I posted over on the Scout site about a welding project I got up to on Sunday: I dropped the gas tank on the red bus, cut out a section of the passenger floorboard, worked up a cardboard template, cut out some 18 ga. steel, fitted it into the hole, and got about 40% of it welded in place before the sun went down. I’m still shocked at how far I was able to get on a project I was only considering a week ago.

→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.

Date posted: October 14, 2024 | Filed under Scout | Leave a Comment »

Our local library, the one within walking distance of the house, recently reopened after a two-year renovation. built sometime in the 1960’s, it was probably a marvel of its time: a one-story brick building with a full basement, sweeping skylights in the main shelving area, and a windowed front facade. As a preschooler, Finn spent hours in the kids section, which took up one whole side of the building; I’d take her down there and (when she was in her bookworm phase) she’d get lost in the shelves, simply reading quietly by herself, and it filled me with pride and love.

In recent years the building was showing its age; the original wood paneling had darkened over time, and the skylights had yellowed and dimmed. The downstairs areas were even darker and creepier. But the shelves were still stuffed with books; while there wasn’t a huge selection, they clearly had reached the limit of their space.

So I was happy to see they’d re-opened it, and stopped in on my way home from work the other night. The girls had checked it out a few days prior and sent me some pictures, which piqued my curiosity. The floorplan is  roughly the same, but it looks like they used architectural tricks to open up the space further, widening out the available space and making it feel airier inside. The surfaces are all modern and clean, and the furniture is all new and shiny. And they’ve added several enclosed glass spaces for things like podcasting and meetings, which is a nice idea.

What didn’t come back, at least not yet, are the books. The shelves are shorter, there are fewer of them, and they’re not full—not by a long shot. The areas I used to frequent, the military history, detective fiction, CD/DVD areas, and graphic novels, are threadbare. I was, frankly, kind of surprised. Meanwhile, their online e-book selection remains limited, with few titles I’m interested in and fewer copies to actually check out.

Howard, our adjoining county, recently put up a new library on the other side of Ellicott City. It’s at least three stories, covered in glass, the size of a small office park. The parking lot is huge. It joins another one in Colombia of similar size. Interesting how a county with a population less than half that of ours can prioritize and afford amenities like this.

Date posted: October 13, 2024 | Filed under general | Leave a Comment »

Date posted: October 7, 2024 | Filed under hazel | Leave a Comment »

I work with a woman whose husband was an employee of Hodinkee, an oddly named horology website which many credit for raising the visibility of luxury wristwatches to America. She’d mentioned recently that things were a little funky with the company, and recently he left to pursue a different opportunity. Hodinkee just announced they’ve been sold to a British watch retailer, and the article explains the troubles she was hinting at; pandemic-era acquisition and market contraction left them in a dicey financial position. John Gruber writes:

There is a name for a publication that is owned by a retailer: catalog.

I would never be able to buy any of the watches featured on the site then or now, but it was pretty to look at.

Date posted: October 6, 2024 | Filed under watches | Leave a Comment »

It’s been quiet around here lately, mostly because the entire East Coast, for those who haven’t been watching the news, has been under a giant raincloud for the past two weeks. We didn’t suffer any of the horror Appalachia did, and for that I am forever grateful, but it sure was nice to feel warm sun on my pale, shriveled skin walking the dog this morning.

I had, with my cereal this morning, some of the best blueberries I’ve eaten in the last 10 years. In September. Modern civilization may be crumbling but I appreciate the small things.

The Check Engine light on the OG-V (164,000 miles and counting!) has been intermittently coming on and then shutting itself off for no discernible reason. I had the knock sensor replaced a few months ago at the behest of the computer, and immediately after that the light came back on and the computer threw the same code, so clearly the squirrels have been down in the engine munching on wires, or there’s a ghost in the machine. The clutch is definitely on its last legs, so we have to make a decision as to when that’s going to be addressed.

I was in New York last week for the briefest of moments to shoot video for a work event, and it reminded me both how much I love to visit that city and how much I could never stand to live there at this age. And for that matter, how much I dislike dragging video equipment through a train station. I think my remote shooting days are mostly over, unless they offer to send me someplace really cool; it’s cheaper to hire a local crew in most cases anyway.

Hazel found a way to wedge herself in between Finn’s fort and the raised bed sometime last night after 8PM; She backed herself out of the tac harness and went on the lam. I wasn’t aware until I went outside to collect her and found the evidence at 10:30. Jen and I suited up and prepared to canvas the neighborhood, but she came trotting back up to Jen in the backyard, panting, and immediately went inside to drink all of the available water. This is progress; her usual M.O. is to follow her nose to the Mississippi River and points west until someone can grab her and read her chip. I’m going to order a simple collar for her tags in preparation for the next time she slips the harness.

Date posted: October 4, 2024 | Filed under general, hazel, honda | Leave a Comment »

This is some positively amazing reporting from an organization called Forensic Architecture: In 2020, a 60-year old woman named June Knightly was shot with five other female traffic safety volunteers by a right-wing extremist. They were preparing to protect a peaceful protest march in Portland, which was happening blocks away, when the man approached them and began a confrontation. The events leading up to the shooting, her death, and the terrible response by the Portland police and local news media are all recreated in a harrowing but exceptionally well-produced video, with interviews from most of the people who were there.

It’s important to note that all of the local media channels characterized the murder as “a confrontation between armed protestors and an armed homeowner,” all of which is not true: All of the women were unarmed and trying to de-escalate the situation; the shooter instigated the attack, was known to the FBI as an extremist dating back to 2006, and was renting an apartment down the street. He was shot by an armed bystander who arrived moments later and is now serving life in prison. He’s actually responsible for two murders that day: a second volunteer, who was paralyzed in the attack, requested to be taken off a ventilator and died in 2024.

Propaganda kills.

Date posted: September 29, 2024 | Filed under general | Leave a Comment »

I set up another account for the Travelall on Instagram last night, wrote an entirely new post, picked a completely different picture, and added completely different links to the profile. It wouldn’t let me use the account name from my first try, so I used a slightly different one. I wrote a long description for my second post and put it up with a new picture this afternoon.  Checking the account later, I got an ominous notice from the app that said they noticed suspicious activity on my account that may have come from a bot, or something. So I’m fully expecting to have the fucking thing shut down a second time.

I mean, fuck’s sake, I’m not selling meth or boner pills; I’m posting pictures of a rusty truck. What the hell?

Date posted: September 23, 2024 | Filed under geek | Leave a Comment »

I had the opportunity to buy a piece of hardware for the office that I’ve been looking at for a long time and figured I’d write up an initial review of it here. We’re on a Microsoft tech stack at work, and most of it works well enough. However, we’ve been fighting against Sharepoint’s inexplicable habit of corrupting media files larger than 1GB, which makes any kind of file sharing useless for my team. I’ve been a Dropbox advocate for as long as I remember, and I’ve threatened to quit if they took it away from my team. But Dropbox is a cloud-based service and relies on your local hard drive for local storage; when you have ~10TB of working video files, you can’t fit that all on a laptop.

Because my team is half-remote, I need to have a central local file server with media files available for people to check in and out when they get to the office, backed up to Dropbox seamlessly. So I bought a Synology Diskstation DS1522+, which is basically a box with four hard drive sleds and an operating system. With five 8TB drives the whole bundle came to about $2,300, which is not cheap, and which is why I don’t already have one of these sitting in the basement.

Setup was easy. I’m used to pulling/swapping hard drives, so the new units went into the box pretty quickly, and after I buttoned it up I found an out-of-the-way counter to hide it on with power and a network drop. Once it booted up I followed the quick start instructions to find a web interface and stepped through account creation and basic configuration of the box. Within about 10 minutes I had it formatting the drives into a hybrid RAID configuration, allowing for 2-drive fault tolerance and netting 20TB in total storage. It was easy to set up SMB and AFP services for sharing, build out user profiles, and add a cloud services package to connect to Dropbox. From there I set it up to sync with our huge video folder overnight.

This morning I logged into the box as a network drive and all of our stuff is right where it’s supposed to be. Instead of dealing with hours-long download times via the cloud, our files now take minutes via the local network, and it’s much easier to dump folders back to the local drive instead of uploading via a web browser and bogging down a working machine for hours at a time.

Overall I’m really impressed with it so far, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it over the next year to see how well it holds up. Eventually my ancient Mac Pro towers will need to be replaced, and a simple box like this looks like a great option. I’m glad to be able to test-drive it here.

Date posted: September 19, 2024 | Filed under geek | Leave a Comment »

Well, I suppose this was inevitable. Then She Did… was the song they were playing the other day when the show blew up, and I was thinking to myself as I watched the footage, “damn, that sounds good.” And then it got stuck in my head. Long ago, when the album first came out, I used to play along to the second side under the influence and this was one of my favorite grooves.

This is a reasonably good live recording from 1990 when the full band was still together and playing tight. What I would give to have seen them at their peak.

Date posted: September 18, 2024 | Filed under earworm, music | Leave a Comment »

An article on a completely different website brought me to this one, and I could not have been happier last night. This is a reconstruction of the history of the Millennium Falcon, from the earliest days of Lucas’ scripts through Ralph McQuarrie’s original sketches, a pivot in the “Space Pirate” design after Space: 1999 hit TV in 1975, and the birth of the now iconic shape. The author sources multiple books, articles, websites, and photos to piece together how it evolved. I remember seeing some of these paintings over the years in different books and magazines, and now I know why they were different than what we saw on screen.

Date posted: September 18, 2024 | Filed under art/design, entertainment | Leave a Comment »