Posted on
by
Photo of a very skinny house, not much wider than the front door. The house is overgrown with vines, the stoop is falling apart and the door is very weather beaten. The rear end of an abandoned car is visible on the left.
A very skinny house on Stillwell Avenue in Brooklyn.

Programming note: The notification email has been resurrected after many years. If you subscribed ten years ago and this email comes as total surprise, sorry—no hard feelings if you unsubscribe.

I’ve wanted to check out the MTA’s annual pop-up shop, but always find out about it after the fact. My luck changed this this year, I read about Debi Mazar’s subway shopping spree while the event was still on. By the time I got there, things were somewhat picked over, but they still had a lot on offer. It was mostly signs, but there were also some other items, such as air gauges and other random train parts. I walked away empty-handed, but it was worth the price of admission if only to see the excitement of the people coming out and posing for photos with their loot.

Since I was in the area, I walked down to Coney Island. On the way I saw this incredibly skinny house on Stillwell Avenue. Despite its compact size, the owners have a difficult time with upkeep.

Coney Island is quiet in the off season, but a couple of the places on the boardwalk are open. There were a surprising number of tourists milling about, confused about he ordering system at Nathan’s. Strange to see them so far from the more popular attractions. Good on them for exploring, even if the subway ride is more exiting than the destination this time of year.

Links

Posted on
by
A freshly poured pint of Guinness sits atop a stone bar. "THE CANARY" and a drawing of a canary is printed on the glass. Mixing glasses and liquor bottles are in the background.
The best Guinness I’ve had in recent memory.

We went for lunch in Crown Heights on Saturday. We were unaware of the annual Panamanian Parade happening on Franklin Avenue, but it was a nice surprise. The sometimes drenching rain didn’t dampen the spirits of the marchers or the spectators. By the way, lunch was delicious, as was the Guinness.

There’s a write-up about my Personal Newsletter in the Projects section. It’s a short one—an appropriately short post for a short project.

Links

Posted on
by

Spent some more time on the personal newsletter script I started back in July. It’s in a pretty good place right now and I like getting the updates every morning. I’ll post a quick write-up on my projects page shortly.

This week’s Jamulus jam was just two of us. Thankfully, we weren’t plagued with the same connection/sound quality issues as last week. We started messing around with an original song by the lead singer. It has a lot of potential, I just need to come up with a grooving bass line.

Links

Posted on
by

A few months ago, I blocked YouTube on my laptop. It has been effective in moderating the random watching. It also makes it clear just how often people embed and link to YouTube. This week, I changed the YouTube blocking strategy. Instead of the blunt instrument that is the hosts file, I am now using a filter in the Ublock origin browser plugin. This filter allows embedded videos, and lets me go to the site with just one extra click—if I really want to. Let’s see if I fall back into old habits.

We had a very rough Jamulus session this week. Despite the many, many dropouts, the worst I’ve ever experienced, we soldiered through. Let’s chalk it up as an excellent timing exercise. I’m not sure what to attribute the issues to. Could it have been a bad night at the data center, or was my new docker image to blame? Thinking it might be the latter, I tried it again on Saturday, and it was just fine. Fingers crossed, it was just an anomaly. If it happens again in our next session, I switch back to the old image to rule that out.

Links

Posted on
by

I took this week off. While some might call it a staycation, I call it a mini-retirement. No matter the terminology, it was awesome. I got some late season sailing in, accomplished most to the things on my to-do list, played some bass, made pizza—an all around good time. Now, I need to gird myself for the return to work on Monday.

Since 2022, I’ve been using a docker image someone created to run our Jamulus server when we need it. It’s quick and easy to set up and it works great. If you’re interested in doing a similar thing, I put together some instructions on running your own Jamulus Server. While I was at it, I noticed that the docker image hadn’t been updated in 3 years, so I forked the repo, updated the Linux and Jamulus versions and rebuilt the Jamulus docker image.

I also did some more work on the personal newsletter (mentioned previously). Now, it also lists the day’s events from a shared calendar. The more dynamic content in the newsletter, the better. Knowing what’s coming up that day is very helpful. I think weather might be next.

Links

Since I had more leisure time this week, I amassed quite the collection of interesting links. So many, that I decided to save a few for next week. You’re welcome.