Recent content on Daniel's Weblog
Hot & Not (2026 Backpacking Edition) Just spent two nights in the Adirondack High Peaks and checked Gothics and Armstrong off my list (and repeated Upper Wolfjaw). Here are some gear notes about what went well and what didn’t so I can do better next time: Served me well: Skippy creamy peanut butter squeeze pack On past trips I’ve skimped on the calories and suffered for it, this is an…
L Train Brass Band at The Debt Gala on May 3rd, 2026 at Music Hall of Williamsburg Scroll for more →
Tool - Explain Shell . When I come across a terminal command or a set of arguments I don’t recognize my first stop is always ExplainShell.com. It isn’t perfect because it pulls data from manpages which don’t follow a perfectly uniform structure but much more often than not it helps me quickly make sense of what I’m looking at. After several years in maintance mode it…
Review of the “Telesin Remote Controller for GoPro Hero 13/12/11/10/9/8/MAX” I often use a GoPro Hero 10 to record my bands. It’s easy to throw in a bag and attach to whatever is available in the venue via the Magnetic Swivel Clip . Since I can’t start or stop them from the stage I often record a lot of unnecessary footage of set up and tear down. Recording extra video…
Zoom H4n Pro file recovery after sudden power loss I’ve been using a Zoom H4n Pro audio recorder for a few years now. I like that it’s durable, relatively inexpensive 1 and doesn’t look too fancy. Those last two points are very important when I set it up on the New York City sidewalk across from my bands 2 while I’m playing. It doesn’t catch anyone’s eye and if…
It’s well known that hard drive prices have been rapidly increasing . Here’s my personal experience. In November, 2024 I bought a bundle of two 16TB WD Red Pro NAS Hard Drives directly from Western Digital. The list price was $670 but there was a promotion for the bundle bringing the price down to $500. Tax was $45 and shipping was free. That works out to $272 per drive ($17/TB). The…
Grace Bowers at Night Club 101 on March 16th, 2026 Scroll for more →
Gladiators NYC in Central Park back on November 11th, 2025 Scroll for more →
Posting these graphs so I can easily reference them next time they come up in conversation Climate graphs from Weather Spark ( NYC , Arroyo Grande ) Ocean temperatures from Surf-Forecast.com ( Asbury Park , Pismo Beach )
Relisten.net I just discovered Relisten (via a post about gapless.js on HN) a website with a slick multi-column layout for browsing live music recordings on Archive.org. I somehow missed this in my search for prior art while building my own Archive.org audio player. Relisten is built by a different Daniel in Brooklyn. Hello, Daniel! 👋
XKCD 949 from September, 2011 still rings true 15 years later. In my case, I want to share photos and videos with my friends, family, and strangers at full resolution. My experience is iPhone-centric. Here’s a quick rundown of my findings (as of March, 2026) If I could impart one important point it’s that you cannot rely on file storage you do not pay for. If someone share something…
1975 University of Connecticut Marching Band 01-The 1975 Pre-Game Show 3:40 02-1975 Street Series - UConn Husky 1:31 03-1975 Street Series - Old Connecticut 1:47 04-1975 Street Series - The Stars and Stripes Forever 3:26 05-1975 Street Series - The Star-Spangled Banner 1:80 06-Captain from Castile 1:60 07-The Stevie Wonder Show - Up Tight 1:53 08-The Stevie Wonder Show - Don't You Worry 'Bout A…
1965 University of Connecticut Marching Band 1/21 Fanfare #5 0:12 2/21 Temptation 1:45 3/21 Joshua 1:27 4/21 Lover 1:90 5/21 Saints in Concert 2:55 6/21 Bugler's Holiday 1:30 7/21 Latin Prelude 2:40 8/21 Keep on Dancing 0:45 9/21 My Fair Lady 3:00 10/21 That's Entertainment 1:13 11/21 Moon River - Pink Panther 2:33 12/21 See You In My Dreams 1:10 13/21 Fanfare #1 0:39 14/21 UConn Husky 1:34 15/21…
Notable Local Bird Sightings from eBird I’ve made some improvements to my eBird TRMNL plugin that displays notable birds in your area! All you need is a free account and then you can generate an API key . The plugin will do the rest! The API docs define “notable” as the following: Notable observations can be for locally or nationally rare species or are otherwise unusual, for…
Lehigh University Jazz Band 1979-1980 01-Groovin' Hard 5:55 02-Gary 5:45 03-Tiger of San Pedro 4:54 04-I Remember Clifford 4:29 05-Wind Machine 3:13 06-West End 6:24 07-Jaberwocky and Titinium Blues 11:36 raw audio 44:40 Hosted by the Internet Archive ⓘ This whole album is very fun. Apparently track 3 is named after a Sherlock Holmes story ( Wikipedia ) The title is based on a character in one of…
Converting records with a USB turntable and Raspberry Pi Peviously I left a laptop sitting by my record player running Audacity but that was inconvenient so I stuck a Raspberry Pi over there and run these commands via SSH. I am not an expert, I’m just using the equipment I have so please don’t interpret this as “the best way to convert records” You can hear some records…
Moonshine And Marches from Old South Mountain (1963) 1 Entrance Fanfare 0:33 2 Down the Field 1:10 3 Victory March 1:00 4 Lehigh Salute - Royal Fanfare / Men of Harlech / Glory of the Trumpets / Hail the College (Hail to Lehigh) / Lehigh Triumphal 3:27 5 Football Medley - The Old Silver Goble / Rearing, Tearing / Everybody Takes His Hat off to Lehigh (Lehigh Will Shine) 3:15 6 A Son of a Gambolier…
TRMNL Earthquake Recipe TRMNL devices now support 2-bit color palettes ( announcement ). It takes longer to draw the screen but I think the extra detail is worth it for the map on my USGS Earthquake map plugin. You can configure your device to use the extended palette for everything or on per playlist-item basis. For comparison, here’s the 1-bit verison This is one of several TRMNL plugins I…
Digitizing Tapes in 2025 My friend ended up with a big box of video tapes from their childhood from VHS, Video8 , and MiniDV . I have been given / volunteered for / chose to digitize these and I’m trying to strike a reasonable balance between cost, quality, and effort. There is some very interesting work happening with softwared defined decoding in the VHS-Decode project but it’s a…
Yalc is a better alternative to npm link . At work we package some React code in to Node modules to share them between our internal applications. This often involves updating the modules and then immediately testing them in an application running locally. According to the npm documentation the way to do this is via npm link but I’ve always struggled with it. I’m not going to describe…
GoPro Manual File Recovery I’ve never actually used any of the labs firmware but I found this tidbit interesting for repairing an improperly closed file. Reproduced here for posterity: # Useful Tip - Manual File Recovery So you have a corrupted/unclosed GoPro file. You crashed your drone, and the battery was disconnected before the file was closed, or you ran your car wheel over a recording…
Trick - Manual Scrolling Capture (Shottr) I’ve been a convert to Shottr.cc for screenshots for a few years now but I’ve been frusterated that a MacOS update broke the scrolling capture feature recently. I looked around to see if there were any alternatives but was very pleased to find that there is a secret option where you manually scroll. Good enough for me! To enable manual…
1972 UConn Marching Band Vinyl (MC-1860) 1/16 Prance-On and Husky Fanfare 0:49 2/16 UConn Husky 1:33 3/16 Old Connecticut 1:44 4/16 When Johnny Comes Marching Home 1:44 5/16 Down by the Lazy River 1:40 6/16 Rockin' Robin 1:11 7/16 Yo Yo / Theme from Shaft 3:37 8/16 Captains from Castille 1:58 9/16 Peace on Earth 3:70 10/16 Dancing in the Street 2:22 11/16 The Russian Show - Borodin Second…
Summer hiking in Northern CA and Eastern Oregon Scroll for more →
AlarmKit iOS 26 finally lets apps interact with the system alarms and timers.
Fickle Friends Tour Diary I’m a big fan and today they’re releasing a new, self-titled album . In celebration of that here’s an interview by Emily May and a collection of photos from various photographers from their first and only US tour in 2018 (Come back soon please!!!). Each photographer has their own style and each venue looks slightly different. I think they all work…
where not in (Hugo) via jmooring I’ve been pulling my hair out over this for a little while, how do you write where not in in Hugo? The docs say you can do it but I was never able to make it work. Shout out to Joe Mooring on the Hugo forums for this solution: {{ $ p1 := where site . RegularPages 'Type' 'in' site . Params . mainSections }} {{ $ p2 := where $ p1 'Params.categories' 'intersect'…
The Faroes A great photo travelogue by Nagarjuna of their trip. Some of the later pictures of people standing on top of bluffs that appear to go straight down in to the ocean really poke at my fear of heights. Warning: contains modern James Bond movie spoilers.
NYC $20 Dinner Map (Paywall) I’ve enjoyed Hellgate’s irreverant but thorough coverage of NYC for a while and they finally converted me to a paying member with their current 34% off first-year sale . I really like this map of inexpensive resturants.
Fallback Font Generator (via) . This is a tool to help tweak system fonts to match the sizing of your fancy font and reduce Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) when your fancy font finally loads. Built by Brian Louis Ramirez
NY State Renn Faire 2025 Scroll for more →
Tool - Lossless Cut . When I have an hour of video and I need to extract 5 minutes I reach for Lossless Cut instead of Final Cut. It’s a cross platform GUI built on top of ffmpeg. It can merge clips from the same camera in to a single file and extract pieces of a file, both without reencoding. It compliments the commands documented here . I like that I can watch through a video, mark…
My go to commands for processing GoPro footage (or really any video) with ffmpeg: Merge all mp4 files in to a single file without reencoding the whole thing (Small amount of reencoding occurs where the clips are joined): This is very useful on computers without powerful GPUs (older computers or in my case my Synology NAS)! Note that all clips need to be recorded with the same settings ffmpeg -f…
Summer Fling on September 7th, 2025 at Save Coney Island . Scroll for more →
TRMNL Earthquake Recipe I’m having fun building TRMNL recipes! Here’s one that shows recent earthquakes (pulled from USGS’ public API ) and plots them on a map. This is one of several TRMNL plugins I maintain! Find them all under the tag TRMNL
NYC Subway Alerts plugin for TRMNL Trmnl is proving to be the internet connected eink screen I always wanted to build but never wanted to maintain. It lives in my kitchen and predominantely shows my calendar but I decided to try building a recipe of my own. It was pretty easy and I’m pretty happy with the result! This is one of several TRMNL plugins I maintain! Find them all under the tag…
Uploading an entire directory to the Internet Archive: I had a collection of files around ~50 GB in size that I wanted to upload to a single item in the Internet Archive directly from my NAS. There is a cli that could work but didn’t have a trivial way to upload all the files in a directory. I tried the S3-compatible endpoint with Cyberduck but that also didn’t work as expected. I…
Geotagged videos of the L Train Brass Band in the Mermaid Parade My friend collected all of the YouTube videos that include the L Train Brass Band in the 2025 Coney Island Mermaid Parade and I’ve placed them on a map! Clicking on any dot will bring up the relevant YouTube video at the timestamp the band goes by. It’s pretty crude at this point. I didn’t place the markers very…
Songs of Lehigh (vol 2) 01 Klaxon 3:10 02 Victory March 1:26 03 Sunset in Bethlehem 0:54 04 Rearin' Tearing 0:53 05 Hail to Lehigh 1:14 06 Goblet 0:54 07 Campus Dreams 2:13 08 Men of Lehigh 1:60 09 Alma Mater 2:48 10 Noble Men 2:16 11 Hoo-Rah-Ray, Lehigh! 0:17 12 Cheer for Alma Mater 0:29 13 Lehigh's Loyal Sons 0:48 14 O LaFayette, Poor LaFayette 0:46 15 Cliff-Clef Riff 1:24 16 Rise 'N Shine 0:54…
Whiteface Mountain and Mount Esther Scroll for more →
Grandpa hiked Mount Marcy in 1955. After hiking Mount Marcy twice myself I recognized where one of the pictures was taken. Marcy Dam was damaged by Hurricane Irene in 2011 and the dam has since been removed ( Wikipedia ). The same view in 2019:
SSH to server via Tailscale if possible: If Tailscale is not running fall back to a different IP Requirements: Tailscale installed via Mac App Store jq installed via Brew Replace the following values: {SERVER_NAME} : These configuration options will be used when you type ssh {SERVER_NAME} {SERVER_USERNAME} : The username you use to connect to the server {SERVER_TAILSCALE_IP} : IP Address or DNS…
POPS - Lehigh University 1 Salute to Lehigh University 1:29 2 Pride of the 97 2:17 3 Centennial Song 1:36 4 Commando March 3:28 5 Irish Tune From County Derry 3:40 6 Shepherd's Hey 2:10 7 The Sinfonians 5:90 8 March 4:35 9 Song With Words 'I'll Love My Love' 2:17 10 Song of the Blacksmith 1:18 11 Fantasia on the 'Dargason' 3:60 12 Porgy and Bess 10:54 01 Lehigh University - POPS - Raw audio 43:58…
My crowd has been enjoying the app BeReal recently. The world is split up geographically in to zones; every user in each zone recieves a notification at the same time which is randomly chosen each day. I’ve started keeping track of those times. US data is the best but hopefully I can record the others too going forward: Edit: The BeReal API changed and this is no longer functional. Most of…
The L Train Brass Band is a community brass band from Brooklyn open to all. We try to have as much music as possible memorized for parades (it’s more fun that way!) but for some low-key gigs and rehearsals we read music off the page. Many of us like to use our phones to read our music. Neither I, nor the L Train Brass Band have any association with any of the products linked or mentioned…
I’ve been using the iOS Scriptable app and the fantastic Weather Cal widget to have an information rich homescreen for a while now. The built-in COVID widget only had data to the country level but I wanted to see the New York Times’ data at the US county level. OK, so “New York City” isn’t technically a county but the Times makes an exception and groups the boroughs…
Three years ago I soldered my first custom-designed PCBs , a set of ESP8266-powered temperature sensors for my apartment! The original design worked with the ESP8266 modules I had at the time but hasn’t with recent modules (I think I forgot to pull the chip-enable wire high?). Wemos D1 Mini Carrier Board This is a spinoff project of my dedicated, single-purpose temperature sensor boards.…
Photo books I have owned / borrowed in no particular order. 9780947322120 Dupain’s Sydney by Jill White 9781884167058 RFK Funeral Train photographs by Paul Fusc 9780999243008 Just Yannis by Harold Evans and Yannis Behrakis 9780525560029 Of Love & War by Lynsey Addario I also greatly enjoyed her appearance on Radiolab for the episode Sight Unseen . 9781580931465 Subway Memories by by Camilo…
A living document of diagrams and notes on various Unix tools. Tar files and Tarballs Flowchart