Akkana's Musings on Open Source Computing and Technology, Science, and Nature.
And, a scorpion! Some years ago, I bought a long wave 365nm UV flashlight through a group purchase the local geology club made. I had a few UV flashlights, cheap "scorpion lights" you see at gift shops. But it turns out the cheap lights don't really show the fluorescent colors of most rocks very well; this one was recommended by an expert in the geology club as a low-cost entry to seeing…
When they installed the mini-split heat pump in the bedroom (and this year was the year to do it! it's been a lifesaver this month!) the installers drilled a hole in the wrong place. One of them noticed my crochet kingsnake in the living room and suggested that rather than filling the hole normally, I could crochet a snake to put in the hole. I loved the idea and told him not to fill the hole. It…
I was visiting relatives, and we were looking through some photos when someone asked me, "How many photos do you have, anyway?" I had never thought about it. But I have a Linux laptop with all my digital photos on it, so it shouldn't be too hard to answer that at least for the digital ones. (I'm not going to go count the slides in the albums on the closet shelf.) Read more ...
Our MP4 player box died. It was a little cheapo device that reads video files (mostly ripped from CD) off an SD card or flash drive, then plays them on the TV over HDMI. We've had a couple of them, and they're not great: the user interface is terrible, the playback is sometimes laggy and doesn't always have good audio/video sync. But they're cheap, they do play videos, more or less, and they're…
(Note: I've updated this post: see the solution at the end .) Emacs has a useful function called bookmarks, where you can make short names for files you visit often. But bookmarks has one terrible misfeature: it also remembers your position in the file. That sounds like a good thing, right? But the problem is that the bookmarks system only records these positions sporadically. So it's easy to get…
They're doing roadwork on the highway near the house. This is the sort of paving where they melt the old pavement, chew it all up into little pieces, mix it with tar or something then smear it back on the road. They do it all at one time: there's a procession of trucks that each does a different step, and they all move together at a slow walking pace. We rode our bikes over to watch it happening,…
As part of a set-top video project, I looked into streaming. Just local streaming: we have a fileserver in one part of the house, running Linux, and the set-top box by the TV (also running Linux though that part is less important); how can I stream a video from the fileserver and play it using mpv on the set-top box? I thought that would be a dead simple question to answer. But there's…
I installed LineageOS on the old Pixel 3a that's been sitting in a drawer! I've been meaning to try that forever, but never got around to it. The installation experience was pretty good, and Lineage works great, giving a new lease on life to a device that otherwise could be leaching out toxic chemicals in a landfill. (Though I confess it was actually sitting in a drawer, in case I ever found a use…
This image, from Indivisible, has been floating around social media. I saw it on a Mastodon post though curiously, it doesn't seem to be on their website anywhere. But is it true? I wasn't going to share it until I knew that. So I investigated. A few people on mastodon asked, and other people (not whoever posted the image for Indivisible) replied with two links: a Common Dreams article about ICE…