We're just coming off of another heat wave in the Bay Area; temperatures have returned to a comfortable low-to-mid 70's Fahrenheit and humidity is hanging out around 30% (or so my weather station tells me). Temperatures in the 80's and 90's don't sound like much unless you don't have air conditioning (which many Bay Area homes don't) or insulation (ditto). This means that, under such conditions, life kind of sucks because there isn't much in the way of a breeze or a way to cool off unless you go somewhere that has decent AC (and if you work during the …
"Check your ego at the door. No gods, no rockstars. Only n00bs."
--thegibson
I try to go off the grid every couple of months to get away from everything and free up compute cycles for messing around with stuff. For whatever reason I find it helpful to go off to someplace quiet, possibly because it means that I can be nonverbal for a while. It definitely helps with my ADD. At any rate, that's my opportunity to teach myself some new things without having to multitask. When last I did this a couple of weeks back I brought with me …
I haven't been tinkering a lot lately. Not because I haven't wanted to (well, that's not quite true) but because I've had other stuff that I wanted to get out of the way. Basically, I couldn't stand the impacted shitpile that I call an office-cum-workshop in its current state anymore. Figuring out how much floor space I had a few weeks ago really got to me and I decided to do something about it. I've been spending a couple of hours every day (after work and over the weekends) going through one thing at a time (one stack of drawers …
Somehow it's turned into one of those really busy months, where I've been working on stuff more than anything else. Thing is, most of it isn't really worth talking about; not yet, anyway. Lifestyle maintenance is like that. It's not glamorous, interesting, or even all that fun, but it still has to get done, if only for the sake of one's mental health.
For starters, I've been trying to free up some room in my office (where I spend most of my days, if only because of my day job). Talking to someone a week or two ago about home …
It's July 4th as I sit outside and write this post, after quite a few years of wondering if I should type this up. But, I figured, I'm not getting any younger and if I ever get around to writing my memoirs I'm going to put this in there, anyway, and there's no guarantee that I'll remember this if and when I ever do. So, here goes.
Content warning: Gore. This is kind of the definition of trauma for a little kid so if you don't want to read about fireworks accidents you might want to close the tab and …
For starters, let me just say that there is nothing wrong with me as I write this. I used the tag "cancer" up there because this post talks about cancer screening. Also, as I finish and polish this post up a few days later I found out that nothing unusual was found, "You're good, see you in ten years."
Second, I'll try my best to not be gratuitous given the subject matter. Believe me, the prospect of writing about the far end of my gastrointestinal tract does not thrill me. I'll try to give the topic the gravitas it deserves …
A couple of weeks back I wrote about migrating Windbringer to a new laptop, but something I didn't go into a lot of detail about was migrating the encrypted volumes over. There were a few reasons for this, chief among them that I didn't want to put more information than I already had in that post for the sake of organization. Web search is a clusterfuck these days and I wanted to make potentially helpful information as easy to track down as possible. Anyway.
Surprising nobody who's known me for longer than an hour, the hard drives in all of …
A couple of weeks back I noticed that Windbringer was starting to act dodgy in the way that Dell laptops do when they're getting long in the tooth: USB trouble, wifi getting weird (he'd only connect to the legacy 802.11b network), power cell not charging fully and refusing to doo so... Dell is remarkbly consistent in this regard. Not too long after that a good friend of mine visited with one of their System76 laptops and let me tool around with it for a while. This started wheels turning in my head because I new that I was going …
I mentioned not too far back that I'd finished migrating my wiki over to a new piece of software, but it was a little outside of what I'd been trying to accomplish in that post. It seemed a good idea to circle back and explain what I meant by that.
Don't get me wrong, I quite like Pepperminty Wiki. It's a fine piece of software - lightweight, configurable, it uses flat files for storage, and it's nice and snappy. Especially in situations where the web hosting provider is badly over-provisioned and moderately complex web applications tend to bog down. But after …
