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If you want to feel emotions and human connection, take your kid to the DMV drive test and chill with the family members of the other testers while your loved ones are out on their drives.
Nathan Grigg
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Misaligned Time Zones
In yesterday’s post about sunrises , I made a snarky offhand comment about certain places being in the wrong time zone. Today I drew a map that highlights the locations that are more than 7.5 degrees from the central longitude of their time zone. (US time zones are spaced every hour, which corresponds to 15 degrees of longitude.) If you are in the correct time zone, then your average solar…
Worst case sunrise times in the USA
Inspired by Dr. Drang’s plots illustrating the potential effects in Chicago of a move to permanent Daylight Saving Time in the US, I wanted to investigate which places would have the hardest time in the dead of winter. I ended up with this map of the USA Lower 48, with regions shaded by the latest sunrise time that occurred between January 1 and January 15, 2026. If any location were to…
World Cup Scenario Planning
Earlier this week, I put together a quick Jupyter notebook to figure out who plays which third-place team in the Round of 32. I parsed the Wikipedia table into a Pandas DataFrame with 20 columns: Twelve columns named 'A' through 'L' with values True or False , indicating that the third-place team from that group qualified for the Round of 32. Eight columns named 'vA' , 'vB' , etc., for the eight…
Post Office Box
I rent a post office box. It is an unnecessary expense, but I enjoy a walk every now and then to pick up the mail. My youngest child often joins me. He enters, takes a big sniff, and tells me it is his favorite smell. It smells like mildew. I also have a return address stamp, typeset in Gorton Perfected , part of Marcin Wichary’s Shift Happens project.
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If my 7-year-old ever sees me “hacking,” that is, typing terminal commands, he asks to help, which means me transcribing commands for him to type. I started to explain IP addresses to him after he configured part of the network, but he told me he knows what an IP address is, he saw it on Magic School Bus.
Mac Network Backups with ZFS
With my new home server , I’ve made some changes (improvements, hopefully) to my backup system. Previous backup systems To back up my Mac, I’ve always started with Time Machine . It has good operating system support, and it can do frequent incremental backups, even when you aren’t connected to the backup disk. It isn’t great for long-term backups though, because every year or so, it gets…
Software For My New Home Server
Earlier this year, I built a new home server and data storage system. From the hardware side of things, this was a whole new experience for me. But the software side also gave me a lot of opportunities to experiment. Synology, TrueNAS, Docker, etc. My previous storage system was Synology , which is appliance-style software. The operating system is set up to be mostly foolproof, and additional…
Artisanal Web Server
I was playing around with IPv6 on the VPS that hosts this blog when I realized that, at least over IPv6, I no longer need virtual hosts. In the old, old days, a “host” was a physical computer name, mapped to an IP address by DNS. As HTTP spread, it made sense to host multiple websites on the same machine, so browsers were required to send the “Host” header to tell the…
Building a Computer
Catalyst I like having network-based storage, so I can have a place to store backups, large files that I’m not using, copies of media that I’ve purchased, audiobooks, etc. For the last 10 years, I’ve accomplished this with a four-bay Synology, which I eventually replaced with a second four-bay Synology, keeping the old one as a backup. You can run various programs on the Synology because it is…
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Writing go code is a thousand paper cuts but then you get that nice beautiful binary and you put it wherever you want and I’m still not sure it’s worth it.
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Well done Bruce Springsteen . I’m touched by the designation “Winter of ‘26.” Some events are too momentous for a descriptive label. Here’s hoping we remember it as a turning point, a wake-up call to the complacent.
Taking a Stand
US politics are more about identity and power than principles, even though we like to pretend otherwise. In my high school in conservative, rural Idaho, we would debate the virtues of small, limited government, second amendment freedoms, family values candidates, and I was duped into thinking the choice was between Platform A or Platform B, when it was really a choice between giving power to a…
A GMT Watch
I got a new watch. I’ve almost exclusively worn an Apple Watch for the past several years. I still wear one when exercising and sleeping, and I plan to still wear it on some other occasions, but I wanted to see what it was like to go back, shall we say, to a simpler time. My initial feelings are a happy dose of nostalgia. Back before all of our phones and watches and cars were synchronized to NIST…
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Many years after starting The Wheel of Time series (I took a few years’ hiatus between the first 7 and final 7 books), I finished it. Great world, great characters, overall lots of fun. Hard to do the series justice, but I guess I would say the first few books are the most exciting, the middle books make for some interesting world building, and Robert Jordan started to pick up steam again…