I’m a full week late on this post. Partially because I’m having trouble not thinking about the events in Minneapolis and elsewhere. I’ve been asking myself if I should I bother writing about little side projects and such when government agents are murdering people with impunity?
This is the compromise I’ve made on this impasse: I’ll say my piece here, then move on to the typical, lighter fare in my next post. If you’ve had enough of people’s takes on this administration’s antics, feel free to stop reading now.
Another relatively quite week around here allowed time to continue some projects. I reached a good stopping point on the jukebox project while waiting for the required hardware. The software, complete with a serviceable web UI, is done (for now). I loaded up 200 tracks and meant to press it into service for New Year’s Eve. However, on the night, I was too lazy to connect it to the Hi-Fi. I’m sure they’ll be another opportunity to test it soon though.
In the meantime, I moved onto another project I mentioned here almost a year ago. Embarrassingly, I did little with since. One of the many things on the todo list is to reliably source real time subway data. This MTAPI project should be better than what I had done previously. I added the service alert data to it and I hope the project owner pulls in my changes soon. That will allow me to swap out my old data source for this one.
Between the projects, a bit of socializing, some good food & drink and an excellent Friday evening jam, it was a great start for the new year. Until…
After just three days, my hopes of this year being less interesting have been dashed. The actions of the current administration in Venezuela fly in the face of international law, have killed innocent people and put us all on a path of uncertainty. Per usual, Heather Cox Richardson provides some good context.
The last (full) week of 2025 is in the books. That means a wrap for the 2025 weeknotes. There are enough year end review type write-ups in the world—no need to include one here. Looking forward, I hope the coming year brings some ever so slightly less interesting times. I’m not sure what that would look like. Trump and the rest of his corrupt administration out of office and in permanent exile somewhere would be a great start.
As is often the case, it is pretty quite around here since so many people are out of town. We did get a nice coating of snow just after Christmas. it was pretty good timing (unless it derailed your travel plans). All weekend felt like an extended snow day. Warmer temperatures and rain are in the forecast, so it may turn out to be the be the best sort of snow—one that melts before it gets too grimy.
Links
Last Call: Saying Goodbye to Fette Sau Really good post that covers some history of Fette Sau and the other early restaurants in the area. I almost forgot about Spuyten Duyvil.
Aboard a downtown 2 train, I looked up and saw this 8 train across the platform. What the? I had just enough time to snap this picture before we left the station. I shouldn’t have been too surprised, there have been a few 8 lines over the years and the MTA includes an “8” on the roll signs. While this particular sign was an error, there may be 8 trains on the rails in the future.
Recently, I received the renewal notice for vintagesailors.com domain. It is an oft forgotten ecommerce site that sells t-shirts and other goods emblazoned with old sailboat logos. The site’s existence can be chalked up to me wanting a Pearson Ensign t-shirt and not being able to find one I liked.
It wasn’t much of a leap from making one t-shirt to thinking “Hey, I like this, wouldn’t everybody want one?” Of course, everybody absolutely doesn’t want one. But, a few people did, despite an almost total lack of marketing.
I say all of this because I’m going to let the domain expire and I feel like it is worthy of marking the occasion. Plus, there’s still time left to get a hat if you want one! As of 2025-12-28, the site is shut down, I can still get you a hat if you want one, just let me know.
The jukebox project is coming along. I made some good progress this week on a couple utility type things that make managing the music library much less cumbersome. I also learned a bit more about what it’s going to take to interface with vintage hardware. There’s a short write-up here: Jukebox Title Strips (and more).
The jukebox project continues despite the lack of an actual jukebox…
Cataloging and Displaying the Tracks
First up, there needed to be a way of assigning tracks to buttons. Manually doing this was exciting for the first track, but that excitement waned exponentially by the 3rd or 4th track. I created an indexing script that tears through the whole music collection to make those button assignments in milliseconds.
Title strips in the Star Title Strip Co. style.
With that data entry burden lifted, I moved on to making title cards. The first thing I did on this project was the card design. It was really satisfying, to use that design for something physical. I created yet another script that populates the artist and title from the aforementioned indexing script and spits out a PDF. I’m really happy with the way these came out. They deliver on the original vision without me having to copy and paste the information for each and every card—or purchase a typewriter.
Mucking around with scripts and audio files is interesting, but this project is about having a physical jukebox with buttons and title cards under the warm glow of incandescent bulbs.
From the beginning, I’ve thought of using a Seeburg Wall-o-matic. Specifically, the 3WA model for it’s 200 track capacity. I thought I’d just get one that no longer works on eBay and wire up the buttons. What could go wrong with that plan?
I dug a little deeper and found this excellent write up and video of a project exactly like mine. Before watching those videos, I had no idea what was inside those wall-o-matics. Long story short, it’s all electromagnetic (not surprising given the vintage). The button pushes trigger a rotor that fires pulses down a communication wire to the main jukebox to queue the songs.
That means my “just wire up the buttons” plan probably won’t work without destroying the existing mechanism, which I want to avoid. Luckily, the project linked above includes schematics for a Raspberry Pi hat that decodes the pulses. For now, I plan on doing that, but I really need to have the Seeburg hardware before I can proceed. I’ll look to purchase one in the new year.
