This week is a very special, “links only” edition. Enjoy!

Links

Photo of a deconstructed home dashboard project showing a Raspberry Pi 3, video driver board, LCD, breadboard and wires. The LCD has a test version of a home dashboard including weather, transit and calendar information.

It was a stormy weekend here, which was an excellent time to do some more work on the display project. Last week, I mentioned that I tested tested out the LCD. This weekend, I set up the Raspberry Pi, which will be the brains behind this thing. Getting that working correctly took longer than expected. I ended up working on this for the better part of the day. However, many reboots later, it’s working well.

The fully functioning, albeit deconstructed, result is pictured a above. The LCD is showing real data, but with a placeholder design. Now I just need to finish the final screen design and figure out how I’m going to cram all of this into a decent looking enclosure.

In addition to that little tech project, I sort of unexpectedly took on another one this week: Moving the many web properties of my online empire to a new host. This was prompted by the receipt of the coming year’s invoice. To be clear, we’re not talking about a huge some of money. There was a modest price increase, but it reminded me of last year when they charged over 100% more. While I got them to refund the increase, it really left me with a bad impression of the company. This is unfortunate since I was customer since 2003 (with a brief hiatus from 2010-14).

I spent a couple evenings moving everything over. After working out a couple kinks like mail routing, all seems fine. The site seems a little snappier too. The new host seems good so far. If I don’t have to move hosts for another 19 years, I’ll consider myself lucky.

Links

Photo of Social Distortion on stage at the Brooklyn Paramount on 12-SEP-2026.
Social Distortion at the Brooklyn Paramount. Photo credit: Tom Helmick

This week marked 25 years since the attacks on September 11th, 2021. There was markedly more coverage in the lead-up to the anniversary this year and many messages from all directions to never forget. Perhaps that’s a good thing since, as each year passes, there are fewer of us that have their own experience of that day.

I’ve never written about my experience in Manhattan on that day or those that followed here; I’m not sure I ever will. To mark this year, I’ll point to Anil Dash’s account in 23: What was 9/11? I think he accurately captures the feeling of those days.

On a brighter note, thanks to a good friend, I was lucky to see Social Distortion at Brooklyn Paramount. Descendents were on stage when we walked in and we were able stake out a spot over the main floor with great sight lines. Overall, it was a good show. I was happy that they included Ring of Fire early in the set—could have done with few more of their numbers from the 90s though.


Links

Photo of a large, portable BBQ on a street in Brooklyn.

This weekend marks the unofficial end of Summer here. The weather is a touch cooler and dryer this weekend, which properly sets the mood. I saw this portable barbecue on the street on Saturday, I’m sure it will be cranking for the rest of the long weekend.

I’m still waiting for some parts to come in for my little display project, so I refactored and made a few improvements to the software part of it this week. For the most part, I continued the old fashioned way (making code changes manually, slowly), but I did use an LLM for one thing that I didn’t really feel like diving into. The old fashioned way is more satisfying, in my opinion.

After a week off, we had a pretty solid jam on Friday. One of our new (to us) songs is starting to really come together, and we’re excited about learning a couple more. If we would only practice more (or at all) during the week.


Links

Photo of the Statue of Liberty (from the back) against a bright blue sky.

Seeing the After Dark screensavers (link below) after so many years reminded me of an old Mac game I used to like. For the life of me I could never remember the name and I could never summon it in a straight search. Enter Chat GPT: Spin Doctor is the name of the game. After playing the demo, I’ve discovered that I’m much worse at it now than I thought I was.

We have some family visiting from out of town. Ellis Island was on the must-do list, so I was an reluctant tour guide for the day. A couple observations:

  • You don’t need to be an athlete to ascend 215, unless you’re experiencing mobility issues, I suggest giving it a shot, it’s more fun than the elevator.
  • Are tourists trying to emulate their idea of stereotypical New Yorker by being pushy and rude? Chill out people (and stay out of my way).

We also caught a few action-packed minutes of the South Slope Derby. I wondered why any Brooklyn parent would allow their child to race down the hill on 17th Street atop one of these contraptions. However, after seeing this KoKo NYC video with the kids building those contraptions using power and hand tools, I see that they know what they’re doing. The kids are alright.

If you use OMNY (NYC’s transit card), you’ve probably noticed that charges can hit your credit card at odd times on occasion, sometimes days later. If one gets suspicious about being overcharged, the OMNY site isn’t very helpful at lining up charges with the trips, not at a glance anyway. I threw together this page that compares OMNY charges and trips so I could see if I was getting ripped off (I wasn’t). If you have a similar question, feel free to use it. Have fun!

Progress continues on v3 of the Good Morning Display. I ordered most the hardware needed to piece things together. If you care about such things, the parts list is here. I suspect the final cost for this (not including labor) will exceed an off-the-shelf solution. But, where’s the fun in that?


Links