Technology, archives, music, ???
Movie film is a challenging form of media to preserve and share digitally. This is might be somewhat surprising. Unlike the ephemeral tape media standards of the 90s (looking at you Video8 and DAT), film enjoyed a long run as the de-facto format for capturing motion pictures. Film projectors are pretty easy to come by. Yet, the process of digitizing film requires either recording a projected image…
Enough has been said about Tolkien's works that I won't much discuss the work here. Safe to say I now understand why the Hobbit holds the place it does in the canon of fantasy literature. Despite consuming much Tolkien-inspired media, I'd never read any of the Lord of the Rings series nor seen the Peter Jackson film series. I went into the book with the hope of being as untainted by outside…
Cassettes are my favorite form of audio media. They cheap and plentiful in the thrift stores of my youth. Both mass produced and local DIY tapes wound up sunbaked in my hand-me-down minivan's tape deck. Endlessly [1] recordable and five screws away from experimentation, they invite home use, personalization, and tinkering. Cassettes don't take themselves seriously. They are best after being broken…
I've loved gardening since before I had space for it. I tried growing succulent clippings, abandoned house plants, and even some redwood saplings on my smog-choked 3rd floor patio in Oakland. When I moved out to the Sierra Nevada foothills, I definitely wanted some space to tend. It's hard to find a spit of land out here that doesn't call out to your inner homesteader. Yet I passed up a property a…
This post, assembled and composed in the Obsidian client is intended to be a brief (or as possible as I can while still geeking out) overview of the workflow I've developed since mid-2025. Feel free to skip straight to my setup.
As a perfect gift to some RV-enjoyers on winter break, RV There Yet? creators Nuggets released a winter map with additional options for chaos. The added challenges of snow, ice, and frisky goats can be overcome with new tools. I can't say that the winch has become less useful, but there an awful lot of puzzles that can be solved with just jet fuel and determination. One should definitely be…
Warning: this post is positively dripping with of media. Please pardon the larger-than-usual webpage size as I geek out, reminisce, and stand on a little soapbox in my little corner of the Internet. Anyone browsing the stacks of a public librarypy around the turn of the millennium would eventually come across the music-and-software section. Brightly colored photos, generally divorced from their…
I love a well-built game that doesn't take itself too seriously. To that end, I've always appreciated the Swedish studio Landfall's goofy approach to game-making. Totally Accurate Battle Simulator can have hysterical moments but the open-endedness kept it in the realm of toy rather than game. Peak is a brilliantly funny and challenging game that gets more polished every time I play it. Alas I…
Warning! Spoilery! For fans of tile-laying games, atmospheric mansions, and walking simulators, Blue Prince is a killer game. I don't usually find myself so enthralled with a game that I need to take physical notes. I think the only other time I've broken out the pen and paper for is in the elaborate pre-planning of a Dwarf Fortress compound. But of course that never gets updated once I'm in the…
Northern California autumn has arrived punctually on the first few days of October. Its entrance has provided me time to take a look at some of the photos I've had developed from the first half of the year.
I've always been fascinated by the engraved art style (which explains why many of my tattoos being based on woodcuts). But I'd never much pursued the craft beyond emulating the style in pen and ink. Y, however spent many an hour of her junior high school days carving rubber stamps, many of which survive to this day squirreled away in an ink-stained shoebox. This post is going to be a recounting of…
I'd (at last) like to take some time to talk about my process for archiving 3.5" floppy disks. I'm by no means an expert in this. In fact, I'm going to do everything in my power to prevent the expert archivist from cringing at this post. But in my defense, I grew up late enough in the 90s that I rarely swapped floppies in and out of machines let alone understood the formatting. Floppies to litle…
In early 2025, I had over a dozen rolls of 35mm film to develop from the previous year. Having started 2024 by trying to home-develop the film I had accumulated from years prior with mixed success, I decided to send these rolls out to a professional developer. Combined with using unexpired film, I feel pretty proud of this batch if for nothing else than well 70% bear an image of something!
While I neglect the floppy disk archiving blog post that has been cooking for six months, I'd like to take some time to talk about the long-haired calico cat that has been hanging around my house. The cat, currently dubbed Kitchu Cat by my toddler, has meandered through our yard for about a year-- most often as a phantom passing by without much of a discernable schedule. Her infrequency of…
Drawing parallels with the mythical ring of King Solomon which grants the ability to converse with animals, Lorenz achieves the same feat by watching and cavorting with animals of all varieties with an mind boggling amount of patience and compassion. This book, written casually out of experiences the author had raising a variety of creatures in varying states of domesticity-- geese, fish,…
In the idle mental moments in which my hands were occupied putting some toast into my mouth this morning I was wondering what I could write a blog post about. It's been a couple months since I . But there hasn't been much interesting going on around here. Another nature blog post? I feel like I'd be talking about the same things. A cool computer-related write-up? I haven't had the capacity to work…
Since the snow is finally melting in a warm rain shower, I want to take a little bit of time to appreciate a metal-and-plastic friend that has been with me through the past few strenuous, but fortunately not disasterous, weeks. Last year's winter storm brought down numerous trees, trapping my then-pregnant wife and I behind downed electric lines. This storm, perhaps due to the weeding-of-the-weak…
If I were to use a scorecard from when I was 25 to judge 2022, the year was pretty rough. I didn't travel anywhere new, get through many books, or even go to a live music event. It was fairly disasterous for my personal savings and I spent much of the year just trying to clean up after a brutal snowstorm from the final days of 2021. But I became a father so my scorecard has changed.
I love working from home and it has been a blessing for my mental health to be able to take breaks to be with my six-month-old son and walk around outside every now and then. Being away from the bright lights and commotion of the open office has boosted my productivity and allowed me to prepare healthy meals with garden-grown produce. However, about a 10 months into working from home, around the…
Earlier this year I came across a copy of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville (you can read it here or here). It's a travel memoir from the 14th century which describes fantastical lands far to the east of Europe based on earlier writings which were mostly based on hearsay. Needless to say, I found what I sought-- the surreal imaginings of the medieval author-- I also came across a trove of fun…
I found a set of fantasy-themed stationary from the early 80s at a local craft reuse store. Lest I ever ran out of the sheets, I've vectorized the images and present them here for the reader's edification.
Earlier this year (2022) I became a father for the first time. As mentioned in I have some mixed feelings about parenthood. I am simultaneously experiencing a love beyond anything I've ever known while feeling a nagging guilt of adding another human to a crowded, warming world. Having a child gives one the opportunity to think into a future beyond the self, hopefully one that is as full of life as…
This is a short retelling of a SIM swap attack against me in early 2022. Perhaps it will be useful to anyone else who has also been targeted. Note: All times in my local PST.
I love a good informal history, but I also find watered down historical summaries to be pointless. Thus, this book, being deeply researched and full of delightful first-hand stories, is among one of my favorite books to come from the Nevada County Historical Society book sale. Containing both an explanation of the rules of play of many games now out of fashion as well the history of gaming in the…
I feel that I have poor memory and retention skills. Because of this [1], I find myself documenting my life as thoroughly as possible. Journaling (physically) (digitally) (my surroundings), photography (gallery), and archiving (email, chats, everything, obsessively) all play their part in helping me recall the moments of my mortal experience in whatever shallow way one can recollect. About 90% of…
I woke up this [July] morning to find the little raised bed in my backyard that supports some tomato plants, pepper plants, beans, and corn had been raided. The little top to a tomato was all that remained of a particularly large and mature roma specimen. But I surveyed the damage with a smile. This is the year of my first harvest. From maybe $100 of plants and seeds, the advice of many practiced…
Over the past few years, I've been seeking to find hints of what the people of the past thought the future might look like. These works of speculative fiction became science fiction in the 19th and 20th century. While H.G. Wells or Verne come to mind, the legacy of Olaf Stapledon took a bit longer to reach me, perhaps due to the sheer density of his work. Regardless, these works are masterful, if…
On Saturday (that is, April 17th, 2021), I deployed my fairly-long-in-development rewrite of the . Features I'm proud to share in this iteration include the ability to filter by decade or lot as well as search by string. Probably most worryingly for my webserver, the website also supports looking up a random item in the archive. All of these magical features come as a benefit of using an actual…
Despite the nearly 300 years that separate its authorship and my first reading of it, Gulliver's Tavels remains not only readable to the average reader, but fascinating. It's one of the few books that my father has ever read. While my early attempts at reading the book in elementary school proved too challenging due to the dated verbiage, it's this very feature that captivated me as an adult. Now…
I've been using Honey Money, a clear-cut budgeting software built around manually entering transactions, to track my spending since 2017. Given the past year (2020) has been quite a change from the year prior, I thought it would be interesting to pull down that data and see what a difference quarantine has had on my spending habits. I wouldn't say there are a ton of surprises and I'm quite limited…
The middle of a stay-at-home order feels like an appropriate time to reflect on a small pastime I picked up when I was in college. Spurred on by my purchase of a Thinkpad and later an old, strictly-for-note-taking Nokia N900 , I began sitting down in common spaces around campus or public transit and simply writing down (relatively) objective descriptions of the people in the area. The intention…
I'd been keeping a list of projects I wanted to see/build some day in a Github repo but now I think a webpage is probably a better spot so here we are. The projects listed here require substantial technical effort hence the descriptions are mostly desired features rather than proper specifications.
Tabletop RPGs have been on my list of hobbies to try out ever since I came to understand that being the classical geek is perfectly acceptable and fine. Having grown up as a single child in a family that enjoyed board games, but generally ones that lasted less than an a few hours, it wasn't until college where I had my first shot...
This is going to be a long post and perhaps not particularly coherent. The bulk is some rambling about the value of minimalism and self-reliance in post-industrial society and particularly where they come in conflict with each other.
My first run in with Stanislav Lem was through the Tarkovsky film Solaris (1972). Like any Tarkovsky film, it's stunning. However, it doesn't really match the tone that I would later learn Lem was famous for-- humor. While on a search for Summa Technologiae, his non-fiction work on computers and philosophy, I found a few of his fiction works and figured I'd give them a shot. I'm a sucker for…
I'd spent years scouring used book stores for a copy of this work of mythological fiction. I'd seen its pagan elements compared to The Wind in the Willows and with the way that I have loved The Golden Bough and The Wake, I was certain I would love this collection of stories of English folklore and history. This copy of Puck of Pook's Hill comes from deep in the stacks of White Rabbit Books in…
I got a stack of mid-century editions of (started in 1949) as a surprise from my mother for my birthday. Little does she know, I already have a huge back catalog of vintage science paperbacks in my bedroom. What typically draws me to science fiction from this era is that it still has that optimistic, galactic-manifest-destiny feel which is a nice break from the crushing reality of the Fermi…
I've found that I've developed a strong emotional attachment to the stuffed animals my wife and I have adopted since we started dating. The feelings can range from an irrational affection to a grief-like hopelessness. So as a way to get my feelings out, I'm going to write this post.
Pico-8 is a fantasy console, essentially a virtual machine emulating a retro 8-bit gaming system that never existed. It functions as a way for game developers to create simple pixel-graphic games with some of the convenience of modern development. Even better, it compiles into javascript that can be played in any browser!
Oakland has been a whole lot quieter today as opposed to this weekend. The curfew has gone into effect and the police have proven they are serious about arresting people intentionally staying out past 8pm. That said, I still wanted to get a decent P25 decoder set up running for my own curiosity as well as recording for public transparency. This is certainly not the end of the protests and there's…
This post is just a quick overview of how I was able to set up a tiny ADS-B listening station during the civil unrest in late May 2020.
I don't think my fascination with dreaming is unique among humans, but I would like to use this page to share my experiences and more interesting dreams.
This post on Hacker News about Polarized, an online document and note manager, was the first time I read the term "personal knowledge repository." I had long been maintaining systems that served this purpose, but I think this term in particular captures the purpose of something I hadn't quite been able to define in concrete terms. A personal knowledge repository can be a dumping place for…
For a time I was looking into getting a product from Thalmic, now known as North or maybe some other sort of body hack that would allow for me to extend my sensory perception.
PAX Dev is an annual gathering of video and board game developers before PAX Prime (short for Penny Arcade Expo) in Seattle. The two days of panels and talks focus on sharing ideas, business cards, and demo codes with other industry members before the general public invades the convention center.
It's Halloween-time as I compose this post, my favorite time of year. With the cool autumn air of Ohio filled with the near-inescapable smell of burning leaves and bonfires giving an excuse to pull out thrift-store sweaters I recall trying to summon spirits with a handmade ouija board, wandering aimless and anonymous down transformed neighborhood streets and woods filled with adolescent mystery.
O11ycon 2018 was a conference organized by the team at Honeycomb.io focused on exploring and developing the concept of observability in the context of distributed systems engineering. Called a co-creation event and y-know, hippieshit by organizer Rachel Chalmers, the conference was open-ended, and I got the pleasure to participate and even present on stage during the "call for failures." Overall,…
Running your own email service seems to have the reputation of a Herculian effort, unnecessary in the era of free email services and social media. I've come across legends of unstoppable spam attacks and undeliverable mail, ISP clampdowns and botnets. But I feel like it's an important step in regaining personal control of your data, identity, and privacy. Running your own mail server can provide a…
Saying goodbye to a region I have called home my whole life has been full of mixed emotions and even if I'm not totally settled into this new state, I figured it would be worthwhile to collect a few thoughts here and reflect on the trip across the country.
I've never been majorly invested in social media or mobile video games, but over the past year or two, I (and many others) have still noticed that I end up wasting a lot of time getting distracted by push notifications, alerts and other digital clutter. This is my experience with turning off the color on my shiny rectangle device.