Articles
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Summer of the Apocalypse
September 11, 2020
Read moreWhat is it we’re feeling during this summer of the apocalypse? Pandemic, politics, heat wave, fire storm: we have it all! The pandemic has kept us cooped up and isolated for months, feeling desperate for travel and socialization and a change of scenery from the inside of our house. We started to get out a bit for hikes and bike rides, and then the heat wave rolled in and we hid from it in any cooler darkness we could find, and suffered through the steaming nights. The heat spawned a thousand fires, some of which sputtered out but others grew and raged and devoured our favorite preserves, destroyed our friends’ homes, and spewed great gouts of unbreathable smoke. The best air was inside the car, filtered and cooled thanks to burning dino-juice and adding to the planet’s global warming but not even noticeable in comparison to the conflagration in our back yard. “Let’s run errands!” became the welcomed excuse to simultaneously get out of the smoke, heat, and confines of the house, pretending that we’re “going somewhere” as if REI was a foreign country.
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Refurbishing the Espresso Machine (in pursuit of coffee)
September 11, 2020
Read moreThe heating element on my Rancilio Silvia finally died for real, after faking it a couple times previously. One day the machine was happily cranking out shots of espresso, and the next day I flipped the power switch and the GFCI breaker immediately tripped. Arrgh, I need coffee! Fortunately I have one or two (OK, six actually) backup ways to make coffee, but dangit it’s just not the same.
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Writing Machines
September 8, 2020
Read moreTODO: add photos of the devices
As part of my intermittent but long-standing quest for the perfect solution to electronic writing, I recently revisited some of my old devices, and acquired a new one. The objective of this quest is to make writing technical papers, letters, autobiographical notes, and blog posts accessible when not sitting in front of a proper computer; generally speaking it translates to 1) a decent keyboard, 2) a display of at least a few lines by more-than-a-few columns, 3) compact size, 4) low power consumption, 5) nearly-instantaneous startup, 6) inexpensive enough to tolerate being used in public settings where it might be damaged or “borrowed”, like e.g. a bar.
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Coe Bikepacking Addendum
September 8, 2020
Sadly, almost everything I saw when I rode through Henry Coe State Park back in March on a bikepacking trip, has been burned by the recent fires. Fire is a natural process and passess through Coe on a pretty regular cadence; I worked on the last big fire in there in 2007 and it burned pretty hot in some places. And yet, the area recovered quickly. You’d hardly know it burned, if you didn’t know what to look for. So I’m hopeful that this latest conflagration will not have been too devastating.
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Blog Update Addendum
September 8, 2020
Read moreI had a bit of a breakthrough with this blog that requires an update to the previous update. I was struggling with how to make my Tufte-style theme work with GitHub’s automated Jekyll build; the Tufte theme doesn’t adhere to GitHub’s “safe” plugins list, so it won’t build in their system. It almost works – there’s really only a couple features that seem to prevent it from working, but they’re pretty integral to the look-and-feel I want from the theme. It took me a couple trips down blind alleys, but now I have a working solution.