Pete's Online Log of Goings-on
Finally, I have been to Gen Con! And boy do I want to go again! Wednesday I rented a car, picked up Nes, and headed to Indianapolis. After checking in at our hotel (about 20 minutes from the convention center), we drove downtown to scope things out. Nes has come to basically every Gen Con since 2009, so he was a good guide. When we got back to the hotel, a group of people was playing a board game…
I bought a Morn action figure. Mostly because I had the tab open so long and was wanting to close some tabs. I think he likes his new home: That photo also reminds me: I don’t think I mentioned that work got rid of our desk phones. So I found myself with an empty space that I decided to fill with my grandfather’s typewriter. I like it there. Yesterday I made breakfast on the griddle and realized…
Descendants: Wicked Wonderland , the latest installment in the Descendants franchise, came out recently, so of course Jamie, Kiddo and I had to watch it. It was, like the other movies in the series, visually interesting. I give it props for good costume and set design. The plot and characters were about what you expect from a Disney musical like this. Our main complaint is that the songs were just…
So this worked: Install Steam. First make sure contrib is enabled in /etc/apt/sources.list , then: # dpkg --add-architecture i386 # apt update # apt install steam-installer mesa-vulkan-drivers libglx-mesa0:i386 mesa-vulkan-drivers:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 Download the Battle.net installer Launch Steam (first launch may take a while) Select "Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library" from the Games menu,…
I took detailed notes during the preparation phase, but they were in an unsaved log entry in an open browser tab that I closed as I rebooted to install Bookworm. So I m recreating those notes from memory with a little help from my bash history. I decided today it was time to upgrade from Debian 12, a.k.a. Bookworm , a.k.a. oldstable to Debian 13, a.k.a. Trixie , a.k.a. stable . Only after making…
It s nice having our own sensors to track things like radon and PM2.5 . Walking outside yesterday morning, I didn t need a sensor to tell me the air was bad. Here s our outdoor PM2.5 readings for yesterday and today. Needless to say, we mostly kept indoors and soccer got canceled. We also discovered just before bed that smoke was sneaking into our bedroom through the cracks around our window air…
I duplicated my newspaper script and made Jamie her own newspaper based on feeds she selected. Now this morning my printout featured a post of hers with a picture of her paper. Thus the cult of recursion demanded I take a picture so it shows up in her printout tomorrow. Jamie also bought us some light weight cream colored paper that gives our printouts more of a newsprint feel. It s delightful. On…
I ve had an idea on my mind for a while now, and today I vibe coded it: an RSS Reader except it prints out on paper. Version 1 was ready in roughly 15 minutes. Just a python script that uses feedparser, BeautifulSoup and weasyprint to download recent posts, render them into simplified html, put them into a three column layout, and send it to the printer. A few enhancements later and I have QR…
Been a couple months since I did one of these. I should add commentary as I save the links instead of trying to rush it when there s just two hours left in the month... William Butts The End of Books They were also about what it means to try to know something—to arrive at knowing, to fumble for it with the help of books. Banned Book Library (makes me want to repurpose the Wiz WiFi bulb I still…
We’re under an “extreme heat warning” this week. Jamie and I set up a canopy over Olaf’s run so it doesn’t bake in the sun. Olaf seems mostly unbothered so far, though. We also put in the window AC in our bedroom today, nearly a month later than last year . June (for the most part) was cool and rainy this year.
During my May posting drought I also sort of slipped out of the habit of reading my On This Day , but I ve gotten back into it and good thing too, lest I miss my most verbose day . Suddenly feel a strong need to keep the five (soon to be six) year streak of posting on June 13th alive. I wish I understood my brain. It s been rainy lately, so we didn t get more chances to use the new griddle , but…
I still love our coal grill . I really do. And it gets plenty of use. But it does have its limitations. With encouragement from Jamie and Kiddo, the Weber has been joined by a Blackstone flat top griddle. I m really enjoying it so far. In particular, there s something real satisfying about cooking breakfast outside.
Below are just some thoughts, not to be taken as any stance, position or opinion. Ten or so years ago, for reasons that are still unclear to me, my employer at the time took me along on a visit to a web consulting business in downtown Chicago. I went with my then boss as well as our CEO. I wish I remembered the name of the company or any details of why we were there, but to the best of my…
I m playing around with ErsatzTV and it s both tedious and fun. I am a big fan of the ephemeral TV experience, but even though we have a large selection of broadcast TV stations, they rarely play much that we want to watch. So I m making our own. I m up to 10 channels so far, including a music video channel, a "mystery" channel that currently just plays Murder She Wrote and Columbo, a Christmas…
Before this evening, I hadn t booted my esgerdev VM since before we left for Colorado —mostly because we ve been busy and the weather s been nice, but also because motivation was a bit lacking. But then I learned about this PHP testing thing called Infection which mutates your code and checks if your unit tests detect the changes. So I was curious to see how the unit tests I ve written so…
I ve been wanting to better document the Squirrel Deck since I started tweaking it in Colorado. Back in September I wrote "I ll definitely be taking the Squirreled Away deck apart and seeing which cards might make sense in my squirrel deck." Well, Spring Break is when I finally got around to doing so. Plus I was gifted a couple cards by Tommy, got a few other squirrel cards via Bloomburrow…
We ve achieved perfect saturation: after multiple weeks of YouTube bombarding me with Angine de Poitrine reaction videos, yesterday it showed me a video talking about how many Angine de Poitrine reaction videos there are. I m happy they re getting the attention, though. I can t stop listening to them. How do they make microtonal math rock so catchy? I do think they are providing exactly what a lot…
Today we ve officially hit the four year mark since I first posted about my rewrite . To nobody s surprise, the rewrite still isn t live yet. My momentum has slowed over the past week or two. I ll still get there. It ll go live when it s ready. There are still 37 TODO comments in the code and 26 static analysis issues I need to address. I do think it s feature complete though. Not much more to…
I bought the Fender . I like it. Jamie found a new show for us to watch: Last One Laughing . It s a hilarious distraction. Kiddo asked me the other evening for more details on why the Romans are responsible for the Silent E . I had to remind her it was the Normans , not the Romans. And that it was perhaps more complicated than that.
Kiddo went to practice her guitar this evening without being reminded to, which is always a nice surprise. So I went down to join her and after a while she asked if she could play the bass. I’ve offered to let her in the past but she’s not taken me up on those offers before. She played a few chromatic scales and actually got some good sound out of the bass which is impressive since the E string is…
So I no longer have the Gretsch Streamliner Jet Club Bass. I now have a Fender Player II Series Jazz Bass. It s still a rental. In January I wrote about the Gretsch "I have no complaints with it." But that has changed. My main complaint was with rattling when I played open-string notes. I decided this was because the strings were too close to the fretboard. So for the past few weeks when we go to…
So the "dynamic" content is roughly 95% done. Things like Pete s Log and KLUE4 and my media gallery and shiny new guestbook. I m quite pleased. So I ve been reviewing my objectives for what must be done before I go live with esgeroth.org version 19.53.0 (19 and 53 are the first two prime factors of Pete s Number —I like my version numbers to be arbitrary ). Unit testing: 100% of tests pass ✅…
Jamie also told me today about a Chicago band that is channeling Morrissey: Brigitte Calls Me Baby . She played me one of their songs and the Smiths/Morrissey connection is unmistakable. And I felt pretty certain I d heard them on WLTL recently. What I didn t grasp immediately is that Brigitte Calls Me Baby released an album today: Irreversible . It s nostalgic and fresh in equal measures. My 2026…
Jamie was listening to New Music Friday in her office this morning, and I chanced to stop by while Imidiwan Takyadam by Tinariwen featuring José González was playing. It instantly spoke to me. I d never heard of Tinariwen or José González before. Tinariwen is a Tuareg "Desert Blues" band that s been active roughly as long as I ve been alive. José González is a Swedish Indie musician whose parents…
Sigh 1 Jamie and I had ourselves a fun Irish evening on Saturday. We made corned beef and cabbage with Guinness and watched Derry Girls . Tonight Jamie consulted GenAI for advice on how to use some of our corned beef leftovers. What resulted was spaghetti with a corned beef and great northern beans sauce. It was pretty decent. We got some good hail this evening. Bigger than a pea, smaller than a…