Software Engineer. Professor. Speaker. Writer. Photographer. Coach. Dad. Husband. Occasionally funny.
From 2014 to 2022, Erik Isaksen, Danny Blue, Amal Hussein, Leon Revill, and myself produced 207 episodes of The Web Platform Podcast. It was a labor of love and admiration, talking to guests and discussing the standards that worked, the one’s that we being built, and what web developers were building on top of it. At some point we lost track of the number of guests we had on panels to…
We don’t lack turntables. At last count, there are at least three in the house that get used and that doesn’t count the one I have in my office. The funny thing is, I am fairly certain that we’ve never actually purchased a single one of these turntables; they’ve all been throwaways we rescued or that someone gave us. Which leads us to the Technics SL-D3. The Technics SL-D3…
Some time ago, tired of the endless updating of kid devices and the increasing amount of random device spam—I’m looking at you LG—I setup Pi-Hole as my networks end-all DNS server. If you’re unfamiliar, Pi-Hole is a network-wide ad and tracking blocking sinkhole server, routing a known set of matching domains to basically nothing (e.g., non-routable addresses). It’s easy to use,…
There are few things worse than getting an alert notification from a server at night. Your mind races—is my redundancy working, should I grab a fire extinguisher—knowing that the glaring light of your SSH session in bed will wake your spouse. Then you’ll have two problems. Such an event found me the other day, for of all things, my single no-frills instance that runs my Mastodon server. This…
A friend recently noticed that I had added a curious link in footer of this very site— graveyard —which after browsing called me, on the telephone, with a delectable delight at the idea. How did I come up with the concept of memorializing and demonizing my dead online accounts? Poetry. Poetry does not sit in the forefront of most people’s mind. I know few people who read poetry and fewer still who…
A more than usual amount of people, their opinions transformed into sage advice backed by hubris and the whispers of their AI—less reliable than whispers on the wind, which at least attest to the burning climate conditions we find ourselves in—have felt the recent need to message me about what I should be doing. These messages range a surprisingly wide gamut around my writing of late, often tied…
This is one of those snippets that is cheeky-useful when I’m in a pinch to test something but I don’t have the code base. Well, or I just don’t want to go through the steps of pulling the codebase, dealing with dependency hell, and then running a build that makes me question why people still use frameworks. But I digress. Sometimes, I need to swap the root of an API to point…
A smooth blackberry vanilla ice cream from this years harvest was a delightful surprise and burst of flavors. Justin Ribeiro I adore ice cream. Our love affair defies time and space—the space being in my waistline, tighter this time of year—I’ve found my way to some very good ice cream over the years by sheer chance. Randomly on a road trip from Seattle to San Francisco 25 years ago, happen…
World Cup 1994 photographs sit on an old photo binder, showing Stanford stadium post match. Justin Ribeiro As the 1980’s rolled forward, I recall my first international match, the USA vs USSR at Stanford’s old stadium in the run up to the 1990 World Cup. I remember Harkes’ penalty less for it being a US goal and more for the fact that it had hit the goalkeepers hands and somehow went in. I…
I don’t hide my distaste for what LinkedIn has become; a long time ago, it was a nice address book compliment and now it lives under the zombie section of my graveyard . People ask “are you on LinkedIn?” and I respond “sure, if you consider Perl scripts run via cron being ‘on’ LinkedIn”. These people look at me with that sort of forced smile one makes when…
Cut redwood log sits on my JET 14SFX Bandsaw Tables next to the 3/4 inch Lenox TRI-MASTER Carbide Blade; it cuts like a hot knife threw butter. Justin Ribeiro At beginning of the year, I went on a brief—albeit required—fixing and tune up of my JET JWBS-14SFX . One reason for this maintenance beyond the age was because the weather-related fallen trees around the property had given me the inspired…
Meta spam to an email account I have never used. Justin Ribeiro When I saw this email from Meta show up in my inbox, I was confused. One, I don’t have a Meta or Facebook account. Two, this spam message didn’t even go to an email address I have ever used or publicly shared. Three, it was for their Pixel tracker for storefronts or what not, made all the more confusing as to why that…
Recent conversations around artificial intelligence (AI) have left in me in various quagmires at get-togethers and parties. Few people can define AI regardless of their loudness or hand waving gestures—how exactly do you define AI is usually my incredulous retort—which only leads to fire and brimstone hurled squarely in my direction. These conversations devolve quickly since the conversant…
Something changed, and not in a good way. Since the install last year the T-Mobile 5G internet has been reasonably fine. Sure, it has some latency spikes now and again, but it has generally sorted itself out with my intervention. That was up until two weeks ago. The lag seemed worse than usual. There were family complaints filed. A meeting was held. The words “Dad you have to fix this”…
I don’t recall exactly when I started using Google Analytics for website statistics on this site, but it was a very long time ago and I do remember the breathe of fresh air it was at the time. These days, not so much. Over the last couple years I’ve fought Google Analytics overall weight and slowness and over-eagerness to capture too much about users by twisting and bending to try to…
It is never a good thing when your neighbor asks a innocuous but loaded question: “Are you having trouble with your pool by any chance?” Yes I was Dave, funny you should ask. As winter faded, an annoying occurrence of water loss from the pool begin to become evident. Initially, I chalked this up to the heat wave that struck California way too soon at the beginning of March. We had to…
Some years ago, I acquired—in perfect working order—a dumpster Leica IIIc and Summitar lens. It was dumb luck then as it is now and I love a user-camera. Little did I know that I would find myself enamored by the Summitar. My version is a 10-blade, single coated version post World War II, in the 621000 serial number range. Frankly none of that metadata matters; with old gear as in new, I just load…
I have been busy on a lot of different projects, but the one I’m most excited about is the SX-70 Flash Adapter. I have an amazing photographer out in NYC testing it in studio, and as of today I’ve got a nice snap case modeling and printed that looks pretty trick if I do say so myself. My amazing designer, Laura Perrone , is currently working on the art and manual for the device, and…
I have a lot of Makita tools. Corded versions, a lot of the LXT, decades of tools that I started when my great Uncle Rich gave me a Makita cordless drill back in the 1990s. I still have that drill, though it’s NiCad battery has seen better days. One reason I’ve generally stuck with Makita is that when maintained they last a very long time. When I do something foolish, like breaking the…
While clearing out the overabundance of spare parts I have, I came across a lone eight ball of unknown provenance. I don’t recall buying or being given this eight ball—we have not owned a pool table since the early years of the now much-older college kid—so this made very little sense. What seemingly made perfect sense in the dying moments of the weekend was to remember that the not-so-great…
The restored, sharpened, and working No. 4 Smoothing Hand Plane in all its glory. Justin Ribeiro It started at an estate sale. Monica and I were driving by and we decided to stop in and take a peek—a gander, if you will. We’re never specifically looking to walk away with anything, but I am endlessly looking for old parts for the various cameras, darkroom, and shop machines to repair or to…
Restored and setup, the Sears Craftsman Model 391-5190 vise is a joy to work use. Justin Ribeiro Given the my recent completion of our workbench build and my love of all things vises , it will shock no one that I decided to add a bench vise to the new workbench. I looked around at off-the-shelf new options but lets be honest, that’s not my style. Instead, having seen a no-name rusted and…
The Bambu Lab P2S and AMS 2 Pro sits having finished printing two Poké Ball fidgets. Yes, the twins added eyes to the printer, not included in purchase. Justin Ribeiro This is not a review so much as my shocked amazement of Bambu Lab P2S . I’ve used a lot of 3D printers over the years—like, 15 years as I recall—including writing one of the first internet-connected views of status into…
The top installed as viewed from the parts boxes side. Justin Ribeiro At the end of last year with the darkroom largely complete , I turned my attention to start looking at the larger shop/art room and the setup. The room itself was still a hodge-podge of my tool boxes and tools, with various art carts in various parts of the room. While this worked for me, it was not working for anyone else in…
I do not check my site logs much—let alone my analytics—as it has not been of particular interest to me. I do get alerts for anomalies in traffic and I had seen some spikes that raised an eyebrow. Bad actor crawlers it appeared. That’s no good. Turns out that most of this was AI bots scrapping in foolish and terribly inefficient ways. This had now moved into new frustrating territory that I…
I love open source. I contribute to open source, I maintain open source, I speak at open source conferences, a lot of my research on creativity and innovation is focused on the wonders of open source contributors and maintainers, the list goes on. Which is to say I am not a stranger to the communities and norms and arguments and at times the vitriol that comes with those interactions in these…
Besides photography, I have a love of other art forms. One such style that I adore is linocut and reduction woodcut prints. Having tried my hand at the making such prints—Monica is the way more skilled artist in the family in this technique—I understand the patience and time it takes to accomplish. As such, we have a small collection of such prints, which we pretty much exclusively buy directly…
When we bought the house now nearly four years ago the house came littered with Amazon Ring hardware. Old door sensors, keypads, cameras, you name a Ring device and chances were good that the previous owners had it. Over time, as we would find Ring devices in various states and odd places—a doorbell that was not a doorbell—we’d remove the device and throw it into a bin. Littered you see is…
I had made a mention the other day that I love upgrading and keeping my hardware running as opposed to buying new, off-the-shelf gear. The aside note I made around the fact that ongoing growth of AI requires ostensibly more hardware. I say ostensibly most because at some point you hit diminishing returns on those training GPUs folks—you can’t out-math the math on your training data. Which is…
In my last post I used an autostart silent looping video file to simulate a GIF—the file size saving and the overall processing power are diminished on the viewers device. I’ve used this effect in previous posts over the years and it’s a nice replacement, though not very meme-ready in the classic GIF sense. However, in my recent quest to clean out cruft of code that have piled up on…