A Geek Goes Flying

After stripping everything down to minimalism to comfortably host Thanksgiving this year, I’ve decided to redo my reading/listening station . Getting rid of the IKEA side table, the clusterfuck of cables, etc., and getting down to basics. Moving the Schiit stack to the built-in bookshelves, which aren’t deep enough to comfortably host the Mac Mini, let alone the shelf I built . Also ditching the iPhone 12 setup, since I just never really used it. But I still do want streaming capability. (I tried, I really tried, to use / like the Logitech Media Server setup on the mini, but, alas.) Wiim Pro Enter the streamer After too much research, and considering the Arylic S10+ and LP10, and the Eve Play, and some other devices, I settled on the WiiM Pro , especially once Amazon dropped it from $150 to $125, a pretty good price . If I ever use Spotify, it integrates (though I probably won’t ), and apparently it works with the Pandora and SiriusXM I do  have ... But mostly I anticipate using it...

I’m doing more with Things integration and PHP is a quick-and-dirty, but way more powerful than BASH , way to do what I’m trying to do. But tweaking permissions, bang-bash lines, etc., is more than I wanted to deal with. So I’m wrapping some PHP code in a BASH script with a .command extension. This may not be the best way to do this, but, again, quick-and-dirty. #!/usr/bin/env bash clear PHP= `php --version` EXIT= $? if [[ $EXIT -ne 0 ]] then echo "PHP not installed, running brew install php..." brew install php fi UUID= "`uuidgen`" DIRECTORY= "`dirname " $0 "`" cat > /tmp/ $UUID .php << 'FNORD_EOF' <?php print "Hello, world. Running in directory: " . $argv[1] . "...\n"; print_r($argv); ?> FNORD_EOF php /tmp/ $UUID .php "$DIRECTORY" rm /tmp/ $UUID .php

Because “being the IT guy” is somehow something I still can’t shake (even had someone from another office, who we rent space to, asking me to help her troubleshoot her Windows machine ... sorry, I don’t do Windows, haven’t in ~25 years...) We have a conference room buried in the building that doesn’t get good WiFI and doesn’t allow in cell signals, not really. I went to add a  Netgear Trek N300 travel router  to create a hotspot in the room, but ...  There are a half-dozen Ethernet ports but none were connected. So I had the building manager bring in the “wiring guy,” who, well ... 🤬 (Who ignores the existing patch panel and just leaves a keystone hanging?!) Anyway. That’s when I realized we had no spare port to connect the new Ethernet jack to. Sigh. None of this is enterprise-grade, but, it is what it is. Cable Modem -> Netgear WNDR3400v2 router connected to a switch in the wiring closet for the  sublet “suite,” and now, our shiny new  Netgear GS316...

As part of my never-ending quest to Realize My Potential™, I’ve long been using the Things app ( on my iPhone ; on macOS ) for a variety of things, but especially including keeping track of tasks I need to do. One thing that’s always bugged me, though, is you can’t attach files to Things entries. My hacked together solution, for now, is to keep a folder on a cloud service, and to create UUID-named directories under that folder, and to include a note in the Things entry that includes the UUID so I can easily find the files I need to reference for that task. It’s a kludge, but it’s a workable one. Things has a basic API . (There are other ways of interfacing with Things, but this is the one I’m currently using / exploring.) From Terminal, I ran: open "things:///version" Which caused this to pop up: Easy so far. I of course enabled it. Next step: Actually add a task to the Inbox. (This is even more of a kludge, it doesn’t properly URL encode the user input, but I’m not likely to...

Have been watching the Ninja Foodi Grill XL (DG551) , and its smaller sibling, the Ninja Foodi Grill (EG201), for a minute. The EG201 hit a Black Friday price of $159 and was tempting, but I wasn’t sure about the site; the XL doesn’t seem to dip below $219 much these days (and when it does it’s down to $199) . I liked it at $219, not at $299, so when it returned to that price, with same day delivery, I pounced. I have an old BLACK+DECKER Countertop Convection Toaster Oven (CTO6335S) and a George Foreman 4-Serving Removable Plate Electric Grill and Panini Press (GRP1060B) . Both were ... Fine. The toaster oven had a habit of heating up to the point where the LCD screen turned black and was unreadable, and it was hard to clean and cooked somewhat unevenly. The George Foreman ably served me through two dying dogs (Maynard, lymphoma and chemo; Astrid, old age), where cooking up fatty frozen hamburger patties was clutch in keeping them interested in eating. But it took up a lot of coun...

This has been bugging me for a minute. I remembered a site, 'raging.com,' that was a de-bloated AltaVista service, that took a page from the early Google playbook and offered fast, powerful, text-only searching. Trying to find it circa the 1990s via archive.org found captures of Raging Bull (“Leading the Investor Revolution”), located at www.raging.com , through at least May 11, 2000. And since I also remember visiting that site a lot during those heady dot-com bubble days, I was convinced I was mis-remembering the name of the AltaVista search offering. But, nope, my memory is (at least in this respect) intact, and it wasn’t a fever dream, confirmed when I found this Slashdot comment . As early as May 19, 2000, raging.com brought you to raging search from altavista : raging.com search engine home page By August 15, 2000, it was a redirect to ragingsearch.altavista.com , but still branded “raging.” Looks like that survived until at least early 2005 , but by February 5th of that ...

Much to my surprise, I found myself with six guitars[1] (seven, if you count the battered 10 year old JS34 Dinky I keep at the office, that I bought off a guy from Taft in the alley behind the Virgil ). And my small space was starting to get cluttered. Most of the cheap stands I found on Amazon were too big, or only fit a smaller number of guitars, or had enough 1-star reviews to make me nervous. $130 isn’t a huge splurge, but it’s more than I wanted to spend - but I’m glad I did, on this  String Swing Guitar Stand for 6 Electric or Bass, or 3 Acoustic Guitars for Home or Studio (CC34) . (After being inundated with ads for their stuff on Facebook etc.) (I kinda want to wall hang, too (or, like, shelf-hang, maybe with something like this ?), but I have no idea where I could do that where it would look “right.” I’m planning on wall hanging one guitar out in my living room where I’ll be reminded to pick it up every day.)   The CC34 stand with one acoustic, five electric guitars ...