Husband, father, coder, photographer, traveler.
When I was a student at UCSB, I worked in the Computer Support group for the Electrical and Computer Engineering department.
While I never met him personally, I passed by Nakamura’s office countless times when working. Every time I passed, I thought how amazing it was that the inventor of the blue LED was a professor at our university.
This was a fascinating story of how the blue LED was invented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF8d72mA41M
This week I started learning to write Sourcery stencils. I’ve never been a huge fan of writing code that generates other code, so this is new to me.
The interesting thing with Sourcery is how I felt like I was completely flailing on getting anything to work up until a point, and then something just clicked. After that, I became much more productive. It was surprising to me just how apparent the switch was while it was taking place.
My first Mac was a Mac 512k that my parents brought home one day when I was 7. I can’t count the number of hours I spent in MacPaint on that 9” screen.
The first Mac I personally purchased was a PowerBook 5300 (the grayscale one), which I bought for college.
Happy 40th, Mac.
I’m working on restoring files on a Linux server from a Synology Active Backup. It was going pretty quick for larger files, leading me to think it must check file checksums or something to make sure the file has changed before restoring it. However, once it got to the small files, the checksum checks take more bandwidth than just overwriting with the same file.
Currently 13 hours into the restore and have sent about twice as much data over the network than the original restore size.
Pascal was the first language I learned to code. I took a programming class in high school. The school computer lab had Mac Classics for each student. I remember every row of computers in the lab had an AppleTalk network to an inkjet printer at the end of the row.
My parents bought me a license of THINK Pascal so I could practice on my Mac II at home.
RIP.
I came across my grandfather’s Canon AE-1 a few days ago. I got the shutter to trigger one time, then it didn’t work.
The internet says a non-functioning shutter could be due to a dead battery. The camera hasn’t been used in years (decades?). On a whim I ordered a new battery.
It arrived today and the shutter is working great! I’m guessing it triggered once before the battery swap due to a remaining charge in a capacitor, which amazes me thinking about it.
Time to buy some film…
I sold my EOS R earlier this evening. I’m glad it’s going to be getting use instead of sitting on a shelf, and I couldn’t be happier with my R5, but it’s always sad to see a camera go. I imagine it has something to do with being the tool used to capture so many memories. So long, friend.
Purchased a Supermicro 2U server with a 14 core 2690 v4 CPU for barely more than the price of the chassis alone. Bumped the configuration to 256GB of RAM for just $125 more.
It should be a healthy upgrade from the 6 core 2013 Mac Pro it will replace. Eventually I’d like to upgrade to an Epyc Rome/Milan build in the same chassis, but I figured I might as well try this setup first. If it’s not quick enough, I’ll just buy the new motherboard/CPU and reuse the RAM.
This video finishes the series I started last year with getting a short-term rental property ready to rent. In this video I go over the networking equipment and the general setup we’re using to offer WiFi for our guests.
The UniFi Dream Machine has been working well for over a year now. Since recording this video, I’ve had to do one remote update of the firmware for a major vulnerability in October, 2023. The update worked without a hitch.
Even though there are a few head-scratchers with the M3 Pro, in general the new M3 MacBook Pros look like a nice update. The Max with 12 P cores and 4 E cores looks like an especially nice configuration, albeit at a price.
I’m still holding tight with my M1 Max (maybe an M4 will have my name on it), but it’s exciting to see the performance gains continuing to made with each generation.
That wraps up the car maintenance this week.
On Tuesday I took it in for new summer tries (Continental ExtremeContact Sport O2’s…so far they have been super-sticky). Then yesterday it had an oil change.
Feels pretty smooth after everything’s been done.
Replaced the engine and cabin air filters in the subie tonight. Judging by the state of the old ones, I should have swapped them long ago.
It’s been awhile, but I spent some time this weekend contributing to an open source project. After getting a Unifi PDU last week, I wanted to be able to see power metrics in my Grafana setup.
Unpoller had a lot of code attempting to add support, but the main dev didn’t have hardware to test with. I pushed it the rest of the way and posted a PR:
https://github.com/unpoller/unpoller/pull/612
It was my first chance to work with Go, so that made things a little interesting.
Had a drive die in my TrueNAS SSD pool (8x 2TB in mirrored VDEVs) earlier this week.
Decided to order 2x 3.84TB replacements to swap the entire VDEV, because solid state prices have plummeted this past year. I’ll have an unbalanced pool, but thinking unbalanced SSDs shouldn’t have too big of a performance impact.
Will keep the good 2TB SSD as a cold spare for the next failure.
Today was a perfect day to go mountain biking. Hit up a relatively new trail called Michigan’s Dragon and had a great time. Biked about 17 miles of rolling single track along a lake.
Can’t wait to go back, though I’d probably pick a slightly shorter section next time. I’m definitely going to be feeling this tomorrow…
Damn…two desktop UPSes dead in as many weeks. One little power blip and it just gave up.
I could probably just replace the battery, but the screen backlight has been out for awhile now too, which is a hassle, so I’ll probably just replace the whole thing.
Thought a few of you would appreciate this. [ ]
Here’s one of the original App Store screenshots for MyWeather Mobile. We’ve come a long way…
Seasonality Go was just a glint in my eye, and wasn’t available until day 1 of the iPad App Store a few years later.
Looks like someone already put MyWeather Mobile on that list of the first 500 apps on the App Store. That was a heck of a project to pull together in just a few weeks. So much fun.
@gruber@mastodon.social I appreciate your take on the Vision Pro. Before the keynote, I was skeptical a product like this would be anything but a toy.
After seeing the keynote and reading your take on it, I can say with certainty that I was completely wrong. The Vision Pro will cement itself as an important part of future computing.
https://daringfireball.net/2023/06/first_impressions_of_vision_pro_and_visionos