Tag: makethings

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Photo of a super sweet, orange bike propped up against a stone wall with green foliage in the background.
Tangerine Dream

I bought a new bike this week. I immediately took it for rip around the park followed by a quick, golden hour photo shoot. It’s been a while since I’ve ridden anything other than an acoustic Citibike around town. This bike is so much lighter and more nimble than those blue beasts—it feels like flying.

On the project front, I made good progress on V3 of the home dashboard. The visual redesign had been on my todo list for ages, but I was stuck on creating the overall aesthetic. Rather than letting that continue to block me, I worked on wiring up the data. Now there is a working dashboard that is getting all the data I want. While it won’t garner even an honorable mention at a design competition, it feels good to have built something. The hardware is next. Perhaps I’ll get some inspiration for the visual design whilst I work on that.

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Photo of Joe Jackson with the band on stage at the Beacon Theatre. Left to right: Joe Jackson at the keyboard, Doug Yowell on drums, Graham Maby on bass, Felipe Fournier on percussion and Teddy Kumpel on guitar.
Photo credit: @dougyowell on Instagram

Caught an evening with Joe Jackson and the band at the Beacon Theatre on Saturday night. He began the show at the piano, solo for the first song. Then he was joined by his long time bassist, Graham Maby for the second. These guys have been playing together for 50 years. I wonder if they think about how special that is while they’re on stage, just the two of them. Maybe after thousands of performances, they don’t. But, I like to think they do.

The rest of the band joined them, one by one from the wings for the third number and proceeded to rock the Beacon. It was a wonderful show with plenty of newer material mixed in with the classics from his extensive catalog. He even played Home Town, one of my favorites, and a pleasant surprise.

I did some quality procrastineering this week and created a little menu bar pomodoro timer. It already helped me break a procrastination spell this weekend, so it’s not a total loss. If you also suffer from procrastination from time to time, the pomodoro technique can help jump start things. You don’t even need my fancy application, you can just use the timer on your phone.

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There are a lot of links this week—so many that I’ve decided to categorize them..

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Photo of a number table tent on a wooden table. The number is "86".

On my Birthday, we got 86ed from some place in Park Slope (see photo). The woman behind the counter wasn’t all that impressed by my attempt at humor after she handed over this number. Perhaps she’s tired of the not so original reference, or maybe she thought it was some sort of middle-aged 67.

I did up a very quick app (I’m using the term very loosely here). Thanks to generative AI, I spent less time on this digital version than on laying out the printable version I was using before. It’s just a little tracker to help me stay on the right dietary path using the DASH diet (from the days before the government added beef tallow to its recommendations). After using it for a week, I made a couple tweaks and am pretty happy with it. You can check it out here: Simple DASH Diet Tracker, if you’re interested in such things, the code is on Codeberg.

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This is an offshoot not only of the jukebox project, but some little things I’ve been automating at work as of late. Nothing here is groundbreaking, but it wasn’t obvious to me when I started using copilot. During my first attempts, I just added copilot my normal process of knocking something together: Jump in and start experimenting with things, write some comments and notes and gradually build up a working thing piece by piece. Copilot was helpful, but kept running ahead of me, doing things I didn’t ask it to do, which was annoying.

I really started to see more benefits once I started working in a slightly different, and possibly more obvious, way. In brief:

  • Start by writing brief requirements
  • Use Copilot instructions files
  • Use new chats from time to time
  • Try different models

Keep reading for the longer version…

Continue reading →

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Photo of a green moving truck parked on a Brooklyn street with the text "Otter Moving & Storage" and an animated Otter carrying a cardboard box.
Don’t otters crack things open on rocks?

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.

We are living in interesting times, indeed.

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