first game to get back into the groove with Civ 5’s new quirks, but I really appreciated the improvements to AI. Civ V is now my most played game with 117 hours. (Finally surpassing Civ 4) Most of that time was added in March as I got sick and spent a few days home. The achievements in Civ 5 really played a key role in keeping me interested over so many hours. I did things I never would have done in order to get those achievements and now I have a much better understanding of how best to use those Civilizations.
To finish up talking about the game I left off in my last post, I won my first civ 5 game via conquest - a new one for me. I usually turtle and do a culture victory or science victory. It was only near the end of my time playing Civ IV that I started to become comfortable with domination victories. I ended up with a score of 2679, a score I have yet to best. The way the ending is now structured makes it easy to miss the old charts and graphs they’d always make you click through. So on that first game I missed out on finding out what historical leader I compared with. And, there doesn’t seem to be a way to access that. Other thoughts from this first game include that the construction pace feels a bit slower (like less buildings units built in a game) and Dan concurred once he played his own games. Great people now make their buildings outisde the city. This makes using them to make their special building more of a strategic process than in Civ IV. Great artists make monuments and those could end up obliterating a farm or some other tile modification. A final fun bit of art imitating life: in this game the Americans had taken over middle east.
?At first I ridiculed achievements/trophies. The idea that grown men and women (and, heck anyone over 12 years old) would care about getting these achievements enough to continue playing through their games until they earned them all seemed ludicrous. Then, I acknowledged it was a fun way to compete with friends in games that are otherwise single player experiences. In time I came to understand the idea behind achievements, both for compulsive people and regular folks. From my non-scientific observations, it appears that people who play video games tend to be more likely to be compulsive people. The video game companies figured this out and then realized that if they created trophies for all kinds of situations in a game, that most people would keep playing until they got all of them. Perhaps this would keep them from trading in a game long enough that it would kill the market for used games.
[caption id=“attachment_3621” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Civ 5 tells me I need to set some city production”] [/caption]
Interestingly, the game appears not to pop up and tell you to choose city production, you have to notice that in the bottom right, same for science and so on…..At least it doesn’t let you skip a turn before you worry about that. So I actually like it better. It was far too easy to say you’d deal with something later and then forget. And all the messages queue up there for you to read. I used ALWAYS lose track of those in civ 4. Especially since they used to appear when I was busy on something else and disappear before I could act on them. And here’s what it looks like when you decide to what to build.
[caption id=“attachment_3606” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Civilization 5 choosing the game to play”] [/caption]
The opening movie is AWESOME. Most of the visuals were from the trailers, but the frame story was great. Best intro thus far. I decided not to play the tutorial first since it appeared to be for those new to the Civ franchise. I chose Wu Zetian of China since I’ve been playing the Chinese almost my entire time with Civ IV. She has the “Art of War” which makes Great Generals spawn more often. Also the Cho-Ku-Nu unit (like Civ 4) and Paper Maker. I did a small continents map. And I made myself Settler, marked “for learning the game” so I figure it’ll be tutorial enough. And a standard game pace. I REALLY like the new menu system. It’s very well done. Sounds like Leonard Nimoy is still the narrator. I love how it describes my ruler and China in history. Pretty awesome. I let the wonderful narration read out before I “begin my journey”. I take a while to look for the screenshots and it comes up with hints. Pretty awesome. The Chinese music is great. Here are some screenshots. Another post later. Right now I want to play and the game gets annoying (freezes cpu) if I alt-tab out of it to get the screenshots.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Everything but the RAM”] [/caption]
14 Sept
Sometime in my junior or senior year of college I came across a book about building my own computer and resolved to do it. My tribulations with my Dell computer were enough to convince me that building computers with generic parts was the way to go. Later experience with my Emachine and the inability to tack on a DVD-writer (because they had blocked the slot with a metal mesh) confirmed this was the case. Just under five years ago I was finally able to do this and built my [first computer](/2006/01/03/new-computer-built/ /2006/01/07/building-the-computer/). I can’t believe it took me four hours to put that first one together. Nowadays, if things go well, it takes about an hour. In the time since then I’ve built 8 other computers. Of course, those weren’t all for me. I also built Dan and Dave’s newest computers, my father-in-law’s computer, his sister’s computer, and a bunch of others.
There are many times that The Giant Bombcast or other video game podcasts have led me to discover games I wouldn’t have otherwise considered: Peggle, Saint’s Row the Third, Assassin’s Creed, and The Witcher. But there was one time they did me wrong: XCOM: Enemy Unknown. They made it sound like it was just an exercise in frustration in which you died at every turn and it since it was made by Firaxis, I thought it was just going to look like Civ. Nothing wrong with that, but I already had Civ. But Dan got an extra copy at some point and gifted me this one. It’s been a blast and I’ve loved playing it even as it has started to kick my butt as the difficulty ramps up. If I had more time, I’d be playing this game A LOT.
I’m a seasonal Team Fortress 2 player. Although I play it here and there at any time of year, I tend to really play a lot during October for the special Halloween missions. This year Valve was busy working on a new mode that was released earlier this week so they released a community-made Halloween mode: Invasion. It’s the first time I’ve spent any money since I spent $2.50 to get a bigger backpack a few years ago. Overall, the new modes were a lot of fun and I’m glad that Valve has gone from what should be the basic level of video game company support- supporting community mods- to allowing the best of the best to make money by sharing in the profits made during community events.
Yeah, so the first video I recorded in September is missing the video game footage. Whoops! Either way, I finished The Witcher this month. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, this is another game I tried thanks to the Giant Bomb guys - specifically Vinnie. I thought the game was overall a lot of fun. I feel like the throughline of the story could probably have been done a little better. Even before I spent a couple months away from the game, I was only tenuously connected to how my actions were leading to anything being done other than being against the Salamandra. Still, the story was neat and the twist at the end was pretty crazy in a good way. I look forward to The Witcher 2, but I probably won’t get to it until 2016 due to some family stuff coming up over the next few months.
The Witcher (3 hours): Finally had some time to get back to The Witcher. It definitely isn’t the type of game where you want to have long gaps between playthroughs. But there isn’t much I can do about it.
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (30 minutes): Scarlett just asked me if we could play Sonic. So we tried to get past the third world for a while, but I kept slipping up.
Although, if you aren’t judgemental, I guess it’s a good thing it exists. I know some women (not Danielle, we both rarely drink alcohol) who had miserable pregnancies because they couldn’t drink. So at least this way if they want to drink now that the baby’s out, they can make sure the milk is alcohol-free.
Although, if you aren’t judgemental, I guess it’s a good thing it exists. I know some women (not Danielle, we both rarely drink alcohol) who had miserable pregnancies because they couldn’t drink. So at least this way if they want to drink now that the baby’s out, they can make sure the milk is alcohol-free.
The wedding day went the way these things always go. If you’re not involved you’re spending most of the day waiting around until it’s time to get your nice clothes on and go to enjoy the wedding. I went to get In-N-Out Burger for lunch and learned that Scarlett really, really likes french fries.
Wedding bells are ringing in today’s Top 200 Photo.
photo #125 is:
I saw this photo when I went to DC with Danielle’s parents to see the Cherry Blossoms. When we were waiting to cross the street back towards the mall I saw this awesome wedding limo. I’m sure they got some awesome photos for their wedding.
There will not be a #158 because it is a photo that was already covered. (Moved up quite a few ranks much faster than I thought it would)
photo #157 is:
This is a photo from the only time I was the paid photographer at a wedding. The bride was the sister of one of Danielle’s coworkers and needed to work on a budget. Working that wedding taught me that I enjoy photographing weddings a lot more when I’m not the official photographer.
The flower and garter tosses are when weddings really get wild and fun. The person throwing usually fakes the first throw. There are usually shenanigans going on in the receiving crowd. But, as a photographer, my favorite part is when the guy puts the garter on the woman who caught the bouquet. There’s a tension, ENCOURAGED by a good DJ, between pushing the boundaries of modesty and making the girl nervous. The rest of the guests usually help things out by cheering the man on. Sure, as I write this, I realize it’s pretty sexist, but at least it’s voluntary in that the women who get in line to catch the bouquet know exactly what’ll happen if they catch it.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“All the men in the wedding court”] [/caption]
Here are some of my favorite photos from the group portraits session. Some of these (mostly when it’s a group photo) were me “stealing” a setup that the official photographer had already set up. Many of the shots with one or two people are quick shots I grabbed while others were being shot by the official photographer. This is one of the reasons why people who have photographer friends are so lucky. I was able to capture tons of shots that the photographer couldn’t because she just couldn’t be in two places at once.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“This happens later, but it was a great photo to open with”] [/caption]
And so the ceremony began, starting with the couples approaching the aisle. I was able to get some great shots because I was using both my Rebel XT and Rebel XTi with the EF 28-105mm (and the lens hood to help mitigate lens flare) on one camera and the Tamron 55-200mm on the other. This allowed me to get close up shots no mater where the subjects happened to be standing.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Jen appears from across the lake”] [/caption]
Jen was no where to be found at the wedding location because she was actually across the lake for her grand entrance. None of the guests at the wedding knew about this so everyone was very excited. I went on to the docks to photograph her entrance.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The Entrance to the Wedding Location”] [/caption]
Our good friend Jennifer Bonass got married a couple weekends ago. The wedding was out in Chestertown, Maryland - out near Ocean City. Since there’s only one bridge to get there, we left early to make sure we’d get there on time. We got there insanely early (1-1.5 hours early) so I decided to take some photos of the setup to pass the time. Turned out to be a great thing I was there early because the official photographer was with Jen and they were at another location so I was the only one to get these shots. Here are some of my favourites.
These guys show up during rush hour every Friday. I don’t care if you agree or disagree with their views, but it’s so annoying that it backs up traffic as people try and read the signs.
Thanks to mom, now I have 18 GB of triple RAM on Bowser. Incidentally, it’s the first time I’ve used the Task Manager in Window 10 and it’s really slick! I like it - it matches the look/feel/usability of the similar utilities in KDE’s Plasma 5.
While it’s generally not needed for a general purpose Linux computer, when editing large RAW files it helps to have lots of RAM. But the biggest reason I upgrade the RAM on SuperMario was that Crashplan requires about 1GB of RAM per 1TB being backed up. With me moving everything but gaming over to SuperMario, I have 4.8TB of data to back up! It had been failing its backups and now, with 24GB of RAM it works quite well and I’m getting close to having everything backed up! Plus, there’s a lot less swapping of programs in and out of RAM!
When I first started playing with Linux I had a very crappy old computer; I think it was a 286. It was painful to try and do anything in Gnome or KDE, but it ended up making a pretty good server as it was the server that ran this site until late 2005 or early 2006 (I can’t remember). Then I moved onto another machine which was slightly better, a Pentium II 400 Mhz, 128 MB RAM computer. That computer ran a little better in Gnome or KDE, but I became a huge fan of Fluxbox as it ran best and I was able to use it as my almost-primary computer. It is now Luigi, my file/print server.
I created my first GPG key 10 years ago when I didn’t really know anything about encryption. So I have created a new key and signed it with my old one. You can find it here: My New GPG Key
I’ve also uploaded it to the servers supported by KGPG.
I have finally uploaded my public encryption key to the main pgp server that is the default on KGPG, the encryption program I use on my Linux computer. I also set up my Thunderbird email program to digitially sign all of the messages I send with my public key so that anyone who gets an email from my Gmail account will now have the assurance that I sent them the email and not someone spoofing me. In fact, if they have the ability to check GPG keys on their computer, they will be able to check the key against the server and make sure that the email has not been changed since I wrote it.
I created my first GPG key 10 years ago when I didn’t really know anything about encryption. So I have created a new key and signed it with my old one. You can find it here: My New GPG Key
I’ve also uploaded it to the servers supported by KGPG.
I recently had to reinstall an OS on the wife’s Dell Inspiron 17. I was unable to complete an install for Fedora 22, but Fedora 21 and Fedora 23 beta were able to install. It would always freeze mid-install - usually around 70 or 80%. From what I could gleam on the net, it has to do with a kernel issue. But I’m not 100% sure. Anyway, just putting this out there for anyone trying to get Fedora 22 on a Dell Inspiron 17.
The latest curl works with XBMC (now Kodi) so it’s time to upgrade my main Fedora computer.
fedup --network 21 --product=nonproduct
So that started running at 1427. The d/l finishes at 1500, but as usual some stuff to take care of. Mostly packages left over from previous versions of Fedora.
WARNING: problems were encountered during transaction test:
broken dependencies
kmod-nvidia-3.17.7-200.fc20.x86_64-1:331.113-1.fc20.x86_64 requires kernel-3.17.7-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.4-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.3-200.fc20.x86_64
kmod-nvidia-3.17.3-200.fc20.x86_64-1:331.104-1.fc20.x86_64 requires kernel-3.17.7-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.4-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.3-200.fc20.x86_64
nautilus-actions-3.2.2-4.fc20.x86_64 requires libgtop2-2.28.5-1.fc20.x86_64
xorg-x11-drv-r128-6.9.2-1.fc20.x86_64 requires xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.14.4-13.fc20.x86_64
directfb-1.6.2-3.fc19.x86_64 requires libmng-1.0.10-12.fc20.x86_64
kmod-nvidia-3.17.4-200.fc20.x86_64-1:331.113-1.fc20.x86_64 requires kernel-3.17.7-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.4-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.3-200.fc20.x86_64
libipoddevice-0.5.3-8.fc12.x86_64 requires libgtop2-2.28.5-1.fc20.x86_64
libbtctl-0.11.1-13.fc19.x86_64 requires openobex-1.5-9.fc20.x86_64
Continue with the upgrade at your own risk.
Time to sort that out. I also remove some of the really old stuff, stuff it lists as not having an upgrade - that I’ve had in there since Fedora 13 or so. In the end I’m left with the usual issue I have: my kmod-nvidia packages are tied to the Fedora 20 kernels. So, as usual, I’ll probably have to remove them and reinstall when I finish the upgrade.
Went off without a hitch. Like the new login theme. Waiting to make sure the curl in F21 works with Kodi (formerly XBMC) since the current newest version in 20 doesn’t work.
Booted it up in Virt-manager (which finally has bridging!) I love the new theme!
But, sadly, it logs into KDE4, not KDE5. Perhaps 5 isn’t ready for primetime?
What I find baffling, given that this is running in a VM is that it loads FASTER to the desktop than the computer it’s running on. I wish I knew which technologies I am running or which widgets are causing my KDE load to go so slowly.
Back when I was actively reviewing Linux distros and still learning all about Linux, it was in vogue to say that any distro was as good as the next. They all had the same GUIs and programs. The only difference was which package manager you preferred. Distributions started off, in fact, as a way to simplify Linux installations. Otherwise you’d have to go get the Linux kernel and then every package you wanted to install. Unlike Windows, Linux is just a kernel. If you just got Linux, you wouldn’t have tools or GUIs or anything. So the distributions give you all the programs you need to use your computer (which turns out to be WAY more than Windows for free (libre AND gratis).
I recently had to reinstall an OS on the wife’s Dell Inspiron 17. I was unable to complete an install for Fedora 22, but Fedora 21 and Fedora 23 beta were able to install. It would always freeze mid-install - usually around 70 or 80%. From what I could gleam on the net, it has to do with a kernel issue. But I’m not 100% sure. Anyway, just putting this out there for anyone trying to get Fedora 22 on a Dell Inspiron 17.
The wife told me she couldn’t print from her computer. Sure enough, I couldn’t print from mine either. I tried the trick from last time and ran
system-config-selinux
but selinux wasn’t responsible this time. So I removed the printer and this time I added it through the cups website: localhost:631. After doing that it worked.
I was having trouble printing and couldn’t figure out what was going on. I tried everything, including reinstalling the printer and reinstalling the driver. I was getting a misleading “you are using the wrong driver” message. Turns out SELinux was to blame! I happened to check dmesg and see some audit messages. Then I did a
setenforce 0
to turn it off and printing worked. I tried some restorecons on some directories, but I don’t think that fixed it. What I think fixed it was going into the policycoreutils gui and checking as active the cups module “Allow cups execmem/execstack.” Obviously, I turned setenforce back on after checking the box.
Today I was banging my head against the desk trying to figure out why I couldn’t ssh to one of my Fedora machines. I knew that while Fedora wasn’t the most secure Linux distro out there, it was more secure than many by default. That includes having a strict firewall set up. But I had already enabled ssh. What was going wrong? Well, it turns out that the ssh daemon is disabled by default! Just typing the following:
So I found out today that there is no way to re-enable different backgrounds and plasmoids per virtual desktop. It appears to be a mix of forcing people to finally use activities and a complication that was causing all kinds of bugs (according to their bugzilla). I was bummed for about an hour. The different backgrounds can make it very easy to know what virtual desktop you’re at without having to glance at the pager. And if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time longer than a couple months you have seen my Desktop Screenshots and know how much I customize it in KDE.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the next day, when I woke up, that plasma had loaded up despite the fact that I removed kmod-nvidia. Also, I did not have the same issue with KDM as I did with tanukimario. I was loaded in with the blue triangle background. I was greeted with the message “Your saved type “kde-plasma” is not valid any more. Please select a new one, otherwisee ‘default’ will be used.” I select “Plamsa” and am greeted with the KDE loading screen I’ve become oh-so familiar with.
Today was the big one, time to upgrade supermario, my workhorse machine. As usual I had to remove the kmod-nvidia packages. This time around, because my card was getting a little long in the tooth, it was the kmod-nvidia-340xx packages. I also had a bunch of plasmoid packages to get rid of that I didn’t need to remove on the other computers because I was only a heavy plasmoid user on this computer. Thankfully, I’d long since abandoned all the ones I had to get rid of. After running fedup 3 times (once initially, once after removing plasmoids, and once after removing kmod-nvidia packages) to make sure nothing was expected by the program to cause problems upon upgrade, I finally rebooted to upgrade. If the past is any indication, I should be able to get to a screen where I can reinstall kmod-nividia after the upgrades. I’m only a tiny bit worried that Fedora only seems to connect to the internet when a GUI comes up, but if it comes to that I’ll investigate what I need to do and be sure to publish the procedures here for anyone else in the same boat.
Today I upgraded my netbook. Interestingly, this had less problems than yesterday with the guest computer. Perhaps because I wasn’t using KDM on my netbook? Anyway, I was actually expecting a worse time, but it worked out. It appears that KDE Netbook edition didn’t make the jump to Plasma 5. But maybe it’s just a setting I need to discover. See, my netbook is a 2nd gen netbook - not a piece of garbage like our EEE Machine, but it has a sub-HD resolution and so using most programs is hard unless the Window Manager or Desktop Environment is getting rid of window decorations. So far, KDE 5 is OK. I may end up going to Fluxbox. (I did not like XFCE on this screen resolution) Here’s my desktop as of now:
Turns out that the issue was the Fedora SDDM theme. Once I changed that to the default KDE theme everything worked. I wonder what I need to do to get the Fedora theme so that works as well. At least I know for future computers what needs to be done.
Started off with the guest room computer as it’s the least used. If things go pear-shaped there’ll be less complaining. fedup had a complaint about the one of the dependencies of the Dolphin Emulator. I just uninstalled it for now. I’ll worry about reinstalling it later. Often during these upgrades it appears that the biggest source of issues are badly written dependencies; badly written in the sense that I end up having to remove the offending packages only to reinstall them post-upgrade without any issues.
It’ll be of no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I’m both a fan of the Fedora distribution of Linux as well as the KDE desktop. For the first time in six years, the KDE desktop is changing again. While the change is not as radical as the change from KDE 3 to KDE 4, it’s still a big technological change. I decided I couldn’t wait until May to experience it, so I took a look at the current beta from within virt-manager. Here’s the default desktop:
The wife told me she couldn’t print from her computer. Sure enough, I couldn’t print from mine either. I tried the trick from last time and ran
system-config-selinux
but selinux wasn’t responsible this time. So I removed the printer and this time I added it through the cups website: localhost:631. After doing that it worked.
For the past week I’ve had a huge surge in people viewing the image above. I saw that it was mostly from Google and not flickr. I was wondering why and then I realized I could see the search terms brining people to the image. Here are the search terms bringing people over:
1 tweedle dee and tweedle dum costumes 19
2 tweedle dee and tweedle dum 10
3 tweedle dee and tweedle dum costume 6
4 tweedledee and tweedledum 6
5 tweedle dee hats 2
6 tweedledee and tweedledum costumes 2
7 tweedle dee 2
8 image of tweedledee and tweedledum 2
9 tweedledee tweedledum costume women 2
10 tweedle dum and tweedle dee costumes 2
11 tweedle dee and tweedle dum women costumes 1
12 tweedle dee tweedle dum costume 1
13 woman tweedle dee and tweedle dum costumes 1
14 tweedle dum tweedle dee outfits 1
15 womens tweedle dee costume 1
16 what do tweedle dee and tweedle dum say in… 1
17 “tweedle dee and tweedle dum” 1
18 tweedle dee and tweedle dumb costumes 1
19 tweddle dee and tweedle dum costumes 1
Last weekend Danielle and I went to Borders so Danielle could check out the Buffy graphic novels and I could pick up Watchmen. While in the graphic novel section I started looking around to see what new books were out in this space and I came across Beyond Wonderland and Return to Wonderland, two comics in Zenoscope’s Grimm Fairy Tales line. From the busty cover on Beyond Wonderland, I thought it might be like Clamp’s Miyuki-chan in Wonderland.
I’m a big Tim Burton fan and I also tend to like his casting of Johnny Depp. But I’m no fanboy: I found Tim Burton’s take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to be worse than the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The first thing I have to get off my chest and the thought that was pervasive in my mind nearly to the point of preventing my enjoyment of the movie is that this movie should really have been titled Return to Wonderland. If you’re into movies, you probably already knew this, and so did I. But I can imagine lots of people who just see a commercial or see the name and think it’ll be a live action version of the old Disney movie. (It doesn’t help that Disney is behind this version as well) So, in this version, we have an adult Alice about who runs away from her marriage proposal and into the rabbit hole.
I was watching Gold Diggers of ‘49 the other day with my daughter as we made our way through old cartoon shorts. That’s how I grew up - on Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the other WB shorts along with the Disney shorts. Sometimes, late at night, they’d show the black and white cartoons like this one, but I mostly found the black and white cartoons boring. They came from a time when animation was very experimental and new so people were impressed that these drawings could move around. There often isn’t much in the way of plot and the jokes are usually broad gags carried over from vaudeville.
I was watching Gold Diggers of ‘49 the other day with my daughter as we made our way through old cartoon shorts. That’s how I grew up - on Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the other WB shorts along with the Disney shorts. Sometimes, late at night, they’d show the black and white cartoons like this one, but I mostly found the black and white cartoons boring. They came from a time when animation was very experimental and new so people were impressed that these drawings could move around. There often isn’t much in the way of plot and the jokes are usually broad gags carried over from vaudeville.
This year has been an incredibly racist year from people being afraid to vote for Barack Obama because they believe he’s a secret Muslim (so? Any American-born person should be allowed to run for president) to people who say he’s too black or not black enough. Now this old guy claims that Obama’s an Oreo and it’s unfair for him to reap the rewards of the Civil Rights battles of the previous generations.
Obama will not be the first African-American President of the United States. Barack Obama will be the first mulatto President of the United States of America. This is the myth of race in the USA. Apparently because Barack is half-black, he’s the first African-American President. But if he’s half-black then he’s also half-white. So why isn’t he just the 40-somethingith white President of the US? I don’t understand, if one half is valid, why isn’t the other?
On Hardball on MSNBC they were talking about Barack Obama’s poor bowling performance during his campaigning in Pennsylvania. One of their political commentators quipped, “Perhaps he should have stuck to shooting hoops.” I absolutely couldn’t believe they would say something like that on the news. And it wasn’t some random yahoo, it was someone that I’ve seen on MSNBC making political commentary in the past. If it matters in how you think of this, this commentator was white.
I’ve always been a bookworm and so around the age of 11 or 12 I asked all my male and female friends whether they would vote for a black man or a white woman for president. Everyone, male and female alike would always say black man. I was surprised that the ladies didn’t stick up for one of their own. I was so surprised, that I would ask my friends this question every couple of years. We moved a little and I also changed who I hung out with so I wasn’t always asking the same people. Yet, even though high school and college a majority would say they would rather go for a black man.
I was watching Gold Diggers of ‘49 the other day with my daughter as we made our way through old cartoon shorts. That’s how I grew up - on Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the other WB shorts along with the Disney shorts. Sometimes, late at night, they’d show the black and white cartoons like this one, but I mostly found the black and white cartoons boring. They came from a time when animation was very experimental and new so people were impressed that these drawings could move around. There often isn’t much in the way of plot and the jokes are usually broad gags carried over from vaudeville.
We went apple-picking just about midway into October, but this year only the Stayman apples had ripened by that time.
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-016
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-047
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-045
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-040
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-032
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-026-1
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-026
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-064
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-084
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-078
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-073
Larriland-Farm-2015-10-11-071
They had this creepy-looking building near the apples, so I decided to take a photo. While I was processing it, I couldn’t decide which look I liked best, so here are my favorites:
A while back I wrote about geotagging my photos when I was using Lightroom. I wanted to demonstrate how much easier it is with Digikam as everything’s built in and it works nicely and quickly.
For the first time in something like 3 years I took my Sigma 120-400mm lens to the zoo. I had intended to get some Firefox (Red Panda) photos and videos, but they weren’t there. That was also a bummer for Scarlett as seeing the Red Pandas was the reason she’d asked us to take her to the zoo.
First off we saw one of the pandas:
But what was a lot of fun was taking photos of the birds; birds that would have been quite hard for me to see in the wild. I think they came out pretty nicely considering the darkness in the bird house and the fact that I was hand-holding the lens. It seems like some of the higher ISO photos didn’t even have too much noise, so I’ll explore using it in the future to get the exposure a little more correct in camera. (if the photos look blurry when you click on them, give it a little time to load)
Another photo of Tai Shan. This time he’s small enough to get on these flimsy branches without falling immediately. It was fun to watch him test the branches to see if they would hold his weight.
I mentioned Tai Shan before. This is his father, Tian Tian. My wife is always expressing how pandas should be extinct already from having such a dumb diet. They eat bamboo, but it is so nutrient deficient that they essentially have to eat non-stop or they will end up actually losing weight by just laying around and being alive.
Another photo from Otakon. I was especially happy to see these guys at Otakon. Ranma ½ was the first anime I ever saw. It was my entry into the whole genre. I remember discovering it at a video rental store in Tualatin, OR. They had some VHS tapes of Seasons 2 and 3. I remember being so psyched that there were cartoons that weren’t for kids. I couldn’t wait for them to get the next tape. I spent all my time in the library at school researching Ranma and learning about the story and getting into fan fiction for the first time. If I’d been born about a decade later I probably would have really gotten into the whole fan-sub scene. Bandwidth was just too small back in those days.
What’s black and white and #173? Today’s Top 200 Photos entry.
photo #173 is:
For about a year, we were obsessed with Tai Shan, the baby panda at The National Zoo. We went at least once a month to go photograph him and watch him act all cute. This triptych is from his first birthday. The giant pink Popsicle is his birthday “cake”.
Recently we went to the pumpkin patch to get a couple pumpkins for the house and for Scarlett to have some fun at the farm. Here’s a gallery of my favorite photos from that visit and aftermath:
Recently we went to the pumpkin patch to get a couple pumpkins for the house and for Scarlett to have some fun at the farm. Here’s a gallery of my favorite photos from that visit and aftermath:
Coney Island is quite photogenic at night, but even I surprised myself (who had gone a few years ago specifically to take photos there are night) with just how photogenic when I got on the carousel with Scarlett (and her cousins). Here are some photos from that night:
The original Top 200 Photo #16 was:
and now it’s:
which has fallen just one position from #15. Pretty funny that they’re both fireworks - although on very different scales!
Here are your new desktop backgrounds for July 2011!
Just click on the one that matches your monitor type and then either right-click and set as desktop or save it to your computer and save it as your desktop manually.
My wife and I love The Oatmeal. While I don’t find each strip funny, I certainly love strips like this one or this one. So I was extremely excited to back the Exploding Kittens kickstarter. Back when I first got it I took it to New York, excited to play it with my wife and her sister.
Exploding Kittens 002
Exploding Kittens 009
Exploding Kittens 008
Exploding Kittens 006
Exploding Kittens 005
While I think the rules create a pretty interesting game, they got caught up on the cards themselves. So I don’t think I’m going to have anyone to play it with, but I do recommend it for its interesting rule set.
My wife and I love The Oatmeal. While I don’t find each strip funny, I certainly love strips like this one or this one. So I was extremely excited to back the Exploding Kittens kickstarter. Back when I first got it I took it to New York, excited to play it with my wife and her sister.
Exploding Kittens 002
Exploding Kittens 009
Exploding Kittens 008
Exploding Kittens 006
Exploding Kittens 005
While I think the rules create a pretty interesting game, they got caught up on the cards themselves. So I don’t think I’m going to have anyone to play it with, but I do recommend it for its interesting rule set.
The local Olive Garden has added these devices to the tables. My first thought was to be annoyed at the fact that this thing takes up a significant chunk of the table. Then I messed with it a bit - it seems to be mostly a neat idea with one think that’s a bit out of place in a semi-classy joint like Olive Garden.
Let’s look at the positive aspect first - you can order drinks or ask for your drinks to be replenished. This helps to alleviate one of the biggest sources of annoyance when out to eat. You also pay on this device so if you’re completely done and don’t need boxes, you can just pay and leave. While a place with good service that isn’t swamped shouldn’t leave you wondering if you should skip the check because you’ve been waiting over 15 minutes for the check, it does occasionally happen. Again - happy customers.
When Dan and Katie were last in town, they invited Scarlett and I out to the Papermoon Diner. If you’ve seen John Waters movies and wondered if that Baltimore still exists, it certainly has one enclave at the Papermoon Diner. If you’ve been to a TGI Friday’s or a Chili’s you’ve seen restaurants with crap on the walls.
Well, the Papermoon Diner takes that and filters it through a Baltimore sensibility:
I heard about this on Boing Boing and then a month later on Marketplace: a sushi restaurant in New York that has eliminated tipping. Sushi Yasuda decided that instead of making people sit there at the end of the meal and agonize over how much to give the wait staff, they’ll just pay them the right amount and not charge the patrons tip. This means that they had to raise prices accordingly, approximately 18%, but I’m quite supportive of that. If there’s one thing I’ve come to hate, especially as money has become more tight since the baby was born, it’s that the true price of eating out is hidden from me. I don’t want to have to take out my calculator and do a bunch of math (sum everyone’s entree and add 18%) to know the true cost of the meal. I want to have a reasonable idea as I order how much money I’m going to spend. This also gets around the issue that comes up everywhere from Reservoir Dogs to any time tipping is brought up on the Internet: how much is the right amount to tip and is it ever ok not to tip? Everyone has crazy different rationals on this and I think just including the tip in the price and paying a living wage gets around that. Really, the only people who benefit from the current system are the credit card companies and restaurants who see us ordering more than we can actually afford because the prices aren’t higher. If a federal living wage law were passed, everyone’s prices would go up at once and restaurants wouldn’t have to worry about being at a competitive disadvantage for raising prices. Then again, maybe it’s not a bad thing to be a first mover while people still think of tipping as customary:
On 30 April of this year I came across an article on Eater about how restaurants can deal with No-Shows. I didn’t even know this was a big enough thing that restaurants have multiple strategies to deal with it. Every time I’ve made a reservation to a restaurant, I’ve gone. I set reservations because I (or I and my wife and whoever else is involved) have decided to go out to eat and want to be sure we’ll not have to wait too long to be seated. Or, in the of exclusive restaurants, ensure we’ll actually get a table. I could understand people not showing up because of a life event - someone gets sick or dies. But I don’t understand the mindset of making a reservation without an intention to attend. Additionally, the biggest reason I make reservations is, as stated above, to ensure I get a table in a reasonable amount of time. Nearly every place I’ve ever made reservations at has a line out the door and even with a reservation I sometimes have to wait 15-30 minutes for my table. That said, they wouldn’t write this whole article if there weren’t a bunch of people skipping out on reservations so I wanted to answer their suggestions.
When Dan and Katie were last in town, they invited Scarlett and I out to the Papermoon Diner. If you’ve seen John Waters movies and wondered if that Baltimore still exists, it certainly has one enclave at the Papermoon Diner. If you’ve been to a TGI Friday’s or a Chili’s you’ve seen restaurants with crap on the walls.
Well, the Papermoon Diner takes that and filters it through a Baltimore sensibility:
I’ve been meditating on a blog post about the riot in my figurative backyard. While I’m still unsure if whether I’ll end up writing anything about it, I came across some interesting MLK Jr quotes today.
A riot is the language of the unheard.
Martin Luther King Jr
and this one seems to apply not only to what I’ve heard about Baltimore, but also to what I’ve heard about Fergusson and New York City:
This photo is not photoshopped in any way. This photo, taken in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, is just an example of how cameras can help us see things differently. If you leave the shutter open long enough to have the scene lit up, you can some unique colors. In this case, I left it open for 5 seconds. So as the photons collected on the camera, the scene lit up in a way I could never experience with the naked eye.
Another photo from Otakon. I was especially happy to see these guys at Otakon. Ranma ½ was the first anime I ever saw. It was my entry into the whole genre. I remember discovering it at a video rental store in Tualatin, OR. They had some VHS tapes of Seasons 2 and 3. I remember being so psyched that there were cartoons that weren’t for kids. I couldn’t wait for them to get the next tape. I spent all my time in the library at school researching Ranma and learning about the story and getting into fan fiction for the first time. If I’d been born about a decade later I probably would have really gotten into the whole fan-sub scene. Bandwidth was just too small back in those days.
Concerts are certainly a funny bit of entertainment. When you go see a movie, you are going because you like the director or the actors or the idea sounded interesting. You see that movie and that’s the end of it. The same holds true for Broadway shows or Operas. But when you attended a concert, you have a few opening acts you probably don’t know. This is somewhat alleviated nowadays for the well prepared by a quick trip to Spotify or Youtube. After finally seeing The Protomen during last year’s Warped Tour, I was excited about seeing them in concert. My ticket informed me that I’d also be seeing Cowabunga Pizza Time and Lionize. Of course, the difference between concerts and other forms of entertainment is no accident. Opening bands are limpets on the bodies of larger acts, hoping to gain exposure to the fans of the main act. This works best when the organizer has paired up bands that work well together thematically. But, this is the obvious reason why you never know the time the main act is going on stage.
For the second quarter in a row The Beatles have NOT made the list! But that’s easily explained: I have been listening to a lot of new music and a lot of playlists that don’t include The Beatles. But as you’ll see, they kinda snuck in sideways. This quarter I spent a lot of time listening to Jonathan Coulton and I Fight Dragons because of their Kickstarters, which I backed. I Fight Dragons released two albums as Kickstarter bonuses - a live recording of their most recent concert and a remix album of sorts in which the band members sung different arrangements of the songs. There was also the new Fall Out Boy album, Save Rock and Roll. I really enjoyed the album but it was overtaken in my mind by the previously mentioned IFD and JoCo music and I quickly forgot they had a new album out. Again, that’s a shame since I did enjoy it and while I was in Florida last week I quickly tired of “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark”. Incidentally, I was reminded of why I stopped listening to live radio - it’s far too repetitive. I think the true problem is that it’s too formulaic in its repetition. I didn’t mind hearing “The Princess Who Saved Herself” every day for a week because the songs surrounding it were always different. On a separate note, I got some music for Father’s Day and I’ll mention that below.
For people of my generation (and the younger ones of the previous one) video games are cultural phenomenon no less important to the way our brains work than books, music, or movies. So it’s no surprise that our music, which has been inspired by books and movies in the past is now being inspired by video games. What was surprising to me were all the different manifestations this inspiration has taken.
When I was growing up, I used to draw comics all the time. So when I heard about web comics I thought it was natural to create one of my own. Dan and I worked on I’m Not Mad for a few years, but it eventually fell off due to limitations in my ability to create female characters in Blender. When I got my drawing tablet (a Monoprice), I thought I might get back into it. But I have come to terms with the fact that I will never have the time commitment to get back into it. I will fulfill my desire to create by photography and blog posts. I’ve always been loathe to let go of URLs and taking stuff off the net, but we have The Wayback Machine. You can see I’m Not Mad at https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.notmadcomic.com
My first passion is photography. It’s something I’ve done all my life. (I think anything done continuously from about the age of five or six is all my life) I love coming up with an idea to shoot. Composing the frame is an artform. I love the emotional effect photography can produce in others. There’s one other hobby that’s been a constant for nearly all of my life — creating comics.
I’ve always been one of those guys that believe you should try everything you want to do. Just throw it at the wall and see what sticks. That’s how I got into blogging back in 2003. (Holy cow, almost exactly 5 years to the day) It’s also how I got into computer animation. And photography. But it’s also how I figured out that I am not into chemistry, weather phenomenon, Macintoshes, etc
So, I was working on fixing up some armature problems with the characters for I’m Not Mad. If you watch David’s Lip Sync you can see there were some major fixes needed for the Dan and Dave characters. Well, in the time since I started working on the character models Blender 2.46 was released. In 2.46 a new Hair Particle system was added to make working with hair a lot easier. So, here’s the David character’s new hair.
Well, I’m filling up my space time with programming and animation. Here’s what I’m currently up to with animation. First of all, there’s " Sugar" . I have the script and most of the props complete for the animation. I got a little frustrated when I was working onNick’s armature and started working on programming and some other projects. I intend to get back to Sugar very soon now and finish it up by the end of the year.
When I was growing up, I used to draw comics all the time. So when I heard about web comics I thought it was natural to create one of my own. Dan and I worked on I’m Not Mad for a few years, but it eventually fell off due to limitations in my ability to create female characters in Blender. When I got my drawing tablet (a Monoprice), I thought I might get back into it. But I have come to terms with the fact that I will never have the time commitment to get back into it. I will fulfill my desire to create by photography and blog posts. I’ve always been loathe to let go of URLs and taking stuff off the net, but we have The Wayback Machine. You can see I’m Not Mad at https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.notmadcomic.com
Scarlett had been obsessed with Mickey and the Beanstalk so I HAD to snap the photo that heads up this post. But there were also some interesting things going on at PDX as I made my way home:
Everywhere on the net that I go where any discussion of media takes place, people get upset whenever someone takes a critical look at the roles the women play in any one piece of media. But Caroline Siede has the perfect explanation in her most recent AV Club article titled, If you like Return of the Jedi, but hate the Ewoks, you understand feminist criticism:
“ Return Of The Jedi is great, but the Ewoks are so annoying.” That’s a pretty common refrain from Star Wars fans. In fact there are whole fan edits dedicated to removing the little fuzzy bears from the film’s climax; I can only assume they’re made by the most hardcore of Star Wars lovers. The idea that a movie can be good despite its weaker elements is one of the most basic tenets of film criticism. Yet when it comes to dissecting films from a feminist viewpoint, we seem to have trouble keeping that in mind.
This year happened to contain one of the driest summers the Pacific Northwest had seen. There were lots of fire raging, some intentionally set and some caused by nature. On the way to the Bachelor Party caving trip, I saw this immense plume of smoke from a fire.
I’d been to lots of caverns before, so that’s what I expected from this bachelor party trip. I first suspected I was wrong when I couldn’t find a sign for the place. My suspicions grew when Dave arrived (along with other attendees) and we just started walking into the woods. As we arrived at the entrance Dave told us that one can be sure he’s arriving at the entrance to a cave by spotting mosquitoes. Turns out we were going into a lava tube. I thought that meant we’d be walking in a cave that was fine as glass. Instead it was as if someone had chosen a cave to dump a bunch of rocks. We did see some baby stalagtites, though.
This year happened to contain one of the driest summers the Pacific Northwest had seen. There were lots of fire raging, some intentionally set and some caused by nature. On the way to the Bachelor Party caving trip, I saw this immense plume of smoke from a fire.
I’d been to lots of caverns before, so that’s what I expected from this bachelor party trip. I first suspected I was wrong when I couldn’t find a sign for the place. My suspicions grew when Dave arrived (along with other attendees) and we just started walking into the woods. As we arrived at the entrance Dave told us that one can be sure he’s arriving at the entrance to a cave by spotting mosquitoes. Turns out we were going into a lava tube. I thought that meant we’d be walking in a cave that was fine as glass. Instead it was as if someone had chosen a cave to dump a bunch of rocks. We did see some baby stalagtites, though.
A while ago I went to the Pacific Northwest for Dave’s wedding. I finally am getting caught up with my photos from back then. It was a fun trip because we’d lived in Oregon for a few years when I was a kid so I was able to revisit some fun areas.
First up was Multnomah Falls. It is the second tallest falls in the US and it’s a really neat hike. Because of timing and Scarlett being 3 (and unlikely to be able to hike back and forth) we only went up to the lower level. But it was still neat to be reminded of the great outdoors areas in Oregon.
This year happened to contain one of the driest summers the Pacific Northwest had seen. There were lots of fire raging, some intentionally set and some caused by nature. On the way to the Bachelor Party caving trip, I saw this immense plume of smoke from a fire.
I’d been to lots of caverns before, so that’s what I expected from this bachelor party trip. I first suspected I was wrong when I couldn’t find a sign for the place. My suspicions grew when Dave arrived (along with other attendees) and we just started walking into the woods. As we arrived at the entrance Dave told us that one can be sure he’s arriving at the entrance to a cave by spotting mosquitoes. Turns out we were going into a lava tube. I thought that meant we’d be walking in a cave that was fine as glass. Instead it was as if someone had chosen a cave to dump a bunch of rocks. We did see some baby stalagtites, though.
This year happened to contain one of the driest summers the Pacific Northwest had seen. There were lots of fire raging, some intentionally set and some caused by nature. On the way to the Bachelor Party caving trip, I saw this immense plume of smoke from a fire.
I’d been to lots of caverns before, so that’s what I expected from this bachelor party trip. I first suspected I was wrong when I couldn’t find a sign for the place. My suspicions grew when Dave arrived (along with other attendees) and we just started walking into the woods. As we arrived at the entrance Dave told us that one can be sure he’s arriving at the entrance to a cave by spotting mosquitoes. Turns out we were going into a lava tube. I thought that meant we’d be walking in a cave that was fine as glass. Instead it was as if someone had chosen a cave to dump a bunch of rocks. We did see some baby stalagtites, though.
I “lost” my optical drives. I had to mess with a registry key to get them back.
Here’s one I didn’t realize until I went to play Civ 5 and my saves were all gone. Because I have my main OS on a small SSD (and originally had my games on a regular hard drive - now they’re on their own bigger SSD), I had My Docs and My Pictures pointing to another drive. The Windows 10 upgrade lost those settings. I had to open up Windows Explorer and right click on each of those and change the location on the location tab.
After waiting for a bit, turned out that the only real issue with Windows 10 is that you shouldn’t do Express Install unless you want Microsoft spying on everything. Also, now that I’m doing photography on Linux (another post about that at some point), the only thing I had to lose was the ability to play games for a while. The updater was pretty self explanatory and the process was more or less similar to a Fedora upgrade.
Some people still treat TV as if it’s the boob tube (that’s boob as in dummy, not breast). But Scarlett’s kid’s cartoons led her to learn some stuff that led to the following exchange:
Danielle (rhetorically): Why does this monkey have a frog on its head?
Eric: It’s Swedish. (The toy is from Ikea)
Danielle: What?
Scarlett: No, it’s symbiosis!
Eric: Symbiosis? (I wonder if she knows what it means) What does that mean?
I’ve been dreaming (no foolin’) about this for two or more years now - having one computer running Linux with a Windows VM for gaming when there aren’t Linux ports. Less hardware overhead for me. But until now VMs haven’t been able to gain native use of the graphics card. This guy figured out how to do it and it’s great. I’m likely going to do this next time I do a CPU/Motherboard refresh.
I’ve been dreaming (no foolin’) about this for two or more years now - having one computer running Linux with a Windows VM for gaming when there aren’t Linux ports. Less hardware overhead for me. But until now VMs haven’t been able to gain native use of the graphics card. This guy figured out how to do it and it’s great. I’m likely going to do this next time I do a CPU/Motherboard refresh.
After waiting for a bit, turned out that the only real issue with Windows 10 is that you shouldn’t do Express Install unless you want Microsoft spying on everything. Also, now that I’m doing photography on Linux (another post about that at some point), the only thing I had to lose was the ability to play games for a while. The updater was pretty self explanatory and the process was more or less similar to a Fedora upgrade.
After waiting for a bit, turned out that the only real issue with Windows 10 is that you shouldn’t do Express Install unless you want Microsoft spying on everything. Also, now that I’m doing photography on Linux (another post about that at some point), the only thing I had to lose was the ability to play games for a while. The updater was pretty self explanatory and the process was more or less similar to a Fedora upgrade.
I spent the weekend trying to figure out why SuperMario boots so slowly. I ended up overturning my ideas about what the problem was and learned a lot of new techniques. The only bad thing is that while I’m a lot closer to the problem, I’m still unsure of the root cause. So that the proper helpers can get credit, let me point you to the LinuxQuestions.org thread in which I worked this out. If you haven’t already clicked, don’t worry, I’m going to bring the relevant info over.
I spent the weekend trying to figure out why SuperMario boots so slowly. I ended up overturning my ideas about what the problem was and learned a lot of new techniques. The only bad thing is that while I’m a lot closer to the problem, I’m still unsure of the root cause. So that the proper helpers can get credit, let me point you to the LinuxQuestions.org thread in which I worked this out. If you haven’t already clicked, don’t worry, I’m going to bring the relevant info over.
Scarlett had a good time picking apples, so Danielle thought it’d be neat to take Scarlett strawberry picking. I was pretty surprised at how many people were there.
When we arrived, they gave us a box to fill with strawberries. Scarlett was quite excited about carrying the box over to the fields.
Unsurprisingly, it was mostly Danielle and I - with Scarlett putting in one or two strawberries at a time.
When we went to my graduate degree graduation, it was also Alex’s birthday so we went to see Aladdin on Broadway. It was really good. Danielle and I enjoy Broadway shows, but have not really enjoyed the Disney Broadway shows. Mary Poppins in particular was quite a disappointment. Aladdin, on the other hand, hews a lot closer to the story that movie audiences remember. The only changes they make have to do with the fact that it’s harder on broadway to have animal characters. So instead of Abu, Aladdin gains a few friends (and a fun song about them in which they are busking. Iago becomes a man who seems to be doing a mix between Sam Kinison and Gilbert Godfrey. While we’re talking about impressions, one of Aladdin’s buddies appears to be doing an impression of Horshach from Welcome Back Kotter. Of course, the star of the show is Genie who plays on our stereotypes of overweight people to impress as he does the most impressive feats of broadway of the entire cast.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday I went to see Mike Burbiglia on his Broadway show “Sleepwalk with Me”. I wasn’t going to blog about it originally, but during the performance he mentioned that he gets Google alerts about himself. He used to Google himself, but then he set it up to get Google to do it for him. Since I know that Google indexes my blog, I thought I’d blog about the performance.
It wasn’t until this year that I realized I was no longer in control of my personal narrative. I believed that I could be in charge of how private or public my life was. But it’s become increasingly obvious this year that it’s not in Facebook’s financial interest for me to be able to control my narrative. Too many of us are disengaging with the social network to a large degree. So now others can post about me and tag me and there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s quite frustrating that all too many conversations nowadays begin with, “please don’t post this to Facebook.” It just makes me want to turn in on myself and spend less time socializing. Because, at least for now, anything that happens in my home when I’m by myself will only end up on the Internet if Danielle and I both want it online.
Sure, it’s a tired and cliche phrase, but hurray for the wisdom of the crowd. I’ve received comments on identi.ca, twitter, and in the comments here with answers to nearly all my problems with KDE. Let’s see if I can get them all to work. First off, I was told that my problem with Konversation not getting my password in time to keep me from being signed into the fedora-unregistered could be solved by setting the password as a server password. Alright! That worked! woohoo! Before I’d had it set to just run the /msg identify command.
I came to a disturbing realization the other day - I’ve come to feel that whatever isn’t online isn’t real. This came about thanks to the Wii’s insanely stupid online policy. Everything about playing online with the Wii is an exercise in frustrating the user. Rather than always be connected to the net when the console is on (like modern computers, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3), the Wii attempts to connect to the game servers at the time you wish to play the game. This leads to the very frustrated experience of wanting to play online, loading up into the game you want to play and then realizing that the system is having problems connecting to the Internet. So you have to back out to the Wii menu and trouble-shoot the problem. This wouldn’t be so vexing if it didn’t take the Wii ages to load games, including the “don’t throw your effing Wiimote around” warning every time! Even in games where it doesn’t make sense! (Like Rock Band)
When most people think of the GPL, if they think of it at all, they tend to think of Linux and perhaps other operating systems. However, there are many benefits to using the GPL for programs on a smaller level. For example there is a Go Application in Facebook. This programmer could have gone through the near impossible headache of creating an implementation of Go.
However, as Wikipedia mentions, it is very tough to create sofware to play go, “While the strongest computer chess software has defeated top players ( Deep Blue beat the world champion in 1997), the best Go programs only manage to reach an average amateur level.” This has to do with the high complexity level of the game’s strategy.
Mugshot is the website that continues to surprise me the more I use it. At first it was just a website with an unusual purple theme. Then it was the very frustrating site with the purple theme. Now it just may be one of the most interesting and underrated sites of the year.
In case you haven’t clicked on the link yet, Mugshot is a social web aggregator. You sign up to Mugshot and then let it know about all of the social networks you’re a part of such as Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, delicious, Picasa, digg and Reddit. Additionally, you add in some feeds from Amazon.com, last.fm, and Netflix. Finally, if you enter your blog address it tracks new posts. It then uses this to track all of these in one convenient place. The thinking is that you and your friends all sign up for Mugshot and then you have one-stop-shopping to find out everything that’s up with your friends.
Flock has completely changed how I interact with the so-called Social Web. In my case, that means Facebook and Flickr. Ever since I first started using Flock and received the help I needed to get the blogging to work, I’ve been using it every day. In fact, that only thing that has kept me from having it be my only/default browser is that it’s extremely slow in Flickr when loading pages. Also, in any pages with videos (whether from Youtube or Vimeo) there is a video and audio stutter that renders the video unwatchable. But that’s the only real negative I’ve been able to find with Flock.
On my trip to the Grand Canyon I read Cory Doctorow’s second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. The book begins in media res with the main character informing us that he’s in an insane asylum and that he is deciding whether to give himself a lobotomy with a pencil. We also quickly learn he believes himself to be set up. I always find it to provide a very interesting tension when experiencing works of art that begin in the middle. Most of the time, as happens with Eastern Standard Tribe, the current story is interrupted to tell how we got here. Of course, this leaves the reader (or watcher in the case of a movie) playing the mental game of trying to figure out how we end up back at the beginning. You know the main character can’t die (unless it’s a work in which resurrection is allowed - plus some other ways that writers can be tricky and mean) and you know that no matter where he ends up going, he’ll end up in the location at the beginning. Regular books, as you know, leave you in the dark about where you’re headed. Doctorow chooses to tell the story in the same manner of Momento, switching between the past and the present, rather than focusing on the past until we’re caught up. This technique made it fun because even as you see how he ends up imprisoned, you are seeing his plans for getting out.
Today I just finished Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It’s the first epub book I’ve ever read and the first ebook I’ve read that I hadn’t previously read as a physical book. I’d been wanting to read the book for a long time, but the idea of sitting at my desk to read or plugging my laptop in and reading wasn’t appealing. In fact, I almost bought the Barnes and Noble Nook to read Cory’s book, but I’m convinced there’s a pricedrop coming given the Kindle’s recent price drop. Finally, I took at trip Let me just say that I recommend it to anyone who’s a fan of science fiction. I will now get into my thoughts about the book - there will be SPOILERS!
SDDM just kept crashing on my system. I can’t figure out what’s screwed up about it. And when it would get me to a KDE desktop, I couldn’t click on anything. So it’s back to KDM for now…
Around a year ago I decided to KDE in Spanish to learn some technical terms. Back then I was using GDM, but now I’m using KDM. I didn’t see a way to set the language! How would I change the language to Spanish? I took a look online and found instructions. I’m going to reproduce them here for others. The great thing about the way that KDE handles things vs the way that Gnome does is that you can set a fallback language. When might this be useful? Let’s take a Vietnamese computer user. Vietnamese people (at least of a certain age) tend to be fluent in Vietnamese and French with some familiarity with English. So a Vietnamese person could set his computer to Vietnamese with a fallback to French for any programs that didn’t have translations into Vietnamese. As usual, I LOVE the level of customization in the KDE desktop.
SDDM just kept crashing on my system. I can’t figure out what’s screwed up about it. And when it would get me to a KDE desktop, I couldn’t click on anything. So it’s back to KDM for now…
Whenever I boot up post upgrade to Fedora 22, it takes much longer to load KDM than it used to. So I thought maybe it has something to do with Wayland and the fact that KDM is EOL’d. So I thought I’d convert to SDDM. I had no idea how to change DMs in the modern day, so I decided to look it up and ask on LinuxQuestions.org. Eventually, I found it on a stack overflow page:
The Witcher (3 hours): Finally had some time to get back to The Witcher. It definitely isn’t the type of game where you want to have long gaps between playthroughs. But there isn’t much I can do about it.
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (30 minutes): Scarlett just asked me if we could play Sonic. So we tried to get past the third world for a while, but I kept slipping up.
I’ve been a fan of Weird Al for about 17 years. I used to have the Disney special Weird Al Going Home, but unfortunately, I lent it to someone and never got it back. Yet, in all the time, I’d never seen a Weird Al concert live. Finally, Weird Al came to Baltimore as part of his Mandatory Fun Tour and I was able to experience an Al Tour. It was a pretty neat experience. It’s only something like the fourth arena concert I’ve been to (even thought it wasn’t technically in an arena). The last arena concert I went to was Rihanna. Interestingly, Weird Al had WAY more costume changes than she did. He had just about one outfit per song with few exceptions. While he was changing, clips played from nearly every video Weird Al has ever been involved in.
Throughout the month of October I alternated between listening to newly acquired music (of which I had quite a bit) and a dynamic playlist that was weighted so that most of the music had auto-ratings above 90, less music above 75, and even less above 50. Any song that I listened to only once would fit in the third category. After that, if I skipped it just once it would fall out of the group. So it gave me a nice mix of music including forgotten favorites. Now that I’ve listened to a good chunk of my library since the last time the Amarok database was corrupted I may modify the playlist to include the caveat that it couldn’t have been played in the last x days. I’m not sure if I want to make the date large enough that I only hear songs once per quarter or my standard two week waiting period. Given how little time I have to listen to music nowadays I might go for the 90 days. I also spent some chunks of time listening to my music on random on Google Music. That’s completely random so I end up hearing some songs I didn’t even remember ever acquiring. A lot of my new music came from Jamendo when I got an email with the month’s most popular songs and I decided to do a search for ska. Although I really enjoy ska, I got into it rather late so I don’t have very much ska music. (Mostly just Five Iron Frenzy, Save Ferris, No Doubt, and the Orange County Supertones - who are an OK ska band - I mostly like their least ska songs)
I have KDE connect installed on my computer and phone. KDE connect allows phone alerts to appear on my computer - letting me see if I’m getting a text or something. It just went off, letting me know I had a phone call. What’s neat is that I was listening to music and it paused the music until the phone call was over. While there might be some circumstances where that wouldn’t be the best default (say a party where I was playing the music), it’s certainly neat in the context of a personal computer.
Until recently I’d never used a DSLR that was capable of video. Oh, I’d had plenty of point-and-shoot cameras that were capable of shooting video, but not DSLRs. Thanks to my mom, I now have the Canon EOS Rebel T6s Digital SLR and I wanted to try out the video. On the first day, with the auto-focus I was annoyed because it’s incredibly loud on the onboard microphone. More or less impossible to shoot film that way until you’re going to have an external mic. So I played around with it with manual focus. Here is the result:
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Box”] [/caption]
[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“240” caption=“Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens on its box”] [/caption]
Recently I got my fifth lens, the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II, Canon’s entry-level nifty fifty lens. This is the cheapest lens Canon makes and, build-wise, it shows. Unlike the other lenses I own (even the kit lens), the 50mm is very plastic-looking and plastic-feeling.
Until recently I’d never used a DSLR that was capable of video. Oh, I’d had plenty of point-and-shoot cameras that were capable of shooting video, but not DSLRs. Thanks to my mom, I now have the Canon EOS Rebel T6s Digital SLR and I wanted to try out the video. On the first day, with the auto-focus I was annoyed because it’s incredibly loud on the onboard microphone. More or less impossible to shoot film that way until you’re going to have an external mic. So I played around with it with manual focus. Here is the result:
This may not be your thing. I’m pretty sure my wife will hate it, but I think Pogo’s work is a perfect example of why culture needs to be free and with less onerous copyright rules. I’m pretty sure all of this is within fair use, but it would take a legal fight for him (or her) to win rather than just give up to Disney’s (and other studios) army of lawyers.
This may not be your thing. I’m pretty sure my wife will hate it, but I think Pogo’s work is a perfect example of why culture needs to be free and with less onerous copyright rules. I’m pretty sure all of this is within fair use, but it would take a legal fight for him (or her) to win rather than just give up to Disney’s (and other studios) army of lawyers.
This may not be your thing. I’m pretty sure my wife will hate it, but I think Pogo’s work is a perfect example of why culture needs to be free and with less onerous copyright rules. I’m pretty sure all of this is within fair use, but it would take a legal fight for him (or her) to win rather than just give up to Disney’s (and other studios) army of lawyers.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the next day, when I woke up, that plasma had loaded up despite the fact that I removed kmod-nvidia. Also, I did not have the same issue with KDM as I did with tanukimario. I was loaded in with the blue triangle background. I was greeted with the message “Your saved type “kde-plasma” is not valid any more. Please select a new one, otherwisee ‘default’ will be used.” I select “Plamsa” and am greeted with the KDE loading screen I’ve become oh-so familiar with.
Today was the big one, time to upgrade supermario, my workhorse machine. As usual I had to remove the kmod-nvidia packages. This time around, because my card was getting a little long in the tooth, it was the kmod-nvidia-340xx packages. I also had a bunch of plasmoid packages to get rid of that I didn’t need to remove on the other computers because I was only a heavy plasmoid user on this computer. Thankfully, I’d long since abandoned all the ones I had to get rid of. After running fedup 3 times (once initially, once after removing plasmoids, and once after removing kmod-nvidia packages) to make sure nothing was expected by the program to cause problems upon upgrade, I finally rebooted to upgrade. If the past is any indication, I should be able to get to a screen where I can reinstall kmod-nividia after the upgrades. I’m only a tiny bit worried that Fedora only seems to connect to the internet when a GUI comes up, but if it comes to that I’ll investigate what I need to do and be sure to publish the procedures here for anyone else in the same boat.
Today I upgraded my netbook. Interestingly, this had less problems than yesterday with the guest computer. Perhaps because I wasn’t using KDM on my netbook? Anyway, I was actually expecting a worse time, but it worked out. It appears that KDE Netbook edition didn’t make the jump to Plasma 5. But maybe it’s just a setting I need to discover. See, my netbook is a 2nd gen netbook - not a piece of garbage like our EEE Machine, but it has a sub-HD resolution and so using most programs is hard unless the Window Manager or Desktop Environment is getting rid of window decorations. So far, KDE 5 is OK. I may end up going to Fluxbox. (I did not like XFCE on this screen resolution) Here’s my desktop as of now:
Turns out that the issue was the Fedora SDDM theme. Once I changed that to the default KDE theme everything worked. I wonder what I need to do to get the Fedora theme so that works as well. At least I know for future computers what needs to be done.
Started off with the guest room computer as it’s the least used. If things go pear-shaped there’ll be less complaining. fedup had a complaint about the one of the dependencies of the Dolphin Emulator. I just uninstalled it for now. I’ll worry about reinstalling it later. Often during these upgrades it appears that the biggest source of issues are badly written dependencies; badly written in the sense that I end up having to remove the offending packages only to reinstall them post-upgrade without any issues.
The latest curl works with XBMC (now Kodi) so it’s time to upgrade my main Fedora computer.
fedup --network 21 --product=nonproduct
So that started running at 1427. The d/l finishes at 1500, but as usual some stuff to take care of. Mostly packages left over from previous versions of Fedora.
WARNING: problems were encountered during transaction test:
broken dependencies
kmod-nvidia-3.17.7-200.fc20.x86_64-1:331.113-1.fc20.x86_64 requires kernel-3.17.7-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.4-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.3-200.fc20.x86_64
kmod-nvidia-3.17.3-200.fc20.x86_64-1:331.104-1.fc20.x86_64 requires kernel-3.17.7-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.4-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.3-200.fc20.x86_64
nautilus-actions-3.2.2-4.fc20.x86_64 requires libgtop2-2.28.5-1.fc20.x86_64
xorg-x11-drv-r128-6.9.2-1.fc20.x86_64 requires xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.14.4-13.fc20.x86_64
directfb-1.6.2-3.fc19.x86_64 requires libmng-1.0.10-12.fc20.x86_64
kmod-nvidia-3.17.4-200.fc20.x86_64-1:331.113-1.fc20.x86_64 requires kernel-3.17.7-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.4-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.3-200.fc20.x86_64
libipoddevice-0.5.3-8.fc12.x86_64 requires libgtop2-2.28.5-1.fc20.x86_64
libbtctl-0.11.1-13.fc19.x86_64 requires openobex-1.5-9.fc20.x86_64
Continue with the upgrade at your own risk.
Time to sort that out. I also remove some of the really old stuff, stuff it lists as not having an upgrade - that I’ve had in there since Fedora 13 or so. In the end I’m left with the usual issue I have: my kmod-nvidia packages are tied to the Fedora 20 kernels. So, as usual, I’ll probably have to remove them and reinstall when I finish the upgrade.
Went off without a hitch. Like the new login theme. Waiting to make sure the curl in F21 works with Kodi (formerly XBMC) since the current newest version in 20 doesn’t work.
The original fedup - 0.7 - did not work. Upgrade to 0.8 and then it complained about three packages - gthumb, picard-freeworld, and kipi-plugins. I THINK what happened is that my Fedora 19 version was the same or greater than the version in Fedora 20, but the dependencies were written in such a way as to not allow greater library versions. In other words, depends on library 1.0 and so version 1.1 doesn’t work. Sometimes that can be an important hedge against APIs changing, but often it can lead to annoying upgrades and updates. There are times where I couldn’t update a bunch of packages because of another. So I would remove that one and upgrade (or update) and later I could reinstall it. So I removed these packages and proceeded with the upgrade. It still complained about nvidia (which is really the only thing that is a problem after every upgrade)
When I was in my senior year at Cornell, my adviser tried to get me to enroll into graduate school. My dad had advised me to wait and see what it turned out I wanted to specialize in. Also, I’d likely be able to get work to pay for my degree. My adviser told me I’d never end up getting a graduate degree. Those who don’t do it right away end up procrastinating forever and don’t get one. I knew I’d work at getting one, so I didn’t pay him any mind. I went to work and work did have a program by which they paid for college classes. But I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go. Almost everyone went to Johns Hopkins Engineering because they didn’t require the GRE. But something inside just didn’t feel right. So I waited.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Dina, a new graduate!”] [/caption]
A few weeks ago I attended Dina’s Bachelor’s Graduation. After having attended my own as well as Daniel’s, I had some idea of what to expect, but this was the first college graduation I had attended outside of Cornell. (Not counting my dad’s graduation when I was young) I have have come to believe that all college graduations are the same everywhere. It is a bit odd that Stony Brook used red gowns instead of black ones. The was also my first long outing with my GPS unit. Here’s where I ran around that day. First as a static PNG:
I now have a newly minted Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Phillips School of Electrical Engineering. So that’s it, I’m official now. I now have my first degree. How do I feel? I feel like I’m on summer vacation. Doesn’t feel any different than any other summer. It DOES feel really good when I tell someone that I’ve graduated. It has the accomplishment feeling to it. Also, I get to tell people that I graduated from Cornell and that usually gets another round of congrats. It’s funny because for the past two days I’ve been really busy helping out around the house, unpacking my computers, and doing wedding preperations, but at the same time it feels like an eternity until my marriage.
I found one way around the situation involving a DNG going to RawTherapee and creating a JPEG image that’s missing the title and tags when read by Digikam’s Exiv2 library. It may not be perfect, or even the best way. But it’s one way around the issue that I was easily able to confirm with about 5 minutes of messing around today. First up you want to tell Digikam to make XMP files to go along with all files:
I found one way around the situation involving a DNG going to RawTherapee and creating a JPEG image that’s missing the title and tags when read by Digikam’s Exiv2 library. It may not be perfect, or even the best way. But it’s one way around the issue that I was easily able to confirm with about 5 minutes of messing around today. First up you want to tell Digikam to make XMP files to go along with all files:
I found one way around the situation involving a DNG going to RawTherapee and creating a JPEG image that’s missing the title and tags when read by Digikam’s Exiv2 library. It may not be perfect, or even the best way. But it’s one way around the issue that I was easily able to confirm with about 5 minutes of messing around today. First up you want to tell Digikam to make XMP files to go along with all files:
After having filed some bugs and spent a bit of time trying to figure out what’s going on, it appears that the issue with the metadata not carrying over from my DNG and CR2 files to the JPEG is not in any way RawTherapee’s fault. The problem is where Exiv2, the library used by Digikam, is expecting to look for this data. Of course, what I don’t understand about this is that Exiv2 is what wrote the data to begin with. Why write it to a location they were not going to be able to read from? Or maybe they only expect it to be there in DNG and CR2 files, but not JPEGs?
I found one way around the situation involving a DNG going to RawTherapee and creating a JPEG image that’s missing the title and tags when read by Digikam’s Exiv2 library. It may not be perfect, or even the best way. But it’s one way around the issue that I was easily able to confirm with about 5 minutes of messing around today. First up you want to tell Digikam to make XMP files to go along with all files:
After having filed some bugs and spent a bit of time trying to figure out what’s going on, it appears that the issue with the metadata not carrying over from my DNG and CR2 files to the JPEG is not in any way RawTherapee’s fault. The problem is where Exiv2, the library used by Digikam, is expecting to look for this data. Of course, what I don’t understand about this is that Exiv2 is what wrote the data to begin with. Why write it to a location they were not going to be able to read from? Or maybe they only expect it to be there in DNG and CR2 files, but not JPEGs?
After having filed some bugs and spent a bit of time trying to figure out what’s going on, it appears that the issue with the metadata not carrying over from my DNG and CR2 files to the JPEG is not in any way RawTherapee’s fault. The problem is where Exiv2, the library used by Digikam, is expecting to look for this data. Of course, what I don’t understand about this is that Exiv2 is what wrote the data to begin with. Why write it to a location they were not going to be able to read from? Or maybe they only expect it to be there in DNG and CR2 files, but not JPEGs?
Two redeeming bits of news for RawTherapee (even though one of them means there’s still something to be solved before I can switch completely to this new bit of software).
When updated to the latest RawTherapee (the version in Fedora 21’s official repositories is old), the issue with pink images disappears
RawTherapee is indeed preserving the metadata in the JPEG. The problem is that it’s doing so in a manner that Digikam does not read through the exiv2 library. I’ve filed a bug report and hopefully this can be resolved. Once that’s done, I’d be able to leave Adobe Lightroom behind. If I wanted to, I could use the new software now, safe in the knowledge that the metadata was being written, but until it’s time to replace my photo hard drive (later this year), I won’t be moving the photos over to Linux.
Last Fall I started considering moving away from Lightroom after having used it for nearly a decade. Back then I was making use of the student price to actually be able to afford it. Competition from Apple Aperture and other programs caused it to eventually drop to $150 per version. But Adobe seemed to be moving more and more towards a subscription-only model. Lightroom is still available standalone, but it appears the rest of the CS suite (including, for example, Photoshop) are on the treadmill now. While there are surely some benefits to being able to rent Photoshop and Adobe’s awesome video editing software when you need to do a project rather than for a thousand-plus fee, one way I’ve afforded Lightroom is not upgrading every year. So while it’s cheaper to pay monthly than buying outright (at the prices they had when they went subscription), I rarely found the upgrades worth is and so was able to save some money. I started considering alternatives. But I’d had Lightroom 5 on my wishlist and someone bought it for me for Christmas. So I figured I’d be a Lightroom user for a few more years.
As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’ve been into photography since I was five years old. That’s when I got my first Kodak Instamatic camera and started shooting photos and creating photo albums. I have about ten photo albums, with most of them coming from when I got to high school and could really afford film and developing. Ever since I got my first digital camera in my second semester of college, the number of photos I’ve taken yearly has increased nearly exponentially. Because I’m an organized person, I started off putting my photos into event-based folders. Once I realized that’d quickly get unwieldy, I decided to put them in folders by date. Eventually, software like Picassa, Lightroom, and digiKam came out which would have allowed me to continue to to organized my photos by event because they could read the metadata and reorganize them by date. However, I’ve found that my system has two main benefits 1)my photos remain organized even if my descendants don’t have access to programs that can read the metadata on the photos. 2) it’s very easy for me to very quickly find a photo. It would be somewhere like 2010->Jan 10->So and So’s Wedding.
[caption id=“attachment_2818” align=“aligncenter” width=“1036”] Apparently I mostly shoot wide[/caption]
Nearly 60% of my photos are in the wide to short telephoto range and nearly 40% is exclusively wide. Now, I do have SOME photos from others in my Lightroom catalog, but not enough to skew the results. I would say the reason for the huge concentration of photos in the 33-82mm range comes from the kit lens and its equivalent focal length USM version that I shoot a lot of photos with. The large concentration around the 308-330mm range comes from the 1.6x crop factor of my XT and XTi on the Tamron 55-200mm I use for wildlife photography.
The more I’ve been learning about Lightroom 2 (technically now at 2.3), the more I’ve been liking it! First of all, I learned that - thanks to new camera profiles (also available in the latest camera raw software) - I can get my photos to start from where Canon’s own RAW software would have started. I never realized it was a better choice than photoshop because I liked the photoshop workflow so much. But now that I’ve played with the camera profiles in Lightroom, I realize that I’ve been selling my images short.
I just wanted to really elaborate on why I think Adobe Lightroom is a program any enthusiast to pro user should own. Although, as I related here, LR has grown on me, going through the photos I shot at my cousin’s wedding has really cemented my love for Adobe’s product. Here are my two favorite features. You may want to open up the images in a new tab at full size so you can follow along.
So I did a test and found that as long as I save the metadata to the file, Adobe Bridge (even with CS2) can correctly read the changes. So I decided to work in Lightroom to see if it was worth buying. I can say that I am really loving it! I’ve been able to adopt my usual RAW workflow with only some small changes. Now I can’t see how I could ever work without LR!! (It’s no wonder why Adobe gives a 30 day free trial!)
For quite some time I’ve been been struggling with the point of Adobe’s Lightroom. Other than competing with Apple’s Aperture, it appears not to have a purpose. Of course, right around the time Lightroom (LR) was hitting its stride, I stopped reading photography magazines. The zine I loved the most was a British one published by the same company that puts out Linux Format Magazine. Unfortunately, even with an exchange rate of $1:1 Britsh Pound (which isn’t the case), it’s still $90 per year. So I may have missed lots of tutorial and explainer articles talking about why LR is such a great program. My impression of it was of a Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw. So I didn’t really see the point of paying $200 for that when those programs work just fine for me. It also seemed to straddle some Photoshop territory and I just couldn’t figure it out.
Last Fall I started considering moving away from Lightroom after having used it for nearly a decade. Back then I was making use of the student price to actually be able to afford it. Competition from Apple Aperture and other programs caused it to eventually drop to $150 per version. But Adobe seemed to be moving more and more towards a subscription-only model. Lightroom is still available standalone, but it appears the rest of the CS suite (including, for example, Photoshop) are on the treadmill now. While there are surely some benefits to being able to rent Photoshop and Adobe’s awesome video editing software when you need to do a project rather than for a thousand-plus fee, one way I’ve afforded Lightroom is not upgrading every year. So while it’s cheaper to pay monthly than buying outright (at the prices they had when they went subscription), I rarely found the upgrades worth is and so was able to save some money. I started considering alternatives. But I’d had Lightroom 5 on my wishlist and someone bought it for me for Christmas. So I figured I’d be a Lightroom user for a few more years.
Last Fall I started considering moving away from Lightroom after having used it for nearly a decade. Back then I was making use of the student price to actually be able to afford it. Competition from Apple Aperture and other programs caused it to eventually drop to $150 per version. But Adobe seemed to be moving more and more towards a subscription-only model. Lightroom is still available standalone, but it appears the rest of the CS suite (including, for example, Photoshop) are on the treadmill now. While there are surely some benefits to being able to rent Photoshop and Adobe’s awesome video editing software when you need to do a project rather than for a thousand-plus fee, one way I’ve afforded Lightroom is not upgrading every year. So while it’s cheaper to pay monthly than buying outright (at the prices they had when they went subscription), I rarely found the upgrades worth is and so was able to save some money. I started considering alternatives. But I’d had Lightroom 5 on my wishlist and someone bought it for me for Christmas. So I figured I’d be a Lightroom user for a few more years.
Last Fall I started considering moving away from Lightroom after having used it for nearly a decade. Back then I was making use of the student price to actually be able to afford it. Competition from Apple Aperture and other programs caused it to eventually drop to $150 per version. But Adobe seemed to be moving more and more towards a subscription-only model. Lightroom is still available standalone, but it appears the rest of the CS suite (including, for example, Photoshop) are on the treadmill now. While there are surely some benefits to being able to rent Photoshop and Adobe’s awesome video editing software when you need to do a project rather than for a thousand-plus fee, one way I’ve afforded Lightroom is not upgrading every year. So while it’s cheaper to pay monthly than buying outright (at the prices they had when they went subscription), I rarely found the upgrades worth is and so was able to save some money. I started considering alternatives. But I’d had Lightroom 5 on my wishlist and someone bought it for me for Christmas. So I figured I’d be a Lightroom user for a few more years.
note: This is a blog post about fine art nude photography. While there is no pornography or erotic image on this page, you may not want to load it up at work. Also, to see all my work with this model on flickr, you’ll have to sign in so they can verify that you’re old enough to see the photographsTo keep my front page from being NSFW, I’m going to use a MORE tag to make you jump to see the photos themselves. See you after the jump.
note: This is a blog post about fine art nude photography. While there is no pornography or erotic image on this page, you may not want to load it up at work. Also, to see all my work with this model on flickr, you’ll have to sign in so they can verify that you’re old enough to see the photographs
I’d been wanting to photograph a model for a long time. I’d read that photographers often get together and rent out studio space to do so, but I didn’t know how to find it. I did a few google searches in 2006 and couldn’t find anything so I gave up. I’d also wanted to do nude photography since that time. I even bought a book about techniques. It all floundered for five years. Then I heard on This Week in Photo about meetup.com. There I found a group doing Boudoir Photography. I joined them. They were going to do a workshop at The Carriage House in DC. So I joined that group. And The Carriage House arranged for professional model Devonny Sandrick to be available. At $125 for time with a professional doing fine art nude and getting a liberal model release in return, it was a great deal I couldn’t pass up.
note: This is a blog post about fine art nude photography. While there is no pornography or erotic image on this page, you may not want to load it up at work. Also, to see all my work with this model on flickr, you’ll have to sign in so they can verify that you’re old enough to see the photographsTo keep my front page from being NSFW, I’m going to use a MORE tag to make you jump to see the photos themselves. See you after the jump.
note: This is a blog post about fine art nude photography. While there is no pornography or erotic image on this page, you may not want to load it up at work. Also, to see all my work with this model on flickr, you’ll have to sign in so they can verify that you’re old enough to see the photographs
I’d been wanting to photograph a model for a long time. I’d read that photographers often get together and rent out studio space to do so, but I didn’t know how to find it. I did a few google searches in 2006 and couldn’t find anything so I gave up. I’d also wanted to do nude photography since that time. I even bought a book about techniques. It all floundered for five years. Then I heard on This Week in Photo about meetup.com. There I found a group doing Boudoir Photography. I joined them. They were going to do a workshop at The Carriage House in DC. So I joined that group. And The Carriage House arranged for professional model Devonny Sandrick to be available. At $125 for time with a professional doing fine art nude and getting a liberal model release in return, it was a great deal I couldn’t pass up.
note: This is a blog post about fine art nude photography. While there is no pornography or erotic image on this page, you may not want to load it up at work. Also, to see all my work with this model on flickr, you’ll have to sign in so they can verify that you’re old enough to see the photographsTo keep my front page from being NSFW, I’m going to use a MORE tag to make you jump to see the photos themselves. See you after the jump.
note: This is a blog post about fine art nude photography. While there is no pornography or erotic image on this page, you may not want to load it up at work. Also, to see all my work with this model on flickr, you’ll have to sign in so they can verify that you’re old enough to see the photographsTo keep my front page from being NSFW, I’m going to use a MORE tag to make you jump to see the photos themselves. See you after the jump.
note: This is a blog post about fine art nude photography. While there is no pornography or erotic image on this page, you may not want to load it up at work. Also, to see all my work with this model on flickr, you’ll have to sign in so they can verify that you’re old enough to see the photographs
I’d been wanting to photograph a model for a long time. I’d read that photographers often get together and rent out studio space to do so, but I didn’t know how to find it. I did a few google searches in 2006 and couldn’t find anything so I gave up. I’d also wanted to do nude photography since that time. I even bought a book about techniques. It all floundered for five years. Then I heard on This Week in Photo about meetup.com. There I found a group doing Boudoir Photography. I joined them. They were going to do a workshop at The Carriage House in DC. So I joined that group. And The Carriage House arranged for professional model Devonny Sandrick to be available. At $125 for time with a professional doing fine art nude and getting a liberal model release in return, it was a great deal I couldn’t pass up.
note: This is a blog post about fine art nude photography. While there is no pornography or erotic image on this page, you may not want to load it up at work. Also, to see all my work with this model on flickr, you’ll have to sign in so they can verify that you’re old enough to see the photographsTo keep my front page from being NSFW, I’m going to use a MORE tag to make you jump to see the photos themselves. See you after the jump.
note: This is a blog post about fine art nude photography. While there is no pornography or erotic image on this page, you may not want to load it up at work. Also, to see all my work with this model on flickr, you’ll have to sign in so they can verify that you’re old enough to see the photographs
I’d been wanting to photograph a model for a long time. I’d read that photographers often get together and rent out studio space to do so, but I didn’t know how to find it. I did a few google searches in 2006 and couldn’t find anything so I gave up. I’d also wanted to do nude photography since that time. I even bought a book about techniques. It all floundered for five years. Then I heard on This Week in Photo about meetup.com. There I found a group doing Boudoir Photography. I joined them. They were going to do a workshop at The Carriage House in DC. So I joined that group. And The Carriage House arranged for professional model Devonny Sandrick to be available. At $125 for time with a professional doing fine art nude and getting a liberal model release in return, it was a great deal I couldn’t pass up.
Yesterday I put in for the GOG Galaxy Beta and today I got my invite. I couldn’t wait to get home to see it in action. I did not bury the lead, it was exactly as I state in the title, A Good First Start. The settings are so minimal at this point that it doesn’t have any tabs:
GOG Galaxy - Settings
As you can see, many of the most exciting features are marked as coming soon. Still, it’s exactly as I hoped they’d do it. I meant to remark in my last blog post that I hoped they’d make the game pages just like their webpages. I find their webpages very, very useful. It’s less cluttered than Steam and brings the reviews to the fore. Let’s take a quick screenshot tour of the client. (I was going to do a screen capture video, but the client is so simple at this point that a few screenshots will do it justice)
Yesterday I put in for the GOG Galaxy Beta and today I got my invite. I couldn’t wait to get home to see it in action. I did not bury the lead, it was exactly as I state in the title, A Good First Start. The settings are so minimal at this point that it doesn’t have any tabs:
GOG Galaxy - Settings
As you can see, many of the most exciting features are marked as coming soon. Still, it’s exactly as I hoped they’d do it. I meant to remark in my last blog post that I hoped they’d make the game pages just like their webpages. I find their webpages very, very useful. It’s less cluttered than Steam and brings the reviews to the fore. Let’s take a quick screenshot tour of the client. (I was going to do a screen capture video, but the client is so simple at this point that a few screenshots will do it justice)
If I mentioned it on this site, I wasn’t able to find it in a search because of the generic word, but I was very annoyed and pretty upset about EA’s Origin store and platform. Part of what I enjoy so much about playing PC games is that the only limitations on what you can run are based on OS and the power of your hardware. In the console world there are games exclusive to Playstation or Xbox and for the non-exclusive games I have to figure out (if I’m planning to game socially) which platform my friends and family are going to buy the game on. For PC games that’s not an issue. All games run on Windows and a greater and greater number run on Linux and OSX. Usually, no matter the OS, everyone can play together online.
For the past two years we’ve had increasing evidence that something needs to change in the police/neighborhood dynamic. But Fergusson, New York City, and Baltimore are only the tip of the iceburg in every sense of the metaphor. If, like me, you follow the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Boing Boing, and other organizations committed to justice, you know that for every Freddie Gray there are dozens whose injustices don’t make it to national prominence. Of course, this isn’t even a new trend. African Americans have been complaining about harassment and being framed for a long time.
I’ve been meditating on a blog post about the riot in my figurative backyard. While I’m still unsure if whether I’ll end up writing anything about it, I came across some interesting MLK Jr quotes today.
A riot is the language of the unheard.
Martin Luther King Jr
and this one seems to apply not only to what I’ve heard about Baltimore, but also to what I’ve heard about Fergusson and New York City:
For the past two years we’ve had increasing evidence that something needs to change in the police/neighborhood dynamic. But Fergusson, New York City, and Baltimore are only the tip of the iceburg in every sense of the metaphor. If, like me, you follow the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Boing Boing, and other organizations committed to justice, you know that for every Freddie Gray there are dozens whose injustices don’t make it to national prominence. Of course, this isn’t even a new trend. African Americans have been complaining about harassment and being framed for a long time.
For the past two years we’ve had increasing evidence that something needs to change in the police/neighborhood dynamic. But Fergusson, New York City, and Baltimore are only the tip of the iceburg in every sense of the metaphor. If, like me, you follow the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Boing Boing, and other organizations committed to justice, you know that for every Freddie Gray there are dozens whose injustices don’t make it to national prominence. Of course, this isn’t even a new trend. African Americans have been complaining about harassment and being framed for a long time.
The lives lost are tragic, but the constant police misbehavior has an even worse effect on society. I came across the following today on an article about Stingrays:
Well, the supposed “good guys” (cops) no longer really care what is legal and what is not, so why should I?
Once this type of sentiment becomes entrenched, civil society is in danger. Just like paying taxes, we need people to believe in the social rules or the illusion comes crashing down.
Recently this photo was published by the Associated Press and has been getting a lot of attention on the interwebs. It shows Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard, an American solder in Afghanistan, after being hit by a mortar attack and only hours before death. A lot of the debate participants seem to feel one way or another depending on how they feel about our war. But I think the debate deserves to be much more complicated and nuanced because there are actually a lot of issues at play here.
I’m still listening to The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which I mentioned back back on 12 March, since it’s a massive 21 hour book. Today I heard what I consider to be one of the most interesting theories involving wars. The author of the book noticed that no two countries containing a McDonald’s in their borders had ever fought. In other words, if Country A and Country B both have a McDonald’s they won’t fight each other. If Country C didn’t have a McDonald’s, then it may be attacked by either Country A or Country B, or it may attack either of these countries. His main exclusion to this theory is that a Civil war doesn’t count, so the problems in Yugoslavia don’t disprove the theory. The author then took his theory to McDonald’s who then independently verified that no two countries containing a McDonald’s had ever attacked each other.
As KDE 5 reaches 5.2 and many begin to debate its features (this is a small evolution on 4 compared to the difference between 3 and 4) there has been an ever-increasing assertion that Activities are pointless. (At least it appears that way to me) I wanted to share how I use Activities, why they make me more productive, and why they’re the biggest feature keeping me on KDE.
So, I have lots of Activities: Main, Media, School, Photography, Video Games, Video Editing, Programming, and Reading. In its current implementation, each Activity must have the same number of virtual desktops; three in my case. In each activity I make use of different widgets. On nearly all of them are the brilliant folder view and application launcher widgets. These allow me to quickly see the folders relevant to the task at hand. In the case of the Multimedia activity, desktop 1, this is very useful for my workflow. Let’s look at that desktop:
Now that KDE 4.6 has finally landed in Fedora (KDE 4.6.1, to be precise) I can properly test activities. I spoke before of how I planned to use them back in this post. So let’s see how well it works in practice. I think for my first activity, I will setup an activity for programming because it will have the least adverse affect on my current way of working if things go wrong. So I click on the KDE cashew on my left screen. I click on the activities button. Here’s what I get:
I’ve been using KDE since November of 2010 around the time that 4.5 was released for Fedora. Around the time of 4.4, the KDE folks, especially Aaron Seigo and the rest of the Plasma team, started really pushing activities. I kept talking to people on identica and I couldn’t quite figure out the point of activities. They seemed to be redundant in a world with virtual desktops. (And, as you can see in the comments of the article I’ll be linking to, most people feel the same way) The biggest reason I seemed to hear was that each activity could have a different set of widgets. But one weekened I was messing around with KDE system settings and found out that you could set each virtual desktop to have different widgets and not have to mess with any of these activities. So after that weekend I *really* didn’t understand the whole hassle of activities. This is how I configured my desktops:
I forgot about this little project for a while, but I remembered in time to make October’s background. I’ve decided to stop making the square versions of the background. If I get enough people who actually want it, I’ll reinstate it. To set as your background, click on it then right-click and set as desktop. If that option’s not available, save it to your computer and use your OS’s method of setting the desktop.
Here are your new desktop backgrounds for July 2011!
Just click on the one that matches your monitor type and then either right-click and set as desktop or save it to your computer and save it as your desktop manually.
This month’s calendar is from Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. The Dolles Salt Water Taffy place is in nearly all the postcards and other media for the city.
Here’s the background for February. A little shoutout to my alma mater. Click on the image and then right click to set as your desktop or save to your computer to manually set to the desktop.
[caption id=“attachment_4050” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Feb 2011 desktop for more square monitors (1024x768)”] [/caption]
This post is meant to be a followup to last year’s post, Visiting Walt Disney World with a 2 Year Old. I’ll be referring to, and updating, that post with the elements that were different this time around. For one, I said she wouldn’t remember the first trip. While that’s certainly true in the long run, three year old Scarlett definitely remembered the previous trip. She asked for rides she’d been on last time and she remembered going on the monorail.
For a while during Scarlett’s second year Danielle and I went back and forth on whether we should take Scarlett to Disney just before her second birthday or whether we should wait until she was older. On the one hand - she’s not going to actually remember this trip. Or rather, any memories she has are sure to be false memories triggered by the photos and videos we took. On the other hand - whether or not she remembers it, it’s still forming her base memories; memories that anchor most of the subconscious feelings we feel about our lives.
It’ll be of no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I’m both a fan of the Fedora distribution of Linux as well as the KDE desktop. For the first time in six years, the KDE desktop is changing again. While the change is not as radical as the change from KDE 3 to KDE 4, it’s still a big technological change. I decided I couldn’t wait until May to experience it, so I took a look at the current beta from within virt-manager. Here’s the default desktop:
note: I wrote this on 17 April, a full week before it is published on the blog
[caption id=“attachment_4398” align=“aligncenter” width=“450” caption=“Acer Aspire One - out of the box”] [/caption]
Nearly six years ago I bought my first laptop. I’d never seen the point of laptops over desktops - the value per dollar just isn’t there. But I was going to be traveling for work now and again and needed to be able to get in contact with the family while away. I got an old Acer that was on sale at best buy because it was the last one left. A year after buying that laptop, netbooks came out. I got my wife one of the first Asus EEE PCs because she was going on a work trip didn’t want to haul my heavy laptop around. So for the past few years we’ve traveled with both of those so I can use my laptop to watch my movies and she can use her netbook to watch hers. But I’m getting tired of that heavy laptop and now netbooks aren’t saddled with crippled versions of Linux and inferior hardware. So I got myself a new Acer Aspire One from Amazon. I’d seen the same one at Costco for $50 more (because it has double the battery life) and I’d wanted to get it for a while now. I’m going to be traveling to Chicago for a trip soon, and since my back has been giving me issues, I figured it was the time to go to a lighter laptop.
Today I saw the ad above which is part of an ad campaign that includes the ad in the header. As you can see by comparing these images, the photographer had many permutations of clothing available for the athlete, Purity Kirui, to wear. But I think each of these images reaches into the viewer’s mind differently. The header image is a standard athletic image. Purity seems to be enjoying her incredible athleticism and the implied advantage of doing so in Nike gear. It’s been shot in such a way as to make it seem as though she’s almost literally flying through the air or jumping as if she had Flubber on the bottom of her shoes. It’s a good ad and a great photo. (Note: I have cropped image horizontally - original photo here for as long as Nike keeps it up) On the other hand, let’s look at the image I saw at the mall today. At first glance it seems a less dynamic and less powerful image. Yet it kept my attention for longer than the header image. Why is that? Because the photographer is reaching into the zeitgeist - super heroes. The way her shirt is pulling behind her is evoking the current super hero trend. Even though the other image has her in the air, this one seems as though she’s running to go save someone. By tapping into this feeling, she seems even more powerful and as though she’s running even faster. It’s almost implied that Nike’s the shoe of power and integrity and even, subconsciously, that it’s the only shoe that can withstand the speed. This is the power of imagery and it’s one of the reasons we are more censorious with images than we are with words.
Today I saw the ad above which is part of an ad campaign that includes the ad in the header. As you can see by comparing these images, the photographer had many permutations of clothing available for the athlete, Purity Kirui, to wear. But I think each of these images reaches into the viewer’s mind differently. The header image is a standard athletic image. Purity seems to be enjoying her incredible athleticism and the implied advantage of doing so in Nike gear. It’s been shot in such a way as to make it seem as though she’s almost literally flying through the air or jumping as if she had Flubber on the bottom of her shoes. It’s a good ad and a great photo. (Note: I have cropped image horizontally - original photo here for as long as Nike keeps it up) On the other hand, let’s look at the image I saw at the mall today. At first glance it seems a less dynamic and less powerful image. Yet it kept my attention for longer than the header image. Why is that? Because the photographer is reaching into the zeitgeist - super heroes. The way her shirt is pulling behind her is evoking the current super hero trend. Even though the other image has her in the air, this one seems as though she’s running to go save someone. By tapping into this feeling, she seems even more powerful and as though she’s running even faster. It’s almost implied that Nike’s the shoe of power and integrity and even, subconsciously, that it’s the only shoe that can withstand the speed. This is the power of imagery and it’s one of the reasons we are more censorious with images than we are with words.
Because I’m using WP Super Cache to reduce the strain on the server, there’ll be a lot of older posts and pages with the old theme. I didn’t notice this until I loaded up my blog at work. The main page was fine as it’s incredibly dynamic, but many of the pages (as opposed to posts) were stuck with the old theme.
I also noticed it’s often stalling before it can finish, so I changed it from every 12 hours to ever 24 hours. If that works well, then at most a few days from now everything will be on the new theme.
My site got pounded today like a beach on a windy day when I appeared on Linux Toda y. So I decided to install WP Super Cache. This should display cached pages to anyone who isn’t commenting so hopefully it will help my site deal with a lot more traffic. The traffic was so bad I couldn’t even SSH into the box. Hopefully now it won’t be so bad. So if anything appears wonky - please bear with me while I work out the bugs.
[caption id=“attachment_6459” align=“aligncenter” width=“527”] Scarlett and her cousin, Lan. Two different approaches to language.[/caption]
Nobody that I personally know was truly raised bilingual. My parents purposely taught me English first. Whatever Spanish I knew before learning it in third grade was picked up from visiting my grandparents. It was mostly limited to asking for food items and very generalized expressions of my state of being. Danielle was taught Vietnamese and learned English in preschool. Pretty much all of our cousins were raised with one language or the other as the primary language spoken at home. My house was pretty much only English unless my parents were trying to talk about something we kids weren’t supposed to understand. Danielle’s parents came to the US at a much older age than my parents (nearly twice as old) so English is laborious to them - they can understand it well enough to only be tripped up by the most esoteric of expressions (eg “like water off a duck’s back”), but can’t express complex ideas eloquently in English. Or, to put it another way, my father-in-law loves to tell jokes - he almost never tells any in English.
One awesome thing that is easy to notice in free/libre software is how international it is. While proprietary software is mainly based out of the US - Windows/OSX - free/libre software comes from all over the place. Mandriva is based out of Brazil and France. SUSE was originally developed in Germany. Miguel de Icaza, one of the founders of Gnome, was born in Mexico. Choqok, the best KDE-native microblogging software is created by an Iranian. So something that Linux has always done better than Windows is support more languages. Microsoft has to pay to create language translations so they have to make a market analysis about which languages to support (and it still doesn’t cover non-Microsoft programs) With Linux, it’s all volunteer work (or paid by companies that care about localization) and if the programs are written correctly for KDE and Gnome, they will all be able to take advantage of the translation work for their program. “Save” should probably translate well across all well-written programs. I think this is one of the reason why all the regions of Spain have their own Linux distros. I don’t know this for a fact, but I would guess that Windows probably only comes out in Castillian (official or regular Spanish) and not in Catalan, Andalusian, Basque, etc
[caption id=“attachment_6459” align=“aligncenter” width=“527”] Scarlett and her cousin, Lan. Two different approaches to language.[/caption]
Nobody that I personally know was truly raised bilingual. My parents purposely taught me English first. Whatever Spanish I knew before learning it in third grade was picked up from visiting my grandparents. It was mostly limited to asking for food items and very generalized expressions of my state of being. Danielle was taught Vietnamese and learned English in preschool. Pretty much all of our cousins were raised with one language or the other as the primary language spoken at home. My house was pretty much only English unless my parents were trying to talk about something we kids weren’t supposed to understand. Danielle’s parents came to the US at a much older age than my parents (nearly twice as old) so English is laborious to them - they can understand it well enough to only be tripped up by the most esoteric of expressions (eg “like water off a duck’s back”), but can’t express complex ideas eloquently in English. Or, to put it another way, my father-in-law loves to tell jokes - he almost never tells any in English.
Around a year ago I decided to KDE in Spanish to learn some technical terms. Back then I was using GDM, but now I’m using KDM. I didn’t see a way to set the language! How would I change the language to Spanish? I took a look online and found instructions. I’m going to reproduce them here for others. The great thing about the way that KDE handles things vs the way that Gnome does is that you can set a fallback language. When might this be useful? Let’s take a Vietnamese computer user. Vietnamese people (at least of a certain age) tend to be fluent in Vietnamese and French with some familiarity with English. So a Vietnamese person could set his computer to Vietnamese with a fallback to French for any programs that didn’t have translations into Vietnamese. As usual, I LOVE the level of customization in the KDE desktop.
I was born and raised in the USA, so I am not sure if it’s fair to call these songs racist, I think that racism requires malicious intent. And, given that the US has a different and unique relationship with its non-caucasian descendants than Latin America, I’m not sure there’s the same level of maliciousness as in the US. All I can do is view these songs through the perspective of an American. The song that sparked this article is by La Banda Gorda and is called “El Negro Pega Con Todo” which means “black matches with everything”. I’d heard it before, but I was listening a little more closely to the introduction this time around.
One awesome thing that is easy to notice in free/libre software is how international it is. While proprietary software is mainly based out of the US - Windows/OSX - free/libre software comes from all over the place. Mandriva is based out of Brazil and France. SUSE was originally developed in Germany. Miguel de Icaza, one of the founders of Gnome, was born in Mexico. Choqok, the best KDE-native microblogging software is created by an Iranian. So something that Linux has always done better than Windows is support more languages. Microsoft has to pay to create language translations so they have to make a market analysis about which languages to support (and it still doesn’t cover non-Microsoft programs) With Linux, it’s all volunteer work (or paid by companies that care about localization) and if the programs are written correctly for KDE and Gnome, they will all be able to take advantage of the translation work for their program. “Save” should probably translate well across all well-written programs. I think this is one of the reason why all the regions of Spain have their own Linux distros. I don’t know this for a fact, but I would guess that Windows probably only comes out in Castillian (official or regular Spanish) and not in Catalan, Andalusian, Basque, etc
The lives lost are tragic, but the constant police misbehavior has an even worse effect on society. I came across the following today on an article about Stingrays:
Well, the supposed “good guys” (cops) no longer really care what is legal and what is not, so why should I?
Once this type of sentiment becomes entrenched, civil society is in danger. Just like paying taxes, we need people to believe in the social rules or the illusion comes crashing down.
Scarlett has become hardcore obsessed with the BBC show Octonauts. Nothing she used to care about - Mulan, My Little Pony, Beauty and the Beast - can be put on the television for her. All she wants to watch is Octonauts. So for Easter we got her all the characters. She has two favorite characters/toys: Shellington, a koala bear, and Kwazii, a cat descended from a long line of pirates. This is what Kwazii looks like:
Originally my first concert of 2015 was going to be a little later in the year, but with Danielle away for the weekend, the email letting me know about a concert in just a few days seemed quite fortuitous. I’d had a couple chances to see Anamanaguchi in concert, but the timing was never right. This time it was perfect - weekend and wife out of town. So I decided to go.
This year I bought LOTS of albums. I don’t know if it’s the most albums I’ve purchased in one year since writing these blog posts or even since keeping track of Scrobbles. I do know that while I listened to my music randomly, in general, I did also listen to entire albums whenever I purchased one. Sometimes I’d listen to the album a few times and other times I’d take the album purchase as an opportunity to review the artist’s previous work. I know that was the case with Five Iron Frenzy (although that was also concert prep as I mentioned a few days ago), Relient K, I Fight Dragons, and Fall Out Boy. It was a very fun year for me, musically. Kacey Musgraves, for example, was a reminder that country music doesn’t have to suck. Disclosure made me realize that I could still like loop-heavy electronic music. I hope that I can continue to explore new sounds in 2014.
This quarter I mostly listened to my music on pure random with a few variations which’ll be accounted for below. This finally allowed The Beatles to place in 2013. In the last few weeks I just listened to music that I added in this quarter to make sure I had a chance to get to know some of the newer songs.
For the second quarter in a row The Beatles have NOT made the list! But that’s easily explained: I have been listening to a lot of new music and a lot of playlists that don’t include The Beatles. But as you’ll see, they kinda snuck in sideways. This quarter I spent a lot of time listening to Jonathan Coulton and I Fight Dragons because of their Kickstarters, which I backed. I Fight Dragons released two albums as Kickstarter bonuses - a live recording of their most recent concert and a remix album of sorts in which the band members sung different arrangements of the songs. There was also the new Fall Out Boy album, Save Rock and Roll. I really enjoyed the album but it was overtaken in my mind by the previously mentioned IFD and JoCo music and I quickly forgot they had a new album out. Again, that’s a shame since I did enjoy it and while I was in Florida last week I quickly tired of “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark”. Incidentally, I was reminded of why I stopped listening to live radio - it’s far too repetitive. I think the true problem is that it’s too formulaic in its repetition. I didn’t mind hearing “The Princess Who Saved Herself” every day for a week because the songs surrounding it were always different. On a separate note, I got some music for Father’s Day and I’ll mention that below.
Throughout the month of October I alternated between listening to newly acquired music (of which I had quite a bit) and a dynamic playlist that was weighted so that most of the music had auto-ratings above 90, less music above 75, and even less above 50. Any song that I listened to only once would fit in the third category. After that, if I skipped it just once it would fall out of the group. So it gave me a nice mix of music including forgotten favorites. Now that I’ve listened to a good chunk of my library since the last time the Amarok database was corrupted I may modify the playlist to include the caveat that it couldn’t have been played in the last x days. I’m not sure if I want to make the date large enough that I only hear songs once per quarter or my standard two week waiting period. Given how little time I have to listen to music nowadays I might go for the 90 days. I also spent some chunks of time listening to my music on random on Google Music. That’s completely random so I end up hearing some songs I didn’t even remember ever acquiring. A lot of my new music came from Jamendo when I got an email with the month’s most popular songs and I decided to do a search for ska. Although I really enjoy ska, I got into it rather late so I don’t have very much ska music. (Mostly just Five Iron Frenzy, Save Ferris, No Doubt, and the Orange County Supertones - who are an OK ska band - I mostly like their least ska songs)
For people of my generation (and the younger ones of the previous one) video games are cultural phenomenon no less important to the way our brains work than books, music, or movies. So it’s no surprise that our music, which has been inspired by books and movies in the past is now being inspired by video games. What was surprising to me were all the different manifestations this inspiration has taken.
Assassin’s Creed was the first game series Vinnie of Giant Bomb convinced me to try by talking about it endlessly on the Bombcast. The Witcher is the second. (This is why I miss his voice on that podcast so much) It has turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would. It’s based on the Bioware engine of the time, so it plays a lot like Mass Effect 1. The story is good so far and full of nice little jokes. You can watch my progress (I’ve been recording it for Extra Life) on this Youtube playlist.
Civilization V (30 minutes) - We got a few turns in our multiplayer games, but other important things (like planning weddings, perhaps) have kept my brothers from sending me new turns.
Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+ (38 minutes) - I got it as part of a Humble Bundle because eventually my PS3 will die or be remotely disabled. As I have just transferred my Steam library to a new hard drive (more about that in a future post), I’m more confident in my ability to be able to play these games for a long time. Played a bit on the last day of Februrary to test my new Xbox 360 for Windows controller. It’s still as much fun as I remembered.
I played a lot of games this year. Perhaps more than in any previous year since leaving high school. Since I usually don’t buy games when they first come out, the winner will not necessarily be a game that came out this year. I went to my raptr page and took a look at all the games I played this year. Following is a list of the games and a little about what I thought of them. At the end will be my pick for 2010.
Just a little under five years ago, I started looking at the possibility of Ebooks again. Two months later I bought a Barnes and Noble Nook. For a long time I was very casual with my Ebook reading. I had the Cory Doctorow books and several months worth of free Nook books which more than made up for the cost of the hardware. Really, the best part of fully digital distribution of books (and games) is revolutionary in the way it can allow the purchase of giveaway of media which would be cost-prohibitive if the company had to pay for the physical object or shipping fees. I installed Calibre for the free EPUBs, but it didn’t touch my Barnes and Noble purchases.
[caption id=“attachment_3556” align=“aligncenter” width=“450” caption=“Barnes and Noble Nook and the a case for the Nook”] [/caption]
As you may remember, a few months ago I decided to rethink the issue of ebooks. I was going back and forth about buying the Barnes and Noble Nook just before my recent flight to Florida. I had been looking forward to the flight as a chance to read through some of Cory Doctorow’s fiction. In the end, I decided I didn’t want to spend the money on the device and read it on my laptop. This was less than ideal. The laptop only had about 20 minutes of charge on the battery and so I had to split up reading the book between the outbound and inbound trips. Sometime in the near future Danielle and I are going to be taking a much longer flight, so I caved and decided to buy the nook.
Just a little under five years ago, I started looking at the possibility of Ebooks again. Two months later I bought a Barnes and Noble Nook. For a long time I was very casual with my Ebook reading. I had the Cory Doctorow books and several months worth of free Nook books which more than made up for the cost of the hardware. Really, the best part of fully digital distribution of books (and games) is revolutionary in the way it can allow the purchase of giveaway of media which would be cost-prohibitive if the company had to pay for the physical object or shipping fees. I installed Calibre for the free EPUBs, but it didn’t touch my Barnes and Noble purchases.
I write this to you because you are the largest and most powerful companies in your ecosystems. The digital world has become ridiculous and you need to be leaders in rectifying the situation. Let’s start with Amazon. The two biggest digital things you sell are books and music. Back in the analog world before commerce became a Wonderland distortion, if I bought a book or CD, any member in my household could access this item. It didn’t matter if I bought the book or my wife bought the book. We could both read it. The same went with a CD. Either of us could grab the CD off the shelf and put it into our portable CD player. But now go to the Kindle (or any other e-reader system) and Amazon CloudPlayer. Sure, either of us could pick up the e-reader to read a book. But what if we both want to read a different book at the same time. How can we access each other’s libraries? What about if we each want to listen to the same music library from Amazon CloudPlayer on our smart phones or other devices? For various reasons, like Amazon recommendations, it makes sense for us to have different accounts instead of a family account.
[caption id=“attachment_3556” align=“aligncenter” width=“450” caption=“Barnes and Noble Nook and the a case for the Nook”] [/caption]
As you may remember, a few months ago I decided to rethink the issue of ebooks. I was going back and forth about buying the Barnes and Noble Nook just before my recent flight to Florida. I had been looking forward to the flight as a chance to read through some of Cory Doctorow’s fiction. In the end, I decided I didn’t want to spend the money on the device and read it on my laptop. This was less than ideal. The laptop only had about 20 minutes of charge on the battery and so I had to split up reading the book between the outbound and inbound trips. Sometime in the near future Danielle and I are going to be taking a much longer flight, so I caved and decided to buy the nook.
I was happy to be interviewed for Fedora Magazine about How [I] Fedora and I mentioned that there was a Fedora book that led me to pick Fedora. ( I also mentioned that on this blog here) Recently I’ve been cleaning up my bookshelves as I have run out of space for physical books. While I’ve mostly gone digital, Goodread’s Advanced Reading Copies are currently only distributed as physical books and sometimes it’s nice to have printed deluxe copies of comics. I decided it was probably time to get rid of this incredibly heavy book (that’s moved 3 times with me), but before doing so I’d document some of the contents for historical purposes. What follows are some of the pages I had bookmarked or highlighted.
So, this paper in Nature reveals that sex is much more complex than just having XX or XY. I think an awesome followup would see if trans and/or gay/lesbian people had more of these chimeric conditions. Although, everything has potential for evil, I think this would be super helpful to parents of kids who were going to end up trans to educate themselves in order to be more supportive.
I was walking away from the Tv playing in the lunch room when I noticed the sharp reduction in television volume when I had turned around. Instantaneously I noticed what had been in front of me for nearly 23 years or rather what had been beside me. Human ears are uniquely shaped to funnel in sound most efficiently from the direction in which the person is facing. By contrast, if you’ve ever seen a deer’s ears you know that they face sidways and can swivel to a certain angle towards the front and back. I thought a little more and came to the conclusion that this was just another example of predator/prey biology. Lions, bears, and other predatory animals I could think of also had them facing forward. Elephants were another gargantuan example of prey having ears that faced to the side. This, of course, makes it harder for predators to sneak up on prey from behind. Of course, prey already have the advantage of having their eyes close to (or on, in some cases) side of their head, allowing them to see to the side and, in some cases, backwards. I cannot figure out, however, why it would be advantageous for predators to have their ears facing forward. Perhaps, the same way that having both eyes facing forward allows for stereoscopic vision, having the ears facing forward gives the predator a 3D auditory experience. I can’t see a real benefit for this in humans, but for animals with hearing far stronger than we do, perhaps it provides them with additional details about their enviroment. Just another example of the wonderful design of the Creator who strives, it seems, to make an equal playing field. Neither predator nor prey seems to have an advantage - and that’s a good thing. Otherwise either the predators would eat all the prey or the prey would multiply too numerously. Neither outcome would be good for the environment.
So, this paper in Nature reveals that sex is much more complex than just having XX or XY. I think an awesome followup would see if trans and/or gay/lesbian people had more of these chimeric conditions. Although, everything has potential for evil, I think this would be super helpful to parents of kids who were going to end up trans to educate themselves in order to be more supportive.
[caption id=“attachment_6344” align=“alignleft” width=“478”] Chell from Portal[/caption]
Gender is a pretty interesting concept when it comes to video games. Putting aside “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, video games are unique in that the players are active in constructing the narrative. Some games, like puzzle games don’t REALLY have a narrative (but that doesn’t mean my brothers and I didn’t come up with the “story” behind what was going on in Tetris - paragraph seven) But the rest have stories and put the play on a spectrum from games like Mario to games like Mass Effect and all the way to the The Sims franchise in which you have complete control of the narrative through player agency over all the characters in the house. (See here, here, and here) As the player plays, the player takes the character’s story onto him or herself. This is at least partially the rational for the dearth of female protagonists. Everyone “knows” that not only are all the gamers male, but they also couldn’t stand the idea of playing as a female. Off the top of my head the only top tier female protagonists I can think of are Laura Croft and the girl from Heavenly Sword. There’s also Samus Aran, but that’s also a bit of a cheat since she’s nearly always armored and the reveal that she was a woman was one of video games’ first huge reveals. But I know this is untrue - at least among the video game aficionados I know. Dan, members of the Giant Bomb Squad, and others who write about games online played Mass Effect as a female Shepard. Ryan or Jeff (or both, I can’t remember) of Giant Bomb plays as a female every time a video game gives him the option.
So, this paper in Nature reveals that sex is much more complex than just having XX or XY. I think an awesome followup would see if trans and/or gay/lesbian people had more of these chimeric conditions. Although, everything has potential for evil, I think this would be super helpful to parents of kids who were going to end up trans to educate themselves in order to be more supportive.
I haven’t seen Gone Girl, but my wife condensed the 2 hour movie into a 30 minute play-by-play summary. There are three things I don’t like about the plot. (In case it’s not obvious….spoilers ahoy)
In a world in which women already have a hard time getting their rape allegations believed, the plot point in which she fakes a rape to ruin her ex is quite damaging. Not quite Rolling Stone “we made up a story because it was too perfect to fact-check” sort of damaging, but still provides a frame of reference for everyone who doesn’t want to believe a rape victim.
It remains to be seen how well this works for anyone in practice, but I can imagine defense attorneys mounting the “my wife is Gone Girling me” defense in mariticide. At the very least, it may be just enough to create a shadow of a doubt in juries given how popular this movie is and how much it’s penetrated the popular culture.
This is the least offensive point as it can be used against anything: movies, video games, books, etc : It’s probably given some of those less balanced members of society ideas they may not have had. Just as playing Team Fortress 2 or any other shooter hasn’t made me shoot up the world, most normal people wouldn’t act on this movie (starting with the fact that things need to go perfectly correct for this to play out well in real life), some people out there might now be planning some interesting scenarios.
I haven’t seen Gone Girl, but my wife condensed the 2 hour movie into a 30 minute play-by-play summary. There are three things I don’t like about the plot. (In case it’s not obvious….spoilers ahoy)
In a world in which women already have a hard time getting their rape allegations believed, the plot point in which she fakes a rape to ruin her ex is quite damaging. Not quite Rolling Stone “we made up a story because it was too perfect to fact-check” sort of damaging, but still provides a frame of reference for everyone who doesn’t want to believe a rape victim.
It remains to be seen how well this works for anyone in practice, but I can imagine defense attorneys mounting the “my wife is Gone Girling me” defense in mariticide. At the very least, it may be just enough to create a shadow of a doubt in juries given how popular this movie is and how much it’s penetrated the popular culture.
This is the least offensive point as it can be used against anything: movies, video games, books, etc : It’s probably given some of those less balanced members of society ideas they may not have had. Just as playing Team Fortress 2 or any other shooter hasn’t made me shoot up the world, most normal people wouldn’t act on this movie (starting with the fact that things need to go perfectly correct for this to play out well in real life), some people out there might now be planning some interesting scenarios.
I haven’t seen Gone Girl, but my wife condensed the 2 hour movie into a 30 minute play-by-play summary. There are three things I don’t like about the plot. (In case it’s not obvious….spoilers ahoy)
In a world in which women already have a hard time getting their rape allegations believed, the plot point in which she fakes a rape to ruin her ex is quite damaging. Not quite Rolling Stone “we made up a story because it was too perfect to fact-check” sort of damaging, but still provides a frame of reference for everyone who doesn’t want to believe a rape victim.
It remains to be seen how well this works for anyone in practice, but I can imagine defense attorneys mounting the “my wife is Gone Girling me” defense in mariticide. At the very least, it may be just enough to create a shadow of a doubt in juries given how popular this movie is and how much it’s penetrated the popular culture.
This is the least offensive point as it can be used against anything: movies, video games, books, etc : It’s probably given some of those less balanced members of society ideas they may not have had. Just as playing Team Fortress 2 or any other shooter hasn’t made me shoot up the world, most normal people wouldn’t act on this movie (starting with the fact that things need to go perfectly correct for this to play out well in real life), some people out there might now be planning some interesting scenarios.
I know there are a lot of weird things in legal documents that aren’t actually enforceable. It’s one of the reasons every contract has a part that says invalidation of one part of this contract doesn’t invalidate the whole contract. But this one makes 0 sense to me for eBooks:
“You may not:copy or burn the book or extract to a device whose principal function is to act as a storage device, for example, a CD/DVD or USB stick;”
This isn’t the first time I mention this song on here. But I’ve been thinking about the lyrics a lot recently as it continues to play on the radio at the gym. A conversation on twitter yesterday with @AprilTara spurred me to put my thoughts on the blog. At first blush, the lyrics seem to be a positive antidote to the rampant Photoshopping and fat-shaming we’ve been railing about in vain for at least two decades:
On the guest computer I updated to Kubuntu Vivid Alpha so I could check out KDE 5. Looks awesome - lots of polish over KDE 4. Sad that I’ll lose my current settings, but a chance to recreate with a new desktop.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
Dido tried to be opportunistic and attack me while I was at war with the Celts. Now she is facing my wrath. I will not stop until she has been wiped off the map.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
Civilization V (7 hrs): Met Dan in Mesa Bros; Waiting in Lefties Game
May:
Civilization V (11 hrs): More of the multiplayer games.
June:
Civ V (3 hrs): More multiplayer games.
Super Meat Boy (30 min): I played a few levels until it began to get too hard for me. It is a very well-designed game, but I was never that good at platformers. Really, I just stuck to Mario and Sonic growing up. The others were often too hard for me; at times even Mario and Sonic were too much. I don’t think I ever beat a Sonic game although with one of them (3 or S&K) I used to always get to the final Robotnick.
I played a lot of games this year. Perhaps more than in any previous year since leaving high school. Since I usually don’t buy games when they first come out, the winner will not necessarily be a game that came out this year. I went to my raptr page and took a look at all the games I played this year. Following is a list of the games and a little about what I thought of them. At the end will be my pick for 2010.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
[caption id=“attachment_7750” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Poker Night 2[/caption]
Poker Night 2 (8 hrs) - I find Poker Night 2 to be a bit harder than the original. Not sure if they upped the AI or changed anything about it, but I find it a lot harder to win Texas Hold ‘Em in PN2. Luckily, this game also includes Omaha Hold ‘Em and I have been doing a lot better with that game. While I enjoy Samson, I find the Banter to be a little lacking compared to the original. I think the developers did a better job of defining the player’s relationships with each other in the previous game and that led to somewhat better banter. Still, it’s fun to play Poker without worrying about real money and it’s a lot of fun so I’ll probably put some more time into the game later in the year.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
Civilization V (7 hrs): Met Dan in Mesa Bros; Waiting in Lefties Game
May:
Civilization V (11 hrs): More of the multiplayer games.
June:
Civ V (3 hrs): More multiplayer games.
Super Meat Boy (30 min): I played a few levels until it began to get too hard for me. It is a very well-designed game, but I was never that good at platformers. Really, I just stuck to Mario and Sonic growing up. The others were often too hard for me; at times even Mario and Sonic were too much. I don’t think I ever beat a Sonic game although with one of them (3 or S&K) I used to always get to the final Robotnick.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
Dido tried to be opportunistic and attack me while I was at war with the Celts. Now she is facing my wrath. I will not stop until she has been wiped off the map.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
Poker Night 2 (3 hrs): Before going on my recent business trip I wanted to take a small break from school work so I played PN2 the night before my trip. I reached the point where I’ve heard all the in-game dialogue so many times that I don’t even listen any more. I can generally last a while, but I wasn’t able to win any tournaments. I usually got knocked out by the last man standing.
Civilization V (7 hrs): Met Dan in Mesa Bros; Waiting in Lefties Game
May:
Civilization V (11 hrs): More of the multiplayer games.
June:
Civ V (3 hrs): More multiplayer games.
Super Meat Boy (30 min): I played a few levels until it began to get too hard for me. It is a very well-designed game, but I was never that good at platformers. Really, I just stuck to Mario and Sonic growing up. The others were often too hard for me; at times even Mario and Sonic were too much. I don’t think I ever beat a Sonic game although with one of them (3 or S&K) I used to always get to the final Robotnick.
Civilization V (75 hrs) - What can I say about this game that I haven’tsaidalready? This is the series that made “One More More Turn…” famous and it still works today. If I were to start a game tonight, I would not go to bed at a reasonable time.
With school over I had plenty of time to get back into video games last month. I had a blast!
Team Fortress 2 (6 hrs) - Got back into this game because my brother-in-law wanted to play it. I’d forgotten how awesomely fun it is to play this game!
Plants vs Zombies (5 hrs) - I wanted a quick game of fun so I went after some achievements in PvZ. I also found this game to be a blast.
I’m writing this Sunday, but I am trying to limit my blog posts to one a day so that there can be something for my readers each and every day.
I couldn’t wait for Mario Kart Wii to come out. The Mario Kart series has been my favorite on the Nintendo and Mario Kart Double Dash is the reason why my wife bought a Gamecube. We’ve had countless hours of fun playing and when the release got post postponed until today we were pretty bummed. So today we were at Best Buy right when it opened to make sure we’d be able to get a copy. There were enough, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they sold out by the end of the day.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
[caption id=“attachment_7750” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Poker Night 2[/caption]
Poker Night 2 (8 hrs) - I find Poker Night 2 to be a bit harder than the original. Not sure if they upped the AI or changed anything about it, but I find it a lot harder to win Texas Hold ‘Em in PN2. Luckily, this game also includes Omaha Hold ‘Em and I have been doing a lot better with that game. While I enjoy Samson, I find the Banter to be a little lacking compared to the original. I think the developers did a better job of defining the player’s relationships with each other in the previous game and that led to somewhat better banter. Still, it’s fun to play Poker without worrying about real money and it’s a lot of fun so I’ll probably put some more time into the game later in the year.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
[caption id=“attachment_7750” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Poker Night 2[/caption]
Poker Night 2 (8 hrs) - I find Poker Night 2 to be a bit harder than the original. Not sure if they upped the AI or changed anything about it, but I find it a lot harder to win Texas Hold ‘Em in PN2. Luckily, this game also includes Omaha Hold ‘Em and I have been doing a lot better with that game. While I enjoy Samson, I find the Banter to be a little lacking compared to the original. I think the developers did a better job of defining the player’s relationships with each other in the previous game and that led to somewhat better banter. Still, it’s fun to play Poker without worrying about real money and it’s a lot of fun so I’ll probably put some more time into the game later in the year.
[caption id=“attachment_7243” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civilization V - against Dave - Fighting Barbarians at the Gates - 2620 BC[/caption]
Civilization V (48.5 hrs): As is usually the case, spent a ton of time with Civilization this year. Played about 3.5 hours less than last year, but had way more fun by playing with Dan and Dave. Things have gone a little slower recently because we’ve all been away for the holidays, but I actually feel like there’s a good chance of us finishing the game. At least the one I have with Dave which is much further along.
Civilization 5 (5 hours): Still haven’t caught up on the blog posts. Still entirely consists of games with Dan and Dave. Dan gifted me the latest expansion pack during the Winter Steam Sale, so I may fire up a solo game. Time will tell - I still have a ton of indie games from Humble Bundles and even games Dan gave me for my birthday last year like LA Noire.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
Civilization V (7 hrs): Met Dan in Mesa Bros; Waiting in Lefties Game
May:
Civilization V (11 hrs): More of the multiplayer games.
June:
Civ V (3 hrs): More multiplayer games.
Super Meat Boy (30 min): I played a few levels until it began to get too hard for me. It is a very well-designed game, but I was never that good at platformers. Really, I just stuck to Mario and Sonic growing up. The others were often too hard for me; at times even Mario and Sonic were too much. I don’t think I ever beat a Sonic game although with one of them (3 or S&K) I used to always get to the final Robotnick.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
Civilization V (7 hrs): Met Dan in Mesa Bros; Waiting in Lefties Game
May:
Civilization V (11 hrs): More of the multiplayer games.
June:
Civ V (3 hrs): More multiplayer games.
Super Meat Boy (30 min): I played a few levels until it began to get too hard for me. It is a very well-designed game, but I was never that good at platformers. Really, I just stuck to Mario and Sonic growing up. The others were often too hard for me; at times even Mario and Sonic were too much. I don’t think I ever beat a Sonic game although with one of them (3 or S&K) I used to always get to the final Robotnick.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
[caption id=“attachment_7750” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Poker Night 2[/caption]
Poker Night 2 (8 hrs) - I find Poker Night 2 to be a bit harder than the original. Not sure if they upped the AI or changed anything about it, but I find it a lot harder to win Texas Hold ‘Em in PN2. Luckily, this game also includes Omaha Hold ‘Em and I have been doing a lot better with that game. While I enjoy Samson, I find the Banter to be a little lacking compared to the original. I think the developers did a better job of defining the player’s relationships with each other in the previous game and that led to somewhat better banter. Still, it’s fun to play Poker without worrying about real money and it’s a lot of fun so I’ll probably put some more time into the game later in the year.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
For my birthday, my mother got me a Garmin Swim watch. The watch uses an accelerameter and gyroscope to figure out how many laps I’m swimming and what strokes I’m swimming. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough that it was able to allow me to focus on my strokes instead of counting intervals on the first day I used it. I’m not sure what I am doing wrong with breaststroke, but it made it add 2 extra laps to my third set of 400 IM. Even with those issues, (and the fact that something I do with backstroke is so wrong, it thinks I’m doing breaststroke) I was able to confirm some things I’d supposed, but didn’t want to waste time confirming with a less feature-full stopwatch. For example, I confirmed that, on average, I swim 25 meters in 30 seconds with freestyle. I also confirmed that I do my 400s in slightly less than 10 minutes, but slower with each set as I get tired.
He’d have made Bee and Puppycat, Natasha Allegri’s latest surreal cartoon masterpiece. I think there’s something great about Allyn Rachel’s mumbling delivery that really sells it. I love this amazing world we have that allows for experimentation - I hope we don’t lose it through bungling of Net Neutrality issues. (I like eps 1 and 2 from the Kickstarter [second video] more than the pilot [first video])
He’d have made Bee and Puppycat, Natasha Allegri’s latest surreal cartoon masterpiece. I think there’s something great about Allyn Rachel’s mumbling delivery that really sells it. I love this amazing world we have that allows for experimentation - I hope we don’t lose it through bungling of Net Neutrality issues. (I like eps 1 and 2 from the Kickstarter [second video] more than the pilot [first video])
I still really love using Linux, but I don’t follow the Linux press like I used to. I’ve settled into a comfortable zone where I only follow Fedora and KDE news since that’s what I use. But I followed it very closely for nearly 10 years. Every year there’d be multiple articles asking whether this was the year of the Linux desktop, meaning people would finally see the Microsoft hegemony for what it was and throw off the shackles of proprietary software. It never came. Thanks to Ubuntu and Vista, we almost got there. Then there were the Netbooks, but the manufacturers chose horrible versions of Linux and underpowered machines and Microsoft came out with Windows 7 starter edition. And people went to Macs instead of Linux in the biggest tech comeback of … ever.
[iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/41535967" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen>]KDEnlive Test from djotaku on Vimeo.
I’ve mentioned this on my blog before, but there are a few passions that I have been engaged in to various degrees over the course of my life. One of those is the creation of videos. Of course, video creation is much more involved than my other passions. First of all, you have to worry about sound as well as video. Second, it usually has to have a story or purpose - so it’s at least three times as involved as photography, writing, or programming. So my video production has fallen off quite a bit in the last few years. You can see that if you go to my video site: drop the bomb productions. Although I may have done some tidying up by the time this post goes up, before that I hadn’t touched it in 4 years.
The more I’ve been learning about Lightroom 2 (technically now at 2.3), the more I’ve been liking it! First of all, I learned that - thanks to new camera profiles (also available in the latest camera raw software) - I can get my photos to start from where Canon’s own RAW software would have started. I never realized it was a better choice than photoshop because I liked the photoshop workflow so much. But now that I’ve played with the camera profiles in Lightroom, I realize that I’ve been selling my images short.
I just wanted to really elaborate on why I think Adobe Lightroom is a program any enthusiast to pro user should own. Although, as I related here, LR has grown on me, going through the photos I shot at my cousin’s wedding has really cemented my love for Adobe’s product. Here are my two favorite features. You may want to open up the images in a new tab at full size so you can follow along.
So I did a test and found that as long as I save the metadata to the file, Adobe Bridge (even with CS2) can correctly read the changes. So I decided to work in Lightroom to see if it was worth buying. I can say that I am really loving it! I’ve been able to adopt my usual RAW workflow with only some small changes. Now I can’t see how I could ever work without LR!! (It’s no wonder why Adobe gives a 30 day free trial!)
I still really love using Linux, but I don’t follow the Linux press like I used to. I’ve settled into a comfortable zone where I only follow Fedora and KDE news since that’s what I use. But I followed it very closely for nearly 10 years. Every year there’d be multiple articles asking whether this was the year of the Linux desktop, meaning people would finally see the Microsoft hegemony for what it was and throw off the shackles of proprietary software. It never came. Thanks to Ubuntu and Vista, we almost got there. Then there were the Netbooks, but the manufacturers chose horrible versions of Linux and underpowered machines and Microsoft came out with Windows 7 starter edition. And people went to Macs instead of Linux in the biggest tech comeback of … ever.
As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’ve been into photography since I was five years old. That’s when I got my first Kodak Instamatic camera and started shooting photos and creating photo albums. I have about ten photo albums, with most of them coming from when I got to high school and could really afford film and developing. Ever since I got my first digital camera in my second semester of college, the number of photos I’ve taken yearly has increased nearly exponentially. Because I’m an organized person, I started off putting my photos into event-based folders. Once I realized that’d quickly get unwieldy, I decided to put them in folders by date. Eventually, software like Picassa, Lightroom, and digiKam came out which would have allowed me to continue to to organized my photos by event because they could read the metadata and reorganize them by date. However, I’ve found that my system has two main benefits 1)my photos remain organized even if my descendants don’t have access to programs that can read the metadata on the photos. 2) it’s very easy for me to very quickly find a photo. It would be somewhere like 2010->Jan 10->So and So’s Wedding.
If you read anywhere on the web, you’ll see people talking about how Photoshop (and digital photo manipulation) is ruining the purity of photography. People argue endlessly about this as if they could get everyone on their side. Guess what? This controversy is older than radio. Recently I’ve been reading the great photography history, How To Read a Photograph. It turns out that as early as 1898, people were purposely publishing their photographs straight as they happened to develop. In the 1920s there emerged a division between photographers over whether it was more proper for photographers to alter their negatives (and therefore become an interpretive art form like painting) or if they had to be developed as is. People had already been experimenting throughout the 1900s with the usage of different chemicals to affect their prints in different ways. Photographers even used different films from different manufacturers because they were known to give darker greens or more saturated colors or better grain. Digital photography is no different - it’s just that dark rooms took years to master while anyone can get the basics of the Canon RAW (or Lightroom RAW) editor. But, having seen that this division has existed within photography for the past 100 years, I don’t think it will be going away any time soon.
For quite some time I’ve been been struggling with the point of Adobe’s Lightroom. Other than competing with Apple’s Aperture, it appears not to have a purpose. Of course, right around the time Lightroom (LR) was hitting its stride, I stopped reading photography magazines. The zine I loved the most was a British one published by the same company that puts out Linux Format Magazine. Unfortunately, even with an exchange rate of $1:1 Britsh Pound (which isn’t the case), it’s still $90 per year. So I may have missed lots of tutorial and explainer articles talking about why LR is such a great program. My impression of it was of a Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw. So I didn’t really see the point of paying $200 for that when those programs work just fine for me. It also seemed to straddle some Photoshop territory and I just couldn’t figure it out.
I still really love using Linux, but I don’t follow the Linux press like I used to. I’ve settled into a comfortable zone where I only follow Fedora and KDE news since that’s what I use. But I followed it very closely for nearly 10 years. Every year there’d be multiple articles asking whether this was the year of the Linux desktop, meaning people would finally see the Microsoft hegemony for what it was and throw off the shackles of proprietary software. It never came. Thanks to Ubuntu and Vista, we almost got there. Then there were the Netbooks, but the manufacturers chose horrible versions of Linux and underpowered machines and Microsoft came out with Windows 7 starter edition. And people went to Macs instead of Linux in the biggest tech comeback of … ever.
I still really love using Linux, but I don’t follow the Linux press like I used to. I’ve settled into a comfortable zone where I only follow Fedora and KDE news since that’s what I use. But I followed it very closely for nearly 10 years. Every year there’d be multiple articles asking whether this was the year of the Linux desktop, meaning people would finally see the Microsoft hegemony for what it was and throw off the shackles of proprietary software. It never came. Thanks to Ubuntu and Vista, we almost got there. Then there were the Netbooks, but the manufacturers chose horrible versions of Linux and underpowered machines and Microsoft came out with Windows 7 starter edition. And people went to Macs instead of Linux in the biggest tech comeback of … ever.
[caption id=“attachment_7361” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] NPR All Music Considered works correctly now[/caption]
It’s not a surprise that I love Amarok. Take a look at the related posts below. I think nothing beats it as a music program. If the KDE4 for Windows libraries were more robust I’d recommend it for everyone. As is, I think it’s the best on Linux. But, until the most recent updates there was something lacking that really bothered me. On a stream like NPR’s All Music Considered it wouldn’t update the Now Playing track to the song that was on. And that made it really hard to use that stream in the best possible way - to discover new music! It’s fixed now and that’s awesome! Woohoo!
I went with Backblaze first because they were highly recommended by LifeHacker. Then I chose Crashplan for my main Linux computer because Backblaze doesn’t do Linux. Crashplan offers a family plan that covers 2-10 computers, but I only need to cover 2 computers (my laptops don’t have anything that needs backing up). Covering two computers on Crashplan is more expensive than doing one computer on Crashplan and one on Backblaze. So the less efficient and more complicated setup is the cheaper one; oh well.
I went with Backblaze first because they were highly recommended by LifeHacker. Then I chose Crashplan for my main Linux computer because Backblaze doesn’t do Linux. Crashplan offers a family plan that covers 2-10 computers, but I only need to cover 2 computers (my laptops don’t have anything that needs backing up). Covering two computers on Crashplan is more expensive than doing one computer on Crashplan and one on Backblaze. So the less efficient and more complicated setup is the cheaper one; oh well.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Kinda like this. Only with wires and computers and, really, having nothing to do with clouds.”] [/caption]
If you read a lot of technology news on the interwebs, it appears as though we will soon all be using cloud computing. No longer will people have hard drives or buy programs. They will lease it all from the cloud. (There are many, many things listed under “cloud computer” from Gmail to Twitter. I am talking about the ultimate goal of those who advocate “cloud computing” where your “computer” is on the net and you just connect from home) There are many reasons why cloud computing is not for everyone.
Let me start with the reason closest to my life - high end photography. I went to a baseball game on 10 April and shot over 4 GB of photos. I then loaded these photos onto my computer for editing and sharing with others. It seems to take longer that I can stand to get the photos off my camera and onto my hard drive. I can’t imagine how annoying it would be to have to wait to upload them onto a cloud computing environment. I shoot only in RAW files so I can do some serious editing on the photos and retain the best quality. Sometimes I delete up to half of the photos from a shoot because it’s hard to tell from the back of the camera if it’s subtly out of focus. So imagine waiting forever to upload photos only to ultimately end up deleting them! Photoshop and Lightroom require pretty beefy computers to work correctly, I can’t imagine how slow it would be to have my screen refresh after each edit. It already takes longer than instantaneous on my home computer. This use case - high end photography - also lead me to another reason cloud computing will not be for everyone: bandwidth limits.
I went with Backblaze first because they were highly recommended by LifeHacker. Then I chose Crashplan for my main Linux computer because Backblaze doesn’t do Linux. Crashplan offers a family plan that covers 2-10 computers, but I only need to cover 2 computers (my laptops don’t have anything that needs backing up). Covering two computers on Crashplan is more expensive than doing one computer on Crashplan and one on Backblaze. So the less efficient and more complicated setup is the cheaper one; oh well.
Disclaimer: I got this book for free as part of Good Reads First Reads
I asked for this book because I find it interesting that it’s actually mentioned in by canonical books in the New Testament, but the book itself did not make it into the canon - at least not in the Protestant churches I attended growing up. So I thought it would be interesting to see what’s in there. Instead I got something much, much larger.
Disclaimer: I got this book for free as part of Good Reads First Reads
I asked for this book because I find it interesting that it’s actually mentioned in by canonical books in the New Testament, but the book itself did not make it into the canon - at least not in the Protestant churches I attended growing up. So I thought it would be interesting to see what’s in there. Instead I got something much, much larger.
Disclaimer: Got this book free as part of Good Reads First Reads
You can take something horrible and push it so far that you move into the realm of absurdity. Some of my favorite media do this. Kill Bill takes violence to such ridiculous levels (with blood spurting everywhere) that it’s become no different than the cartoon violence of Tom and Jerry. (Which, if you forgot, has Tom being diced up, pumped full of bullet holes, blown up, and pretty much everything shy of decapitation) Or look at Mel Brooks taking something horrible like the Spanish Inquisition and making it OK to laugh at in History of the World Part 1. But you can push something so far that it goes back around to offensive again. I feel like that’s the problem with this book.
Disclaimer: Got this book free as part of Good Reads First Reads
You can take something horrible and push it so far that you move into the realm of absurdity. Some of my favorite media do this. Kill Bill takes violence to such ridiculous levels (with blood spurting everywhere) that it’s become no different than the cartoon violence of Tom and Jerry. (Which, if you forgot, has Tom being diced up, pumped full of bullet holes, blown up, and pretty much everything shy of decapitation) Or look at Mel Brooks taking something horrible like the Spanish Inquisition and making it OK to laugh at in History of the World Part 1. But you can push something so far that it goes back around to offensive again. I feel like that’s the problem with this book.
The basement bathroom needed some new paint and repairs for reasons I’ll get into in another post. But it got Danielle in a renovation mindset. So she decided to paint the master bathroom. And, in the course of examining the bathroom she found out that the vanity lighting was rusting and needed replacement. So we ended up replacing nearly everything metal in there from shiny Chrome to Nickel. So here’s how the bathroom looked before she painted and I replaced the metal pieces:
I don’t think I could describe this any better than I do on the flickr page:
I walked into my parent’s bathroom on the last day before the end of the final spring break of my life. I saw this beautiful image coming through the windows, the rest of the bathroom as just as dark as the picture portrays. It took some fiddling with the shutter speed and aperture to get the camera to record what my eyes were seeing, but I was amazed at the beauty of a sunset where I couldn’t even see the sun.
A still life photo makes it for today’s Top 200 photos entry.
photo #175 is:
Danielle likes to create decorations that add to the ambiance of the house. This involves taking elements from different places and creating something that’s her own. Here she’s taken candles from a bunch of different stores and combined them with seashells we found on a trip to Florida. Some of her other creations might appear later as well.
The basement bathroom needed some new paint and repairs for reasons I’ll get into in another post. But it got Danielle in a renovation mindset. So she decided to paint the master bathroom. And, in the course of examining the bathroom she found out that the vanity lighting was rusting and needed replacement. So we ended up replacing nearly everything metal in there from shiny Chrome to Nickel. So here’s how the bathroom looked before she painted and I replaced the metal pieces:
When you’re part of a dominant class you don’t realize how differently you see the world. Sure, I’m ethnically Hispanic and have suffered humiliation and financial consequences over one overt racist incident. But by and large the world is my oyster. I’m a man and racially I’m white. In fact I’ve had coworkers come to me and disparage Hispanics (all-to-often a codeword for Mexicans - especially Illegal Mexicans - in the USA) and then say, “they’re not like us white guys.” So for the most part I never saw anything awry with pop culture. In fact, one of the few times I realized consciously that I wasn’t actually represented on TV was when I did see myself represented on TV in the form of reruns of the TV show ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.?. The show was exactly about me - it was about kids (although I think they were high school age or older) who were born in the USA to Cuban immigrants and whose grandparents only spoke Spanish. It was odd and fascinating and I couldn’t get enough of it. But other than that one year or so when I saw those reruns, I was able to identify with virtually any TV show. I could see myself as Chandler, Ross, or Joey in Friends. (Or as a character on Full House or Home Improvement) Now, I loved showed with African Americans like Hangin’ with Mr Cooper, Family Matters, The Cosby Show, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air so it’s not as though I needed to see myself in TV. But until I started poking around on the Internet as an adult I never realized that for people like African Americans, those four shows were almost the only opportunity they had to see themselves on TV (especially in a positive sense). And forget it if you’re Asian! (including Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis) I came to realize that I had been as naive about the entertainment landscape as those white couples from the 1920s who use to take trips to Harlem on the weekend to experience the Jazz and other aspects of African American culture. At the end of the trip they could retreat to their comfortable lives while the African Americans were stuck there.
The basement bathroom needed some new paint and repairs for reasons I’ll get into in another post. But it got Danielle in a renovation mindset. So she decided to paint the master bathroom. And, in the course of examining the bathroom she found out that the vanity lighting was rusting and needed replacement. So we ended up replacing nearly everything metal in there from shiny Chrome to Nickel. So here’s how the bathroom looked before she painted and I replaced the metal pieces:
[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“240” caption=“Day Fourteen: “You Told Me You Were Clean””] [/caption]
It’s been 16 days now since I started taking part in flickr’s famous 365 Project. Well, flickr has many of them, but the most famous one most people partake in is the one where the photographer takes 1 self-portrait per day for 365 days. The reason for the popularity in the self-portrait 365 project is probably due to two properties of said project. First of all, by forcing the photographer to take self-portraits you remove the photographer’s block that can come from thinking of a subject every day. Since you know it’s always going to be you, you don’t need to worry about what to photograph. On the other hand, self-portraits contain a challenge in that you have to pre-frame your shot and then get in it. At the moment the shutter clicks you are no looking through the viewfinder. I’ve found it to be a great exercise in creativity because it wouldn’t be fun for myself or my viewers if they were all just shots of me sitting or standing in front of a wall. I’ve only begun to scratch away at the limits of my creativity, but the house has gotten in the way; more on that shortly. I think my most creative shot thus far was on Day 14 and has to do with Swine Flu. Depending upon whether you are reading this shortly after posting or years later - the Swine Flu [near] Pandemic of 2009 was one of the biggest stories of the second quarter in 2009. It’s been on the news almost nonstop for the past week and so I had to try and do a topical 365 shot. I’m pretty happy with the result. Follow my progress in the 365 project by visitng my 365 se t.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): They were awesome at Warped Tour - I can’t wait until they go on the Projecet Atma tour. Manufacturing delays at the vinyl plant meant that the album was delayed. Still don’t have it - should be in my hands in December.
Jonathan Coulton, Greg Pak, and others – Code Monkey Save World (music and comics): Still missing the new music and The Princess Who Saved Herself. To be fair, the latter wasn’t promised until early 2015.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): They were awesome at Warped Tour - I can’t wait until they go on the Projecet Atma tour. Manufacturing delays at the vinyl plant meant that the album was delayed. Still don’t have it - should be in my hands in December.
Jonathan Coulton, Greg Pak, and others – Code Monkey Save World (music and comics): Still missing the new music and The Princess Who Saved Herself. To be fair, the latter wasn’t promised until early 2015.
I’ve been really loving my favorite new Florida-based Ska band, Beebs and Her Money Makers since I saw them in concert last year. I really enjoyed their new album Wurst Album Ever which I crowdfunded.
Check out the new 70s-tastic video for Death to Ego:
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): Things are on track with IFD. They are posting awesome videos of the recording process. It’s already March so as long as there aren’t any more delays, the album will be here in a few short months! Also, they’ll be on the Van’s Warped Tour, so I’ll be attending Warped Tour for the first time to go see them (and quite a few other bands I really like)
On 6 Nov I went to my 2013 concert. Because of time and money concerns, Danielle and I typically go to a maximum of two concerts a year, and usually just one concert. I was completely unable to resist seeing Five Iron Frenzy in their first tour since breaking up nearly a decade ago. I didn’t really care for Reel Big Fish and I hoped that Five Iron Frenzy would go first as Co-headliner so I could leave early. In fact, although being a fan of ska, the only Reel Big Fish song I’d ever heard was “Everbody’s Doin’ the Fish” because it was the Florida Marlins’ theme song for a season or two. A large part of that comes from the fact that when I got into ska, in the 1990s, I was only into Christian music to the exclusion of secular music - as was encouraged by my middle school church. (My high school church actually shied away from Christian music, which I thought was weird, considering how good it had gotten by the early 2000s) So I listed to Five Iron Frenzy, The OC Supertones, and The Skadaddles. This was going to be my first Five Iron Frenzy concert in nearly 15 years when I saw them at a festival in Florida (and actually filmed a pretty decent video bootleg)
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): They were awesome at Warped Tour - I can’t wait until they go on the Projecet Atma tour. Manufacturing delays at the vinyl plant meant that the album was delayed. Still don’t have it - should be in my hands in December.
Jonathan Coulton, Greg Pak, and others – Code Monkey Save World (music and comics): Still missing the new music and The Princess Who Saved Herself. To be fair, the latter wasn’t promised until early 2015.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): Things are on track with IFD. They are posting awesome videos of the recording process. It’s already March so as long as there aren’t any more delays, the album will be here in a few short months! Also, they’ll be on the Van’s Warped Tour, so I’ll be attending Warped Tour for the first time to go see them (and quite a few other bands I really like)
It’s December and I should have gotten all of my Kickstarter products by now. But that’s not exactly what happened. Every single one of my Kickstarters was late except the one I had the least faith and relationship with - Random Encounter’s Let Me Tell You a Story.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): They were awesome at Warped Tour - I can’t wait until they go on the Projecet Atma tour. Manufacturing delays at the vinyl plant meant that the album was delayed. Still don’t have it - should be in my hands in December.
Jonathan Coulton, Greg Pak, and others – Code Monkey Save World (music and comics): Still missing the new music and The Princess Who Saved Herself. To be fair, the latter wasn’t promised until early 2015.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): Things are on track with IFD. They are posting awesome videos of the recording process. It’s already March so as long as there aren’t any more delays, the album will be here in a few short months! Also, they’ll be on the Van’s Warped Tour, so I’ll be attending Warped Tour for the first time to go see them (and quite a few other bands I really like)
It’s December and I should have gotten all of my Kickstarter products by now. But that’s not exactly what happened. Every single one of my Kickstarters was late except the one I had the least faith and relationship with - Random Encounter’s Let Me Tell You a Story.
I’m writing this in late August - by the time this post appears I should have received all of my Kickstarter goods or they should be in the mail. Interestingly, even though the Kickstarter backer cycles were spread over about a three month period, they’re all supposed to be delivering the product at around the same time - 4th quarter of this year. As of the time of this writing, this is the status of my Kickstarters:
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): They were awesome at Warped Tour - I can’t wait until they go on the Projecet Atma tour. Manufacturing delays at the vinyl plant meant that the album was delayed. Still don’t have it - should be in my hands in December.
Jonathan Coulton, Greg Pak, and others – Code Monkey Save World (music and comics): Still missing the new music and The Princess Who Saved Herself. To be fair, the latter wasn’t promised until early 2015.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): Things are on track with IFD. They are posting awesome videos of the recording process. It’s already March so as long as there aren’t any more delays, the album will be here in a few short months! Also, they’ll be on the Van’s Warped Tour, so I’ll be attending Warped Tour for the first time to go see them (and quite a few other bands I really like)
It’s December and I should have gotten all of my Kickstarter products by now. But that’s not exactly what happened. Every single one of my Kickstarters was late except the one I had the least faith and relationship with - Random Encounter’s Let Me Tell You a Story.
I’m writing this in late August - by the time this post appears I should have received all of my Kickstarter goods or they should be in the mail. Interestingly, even though the Kickstarter backer cycles were spread over about a three month period, they’re all supposed to be delivering the product at around the same time - 4th quarter of this year. As of the time of this writing, this is the status of my Kickstarters:
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): They were awesome at Warped Tour - I can’t wait until they go on the Projecet Atma tour. Manufacturing delays at the vinyl plant meant that the album was delayed. Still don’t have it - should be in my hands in December.
Jonathan Coulton, Greg Pak, and others – Code Monkey Save World (music and comics): Still missing the new music and The Princess Who Saved Herself. To be fair, the latter wasn’t promised until early 2015.
I’m writing this in late August - by the time this post appears I should have received all of my Kickstarter goods or they should be in the mail. Interestingly, even though the Kickstarter backer cycles were spread over about a three month period, they’re all supposed to be delivering the product at around the same time - 4th quarter of this year. As of the time of this writing, this is the status of my Kickstarters:
Those of you who have been reading this blog long enough know that I often write my blog posts during my lunch break at work and set it to post at some point in the future. I’m writing this post almost 1 month before it is to appear on the blog. So in the middle of July I find myself in what many who have backed projects probably experience as the Kickstarter Lull. I backed a project by I Fight Dragons and interviewed them about it here and I backed a comic project by Greg Pak and Jonathan Coulton. During the backing period as a way to drum up support there was a constant stream of both updates and digital goodies. IFD, in particular, gave backers 2 albums (live concert recording and a conceptual album) and a concert film. A little while after the backing period was over, the projects contacted us for the info they needed to fulfill our backer rewards. Since then I haven’t heard from either of them. On the rational side, I’m glad they’re focusing on creating what we paid them to create. But after the constant communications it just feels odd to have “radio” silence. Now we just wait for the products to be created. In the case of these two projects, the members involved are all veterans: IFD put out records before having a record company contract and Greg Pak has already done about a half dozen Kickstarters. So, outside of catastrophe, I don’t fear for my money. I could see where this silence might be more disturbing with an unproven team.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): They were awesome at Warped Tour - I can’t wait until they go on the Projecet Atma tour. Manufacturing delays at the vinyl plant meant that the album was delayed. Still don’t have it - should be in my hands in December.
Jonathan Coulton, Greg Pak, and others – Code Monkey Save World (music and comics): Still missing the new music and The Princess Who Saved Herself. To be fair, the latter wasn’t promised until early 2015.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): Things are on track with IFD. They are posting awesome videos of the recording process. It’s already March so as long as there aren’t any more delays, the album will be here in a few short months! Also, they’ll be on the Van’s Warped Tour, so I’ll be attending Warped Tour for the first time to go see them (and quite a few other bands I really like)
It’s December and I should have gotten all of my Kickstarter products by now. But that’s not exactly what happened. Every single one of my Kickstarters was late except the one I had the least faith and relationship with - Random Encounter’s Let Me Tell You a Story.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): They were awesome at Warped Tour - I can’t wait until they go on the Projecet Atma tour. Manufacturing delays at the vinyl plant meant that the album was delayed. Still don’t have it - should be in my hands in December.
Jonathan Coulton, Greg Pak, and others – Code Monkey Save World (music and comics): Still missing the new music and The Princess Who Saved Herself. To be fair, the latter wasn’t promised until early 2015.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): Things are on track with IFD. They are posting awesome videos of the recording process. It’s already March so as long as there aren’t any more delays, the album will be here in a few short months! Also, they’ll be on the Van’s Warped Tour, so I’ll be attending Warped Tour for the first time to go see them (and quite a few other bands I really like)
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): They were awesome at Warped Tour - I can’t wait until they go on the Projecet Atma tour. Manufacturing delays at the vinyl plant meant that the album was delayed. Still don’t have it - should be in my hands in December.
Jonathan Coulton, Greg Pak, and others – Code Monkey Save World (music and comics): Still missing the new music and The Princess Who Saved Herself. To be fair, the latter wasn’t promised until early 2015.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): Things are on track with IFD. They are posting awesome videos of the recording process. It’s already March so as long as there aren’t any more delays, the album will be here in a few short months! Also, they’ll be on the Van’s Warped Tour, so I’ll be attending Warped Tour for the first time to go see them (and quite a few other bands I really like)
It’s December and I should have gotten all of my Kickstarter products by now. But that’s not exactly what happened. Every single one of my Kickstarters was late except the one I had the least faith and relationship with - Random Encounter’s Let Me Tell You a Story.
I’m writing this in late August - by the time this post appears I should have received all of my Kickstarter goods or they should be in the mail. Interestingly, even though the Kickstarter backer cycles were spread over about a three month period, they’re all supposed to be delivering the product at around the same time - 4th quarter of this year. As of the time of this writing, this is the status of my Kickstarters:
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): They were awesome at Warped Tour - I can’t wait until they go on the Projecet Atma tour. Manufacturing delays at the vinyl plant meant that the album was delayed. Still don’t have it - should be in my hands in December.
Jonathan Coulton, Greg Pak, and others – Code Monkey Save World (music and comics): Still missing the new music and The Princess Who Saved Herself. To be fair, the latter wasn’t promised until early 2015.
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): Things are on track with IFD. They are posting awesome videos of the recording process. It’s already March so as long as there aren’t any more delays, the album will be here in a few short months! Also, they’ll be on the Van’s Warped Tour, so I’ll be attending Warped Tour for the first time to go see them (and quite a few other bands I really like)
It’s December and I should have gotten all of my Kickstarter products by now. But that’s not exactly what happened. Every single one of my Kickstarters was late except the one I had the least faith and relationship with - Random Encounter’s Let Me Tell You a Story.
I’m writing this in late August - by the time this post appears I should have received all of my Kickstarter goods or they should be in the mail. Interestingly, even though the Kickstarter backer cycles were spread over about a three month period, they’re all supposed to be delivering the product at around the same time - 4th quarter of this year. As of the time of this writing, this is the status of my Kickstarters:
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): They were awesome at Warped Tour - I can’t wait until they go on the Projecet Atma tour. Manufacturing delays at the vinyl plant meant that the album was delayed. Still don’t have it - should be in my hands in December.
Jonathan Coulton, Greg Pak, and others – Code Monkey Save World (music and comics): Still missing the new music and The Princess Who Saved Herself. To be fair, the latter wasn’t promised until early 2015.
I know I’m late to coming across this, but I found a presentation where someone was explaining the idea behind Fedora.next where there are 3 core products: Fedora Server, Fedora Workstation, and Fedora Cloud. But I also think it works rather well if you think of Gnu/Linux distros as LEGO sets and Windows/OSX as Playmobil. (Also, I’m now at the point in my life where I realize the benefits of each system, although I still think people should have the right to explore code they run)
I know I’m late to coming across this, but I found a presentation where someone was explaining the idea behind Fedora.next where there are 3 core products: Fedora Server, Fedora Workstation, and Fedora Cloud. But I also think it works rather well if you think of Gnu/Linux distros as LEGO sets and Windows/OSX as Playmobil. (Also, I’m now at the point in my life where I realize the benefits of each system, although I still think people should have the right to explore code they run)
As I read with my daughter I realize I had forgotten a large part of The Car in the Hat. Also watching the old Disney shorts with my daughter. Both Mickey Mouse and the Cat in the Hat were often jerks before they became mascots for their companies. Now they are goodie two shoes.
As I read with my daughter I realize I had forgotten a large part of The Car in the Hat. Also watching the old Disney shorts with my daughter. Both Mickey Mouse and the Cat in the Hat were often jerks before they became mascots for their companies. Now they are goodie two shoes.
But reading @Scalzi’s response to GamerGate jerks just demonstrates how few companies run the media world and how important it is for us to maintain an open internet so that people can express themselves without being gated by companies that, as a whole, tend to be conservative (not in the political sense, in the business sense)
I started off the year with a Samsung Galaxy Victory. It is a decent and capable smart phone, but I like to use a lot of programs like Doggcatcher and SmartBooks and the phone was having issues working correctly when I had more than a few programs running. So I switched to a Nexus 5 and it’s working perfectly for me.
The account sign-up was painless and pretty quick. The part where it did a bunch of stuff to my phone took a couple cycles to take, but once that was through it worked perfectly sing. I decided not to do VOIP for calls at home as I thought I would. As I went through the instructions, it turned out to be too complex and unreliable. People complained that it turned off their alarms (which I use to wake up for work) and other strange nonsense. I decided not to stress it. I barely talk on my phone anyway - ever since my parents became business owners, it’s been a lot harder to get a hold of them. At the end of my fist month I only had used a little over half of the smallest chunk of voice minutes that Ting sells. I’ve decided that whenever Hangouts for Android gets feature parity with iOS and allows VOIP calls, I’ll investigate that. Strangely, the one time I tried to use Hangouts on a desktop to call, it didn’t work as a touchtone phone.
I started off the year with a Samsung Galaxy Victory. It is a decent and capable smart phone, but I like to use a lot of programs like Doggcatcher and SmartBooks and the phone was having issues working correctly when I had more than a few programs running. So I switched to a Nexus 5 and it’s working perfectly for me.
The account sign-up was painless and pretty quick. The part where it did a bunch of stuff to my phone took a couple cycles to take, but once that was through it worked perfectly sing. I decided not to do VOIP for calls at home as I thought I would. As I went through the instructions, it turned out to be too complex and unreliable. People complained that it turned off their alarms (which I use to wake up for work) and other strange nonsense. I decided not to stress it. I barely talk on my phone anyway - ever since my parents became business owners, it’s been a lot harder to get a hold of them. At the end of my fist month I only had used a little over half of the smallest chunk of voice minutes that Ting sells. I’ve decided that whenever Hangouts for Android gets feature parity with iOS and allows VOIP calls, I’ll investigate that. Strangely, the one time I tried to use Hangouts on a desktop to call, it didn’t work as a touchtone phone.
[caption id=“attachment_7470” align=“aligncenter” width=“449”] LG Chocolate Touch - the phone I will be talking about in this paragraph[/caption]
Around three or so years ago I was ready to get a new cell phone. My phone was no longer maintaining a charge and a new battery was more than the nearly free phone I could get by renewing my contract. Smart phones had been around for a few years, but I didn’t want a smart phone. I just wanted a phone with a decent camera. I absolutely love my dSLR; it helps me take the best photos I’m capable of taking. But I rarely have it with me unless I know I will be going somewhere I want to be able to take photos; I always have my cell phone. I spent an hour in the Verizon store finding just the right phone - it looked and behaved like a smart phone (for the most part) and it had a great camera compared to my dying phone. I got the phone and the agent told me I’d need to get a data plan. I informed him that I didn’t want one. He told me about all the functionality I’d be missing. I didn’t care. This phone did what I wanted - it made phone calls and it took nice photos for a point and shoot. OK, he did some wrangling on his computer and told me the data plan was removed. I fought with verizon every time a bill arrived because the system kept adding a data plan. Eventually, I was told I couldn’t have it without a data plan and so I got rid of the phone.
Disclaimer: I got this as part of Good Reads First Reads
This book reminded me a lot of Tim Allen’s books ( like Don’t stand too close to a naked man). The author’s humor shines through, but humor is not its purpose. Unlike the Tim Allen book about quantum mechanics, which is about a weekend he had to himself to think, Aasif’s book is a collection of essays that forms the rough outline of an autobiography.
So…I doubt I’ll be getting a PS4 or any next gen system. I could get by with a Roku (or Google or Amazon or whoever streaming stick) and a laptop to stream my Steam games (if I want to play them on the big screen).
So…I doubt I’ll be getting a PS4 or any next gen system. I could get by with a Roku (or Google or Amazon or whoever streaming stick) and a laptop to stream my Steam games (if I want to play them on the big screen).
I’ve been really loving my favorite new Florida-based Ska band, Beebs and Her Money Makers since I saw them in concert last year. I really enjoyed their new album Wurst Album Ever which I crowdfunded.
Check out the new 70s-tastic video for Death to Ego:
On 6 Nov I went to my 2013 concert. Because of time and money concerns, Danielle and I typically go to a maximum of two concerts a year, and usually just one concert. I was completely unable to resist seeing Five Iron Frenzy in their first tour since breaking up nearly a decade ago. I didn’t really care for Reel Big Fish and I hoped that Five Iron Frenzy would go first as Co-headliner so I could leave early. In fact, although being a fan of ska, the only Reel Big Fish song I’d ever heard was “Everbody’s Doin’ the Fish” because it was the Florida Marlins’ theme song for a season or two. A large part of that comes from the fact that when I got into ska, in the 1990s, I was only into Christian music to the exclusion of secular music - as was encouraged by my middle school church. (My high school church actually shied away from Christian music, which I thought was weird, considering how good it had gotten by the early 2000s) So I listed to Five Iron Frenzy, The OC Supertones, and The Skadaddles. This was going to be my first Five Iron Frenzy concert in nearly 15 years when I saw them at a festival in Florida (and actually filmed a pretty decent video bootleg)
Until I was in high school, my dad and I didn’t bond over much. I knew he was a caring father and loved me, but we just didn’t have much to share except for one thing: Car Talk. My dad was never one to suffer fools, so when he drove me to school in the mornings we listened to NPR, not the music stations with their endless morning show prattle. Every time I hear the horn intro to Morning Edition it reminds me of my childhood.
Until I was in high school, my dad and I didn’t bond over much. I knew he was a caring father and loved me, but we just didn’t have much to share except for one thing: Car Talk. My dad was never one to suffer fools, so when he drove me to school in the mornings we listened to NPR, not the music stations with their endless morning show prattle. Every time I hear the horn intro to Morning Edition it reminds me of my childhood.
[caption id=“attachment_7361” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] NPR All Music Considered works correctly now[/caption]
It’s not a surprise that I love Amarok. Take a look at the related posts below. I think nothing beats it as a music program. If the KDE4 for Windows libraries were more robust I’d recommend it for everyone. As is, I think it’s the best on Linux. But, until the most recent updates there was something lacking that really bothered me. On a stream like NPR’s All Music Considered it wouldn’t update the Now Playing track to the song that was on. And that made it really hard to use that stream in the best possible way - to discover new music! It’s fixed now and that’s awesome! Woohoo!
With the current revolution in Egypt I’ve been hearing a lot of speculation on NPR’s Talk of the Nation about who will come to power when the current government falls. There’s been a lot of talk about the consequences of a government run by The Muslim Brotherhood. The fact is that some key figured in Al-Qaeda were active in The Muslim Brotherhood. Another fact is that Hamas is an off-shoot of The Muslim Brotherhood. However, at least two guests have mentioned that in the last few decades the organization has sworn off violence. Wikipedia (caveats about Wikipedia reliability apply) claims that bin Laden has denounced the fact that The Muslim Brotherhood has denied violence and is participating peacefully in Egypt’s parliament.
While listening to a recent podcast of This American Life (TAL) it made me realize the troubles that the disabled have to go through in this country. I don’t mean the way others treat them differently, although that certainly is an issue, but rather the little things we take for granted. The sad thing is that, from what I’ve heard from friends and family who have lived abroad, the US is one of the top countries in the way we treat those with physical disabilities. The story on TAL, in case you don’t have time to listen to it, was about how California is the only (or one of very few) state in the USA where the disabled can sue for Americans with Disabilities Act violations and get monetary compensation.
John Waters was on NPR to talk about his new book, Role Models. In the course of talking to Terry, he mentioned dealing with people with Alzheimer’s. He asked a friend of his, a nurse who works with Alzheimer’s patients - “People forget who their family is, what they did that day or even five minutes ago. Do they ever forget if they are gay or straight?” And the answer was “no”. He surmised this meant it was built in versus a choice. Because you could forget a choice you made. While not perfectly conclusive proof, I think it certainly adds to the idea that it is inborn rather than simply a choice.
I’ve been listening to podcasts for about two years now. I got into it because I love listening to some NPR programs, but they are always on when I’m at work or asleep on the weekends. Eventually, I heard on NPR that they have podcasts of various shows. I checked it out right away because in Maryland NPR is on 88.1 which is always being interfered with by SiriusXM radio receivers. At first I only listened to a few podcasts because I didn’t own an iPod and I so I burned the podcasts to a CD-R every few days. That got expensive, so I got an iPod shuffle. Since podcasts don’t take up too much space, I started getting into more and more podcasts. Some I discovered in magazines and others were recommendations from Dan. So, I thought I would share the podcasts I listen to so that those following this blog could perhaps discover some new podcasts they didn’t know about. Dan, for example, recently got into This American Life. (I think after I kept telling him about it - but he may have discovered it independently) I’m going to put links to the actual podcast URL, so just copy that into your podcather or iTunes.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The trinkets I received for becoming a member of the Free Software Foundation.”] [/caption]
I’ve been wondering about a peculiar aspect of human motivation. Why do we require a present of some sort in exchange for a donation? Let’s take NPR for example. During membership drives a donation will net the donator a hat or tote bag or something like that. But why does there have to be a prize for donation? The point of donation is that you realize some organization or cause needs your money. So why waste some of that money to get a mug? And if you wanted a mug emblazoned with the NPR logo, you could just go to the NPR store and buy it. But getting gifts must entice more people to donate or organizations wouldn’t waste money on it when they could be using all the money to cover their costs.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Thanks to podcasts, NPR maybe be obsolete”] [/caption]
I am a huge listener of public radio programming, but I no longer listen to my local NPR station. Most of the time I just listen to podcasts of the shows that would otherwise be broadcast on NPR. The basic force behind this is the same as the reason why I loved my MythTV when I had cable TV. I don’t want to have to do appointment radio listening any more than I want to do appointment television. In many cases this is because the shows I enjoy listening to come on the air while I’m at work, in the gym, or sleeping. The shows I listen to are produced by NPR, Public Radio International (PRI), and American Public Media (APM). That includes Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation, On the Media, Media Matters, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Away with Words and On the Money with Christ Disimio. Together with other non-radio programs and some BBC programs, these provide for all of my radio-listening needs. This started out (and a big reason I got into podcasts a few years after most techies had) because, in Baltimore, the local NPR station at 88.1 is interrupted by XM (or Sirius) FM transmitters. So I got pissed that whenever I happened to be available when a show I liked was on, every time someone with satelite radio passed by I couldn’t listen to my program. This is why I donated to the Washington DC NPR station - that one isn’t subject to interference so I’d rather pay for a station I can hear.
Today I was listening to Fresh Air on NPR. They had an economics guy on who’s now a professor at one of the University of Maryland campuses and was involved in Clinton’s economic team. (Although he didn’t always see eye to eye with Clinton’s treasury secretary) This guy put the current economic crisis in the best terms and framed it so well, I can’t believe that we’re in this mess. Those stupid jackasses on Wall Street “were betting that people who did not have money to pay their mortgage would pay their mortgage.” Just take a second and read that again. Yeah, pretty nutty, isn’t it? If people had just used their noggins we wouldn’t be in this mess. “Sure,” you might say, “hindsight is 20/20.” Yeah, but it doesn’t take hindsight to see that people who have bad credit probably aren’t going to pay their mortgage. Couple that with the fact that Wall Street swindled them into interest only loans and variable rate mortgages, and you HAD to see that a disaster was on the way. Again, they were betting that people who didn’t have the money to pay their mortgage would somehow pay their mortgage. Again, in their defense you might say, “but they thought housing prices were always going to go up.” And to that I say, WHEN has ANY market EVER gone up FOREVER? Hello! The tech bubble was just 10 years ago! Nothing ever goes up without an end. That’s just ridiculous. Sigh! Seriously, I don’t know how they let this happen. These guys all have degrees in finance. They should have known and done case studies on how whatever’s hot now won’t be hot in a few years. And then AIG freakin’ insures the mortgages of people with bad credit? I just can’t believe it!
As you know, unless you’ve been living under a rock, the US Government (USG) wants to give us all rebate checks to spur the economy along. All you have to do is file your taxes and you’ll get up to $600 if you’re single or $1200 if you’re married. What hasn’t really been publicized in the mainstream media, however, is the drastic measures the USG is willing to go to make sure you spend your rebate and to help the economy.
This year I decided to mainly support technological causes. I donated to the F ree Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I think that rms and the rest over at the FSF are really doing a lot of great work to preserve our freedoms. I especially like the Defective by Design campaign they’ve been running. So this year they get the lion’s share of my money.
The EFF has been doing a lot of work with other things I care about such as opposing the broadcast flag and overall protecting our electronic and Internet freedoms.
I noticed Dan was on my borders right when I started having the Cho Ku Nu, my special unit. Having played civ and RTS games with Dan, I figured it was strike or be struck. So I went to war. Unfortunately, Dan fights better than AI and because of the terrain features, it became a war of attrition that favored Dan. After a stalemate war, I offered peace and Dan accepted.
Costume Quest (7 hours) - I completed the main Costume Quest and then continued on to the DLC. The game continued to be charming and I enjoyed playing it as well as the simple story arc of the brother and sister realizing they didn’t hate each other that much. Gameplay-wise the game is not too forgiving when you make a mistake. There aren’t any items to use for healing so any mistakes in the Mario RPG-like mechanics (hitting a button on a certain timing to empower your attack or reduce an attack against you) could lead to losing an encounter quite quickly. I think it took me about 5-8 tries on the final boss of the main game to get just the right combination of add-ons (which increase HP or allow you to retaliate when hit) and costumes to make it through to the end. It also doesn’t help that the enemies appear to level up with you. That is to say, if there’s enemy X at the beginning of the game and you come up against him later, he has more HP and hits harder. That’s a bit different than the mechanic used in most of the Squaresoft RPG games I played in my youth. That said, there aren’t really any consequences to losing a fight. As far as I can tell, you don’t even lose candy when you lose a fight. You just end up right where you were before and you have another chance to start the encounter again or move away to change the costume equipped.
Civilization V (17 hrs) - I took advantage of the Steam Fall Sale to finally pick up the Gods and Kings expansion to Civ V. I have enjoyed founding my own religion, Otakuism. Religion plays a much more key role than they did in Civ IV. In the previous game, I would pretty much just found a religion because each city would pay me gold (with certain buildings or government choices) and I’d get a window into cities. In Civ V the religion plays like another level of policies. You get to choose a series of attributes for your religion such as temples giving you gold or faster territory expansion. It tends to make the expansion of religion to other cities and civs a much more important task than before. I’m still a little unsure of how cities pressure other cities to adopt religion because I seemed to have one city flipping even though I couldn’t see any reason for it. (Could have been another civ sending prophets my way) Spies are also added. The spy missions remind me of Assassin’s Creed:Brotherhood assassin missions. Unlike previous iterations of Civ, the spies aren’t on the map. You assign them to a city or city-state and then they either steal you tech (which may not be useful if you’re super advanced and/or playing normal or easier), rig elections in city states (gaining you influence), or protect your cities from being screwed over by other spies. I must admit that I haven’t done much investigating in the civclopedia, but I can’t really see how to generate more spies and so the whole system seems like a mini-game diversion. I continued my strategy of non-aggression unless another civ attacks me or denounces me. Then I drop my hammer on them and take over their capital city and, sometimes, eliminate them entirely. I like that the requirements on resources for building some units has been reconfigured. I usually ended up not using a lot of early-game siege weapons because iron tended to be too scarce. I think it’s a lot more balanced on which units need resources like oil, iron, and horses than before the expansion pack.
A little while ago I wrote about watching Netflix on Fedora 20. Also works on the latest Kubuntu with the latest updates installed. Also, at least with Kubuntu, I didn’t need to modify the user agent. It just automatically worked with Google Chrome. I didn’t try with Chromium, but I’d read that didn’t work.
A little past the end of February I started having problems with my internet connected devices. In the basement we have a Roku box that the wife uses to watch Netflix. She reported that it was no longer connecting to Netflix. We’d had issues before with it needing to be re-registered with Netflix, but that did not seem to be the case. I’d click on the Netflix channel and it would say “retrieving movies” for a while and then pop back to the main menu. At first I thought something was wrong with the Roku box, so I tried the Amazon channel, but that worked and I was able to watch my content. I figured it’d resolve itself. So she just popped in the latest DVD from Netflix into our DVD player. Later that night she was in the bedroom and learned that our Samsung BluRay player was no longer connecting to Netflix. I thought that was weird, but figured maybe it was a Netflix problem. I checked on my computer and I couldn’t log into the Netflix site. Neither could Danielle on her computer. These were Linux boxes (Fedora and Ubuntu respectively) so I tried on my Windows computer. Strangely, that one could log in. That’s weird. I tried on both Firefox and Chrome with no difference. So then I tried the guest computer - that computer hadn’t been used since December and I knew it was working for Netflix back then. That would help me eliminate the possibility that I’d installed a distro update that had killed it for me. (I knew that didn’t totally make sense because of the BluRay Player and Roku) That one could reach it either. What was going on here? Was Netflix blocking Linux? Well, I figured it might go away so I waited until the next day.
I’ve had the Roku Box for a few months now. It costs $99 and I bought it for one simple reason: my wife and I object to having to use Windows and Internet Explorer to watch Netflix’s Instant Programs. As a secondary reason, we’re not in college anymore and we object to having to watch on our computers. We want to be able to watch these on the TV just as if we had rented little silver discs. The Roku box is tiny. Here’s a shot of the front:
But reading @Scalzi’s response to GamerGate jerks just demonstrates how few companies run the media world and how important it is for us to maintain an open internet so that people can express themselves without being gated by companies that, as a whole, tend to be conservative (not in the political sense, in the business sense)
[caption id=“attachment_6232” align=“aligncenter” width=“683”] The Capitol[/caption]
I keep hearing that the gun bill was killed in the Houses of Congress despite 90% of Americans wanting it to pass. Now, we know that polls can be rigged based on how the questions are asked. But, if we take as a starting point that this poll is accurate, what does that mean about our representative democracy system? There are basically two types of democracy - representative and direct. In a direct democracy we’d all vote on all the issues. In the representative democracy that we have, we vote on issues by proxy. We believe that Democrats or Republicans will vote a certain way on certain issues and we know where our candidates agree and disagree with their parties. So we elect them and expect them to vote as we would vote. So what does it mean when 90% of us want something and we still don’t get it? Is the system working correctly? Are we effectively saying they know better than us even though they were elected by us to serve as our proxy? And if it’s broken do we have any recourse short of the reprehensible idea of revolution?
Remember earlier this week when I said the gun control debate was now pointless? Apparently the State Department wants to pretend that what I said isn’t true. In a complete misunderstanding of how the Internet works, they have compelled the website holding the CAD designs for the 3D gun to remove the CAD file. The reasoning is that leaving it up would be exporting munitions (since everyone all over the world can go to a web page) This, of course, ignores the fact that it was already obtained over 100 000 times and is already on Bit Torrent. Oh well. I guess pointless moves are better than nothing in their eyes.
[caption id=“attachment_6194” align=“aligncenter” width=“449”] The Liberator - the world’s first working 3D Printed Gun[/caption]
I’m sorry Obama, Sandyhook victims, and everyone else. You’ve already lost the gun issue. Not because of politicians, but because of technology. We have working 3D printed guns. It’s over. On 6 May my RSS feed reader was ablaze with articles about the working 3D-printed gun including this article from Ars, another article from ars, and one from Boing Boing. This is the same guy who previously created the ability to hold more bullets in semi-automatic guns using 3D printing. The articles all made sure to mention that the CAD files that were uploaded for this new gun had a section that was purposely made of metal to ensure it could be detected by magnetometers. Only one article mentioned that this was a bull-crap attempt at not getting too much flack from anti-gun people. Because there’s no reason why someone who got the CAD files couldn’t change that to be made of plastic and have a nearly undetectable gun. The gun only fires a few rounds, but under the right circumstances that could be more than enough.
Hard drives are relatively cheap, especially nowadays. But I still want to stay within my budget as I setup my backups and system redundancies. So, ideally, for my backup RAID I’d take advantage of btrs’ ability to change RAID types on the fly and start off with one drive. Then I’d add another and go to RAID1. Then another and RAID5. Finally, the fourth drive and RAID6. At that point I’d have to be under some sort of Job-like God/Devil curse if all my drives failed at once, negating the point of the RAID. The best thinking right now is that you want to have backups, but want to try not to have to use them because of both offline time and the fact that a restore is never as clean as you hope it’ll be.
So, back when I started this project, I laid out that one of the reasons I wanted to use btrfs on my home directory (don’t think it’s ready for / just yet) is that with RAID1, btrfs is self-healing. Obviously, magic can’t be done, but a checksum is stored as part of the data’s metadata and if the file doesn’t match the checksum on one disk, but does on the other, the file can be fixed. This can help protect against bitrot, which is the biggest thing that’s going to keep our children’s digital photos from lasting as long as the ones printed on archival paper. So, like I did the first time, I’ll first be trying it out in a Fedora VM that mostly matches my version, kernel, and btrfs-progs version. So, I went and added another virtual hard drive of the same size to my VM.
Back in August I finally had some time to do some things I’d been wanting to do with my Snap-in-Time btrfs program for a while now. First of all, I finally added the weekly code. So now my snapshots are cleaned up every three days and then every other week. Next on the docket is quarterly cleanups followed up yearly cleanups. Second, the big thing I’d wanted to do for a while now: come up with unit tests! Much more robust than my debug code and testing scripts, it helped me find corner cases. If you look at my git logs you can see that it helped me little-by-little figure out just what I needed to do as well as when my “fixes” broke other things. Yay! My first personal project with regression testing!
# btrfs sub list /home
ID 275 gen 3201 top level 5 path home
ID 1021 gen 3193 top level 275 path .snapshots
ID 1023 gen 1653 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2146
ID 1024 gen 1697 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2210
ID 1025 gen 1775 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2300
ID 1027 gen 1876 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0000
ID 1028 gen 1961 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0100
ID 1029 gen 2032 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0200
ID 1030 gen 2105 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0300
ID 1031 gen 2211 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0400
ID 1032 gen 2284 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0500
ID 1033 gen 2357 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0600
ID 1035 gen 2430 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0700
ID 1036 gen 2506 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0800
ID 1037 gen 2587 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0900
ID 1038 gen 2667 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-1700
ID 1039 gen 2774 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-1800
ID 1040 gen 2879 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-1900
ID 1041 gen 2982 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-2000
ID 1042 gen 3088 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-2100
ID 1043 gen 3193 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-2200
I got my new hard drive that would replace my old, aging /home hard drive. As you read in part 1, I wanted to put btrfs on it. This is my journey to get it up and running. Plugged it into my hard drive toaster and ran gparted.
[caption id=“attachment_7889” align=“aligncenter” width=“421”] Gparted for new drive[/caption]
[caption id=“attachment_7890” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] Gparted for new drive1[/caption]
Recently I once again came across an article about the benefits of the btrfs Linux file system. Last time I’d come across it, it was still in alpha or beta, and I also didn’t understand why I would want to use it. However, the most I’ve learned about the fragility of our modern storage systems, the more I’ve thought about how I want to protect my data. My first step was to sign up for offsite backups. I’ve done this on my Windows computer via Backblaze. They are pretty awesome because it’s a constant backup so it meets all the requirements of not forgetting to do it. The computer doesn’t even need to be on at a certain time or anything. I’ve loved using them for the past 2+ years, but one thing that makes me consider their competition is that they don’t support Linux. That’s OK for now because all my photos are on my Windows computer, but it leaves me in a sub-optimal place. I know this isn’t an incredibly influential blog and I’m just one person, but I’d like to think writing about this would help them realize that they could a) lose a customer and b) be making more money from those with Linux computers.
Hard drives are relatively cheap, especially nowadays. But I still want to stay within my budget as I setup my backups and system redundancies. So, ideally, for my backup RAID I’d take advantage of btrs’ ability to change RAID types on the fly and start off with one drive. Then I’d add another and go to RAID1. Then another and RAID5. Finally, the fourth drive and RAID6. At that point I’d have to be under some sort of Job-like God/Devil curse if all my drives failed at once, negating the point of the RAID. The best thinking right now is that you want to have backups, but want to try not to have to use them because of both offline time and the fact that a restore is never as clean as you hope it’ll be.
So, back when I started this project, I laid out that one of the reasons I wanted to use btrfs on my home directory (don’t think it’s ready for / just yet) is that with RAID1, btrfs is self-healing. Obviously, magic can’t be done, but a checksum is stored as part of the data’s metadata and if the file doesn’t match the checksum on one disk, but does on the other, the file can be fixed. This can help protect against bitrot, which is the biggest thing that’s going to keep our children’s digital photos from lasting as long as the ones printed on archival paper. So, like I did the first time, I’ll first be trying it out in a Fedora VM that mostly matches my version, kernel, and btrfs-progs version. So, I went and added another virtual hard drive of the same size to my VM.
Back in August I finally had some time to do some things I’d been wanting to do with my Snap-in-Time btrfs program for a while now. First of all, I finally added the weekly code. So now my snapshots are cleaned up every three days and then every other week. Next on the docket is quarterly cleanups followed up yearly cleanups. Second, the big thing I’d wanted to do for a while now: come up with unit tests! Much more robust than my debug code and testing scripts, it helped me find corner cases. If you look at my git logs you can see that it helped me little-by-little figure out just what I needed to do as well as when my “fixes” broke other things. Yay! My first personal project with regression testing!
# btrfs sub list /home
ID 275 gen 3201 top level 5 path home
ID 1021 gen 3193 top level 275 path .snapshots
ID 1023 gen 1653 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2146
ID 1024 gen 1697 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2210
ID 1025 gen 1775 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2300
ID 1027 gen 1876 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0000
ID 1028 gen 1961 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0100
ID 1029 gen 2032 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0200
ID 1030 gen 2105 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0300
ID 1031 gen 2211 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0400
ID 1032 gen 2284 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0500
ID 1033 gen 2357 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0600
ID 1035 gen 2430 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0700
ID 1036 gen 2506 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0800
ID 1037 gen 2587 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-0900
ID 1038 gen 2667 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-1700
ID 1039 gen 2774 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-1800
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ID 1041 gen 2982 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-2000
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ID 1043 gen 3193 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-14-2200
I got my new hard drive that would replace my old, aging /home hard drive. As you read in part 1, I wanted to put btrfs on it. This is my journey to get it up and running. Plugged it into my hard drive toaster and ran gparted.
[caption id=“attachment_7889” align=“aligncenter” width=“421”] Gparted for new drive[/caption]
[caption id=“attachment_7890” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] Gparted for new drive1[/caption]
Recently I once again came across an article about the benefits of the btrfs Linux file system. Last time I’d come across it, it was still in alpha or beta, and I also didn’t understand why I would want to use it. However, the most I’ve learned about the fragility of our modern storage systems, the more I’ve thought about how I want to protect my data. My first step was to sign up for offsite backups. I’ve done this on my Windows computer via Backblaze. They are pretty awesome because it’s a constant backup so it meets all the requirements of not forgetting to do it. The computer doesn’t even need to be on at a certain time or anything. I’ve loved using them for the past 2+ years, but one thing that makes me consider their competition is that they don’t support Linux. That’s OK for now because all my photos are on my Windows computer, but it leaves me in a sub-optimal place. I know this isn’t an incredibly influential blog and I’m just one person, but I’d like to think writing about this would help them realize that they could a) lose a customer and b) be making more money from those with Linux computers.
This book deserves all the praise that has been heaped upon it. Brooks does an excellent job putting together a history of both how the zombie virus became an epidemic and how the human race came on top. He gives each character their own voice and style. I really felt as if it were a real documentation of history. I also enjoyed the meta-story told through both the names of the countries/provinces and the introductions to each section.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
Scarlett at the Beach in Florida and my dinner at Universal Studios.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
This time from the Cherry Blossom Festival. The blooms were predicted to come early that year, but lots of the trees weren’t in full bloom because of a cold front that came through.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
This time from our trip to San Francisco for Daniel’s wedding
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
I think this is the first time her face looks really similar to the way it does now. (Only it had more fat back then)
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post (ok, I think this’ll probably be the last one in a row…I’ve been busy!) . For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
The National Christmas Tree (it’s too bad that because of my schedule I won’t get to see it this year) and a few other random shots from last year’s period just before Christmas.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post (yeah, they’re back to back this time). For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
More Scarlett - this time getting the Christmas tree. It made me sad that we didn’t do the lights on her again this year. Then again, she might have wanted to do it all the time - so maybe that’s a good thing.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
Once again a focus on Scarlett. Looking back on these photos I realize how easy it was to get to smile back then. It sounds ridiculous to say she’s gotten more jaded - she’s not even two, for Pete’s sake. But she does spend more time brooding and is a bit more specific about what makes her smile. Perhaps this is part of the reason why some couples decide to have more children - to get back that ultra-innocence of baby-hood before the slightly less innocent toddler-hood what with its tantrums and such.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
Once again I can’t believe how young she looks. But, having gone back to the pumpkin patch, I can say it was definitely easier to take photos when she was younger.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
A break from the Scarlett photos as all the photos in this photo time capsule are from Baltimore Comic-Con. As I mentioned before, I’m sad I couldn’t go this year, but I did get to go to the pretty awesome Color Run in Brooklyn. Perhaps those photos will make it next year!
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
In this installment: the first time we ever took Scarlett to the beach. Heh, I’d completely forgotten about that car-walker.
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
I think in these photos Scarlett is finally starting to have the same facial features as 1.5 year old Scarlett.
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
Again mostly Scarlett, but also a scan from a photo I took when I was in High School. Dan’s all the way on the left, in the water.
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
The video called Keyboard Scarlett comes from the fact that I found out I was able to make her laugh hysterically if I moved her hands back and forth on the table like Keyboard Cat. Interestingly, now that she has full agency over her limbs, she hates when I do anything like this.
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
Of course, it consists of Scarlett photos. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, I can’t believe now much she’s changed in just one year!
Unsurprisingly, Scarlett is once again the subject of the Photojojo. Also captured, a visit by the in-laws. I think the most interesting thing is that I find her way cuter as she looks now vs a year ago. But back then I found her way cute. Scientists say it peaks at age 4. I guess we’ll see.
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
More Scarlett photos. The one of her sleeping on me, melts me. The one of me talking to her with her eyes open like “WTF IS GOING ON?” is hilarious. (the last image)
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
Scarlett’s only 2-2.5 months old in these photos and the most striking things are how tiny she is and how much in awe she seems of the world around her. No mean feat considering how tiny she remains compared to her peers. But it definitely takes a lot more to astound her than it did a year ago.
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
I took a long time to publish the previous post, so here we are again. It’s mostly Scarlett Easter photos. As I sit here and look at a photo of this year’s Easter photo, it’s pretty awesome to see how much she’s changed. For one thing, she’s mobile now, so it was a challenge to get her to sit there while we took the photo. For another, she can actually sit on her own.
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
The biggest takeaway which is SOOOOO crazy is how much Scarlett has changed in just 1 year. Only 365 days. And she looks COMPLETELY different!
So…..apparently the most interesting photo has nothing to do with Scarlett being born? It must be based on when I uploaded it, not when the photo was taken.
Apparently, I only had one interesting photo last January. (Makes sense - we were probably spending all our free time getting ready for Scarlett’s arrival. I expect she’ll be a huge chunk of the photojojo in the coming year)
Interestingly, this year we had some snow in Dec, but if my title is correct here, the first snow of last year was in January.
I’ve fallen a bit behind on these photo time capsules. Here’s the one from early December. Apparently, all my interesting photos from back then were taken in NYC.
My latest Photojojo photo time capsule containing the ending to my 365 project and some photos from the Coney Island Mermaid Parade has arrived. Here are the photos:
Time again for my photojojo time capsule. It contains my most interesting photos within a two week period. This time around it’s mostly my 365 plus one of my first Holga photos.
Once again, it’s a heavy focus on my 365 project. Photojojo is a photo time capsule that sends you your most interesting photos (according to flickr) from the previous year so you can enjoy them again
Another Photojojo photographic time capsule. See it online here and get your own if you want. This shows you your most interesting photos (according to flickrs algorithms) from 1 year ago. Mine this time focus largely on my 365 Project.
Once again I have received my Photojojo time capsule. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view) , it’s all 365 Project photos as that’s the most interesting thing that was going on at the time photographically.
Apparently I always go to National Parks in Oct, because last Oct I went to Shenandoah National Park. So all but one of the photos are from that trip. The time capsule is available online here if you want to see how to setup your own.
Once again, here are the most interesting photos as selected by the Photojojo folks and flickr’s interesting algorithms from one year ago. ( View on their site)
I’ve been slacking a bit with these, so here are two photojojo entries. The first one is from 25 Aug to 8 Sept. Apparently only my 365 was interesting at the time:
Found online here. Mostly involves my 365 project. But the first photo is from a BBQ with a bunch of our friends. That was an exciting day in both good and bad ways.
As always you can view it on their site here. (and sign up for your own) Here are the photos from the late July Photojojo time capsule. It’s mostly my 365 with a little bit of Otakon thrown in.
View it online here. For those new to this blog, Photojojo is a time capsule that emails me my most interesting photos from a year ago. This time it’s mostly involving our trip to Florida for my grandfather’s birthday.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“I took this first one while I was waiting for my wife to finish up at work so we could go see some houses.”] [/caption]
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“After putting it off for a few years, we went to a Corn Field Maze. It was fun for a little bit until we couldn’t find our way back out.”] [/caption]
This month finds me with getting two asian photos in my inbox from Photojojo. Either an amazing coincidence or they have some great code going on the in background. Interesting, the first one is a product of racism while the other is a product of love.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Yeah….racism….it’s great for selling stuff.”] [/caption]
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“From Lisa and Pawel’s Wedding”] [/caption]
It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.
Escalator is a series of short comics, all by Brandon Graham. Although I routinely read short science fiction stories and anthologies, it’s much rarer for me to come across comics anthologies. This collection contains some of Brandon’s oldest non-porn comics. I think it’s an interesting insight into his mind as well as look into how his work differed in the 1990s. A lot of is it autobiographical or semi-autobiographical and that adds a little something special to the stories as well.
What this trade adds to the Image Comics series is the first issue from Oni Press which sets up some of the characters as well as why they leave the city. It also includes the porn comic that originated the characters. The porn comic wasn’t my cup of tea, but as a completist, I did want to see where the characters started off. Interestingly, with each edition of the comic, Graham draws Nik with less hair. He has a full beard in the porn comic, a goatee in the Oni Press comic, and a clean-shaven face in the Image Comics issues.
If you’re purchased comic artists’ sketch books before, you probably have a good idea of what you’re going to get. However, unlike other sketch books I’ve seen, this one contains little mini-comics scattered among the more traditional sketches. It’s also neat that he includes some sketches his wife has drawn since they often draw together. Also fun - his reinterpretations of some Marvel and DC characters.
I first saw the movie adaptation in middle school. The youth ministry pastor decided to share it with us. I fell in love immediately. When I came across it again in college, I bought it and my wife and I have seen it so many times we can more or less recite the movie. Outside of Disney movies the only others we know so well are Snatch and The Birdcage. While I was in college I came to realize it was based on a book. At the time I was a huge Audible fan and I got it as an audible book. The weird narrative structure didn’t make sense to me as a audio book. So I put it off for about a decade. Then, I suddenly decided to check it out from the library.
I first saw the movie adaptation in middle school. The youth ministry pastor decided to share it with us. I fell in love immediately. When I came across it again in college, I bought it and my wife and I have seen it so many times we can more or less recite the movie. Outside of Disney movies the only others we know so well are Snatch and The Birdcage. While I was in college I came to realize it was based on a book. At the time I was a huge Audible fan and I got it as an audible book. The weird narrative structure didn’t make sense to me as a audio book. So I put it off for about a decade. Then, I suddenly decided to check it out from the library.
On the third mission to Mars things go horribly wrong and Mark is left for dead. It seems like a pretty grim premise, but this book was a very fun read. I love Mark’s logs, which are - essentially - Mark’s inner monologue. This was not “watch one man go mad in isolation”; it was a test of one man’s ingenuity.
If you love or have ever loved reading comics, you need to read this book. It is essentially a love letter to comic book fans. This is a world in which the characters are slightly self-aware. They don’t really know they’re in a story, but it does still have some of the same vibes of Redshirts. The characters know that they always come back after death (view spoiler)[(a tragic fact considering how the book progresses (hide spoiler)] and they know they monologue and then save the world. But they don’t necessarily know they’re in a book or comic.
Posts like this one and others I’ve mentioned recently help explain why I’ve had an increase in hatred of pop music as my music tastes have expanded. (Although I don’t think there’s anything wrong with enjoying Bubblegum - as it was once known - most of it is garbage) The record industry, as with any established industry (and not too differently from fast food chains), hates risk. They take artists who put out amazing mix tapes and make them bland. As a corollary, when I do enjoy mainstream acts (as opposed to indie), I tend to enjoy the songs they don’t play on the radio. (Lana Del Rey and Fall Out Boy are perfect examples)
Posts like this one and others I’ve mentioned recently help explain why I’ve had an increase in hatred of pop music as my music tastes have expanded. (Although I don’t think there’s anything wrong with enjoying Bubblegum - as it was once known - most of it is garbage) The record industry, as with any established industry (and not too differently from fast food chains), hates risk. They take artists who put out amazing mix tapes and make them bland. As a corollary, when I do enjoy mainstream acts (as opposed to indie), I tend to enjoy the songs they don’t play on the radio. (Lana Del Rey and Fall Out Boy are perfect examples)
Some things people don’t know because they weren’t taught. Or it was taught in a way that didn’t make sense to the way their brains work. Or it was beyond them for some reason. All of this is fine. It’s the prideful ignorance that is really wreaking havok with this country. The following Daily Show clip is what inspire this mini-rant:
Today I was reading an article about protecting kids from seeing bad things on the Internet. The author pointed out that there’s bad enough stuff on Conservative Fox News and pointed to this link.
The Supreme Court rulings on campaign finance make me think of Animal Farm. All are equal, but some are more equal than others. (Because if money is free speech, some have way more free speech than others)
The Supreme Court rulings on campaign finance make me think of Animal Farm. All are equal, but some are more equal than others. (Because if money is free speech, some have way more free speech than others)
Skip to 28 seconds in. Sure, there are way too many Super Mario Brothers covers, but that theme is amazing as is seeing this performance of the theme on an ancient Chinese hyper flute. The instrument looks like something out of a science fiction movie.
There was a time when I loved video games. I subscribed to EGM and EGM2. I trolled the nascent World Wide Web looking for video game news. I read IGN religiously. The most powerful systems out there were the Nintendo 64 and the Playstation. Then I discovered girls and dropped the subscriptions. Most of the video games of that time period were still very arcade-y in nature. Or they were platformers like Mario or Tomb Raider that had the flimsiest excuse for a plot. Yo, the princess got kidnapped again. Run through a bunch of levels to get to her. No exposition or reason for anything going on. You just needed to complete these tasks to unlock the final boss fight. Of course, games were starting to have cut scenes between levels to keep the narrative going. And I remember the great FMV flame wars that caused. Were you just working to unlock expository videos? This was better than the Mario case, but there was still just a small correlation between what you were doing to get through the level and what was going on in the story. The biggest exception was the movie tie-in game, but those tended to have gameplay elements that were full of suck.
This is a game I have been waiting for ever since I played New Super Mario Brothers on my borrowed Nintendo DS. This is the purity of Mario. Screw all this 3D stuff. Yeah, it rocks to have a 3D space to run around in, but that’s not Mario. Mario is a side scroller and its charm comes out best that way. Or maybe I’m just an old codger nostalgic for what I grew up with. It’s probably the latter given that the Mario theme in New Super Mario Brothers Wii (NSMBW henceforth), a modified version of the original with a little “ah” a capella thrown in, excites me in ways I cannot express. Apparently it also excites the goombas and turtles because they do a little dance move during the a capella parts.
Don’t worry, this blog isn’t about to become some weird fan tribute blog to Braid. It’s more of a case of trying to make sense of the game I’ve just played. There’s really no reason to make sense of The Beatles Rockband. You are one of The Beatles playing music. There’s nothing to “get”. But finishing Braid has left me with more questions than answers. Braid has the potential to leave you frustrated in the same way you may end up frustrated at a particularly dense painting where you see that there is a table of objects, but can’t figure out the significance of the objects. It just looks like a cluttered table until the docent explains that the book with a skull on it represents that man will never understand his world until he dies.
warning: The following contains many spoilers about Braid. I, personally, feel that your enjoyment of the game will be greatly reduced by reading this ahead of time. You have been warned!
I finished Braid last night. I did cheat a little. Of the 60 possible puzzle pieces, I used a walkthrough to get about 10 of them. Each of the ones that I used the walkthrough for (and I did not do this until I had spent a good chunk of time trying everything I had learned up to that point and even afterwards (since you could revisit worlds) were puzzles I would have NEVER solved. For example, the puzzle piece that is accessed by moving around the giant replica of the puzzle in the level would never, ever have occurred to me. Someone of a certain type of mind would surely have realized that the puzzles would not exist in the world if they did not have a purpose, but I could not figure this one out. And the fact that most of the puzzles are one-offs means that you never do this again.
That a game like Braid can exist is a statement on where video games are as an art form with a well-established history and canon. To make a parallel in the paint world: without a long canon of traditional paintings of tables with fruit and bread, people wouldn’t have really understood the “parody” or “remix” of a Cubist rendition of such a painting. In the same way, Braid is most enjoyable to those of us who have been playing video games for the past 20 years, growing up with Super Mario Bros. as our first video game experience. In fact, Braid does indeed make a few callbacks to this classic game which has almost become a scripture to us. Any game that allows users to design levels (eg Little Big Planet) cannot exist for more than a femptosecond before at least four people have recreated Super Mario Bros. World 1-1. Braid does nothing so brash and that’s where the game design genius begins to show. The game designer does not ape Mario, but hints at it here and there. One can almost see the developer giving you a knowing look and a nudge in the ribs. “Look here, I’ve made this or that subtle reference.” I don’t want to ruin it by speaking of it even though this game has been out for ~ a year already. It would ruin the delight of experiencing it.
For years I had been saying that I would not buy an iPod product. After all, they sell music in the iTunes music store with DRM on it. All of my music on my Linux computer is in the OGG format and it can’t be played with iPods. However, when it came time to buy an audio player I did a bit of research. It had to be something I could buy at the local Best Buy because I had a coupon and gift card. Of the players sold at Best Buy, the players which supported OGG were, ironically, not well supported on Linux. In fact, the best supported and integrated player in Linux was the iPod. That’s important to me since I use my Linux computer for serving my main audio needs. All of my podcasts come in through Rhythmbox. The second requirement I had is that it had to be of the same form factor as the 2nd Generation iPod Shuffle so that it could use it at the gym clipped onto my shirt or shorts and not weigh me down at all. I used to work out with an iPaq in my pocket and it was not very comfortable at all.
I received Super Mario Galaxy for Christmas and I must say that I’m quite happy with the gift. This is the most talked about Wii game for the end of 2007 and not without reason. Everyone who’s into gaming kept mentioning that Mario Galaxy is the true successor to Super Mario 64 on the Gamecube. Pretty much everyone, myself included, thinks that Mario Sunshine was a piece of sod that should never have been made. Mario Galaxy, on the other hand, has a lot of the same charm that made SM64 so much fun to play. My only complaint, and this is a very tiny one, is that the puzzles are a bit easier than Mario 64. I remember racking my brain with my brother trying to figure out how to get the each of the stars for SM64. With Mario Galaxy, I feel that most of the stars are a lot easier to get. However, as I write this blog post I realize that I played Super Mario 64 approximately 10 years ago, so it’s possible that the puzzles that were so hard for me back then would not be quite as hard now. That said, I beat the game in two days with about 20 hours of gameplay. That is, I beat the final Bowser, but was only about half way through collecting all of the stars.
Skip to 28 seconds in. Sure, there are way too many Super Mario Brothers covers, but that theme is amazing as is seeing this performance of the theme on an ancient Chinese hyper flute. The instrument looks like something out of a science fiction movie.
Skip to 28 seconds in. Sure, there are way too many Super Mario Brothers covers, but that theme is amazing as is seeing this performance of the theme on an ancient Chinese hyper flute. The instrument looks like something out of a science fiction movie.
If you’ve been following Internet news recently, you know that the World Wid Web is celebrating its 25th Anniversary this year. Lots of people have been talking abou tthe first websites they ever set up. Unfortunately for me, my earliest sites were not captured by the Internet Archive. But I started on the web around 1995 or 1996 on Angelfire. From there I went to Tripod and Geocities. Eventually, I joined the two so that I could have a whopping 20 MB of hosting space between the two providers. I’ve mentioned it many times before, but my first web presence was a Squaresoft fan site - mostly revolving around Final Fantasy 6 (3 in the US) and Chrono Trigger. I also used it here and there in High School for various things. When I got back to Tripod in college and found that Tripod had deleted that site, I created a personal site for the first time. Around 2003 I started messing around with running my own server using Fedora Core 1. And since 2005 I’ve been blogging here at It’s A Binary World 2.0. And in the last few years I’ve had a web comic and a site that comments on commercial comics. It’s incredible that we’ve gone from 10 MB at Tripod to my current host giving me unlimited storage because it’s gotten so cheap. I’ve gone from one website to 3 with more to come in 2014.
I got my new hard drive that would replace my old, aging /home hard drive. As you read in part 1, I wanted to put btrfs on it. This is my journey to get it up and running. Plugged it into my hard drive toaster and ran gparted.
[caption id=“attachment_7889” align=“aligncenter” width=“421”] Gparted for new drive[/caption]
[caption id=“attachment_7890” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] Gparted for new drive1[/caption]
I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): Things are on track with IFD. They are posting awesome videos of the recording process. It’s already March so as long as there aren’t any more delays, the album will be here in a few short months! Also, they’ll be on the Van’s Warped Tour, so I’ll be attending Warped Tour for the first time to go see them (and quite a few other bands I really like)
It’s December and I should have gotten all of my Kickstarter products by now. But that’s not exactly what happened. Every single one of my Kickstarters was late except the one I had the least faith and relationship with - Random Encounter’s Let Me Tell You a Story.
Do I even need to repeat it here? Eh, why not: “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics”. Between the way the mind works and the way we’ve been socialized, statistics carry more weight than the same information without statistics. However, there are many ways to take the same data and bend the results to draw out your conclusion. In the case of a story I came across at the end of May, it was through omission. The story mentioned a study by the Drug Czar’s office that revealed
I heard today that AOL is getting rid of Moviefone. Makes sense, I haven’t used it to find movie times in at least a decade. Shoot, I rarely even go to the Moviefone website. I just use Google’s ability to show showtimes, go to the actual theater’s website, or Fandango. Lots of people remember Moviefone from the pretty funny Seinfeld episode in which Kramer answers the phone number (when the phone numbers get switched?). My favorite line: “Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you want to see?”
I heard today that AOL is getting rid of Moviefone. Makes sense, I haven’t used it to find movie times in at least a decade. Shoot, I rarely even go to the Moviefone website. I just use Google’s ability to show showtimes, go to the actual theater’s website, or Fandango. Lots of people remember Moviefone from the pretty funny Seinfeld episode in which Kramer answers the phone number (when the phone numbers get switched?). My favorite line: “Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you want to see?”
I heard today that AOL is getting rid of Moviefone. Makes sense, I haven’t used it to find movie times in at least a decade. Shoot, I rarely even go to the Moviefone website. I just use Google’s ability to show showtimes, go to the actual theater’s website, or Fandango. Lots of people remember Moviefone from the pretty funny Seinfeld episode in which Kramer answers the phone number (when the phone numbers get switched?). My favorite line: “Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you want to see?”
I heard today that AOL is getting rid of Moviefone. Makes sense, I haven’t used it to find movie times in at least a decade. Shoot, I rarely even go to the Moviefone website. I just use Google’s ability to show showtimes, go to the actual theater’s website, or Fandango. Lots of people remember Moviefone from the pretty funny Seinfeld episode in which Kramer answers the phone number (when the phone numbers get switched?). My favo
The Sword & Sorcery Anthology by David G. Hartwell
Firefox (aka Red Panda) busy Not Spying on You[/caption]
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Back to the Future: The Video Game - The Pseudonym Fun of the series continues[/caption]
Saint’s Row The Third: The Ho Boat[/caption]
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The Princess Who Saved Herself[/caption]
GitHub activity graph
Gparted for new drive[/caption]
Gparted for new drive1[/caption]
Noticed the Catbite sticker on the wall with the others
The Misbehavin’ Maidens at the New Deal Cafe
FIF Concert (Nov 2013)[/caption]
I’m on a motorcycle!
I see you!
Yeah, I know how to use this
Sam in the leaves
Sam’s First Carousel Ride[/caption]
Chicken and cauliflower tikka masala
Cuban Picadillo
Ground pork tacos
Teriyaki Chicken Thighs
Teriyaki Chicken Thighs
lemon-dill biscuits
Za’atar chicken cutlets
Korean Pork and Kim Chi Stew
brussels sprouts and garlic chips
Cooking[/caption]
At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
Sandisk Sansa Clip Zip in Packaging[/caption]
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The Mocking Dead Volume 1 by Fred Van Lente
Wizzywig: Portrait of a Serial Hacker by Ed Piskor
Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present by Dan Mazur
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GOG Galaxy - Settings
Of course, what we “see” is dependent upon our state of mind. Having been watching lots of fairy tale cartoons, her first guess was that I’d drawn a dragon and a dinosaur. Her second guess, of course, was correct that it was a giraffe and rhino. She then added a bird and some apples for the giraffe.
Of course, I took my Canon 400D and Fujifilm A 345. Overall I did pretty well. Out of 800+ pictures only 63 were out of focus. Also, for sake of mentioning it, 61 were of my wife. That’s a new thing for me as we usually don’t take the usual tourist-y pictures. Our first day were were still on Eastern Time so we got up at 0400 and went to watch the sun rise.
Running Vivaldi for the first time.
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cover of Panic by MxPx
MxPx Front Cover
Album front cover
PyCharm asking if I want to add the new file to source control
Ready for my first USMS swim meet!
Red Hat Linux and Fedora Unleashed Cover
Gnome - 20151002
Atmel Webserver[/caption]
lil kids - CC licensed by jepoycamboy[/caption]
Ready for the Race!
Yup, there’s snow accumulating on my head
if you look at my knee, this is after I fell
The starting line when I first arrived to the race.
a post-race selfie
Noah’s Chaos
Stella’s Chaos
Tight Formations
Scarlett Spells Something
Noah’s Expansion Spell
Noah’s Magic Hands
Audrey’s Shapes
Firework Fun
Audrey’s Circle
Poker Night 2[/caption]
Costume Quest - DLC[/caption]
Cities XL - Trio - buildings up close[/caption]
Civ 5 - Gods and Kings - Otakuism[/caption]
Saints Row: The Third - My Engineer Mask[/caption]
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BBQ Thermostat: Arduino MKR 1010 and Therm Shield measuring temperature during a smoke
Grafana graph of my BBQ Thermostat while measuring the smoker temp
Tilevania in the Unity UI
Glitch Garden during development
git before merging master to devel
git after merging master into devel
Yakuake with Dracula theme
Kate with Dracula theme
Laser Defender - a Galaga Galaxian clone
Arkanoid
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Cover of Canon Eyes
Choqok[/caption]
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First time soldering headers
I love the idea of having art on the gates that come down when the the restaurant is closed. Rather than the ugly grey, possibly tagged with grafitti, we get this amazing art.
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Scarlett (March 2020)
Scarlett’s scientific journal entry about a duck and a baby duck
Up in the jungle gym at Centennial[/caption]
Just a photo to showcase Scarlett’s new haircut. But when I saw it a month later, I really liked how it looked.
Scarlett Trick Or Treating at Ellicott City[/caption]
Scarlett and I in the Kitchen before Bedtime[/caption]
Scarlett Sleeping[/caption]
Scarlett’s Natural Curls[/caption]
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It was part of my college visitation trip and it was a surprise that we would get to see NYC. It was a miserable day, but I was ecstatic to see this place I’d only heard of in movies.
Sam’s human looks like something that belongs on Rick and Morty
Sam at the Bronx Zoo
Sam’s duck
Messing around with the Neopixels Strip
You Know It
Annual Self-Portrait (2020)
and now it’s:
which was not in the top 20 before, so it has really gained a lot of views. That comes from the fact that it’s on Pixel-Peer as an example of that lens’ abilities.
and now it’s:
and the current #18 photos is:
this photo has been on the rise ever since Bradley Manning’s trial started up.
With 1194 views
lamb and onion burger
beef short rib ragu
Chicago-style pepperoni pan pizza
hoisin-glazed baby back ribs
oatmeal-rasin bread
Grilled brined zucchini with cilantro-yogurt sauce
succotash
vanilla icebox cookies
bistec de palomilla
bistec empanizado
potaje de frijoles negros
lechon asado
Almost No-Knead Bread
Brown Sugar Cookies
1 Hour Pizza
Quesadilla
cinnamon swirl bread
Chicken Chilaquiles
Fried Tofu with Cabbage Salad
Dave’s Fish Tacos
Easy Weeknight Chicken Tacos
Great Grilled Pizza
Pecan-Crusted Fish
Fluffiest Pull-Apart Rolls
bigger on the inside burger patties
FreshJax Bold Bayou Rub
pit beef
quick cheese bread
quinoa taco salad
roasted asparagus with gremolata
Speculoos (aka Biscoffs)
Oatmeal and toppings
beef enchilada casserole
grilled chicken with mustard-tarragon paste
bratwurst “hot tub”
crispy chickpeas
grilled steak fries
Vermont Maple-Mustard Glazed Burgers
Piadine
Tilefish with Jax Citrus Pepper rub
scones
Bake-Sale Berry Muffins
banana poppy seed muffins
gochujang chicken
black bean soup
boiled carrot with Cumin, Cilantro, and Lime
chicken burritos mojados
chicken burritos mojados
cinnamon swirl bread
cinnamon swirl bread
first from easy fish and chips
chips from easy fish and chips
Lemon-Buttermilk Pound Cake
Lemon-Buttermilk Pound Cake
pull-apart garlic rolls
pull-apart garlic rolls
pull-apart garlic rolls
Rosemary Focaccia bread
Rosemary Focaccia bread
Rosemary Focaccia bread
Rosemary Focaccia bread
rustic italian loaf
rustic italian loaf
rustic italian loaf
skillet-roasted cauliflower
Vietnamese Rolled Beef (bo lui)
Vietnamese Rolled Beef (bo lui)
Buttermilk Biscuits
Buttermilk Biscuits
Vermouth Cracked Potatoes
Skillet Turkey Burgers
Pork Posole
North Carolina Cheese Biscuits
Stuffed Chicken Breasts
Thai Chicken Soup
Big Butts Pork Steak
Big Butts Pork Steak smoke ring
fattoush
Happy Mouth Yakitori
Macadamia nut, White Chocolate, and Cranberry Cookies
Bourbon Burger with Caramelized Onions and Horseradish sauce
chopped winter salad with butternut squash
Egg and Sausage McMuffin
English Muffins
English Muffins
Ground Beef Enchladas
Ladybird Johnson’s Barbecue Sauce
roti canai
Brussels Sprouts with Lemon
Thai-Style Pork Burgers
chicken tonkatsu
donuts
Georgian Chicken Soup (Chikhirtma)
Grilled Chicken Fajitas
Milk Street Barbecue Rub No. 2
Mushroom Pork Omelet
the output of man dnf
Arch Linux Installation Begins
Language Selection
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Love Hina, Vol. 11 by Ken Akamatsu
Cornell’s CS101 class textbook back when I was a freshman
I don’t remember what class this was for, but Cornell sure loved Java back then.
I took the skin off because Danielle was going to take off the skin anyway and since this was a rub-based recipe, that would remove all the flavor as well.
Self-Portrait[/caption]
I’d gotten OK at drawing with a mouse[/caption]
Drawing with pen for the first time[/caption]
Drawing with pen for the second time[/caption]
Havana Nocturne by T.J. English
Something seems a bit off here
Haven’t seen one of these in a while
Kdenlive 18.12
Dan making pizza for the family
Crazy boutique Hotel Diva Blackout Curtain[/caption]
Baby birds in BBQ prep station - the mom thought it was the best place to make a nest
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As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’ve been into photography since I was five years old. That’s when I got my first Kodak Instamatic camera and started shooting photos and creating photo albums. I have about ten photo albums, with most of them coming from when I got to high school and could really afford film and developing. Ever since I got my first digital camera in my second semester of college, the number of photos I’ve taken yearly has increased nearly exponentially. Because I’m an organized person, I started off putting my photos into event-based folders. Once I realized that’d quickly get unwieldy, I decided to put them in folders by date. Eventually, software like Picassa, Lightroom, and digiKam came out which would have allowed me to continue to to organized my photos by event because they could read the metadata and reorganize them by date. However, I’ve found that my system has two main benefits 1)my photos remain organized even if my descendants don’t have access to programs that can read the metadata on the photos. 2) it’s very easy for me to very quickly find a photo. It would be somewhere like 2010->Jan 10->So and So’s Wedding.
Oliver Brewing Company Tasting Room
self-portrait at Red Hat Summit
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Civilization V - against Dave - Fighting Barbarians at the Gates - 2620 BC[/caption]
Skullgirls[/caption]
Civilization V - against Dave - Meeting the Egyptians[/caption]
Civilization 5 - against Dave - people from ancient ruins join the Chinese Empire - 3220 BC[/caption]
Civilization V game against Dave - 4000 BC[/caption]
Civilization 5 against Dave - 3460 BC - Ancient Ruins[/caption]
Civilization V game against Dave - 3760[/caption]
I don’t know how easy or hard it is to get a door frame in where all the pieces are at right angles to each other. The previous home owners failed at that and so the door could never close correctly. My father-in-law tried to fix it, but he shaved the wrong side. So when my parents and grandparents came, they decided to fix the door. And that’s a great thing because I’d always thought it’d just be something that would take an hour or 2. No, this door took an entire workday’s worth of hours to get to a point where it would correctly fit in this not-quite-rectangular frame that the previous home owners had put up. But thanks to my grandfather and father’s hard work, we now have a door that properly closes and can be locked.
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It’s interesting that, at least to my eyes, it’s easier to see the second rainbow on the left and I don’t even see it on the right. Also, this What If is particularly relevant and I’d read it just before going to the party.
Last time I wrote about my dabbling in the film world I had had 3 Holga rolls developed. My Yashica and Franka Solida III had arrived after my trip to NYC so I had yet to run any film through them. I shot a few frames with each camera when Danny and Dina came to visit in April and then let the cameras lay dormant. As I explained in a previous post, with the cost of film and development so high, these cameras were somewhat for special occasions. I took the cameras with me to Delaware (a trip I have yet to blog about), and shot with the Holga and Yashica.
Aida at the Park back before digital[/caption]
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A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Game of Thrones - coveted by Australians[/caption]
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![A wonderful and [most importantly] natural smile](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/175/429778032_b081cde0d5.jpg)
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Civ 5 - Lefties 1896[/caption]
Civ 5 - Lefties 1898[/caption]
Civ 5 - Against Dave - Choosing Meritocracy[/caption]
Civ 5 - Against Dave - Trade Route[/caption]
Civilization V against Dave - 3700 BC[/caption]
Old Man’s War Boxed Set 1 by John Scalzi
The God Engines by John Scalzi
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Rock the Universe (1999)[/caption]
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and now it’s:
now it’s:
which has fallen just one position from #15. Pretty funny that they’re both fireworks - although on very different scales!
This had the subtitle:
Facebook defines relationships. ‘Yeah, we would have broken up last night, but the net connection was down.’
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Apparently I mostly shoot wide[/caption]
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Scarlett and her cousin, Lan. Two different approaches to language.[/caption]
Chell from Portal[/caption]
NPR All Music Considered works correctly now[/caption]
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If you read a lot of technology news on the interwebs, it appears as though we will soon all be using cloud computing. No longer will people have hard drives or buy programs. They will lease it all from the cloud. (There are many, many things listed under “cloud computer” from Gmail to Twitter. I am talking about the ultimate goal of those who advocate “cloud computing” where your “computer” is on the net and you just connect from home) There are many reasons why cloud computing is not for everyone.
Let me start with the reason closest to my life - high end photography. I went to a baseball game on 10 April and shot over 4 GB of photos. I then loaded these photos onto my computer for editing and sharing with others. It seems to take longer that I can stand to get the photos off my camera and onto my hard drive. I can’t imagine how annoying it would be to have to wait to upload them onto a cloud computing environment. I shoot only in RAW files so I can do some serious editing on the photos and retain the best quality. Sometimes I delete up to half of the photos from a shoot because it’s hard to tell from the back of the camera if it’s subtly out of focus. So imagine waiting forever to upload photos only to ultimately end up deleting them! Photoshop and Lightroom require pretty beefy computers to work correctly, I can’t imagine how slow it would be to have my screen refresh after each edit. It already takes longer than instantaneous on my home computer. This use case - high end photography - also lead me to another reason cloud computing will not be for everyone: bandwidth limits.
The Forbidden Knowledge of Enoch by R.J. Von-Bruening
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LG Chocolate Touch - the phone I will be talking about in this paragraph[/caption]
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The Capitol[/caption]
The Liberator - the world’s first working 3D Printed Gun[/caption]
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
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Escalator by Brandon S. Graham
Complete Multiple Warheads TP by Brandon S. Graham
Walrus: Brandon Graham’s All Bum Album by Brandon S. Graham
The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure by William Goldman
A Once Crowded Sky by Tom King
Seinfeld - Kramer Moviefone[/caption]