Tag: uspol

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Photo of a snow yeti in a blue and yellow shed decorated with holiday lights in front of a Brooklyn brownstone. The yeti is holding a sign with text: "We're all in this together ♥".

This week ended with what looks to have been an execution of an American citizen by federal agents on the streets of Minneapolis. In Heather Cox Richardson’s comments about The Killing of Alex Pretti, she says that 16 people have the power to put a stop to this nonsense immediately. All of us should be putting pressure on our elected officials in Washington now—especially if those officials are Republicans.

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Photo of a framed painting of a black cat holding a toucan in it's mouth, which, in turn, is holding a pint of stout in its mouth. The text reads "Lovely Day for Grimness".

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.

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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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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.

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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.

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