Recent content on Jachin Rupe's Blog
2025 was an eventful year. And I’ve gotten better at picture management so this year we’ve got a few more pictures. If you are here because you got our Christmas card, we made a mistake on the card (at least, one we noticed). If you spot it, you should let us know. If you’re the first (or one of the first) we will get you a prize. The prize will depend on your location and what…
For starters, let’s get one thing out of the way. Had I planned carefully the rack could have looked a lot better and fit my hardware better. I found this project , got excited about it, and just started printing parts, then, tried to put them together. Then I just did some iterating, until I finally ended up with something functional and a lot uglier than it could have been.
For years now I have wanted a “dashboard” somewhere central in my house. I think the inspiration comes from my childhood when my Mom would keep a paper calendar with family plans. At some point during my childhood, probably when I was around 8 or 9 years old I started checking the calendar at least a couple times a day. I was the oldest of 6 and I was becoming more and more aware that…
The selfhosting Jelu project is going well. I’ve spent a little bit of time over the past year cleaning up my library and I’ve updated the application a couple of times. And of course I’ve tracked all my reading. The application still has some rough edges but they keep making it better and it does what I need it to. If something better comes along hopefully I’m in a much…
We’re just about done with another year. It’s been a while since we did one of these picture posts. We’ve been meaning to do them more often. Maybe this year we really start the habbit. It looks like the last time we did a picture post was 2020 . Wow, the kids are a lot older and 2024 sure did feel a lot more normal.
I had my first thoughts of wanting to do something with our doorbell a few years ago after we added our first smart home devices and tried to get a Ring doorbell, but it was too bulky to fit on our doorframe. This idea remained vague until I saw a YouTube video, probably over a year ago, about how to turn an old doorbell into a smart home button . Once I saw that video, I knew I wanted that…
I just launched the Corn Maze app for the Crow River Winery for 2024 (year 3). There’s some more background about it in a previous post . But I had a bit more time to put into it this year then I have had in the past so I thought I’d share a bit about the improvements I’ve managed to make this year and some general thoughts on how the project is going.
First off, a little bookkeeping. I have been using Goodreads for years now to track my reading. It’s still a pretty good platform, but it’s also just a lot . A lot of ads. A lot of features I don’t use, like “Reading Challenges,” and a lot of the “Community” stuff. One of the things I’m going to try to do over the next five years, though, is attempt…
The Problem One of the crucial features I wanted <much-select> to support is value transformation and validation. This is important for configuring <much-select> to allow users to input “custom” values (not just the predefined options in the list) but you still need some guard rails on the values the user can enter. Accomplishing this through standard web APIs proved to be a daunting…
Much Select [Github] Degree Day Dashboard
The Challenge In the life cycle of a <much-select> a lot of events are triggered. Events can trigger additional events leading to big cascades of events that can block the main browser thread. We can prevent this from happening with debouncing . Two example of this in <much-select> : Each keypress when a user is filtering down a list of options. If we debounce keypress events by a half a second or…
The Problem A lot of Options I need <much-select> to support a lot of options. I’ve been testing with 10,000 options . <much-select> needs to be able to filter that list down “fast”. By that I mean it needs to feel fast to the user. Big Options The size (or length) of options also plays a role. If the options are fairly simple and short (e.g. city names), that’s a lot…
Elm Inside a Web Component A Whiny Introduction This is part 1 of a story I never wanted to write. I have heard over and over again something along the lines of, “don’t make a UI widget, leave that to the platform or to someone else.” Those people are right. What kind of UI widget, you ask? It’s that white whale, a multi-select widget. There are a lot of them out there . If…
This past fall (autumn of 2022), I released my first ever computer game — created for the Crow River Winery’s Corn Maze. Interested parties can check it out at cr2022.cornmaze.us . However, there isn’t much to do since the game is designed to be played on the actual corn maze. As it’s winter now, the maze is currently closed. Originally I’d planned to create a video…
I’ve missed this post for a couple of years, which is too bad, I need to write more on my blog. I’ve got a whole bunch of draft posts, maybe this year I actually finish them. Also, in case this is not clear, these are the best books that I managed to read in 2022. I’m sure there are more interesting lists of the best books that came out in 2022.
Matt Gray A friend of mine, Matt Gray passed away recently . I worked with him for almost 10 years at Clockwork . I have heard many people say that Matt was one of the smartest, kindest, and thoughtful people they knew. I can vouch for all of that. I learned a lot from Matt. We were basically the same age but for whatever reason he was way ahead of me, when it came to a lot of…
This year we’re taking a break from making a Christmas playlist… if ever there was a year to break the norm, amiright?! We fully intend to pick back up this annual tradition in the future but we’ve made 10 playlists with almost 11 hours of Christmas music. So this year, we’ve done our best to put them all together so you can listen all of it (or at least as much as your…
2020 Family Pictures We don’t post much on social media, for a whole lot of reasons, but we do take a lot of pictures. And, well, 2020 sure is a year to remember! Hahaha… sigh. And despite setting aside a lot of plans, ideals, and normals, all the silver linings and graces of this year are not lost on us. We’re grateful for the ways pandemic days, an unplanned 2.5 months without…
Do we promise that all these movies are good? Nope. There’s a bunch we haven’t seen yet… plus you need to bear in mind that our three year old is the litmus for whether a movie makes the cut or not. BUT we made this list for ourselves this year, so we figured we’d share in case an extra movie or two makes sense within your December family rhythms, too. And anything we should add to…
I managed to read 1 more book in 2019 than I did in 2018 and I didn’t wait until May to write about them. I feel pretty good about that. But one book different is basically the margin of error with book you start in 1 year and end is the second. It’s interesting look at my GoodReads “My Year in Books” . They give a page count (which is a little strange given I usually…
Here is the 10th Christmas playlist. I made the first one by myself. Erin’s helped me with all the rest. And I’ll share a few photos from the year while I’m at it. This year’s CD felt like a bit more of a struggle. We could not find a lot of good Christmas music that came out this year. So we ended up turning to some older songs.
This post is a lot later than I would have liked, but I’ve held off writing it until I had a chance to finish migrating my blog to a new platform (more on that later). I’m glad I can do it now, on the new setup. 2018 was a slightly lighter year for books, only 19. Goodreads now has a feature where you can see your “Stats”. It’s pretty cool. Looks like my best year…
My name is Jachin Daniel Rupe. To pronounce my first name it is: JAY-kin It also rhymes with bacon . My last name also seems to throw people off, the e is silent, and the u is long, like how you’d say “dupe”. I live in Minneapolis Minnesota. I’m a software Engineer.
The 8th Christmas playlist is also the biggest, clocking in at 77 minutes. Why so much music, you ask? Well, we (mostly Erin) found a lot of good raw material this year. Several of the albums that showed up on this years playlist will probably show up again on future playlists. We realize that CD players are things that most people only have in their cars now a days and we want people to be able…
I finished 25 books in 2017. Not bad. I got the number up from last year but I think it’s mostly because I read lots of “fun” books. Lots of fantasy. Another factor is that now with 2 children I have less time for things like movies and TV shows, audiobooks and podcasts are what I have time and energy for these days. Non-Fiction Politics: The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce…
This is the 7th year for the Christmas playlist and at this point I was expecting to be scraping the bottom of the Christmas music barrel. Good news though, I’m quite happy with this years playlist. I found a couple of great compilation albums including one from a couple years ago. Maybe I’m not as good at searching the Internet for stuff as I thought. If you need more good Christmas…
This year got our act together before the 1st of December so you can enjoy a whole month of hand picked Christmas music. If you need more good Christmas music here are the links to past playlists. ( 2015 , 2014 , 2013 , 2012 , 2011 , 2010 ). My goal is make it to 10 of these. That should be close to 12 hours of better than average Christmas music, then reassess. We’ll probably keep doing a…
I’ve had my eye on OpenBazaar for quite a while now and at the start of April of this year (2016) it went live. You should check it out, but a short summary would be that it’s a distributed on-line marketplace. It uses bitcoin for it’s currency. Anyone can join the network and sell their products on-line for free. The software is free, setting up a shop is free, accepting…
First off while, I was writing this article, I had Robot Parade by They Might be Giants stuck in my head the whole time. I’ve been reading a lot of economists deriding a higher minimum wage and they’ve got me a bit riled up (here’s a very small selection). An Open Letter to Arindrajit Dube If Government Can Work Miracles… Alex Tabarrok on Price Floors and the Minimum Wage…
At this point I’ve bought lots of things on-line with Bitcoin, but I have not been able to buy anything locally (in Minneapolis MN) until now. I was surprised to find one of my “go to” Thai restaurants Krungthep got a new (to me) website, that accepts Bitcoin. It looks like they use Menufy and it looks like there are several restaurants in the area I can also order from using…
How to Setup a Soundboard This article will show you how to map a set of sound effects (I’ll show you how to do 10) to keyboard shortcuts that will be ready any time you need a rim shot, or sad horns or whatever else. You need to be running OS X. I’ve set this up on a 10.10 and 10.11. I do not know how far back into older versions of OS X this will work (or how far forward).
The bad news is I only read 17 books in 2015. However I feel pretty good about that because I read all 10 of The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson, which are all massive. All 10 averaged well over 40 hours a piece. It’s kinda scary to think I spent so much time listening to those books. Recording them must have been a massive undertaking. The Malazan books were good books, an…
After 8+ years of faithful-ish service I’m ditching WordPress for the great static site generator Pelican , written in my very favorite language, Python. If you’re a “feed subscriber” sort of a person, you will probably need to updated/re-subscribe to this site, I think the feed’s URL is different now. The migration has been rocky and still is not done yet. If you are…
Getting this together happened a little later this year. Lots going on, but as always I enjoyed putting this together and after listening to a bunch of not so great Christmas music we managed to a CDs worth that was pretty good. If you need more good Christmas music here are the links to past playlists. ( 2014 , 2013 , 2012 , 2011 , 2010 ). 6 years of these, my my how the time does fly. Merry…
It’s been a few years since one of my personal projects has been ready for prime time, but the Como Barber Shop site finally is, at least, I hope it is, it’s live at least. Craig’s Como Barber Shop has been my favorite place to get my hair cut for many years (it used to be Pete’s Barber Shop, Pete’s still there, but Craig is running the show now). I’ve always…
The number of titles of books I read this year seems a little light, 30 books in 2013, only 18 in 2014. Looking over the list though, I feel a little better about my reading last year, there were some big books on the list. Non-Fiction Politics and Theology (always a dangerous combination): A Farewell to Mars - An Evangelical Pastor’s Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace by Brian…
Time for this year’s Christmas Playlist. If this isn’t enough Christmas Music, you can always go back to previous years ( 2013 , 2012 , 2011 , 2010 ). Most of the music is available on Amazon. A lot of it you can listen to for free if you have Amazon Prime. I’ve also made a GrooveShark playlist of most of the songs . Ho Ho Ho - Liz Phair - Ho Ho Ho Carry Me Home - Hey Rosetta! -…
When I tell people about bitcoin and I want to give an example of something bitcoins are good for today I usually use the example of international money transfers. Recently I successfully transferred some money to my sister (about $50), who is currently living in South Korea. It was not exactly the smoothest experience ever but I think it demonstrates a real opportunity. Here’s how we did…
It’s been over a year since I last write about my experiences with bit coins . I have not been able to explore the world of crypto currency as much as I would have liked but I have managed a few things. Overall though, it’s been very interesting to see how Bitcoin is becoming more and more mainstream all the time. If you watch closely it seems super slow but if you take a step back,…
The Zombie Translator is back and better than ever. Not only does it “work” but there are now more example phrases not to mention vast improvements to the zombie linguistic engine. My brother Derek is also involved as a writer. There’s also a “social” element to the Zombie Translator. You can follow it on Twitter @ZTranslator , Tumblr and Google+ . There you will find…
I think I’m going to start writing an annual blog post about my favorite books every year. Here’s this years run down. In case you are wondering I don’t actually have a memory capable of remembering all the books I’ve read this year and what I thought of them, but I’ve been logging my reading at GoodReads.com and that makes it easy. Here they are in no particular…
It’s getting to be Christmas time again. That means a lot of awful annoying music that might have been fun at some point but after while just feels soul crushing, but also some that’s actually kinda good. Once again me and Erin have tried to assemble some of the better music (some new some old) to improve everyone’s holidays. We just try not to repeat any exact tracks from…
Here’s a CD’s worth of Christmas music that Erin and I will be listening to this year. Merry Christmas!:) Weezer - Hark! the Herald Angels Sing From the Christmas With Weezer album, one of my favorite Christmas albums and one of my favorite Christmas songs. We Wish You a Merry Christmas - John Denver and the Muppets From the A Christmas Together album. We (me and Erin) really like the…
My girlfriend Erin and I have put together a Christmas Playlist for 2011 of better than average to pretty good Christmas music. Crash Test Dummies - Good King Wenceslas - Jingle All the Way Guster - Tiny Tree Christmas - The Christmas Gig: Two Thousand Ten Julian Casablancas - Christmas Treat Low - Just Like Christmas - Christmas The Killers - Joseph, Better You Than Me (feat. Elton John, Neil…
So, while I was on my road trip (almost 6 months ago now) I took some video (mostly while I was driving). Maybe not the safest thing in the world, but I had some time to kill. I figured I would edit it all together when I get home. Put it to the tune of Mr Space Man . The hi-light of course, being the shuttle launch. Alas, no shuttle launch , at least while I was there, so I kinda lost some of my…
We had to get up early to get our flight home. I got to see Clair in the morning during breakfast. Eric told her I did not cry this time when I rode the Metro. Eric gave us a ride to airport. They have a pretty sweet ‘84 BMW (that’s 2 years older then Carol, but in a lot better shape). The plane ride home turned out to be a lot better then the one to London. We were a little concerned…
I surprised myself, and woke up just enough to mumble “goodbye” to Elysia as she was going out the door (didn’t manage to get out of bed right then though). Then me and Heather slept in longer then we wanted to. We were planning to actually go inside the Louvre today, and considering it was Sunday there might be long lines. We did manage to find time to stop for a croissant…
We slept a little later than usual (that’s usual for this trip, not usual for me), then we headed over to one of Paris’s premier art Museum’s the Musée d’Orsay. On our walk to the Metro we stopped at a fruit stand and a bakery for breakfast. After that I decided I would try to eat at least one croissant a day. The Musée d’Orsay was awesome. It’s an enormous…
Got up early to catch our train to Paris. One last breakfast at the hotel before checking out. I kinda like Netherland’s breakfasts. It’s mostly just bread, meat and cheese. At first it did not really feel like breakfast food, but after a few days I started looking forward to it. We got on the tram and headed to central station (fortunately no strike that day or if they did strike…
One of our main reasons for making Amsterdam on of the stops on our trip was that it was the height of Tulip season. Heather had done some research and apparently a good place to go to look a tulips is the Keukenhof gardens. They are only open for two months every year (during tulip season). They have thousands of varieties of tulips and people come from all over the world.