Tuesday, January 7, 2025
Tuesday, January 7, 2025 The vibes are wretched. p1k3 / 2025 / 1 / 7
p1k3::feed
writing by brennen
Latest posts
Monday, March 24, 2025
Monday, March 24, 2025 It seems like I have left this thing on, probably against my better judgment. The last time I posted here was an extended low-value ramble about a smartwatch, back in December. I kind of thought that might be the last last one before I just turned the server off for good. I had this idea that I was going to start sending out a snailmail newsletter instead. I even collected…
Tuesday, May 13, 2025 - a very 2025 mid-may yard & garden report
Tuesday, May 13, 2025 a very 2025 mid-may yard amp; garden report It got hot early. A harbinger, maybe. Close to 90 a little to the east of here. 80-something here where there rsquo;s some mountain shade and running water. We had a few days of real rain, so it rsquo;s green, but I rsquo;m not sure how long it rsquo;ll last. The tree pollen is just ecstatically blasting itself onto every available…
thursday, may 1, 2025
thursday, may 1, 2025 'nothing gets you high like it used to' i remember that conversation like it just happened sitting outside the king soopers with casey at one of those rickety steel tables there were ways i hadn't gotten high yet, back then, but the observation itself has held up well all these sixteen years, give or take better than a lot of what i once thought i knew (better for that matter…
Wednesday, December 18, 2024 - notes on the garmin instinct 2 solar - table of contents - background & motivations - the watch - case design, fit, appearance, etc. - display - power - durability - sensors - compass failures - software - on-device interface - mobile apps, etc. - gadgetbridge as an alternative - data syncing - some implications of this device - notes for garmin
# Wednesday, December 18, 2024 # notes on the garmin instinct 2 solar tl;dr: These are incomplete notes on the Garmin Instinct 2 Solar, after a year and a half of regular wear. The Instinct 2 is a smartwatch, first released in 2022, that focuses on activity tracking and fitness. It has 5 buttons and a monochrome non-touch display. In many ways it feels like one of the digital watches of yore with…
Monday, January 4, 2021 - keeping a log: 9 months / ~1k entries in
Monday, January 4, 2021 keeping a log: 9 months / ~1k entries in Previously: org mode, vimwiki, timeslice . Mechanisms inspired directly by: A demo amp; talk from Lars Wirzenius on his ikiwiki -based external brain and journal; fediverse discussion of the Org mode agenda; and possibly too much reading about the Zettelkasten . Back in March, in the throes of a bunch of rabbitholing about…
Sunday, April 5, 2020 - wrt 7.0.0 - new features - title extraction and entry caching - a tagging system - json feed output - a repl for debugging - breaking changes - future work / observations
Sunday, April 5, 2020 wrt 7.0.0 Links: wrt related entries here on p1k3 wrt on CPAN as App::WRT wrt repo on code.p1k3.com wrt mirrored on GitHub It rsquo;s been nearly a year since I released a version of wrt, the tool I use for publishing this site from a collection of flat files. I hacked on it for a while late in 2019, and got somewhere in the neighborhood of a 7.0.0 release before getting…
Tuesday, February 25, 2020 - extracting filenames from packages available in debian
Tuesday, February 25, 2020 extracting filenames from packages available in debian Back in 2016 , I wanted to check the names of existing command-line utilities in order to avoid a collision when I renamed my blogging software to wrt . I wound up using apt-file data to see what binaries are available from Debian packages, and I rsquo;ve referenced the list of files I generated then a bunch of times…
Tuesday, May 7, 2019 - App::WRT v6.0.0.
Tuesday, May 7, 2019 App::WRT v6.0.0. Links: related entries on p1k3 on CPAN as App::WRT on code.p1k3.com mirrored on GitHub Despite the bump in major version number, this one is mostly a bugfix release. A hypothetical user wouldn rsquo;t notice many changes, but I rsquo;m rearranging things further in a direction I started on a year ago , abstracting interaction with the underlying directory…
Thursday, January 11, 2024 - a concise theory of notes about notes
Thursday, January 11, 2024 a concise theory of notes about notes Previously: notes on notes 2020: meta meta 2020: the zettelkasten / the zeitgeist I came across an argument about what exactly makes something a zettelkasten, and then thought: ldquo;Zettelkasten rdquo; is a pretty great example of how one of the best ways to fuck up a neat idea is to have a bunch of people get really excited about…
Wednesday, November 15, 2023 - reading: more patrick o'brian
Wednesday, November 15, 2023 reading: more patrick o'brian Previously: reading: master and commander After thinking for a while that I should pick up more of this series (apparently for five years ), I bought copies of the following: Post Captain H.M.S. Surprise The Mauritius Command I rsquo;m through the first two and about halfway into The Mauritius Command . These remain really strange and…
Monday, July 10, 2023 - recent fiction intake, first half of 2023 edition
Monday, July 10, 2023 recent fiction intake, first half of 2023 edition Gilligan rsquo;s Island , the first (mumble) episodes or so on DVD while killing time in a ski town (I don rsquo;t ski). I had only ever caught smatterings of this back in the era of teevee re-runs. It rsquo;s often kind of charming and also periodically extremely racist, which I guess maybe sums up a lot of mid-20th-century…
Tuesday, June 27, 2023 - a thing, falling apart
Tuesday, June 27, 2023 a thing, falling apart (Context: American west, Great Plains, midwest.) Here rsquo;s something I notice: Buying a fast food hamburger is borderline impossible a lot of places. You walk into let rsquo;s say a McDonalds situated at an interstate exit. There are giant touch-screen kiosks you rsquo;re supposed to order from, but even if they rsquo;re turned on they don rsquo;t…
sunday, december 18, 2022
sunday, december 18, 2022 driving out east of denver in the early hours after sunrise onto the winter plains frost and haze, black cattle moving slow in the muted light the grass all gold and brown, the sky all gray and white, pale blue and industry bellowing steam into the layer of smog just above the horizon tags: poem p1k3 / 2022 / 12 / 18
Wednesday, December 7, 2022
Wednesday, December 7, 2022 Submitted: If you haven rsquo;t adopted a somewhat science fictional frame of mind in the last decade or so, you probably don rsquo;t understand things as well as you could. If you rsquo;re operating entirely on that basis, you rsquo;re still probably pretty out of the loop. tags: sfnal p1k3 / 2022 / 12 / 7
wednesday, november 30, 2022
wednesday, november 30, 2022 the blazing light at the edges of the ice on the sidewalk wakes up something in my mind, some sense of the real and i tell myself it doesn't mean anything at all except for snow and sun and everything that entails but then i guess that's a lot, maybe that's most of it it's hard to find the world beautiful when it's dying it's hard to love what you're going to lose but…
tuesday, november 1, 2022
tuesday, november 1, 2022 some days i think you're only ever talking to yourself other days it seems like we dwell in the warmth of some shared understanding (like there's a we , all told, lit with the light of other souls) it's always fleeting, too brief, an unstable configuration except when it seems bigger than the whole world the way a mountain in the distance is part of the landscape while…
monday, october 17, 2022
monday, october 17, 2022 there was one i was trying to write i had the pieces in my mind and then the most of them rattled out to nothing in the juttering motion of the year the bit i can remember, it's been a theme of late, this little mysticism i'm carrying in my pocket and taking out now and then to turn over in the light: an idea of the past looping back into my life 20 years since i first…
Monday, June 27, 2022 - aphoristic noodling
Monday, June 27, 2022 aphoristic noodling I read this post by Baldur Bjarnason , listing 'Everything I’ve learned about web development in the almost twenty-five years I’ve been practising', and this followup , which says: Some of the aphorisms ended up not-so-pithy, but it was overall a fun little experiment that I recommend: note down everything relevant about the craft that you can think of…
Sunday, May 29, 2022
Sunday, May 29, 2022 One earlier this month from Tyler on notebooks and paper notes . This was a reminder that I rsquo;d been meaning to update notes on notes with the current shape of my system. My habits haven rsquo;t changed drastically in three years, but I rsquo;ve made some extensions worth describing. (In particular, I now make heavy use of the tagged log format I wrote about last year. In…
Monday, February 21, 2022 - why i don't blog much, any more
Monday, February 21, 2022 why i don't blog much, any more I read Tyler rsquo;s Why I Blog earlier today, and it reminded me of a draft I started here back in early January. I thought: These are compelling reasons to write in public, or at least I used to think so. Then I remembered I rsquo;d been been writing about not doing that any more. I used to. Lately hellip; Well, prior to a bit about…
Monday, February 7, 2022 - paper again
Monday, February 7, 2022 paper again What is it that paper has that the computer lacks? The answer might be humility. Paper doesn rsquo;t seek to consume and mediate all things mdash; or at least the age in which it did so long ago fell to digital computers, databases, and networks between them. Paper forms a part of the world computer, but in so many ways an almost forgotten part. Uncontested, or…
thursday, december 2, 2021 - spectra
thursday, december 2, 2021 spectra the richness of the colors that come early in a deep drought: sometimes we have a false idea of the variation within some range we see as narrow tags: drought , poem p1k3 / 2021 / 12 / 2
monday, september 20, 2021
monday, september 20, 2021 it's always the last day of the festival you're always packing to go home tags: poem p1k3 / 2021 / 9 / 20
friday, july 23, 2021
friday, july 23, 2021 one thing i notice the hotter it gets the harder it is to give a shit about industry amp; thrift tags: poem p1k3 / 2021 / 7 / 23
Wednesday, July 21, 2021 - rules
Wednesday, July 21, 2021 rules I was doing the laundry a while ago (I first started writing this in May of 2019), and I got to some stuff where I wasn rsquo;t sure whether it was actually dirty and needed a wash, or if I rsquo;d just tossed it on top of the pile on the way to the shower one night thinking I rsquo;d sort it later. Should I trust my past self to have made a definitive decision that…
Tuesday, July 13, 2021 - an appeal to people who sell stuff on the internet
Tuesday, July 13, 2021 an appeal to people who sell stuff on the internet This is a suggestion that people in business should be better at it. It rsquo;s a departure for me, inasmuch as I kind of hate business. All the same, if you work for or own a company that does e-commerce, build a web site that sells stuff, etc., this is one is addressed directly to you. (Unless the company / site we…
tuesday, april 27, 2021
tuesday, april 27, 2021 there was a flood once, and then it was years before the sound of rain on a roof for more than a few minutes stopped being a reminder i didn't want you'd see it in the people who were there mdash; one of those rare wet days would set in and they'd get a little nervous around the eyes last summer we patched together the failing gutters on this old house and added a section…
Monday, April 12, 2021 - software as government
Monday, April 12, 2021 software as government I rsquo;m sketching an incomplete thought here. For context: GitHub eating open source, Microsoft eating GitHub. Google eating e-mail, the web, corporate communications. Apple with its infinite dollars and stranglehold on a class of users with deep, identity-defining emotional attachments to its stuff. All the usual monopoly-and-aspiring-monopoly…
Sunday, April 11, 2021 - observations on gear nerdery & utility fetishism, 2021 edition
Sunday, April 11, 2021 observations on gear nerdery amp; utility fetishism, 2021 edition In most settings, a big van covers about 70% of the utility afforded by a pickup truck, plus you can sleep in it and the stuff inside won rsquo;t get rained on. Before you buy or gift a synthesizer, remember that owning a synthesizer is like having a little robot voice whispering in your ear about how cool it…
Wednesday, March 24, 2021 - the weather
Wednesday, March 24, 2021 the weather Written back in March, posted 2021-07-14. Discusses a mass shooting. I moved out of Boulder almost a decade ago. Writing this now, I don rsquo;t remember if I thought I was making a decision about leaving Boulder . I think I figured I rsquo;d be back sooner or later. I was just getting worn out on living in basements, my landlords upstairs were about to have a…
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
Tuesday, March 23, 2021 The RMS thing has come up again. I wrote at some length about this back in October of 2019 . I felt messed up about it then, and I still do. If anybody wants or needs my opinions, they haven rsquo;t changed much since I wrote that piece. Anyway, I signed the open letter . I could quibble with aspects of the demands there, but I guess this feels like a necessary push right…
Sunday, March 14, 2021 - reading: a desolation called peace
Sunday, March 14, 2021 reading: a desolation called peace A Desolation Called Peace , Arkady Martine, Tor Books, March 2021. The followup to A Memory Called Empire , which I read in November of last year . More overtly Space Opera in its plot mechanics and fantasy physics, but digs deeper into the first novel rsquo;s most interesting ideas, and pays off all over the place. Doubled themes of…
sunday, february 28, 2021
sunday, february 28, 2021 in the transient world nothing is incorruptible except perhaps corruption itself tags: poem p1k3 / 2021 / 2 / 28
sunday, february 14, 2021
sunday, february 14, 2021 days and days into weeks and weeks and months and months go by with all the variation of fenceposts outside a car window on a road through western kansas and then it's the late winter again in february, we finally get a stretch of cold weather i leave my desk and go out for a walk one day and see a coyote hunting prairie dogs in the grass, a bald eagle looking down over…
Tuesday, January 26, 2021 - reading: the steerswoman (series)
Tuesday, January 26, 2021 reading: the steerswoman (series) These are by Rosemary Kirstein, and available as e-books on Smashwords : The Steerswoman The Outskirter rsquo;s Secret The Lost Steersman The Language of Power I came across these by way of a blog post by Sumana Harihareswara , I think with my ambient sense that I should read them enhanced by a review by Russ Allbery and a blurb from Jo…
Saturday, January 2, 2021 - reading in 2020 (books edition)
Saturday, January 2, 2021 reading in 2020 (books edition) As I look over the set of books I rsquo;ve piled up in my house , the other thing that strikes me is that, in the years these books have been accumulating, both the relationship of books to the culture and the nature of reading itself have been rearranged. Like I wrote three years ago : Because really what I read in 2017, in most of the…
Friday, January 1, 2021 - shelves
Friday, January 1, 2021 shelves I rearranged my office back in mid-December. This is always tricky because we have more stuff (hand-me-down furniture, old computers, bins full of electronics) than we really have house to put it in. As per usual one thing led to another and I wound up moving all of my books. I rsquo;ve finally got just enough room to shelve most of them again, thanks to secondhand…
Monday, December 28, 2020 - the yak queue: end of year 2020 - linux audio: pacmd, pavucontrol, and pasystray - limiting wacom tablet pen input to a single screen under X.Org - google pagespeed metrics for p1k3.com - displaying moon phase emojis for current phase of moon
Monday, December 28, 2020 the yak queue: end of year 2020 Yak shaving : Noun: yak shaving (uncountable) Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem. I was doing a bit of yak shaving this morning, and it looks like it might have paid off. A less useful activity done consciously or subconsciously to procrastinate…
Saturday, December 5, 2020 - the garden cart - the short version - the long version - directions for further research
Saturday, December 5, 2020 the garden cart the short version I rsquo;ve been lugging a lot of heavy stuff around the place lately, which has had me wanting a utility item that was a staple of the gardening and building projects of my childhood: A garden cart. My parents own several of these by now, but there rsquo;s a specific version I think of as The Cart. It rsquo;s probably been around for 30…
Sunday, November 29, 2020 - notes from a time (4)
Sunday, November 29, 2020 notes from a time (4) COVID-19 numbers for late November 2020: WHO global numbers: Current: ~61.87 million confirmed cases and ~1.45 million deaths November 18th: 53.7 million cases / 1.3 million deaths Early June: 6,535,354 cases / 387,155 deaths Late April: 2,804,796 cases / 193,710 deaths NY Times US numbers: Current: 13,311,031 cases / 265,940 deaths in the US…
Friday, November 13, 2020 - reading: a memory called empire
Friday, November 13, 2020 reading: a memory called empire A Memory Called Empire , Arkady Martine, Tor Books, March 2019. This evidently won the 2020 Hugo for Best Novel, which is not surprising. I thought as I was reading it ldquo;this is going to win some major awards rdquo;. Space opera / vast empire / political intrigue in imperial capital city, elements of romance, some fairly well-handled…
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
Tuesday, October 13, 2020 I went for an aimless drive on Saturday. It was accidental. I set out to haul the recycling and buy a can of Coke at the gas station, which they didn rsquo;t have so I settled for a 20oz plastic bottle. I left the gas station and got stuck in the turn lane where I rsquo;d usually make a u-turn back towards home and thought whatever, why not just go for a couple of miles.…
Monday, October 12, 2020 - reading: grant
Monday, October 12, 2020 reading: grant There are two kinds of annoying biography: The kind where the author hates the subject. The kind where the author loves the subject. This one, a biography of Ulysses S. Grant by Ron Chernow, is so far the second. I rsquo;m a hundred pages in, out of 960-odd. It rsquo;s a slightly disjointed read, in that bouncing-from-source-to-source and…
Sunday, October 11, 2020 - reading: the great offshore grounds
Sunday, October 11, 2020 reading: the great offshore grounds A novel by the author of Zazen , a book I first read back in 2012 . At the time, you could read the whole thing on the web , which I did, clicking through until the end. I then bought the paperback and read it again. I got to Zazen by way of a MetaFilter thread on ldquo;The Truck Stop Killer rdquo; , a long piece she wrote for GQ drawing…
Friday, October 9, 2020 - reading: interior states
Friday, October 9, 2020 reading: interior states Interior States: Essays , Anchor Books, 2018. An essay collection by Meghan O'Gieblyn , picked up after a friend linked me to one of the included essays, ldquo;Dispatch from Flyover Country rdquo; : Many of our friends who grew up here now live in Brooklyn, where they are at work on “book-length narratives.” Another contingent has moved to the Bay…
Monday, July 27, 2020 - the zettelkasten / the zeitgeist - background - - further research or whatever
Monday, July 27, 2020 the zettelkasten / the zeitgeist Discussed: The idea of a Zettelkasten, note-taking, index cards, wikis, How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. This post roughly continues a thread that goes something like: 2006: this one about notes on index cards 2014: a notes.txt / TODO file format 2019: notes on notes 2020: meta meta background For the unfamiliar: ldquo;Zettelkasten…
thursday, june 18, 2020
thursday, june 18, 2020 the sky turns heavy all afternoon the cheap hardware store thermometer on the front porch drops 20 degrees in a few hours in the evening, it rains for a long time we're out walking when it starts, halfway through a habitual loop down to the river, past the labyrinth and the parking lot full of deputies and the post office it rains while i chop vegetables, while we sit on…
Friday, June 5, 2020 - fragmentary notes from a bad time getting worse (3)
Friday, June 5, 2020 fragmentary notes from a bad time getting worse (3) Back on the 25th of May, four police officers in Minneapolis murdered a black man named George Floyd on camera. In 2018, on a list of guesses to check after 5 and 10 years, I wrote: No meaningful reforms of policing in America will have gained any traction. When I go to look at this list again, I will be able to recall one or…
Monday, May 25, 2020 - feeds: linkblogs
Monday, May 25, 2020 feeds: linkblogs Background: I rsquo;m writing some posts linking to feeds that I like. Today rsquo;s theme: Blogs that curate interesting links. Linkblogs were once a really common form, and if done lazily can be a formulaic waste of time, but there are a few people with a real knack for sifting out the good stuff who I find worth tracking. Three examples: Leah Neukirchen…