A Geek Goes Flying

Reading glasses I’ve hit that point where I don’t absolutely need glasses, but late at night tired eyes appreciate a mild set of readers. I have some cheap ones¹ I picked up from Zenni that work fine, but over six months or so they got foggier and foggier no matter what cleaning spray (Residual Oil Remover, Koala Eyeglass Lens Cleaner Spray, ShaggyMax OptiMist Prime, &c.) I tried. All of those are great screen cleaners for laptops, monitors, TVs, iPads ... But they just seemed to move the smudges around, no matter how fresh and clean the microfiber cloth I was using was. Somewhere I read that a drop of Dawn dish detergent and a bowl of warm water would get the job done. It absolutely does. I lightly rubbed the lenses with my fingers in the bowl, and used a Koala cloth to dry them, and they’re like brand new again. In somewhat related news, my 512GB iPhone 16 Pro is low on storage, and I have ~160GB of videos and photos. Need to offload them. Not going to pay monthly for iCloud to ...

I’m irrationally saddened by Jackie’s passing early yesterday morning . I wasn’t nearly as devout a camera watcher as many, and I’m trying really hard to not anthropomorphize her (the Facebook pleas for her remains to be taken to their habitat so Shadow can get “closure” and similar calls are just ... yeah). But it sure was something to watch her and Shadow raise multiple broods (even if the weather took one last year before it ever had a chance). Summary of the eagles in Big Bear Valley .

Local DNS setting in PiHole Local DNS I have a CNAME on my main domain that resolves to a DDNS name that’s kept updated from my home network. (Before:  https://freedns.afraid.org/  now whatever the MikroTik supplies, with the FreeDNS name  as a backup - two is one, one is none). It worked fine for years but now it’s not resolving properly from inside the LAN. I’'ll troubleshoot that one day but for now, the expedient fix was just to map that host to the internal IP address on the PiHole (6.3 core version, 6.4 web), since the MikroTik is using that as its DNS source. That was easy. Tahoe SSH authentication issues But now... Why can’t I login to any of my boxes (even remote) using SSH? Attempts hang at:  debug1: Next authentication method: publickey AI tells me it’s likely an issue with macOS Tahoe’s launchd sockets¹?). I was able to connect to the router via SSH and a password (bypassing the public key exchange) using either one of these: % SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/dev/null ssh...

🐦‍🔥 (or maybe 凤凰 ?) I haven’t played the MH-100QMNT all that much. I thought about selling it, but realistically I won’t get much for it , and I  have  been getting back into “super strats” more lately. This thing is cheap (made in China, and I paid $170 for it including a ratty but functional hard case), but capable. And I could use a lessons / rehearsal / gigging guitar I don’t care  that  much about. I started imaging loading it up with higher end Seymour Duncan pickups etc., but then, brakes screeching, thought: Why would I put $400+ into a maybe $175 guitar? Decided to see what I can do using only budget components. Carefully selected budget components, but budget pieces nonetheless. This project took longer than I thought it would, both because not everything was delivered with Amazon speed (the pickups and other electronics took ~7 days to arrive), and because this was my first time doing an electronics project like this.  Tuners & Bridge and other...

Kill Your Television, Burning Man ’97 This Slate piece put into words what I’ve been trying to: The reason TV characters felt real was because we spent real time with them—a standing date, week in and week out. They were in our homes more often than anyone but our immediate family, and they, usually, aged as we did, whether or not the show acknowledged it. Buffy started sophomore year one season and junior year the next; John Carter went from raw med student to seasoned chief resident. We knew on some level that the barflies from Cheers weren’t really our drinking buddies, but they served the same function—a group of lively, funny, unpredictable oddballs you always knew where to find. They were, in the words of another classic sitcom, there for you. Streaming shows, by contrast, turn up when they feel like it—dropping by months or years later, sometimes without even the courtesy of an advance announcement. Rather than a steady, manageable commitment, they take up hours at...