Last year I was fortunate enough to attend Tinkerfest at the Chabot Space and Science Center, high in the hills of the East Bay. One of the fun things about it was that I ran into an old friend from HacDC, who is very involved in the amateur radio ballooning community out here. Their specific thing (because everybody seems to have a Thing out here ( Read more... )

Note: I used the tag 'searx' for this post even though I've been using SearxNG for quite a while. There's enough compatibility between the two that the stuff I've written (so far) will work. However, I haven't decided if it's worth the hassle of changing the tag and possibly making things harder to find.

A constant problem when you have a sizeable ( Read more... )

"Check your ego at the door. No gods, no rockstars. Only n00bs." --thegibson

I try to go off the grid every couple of months to get away from everything and free up compute cycles for messing around with stuff. For whatever reason I find it helpful to go off to someplace quiet, possibly because it means that I can be nonverbal for a while. It ( Read more... )

We're just coming off of another heat wave in the Bay Area; temperatures have returned to a comfortable low-to-mid 70's Fahrenheit and humidity is hanging out around 30% (or so my weather station tells me). Temperatures in the 80's and 90's don't sound like much unless you don't have air conditioning (which many Bay Area homes don't) or insulation ( Read more... )

I haven't been tinkering a lot lately. Not because I haven't wanted to (well, that's not quite true) but because I've had other stuff that I wanted to get out of the way. Basically, I couldn't stand the impacted shitpile that I call an office-cum-workshop in its current state anymore. Figuring out how much floor space I had a few weeks ago really ( Read more... )

Somehow it's turned into one of those really busy months, where I've been working on stuff more than anything else. Thing is, most of it isn't really worth talking about; not yet, anyway. Lifestyle maintenance is like that. It's not glamorous, interesting, or even all that fun, but it still has to get done, if only for the sake of one's mental ( Read more... )

It's July 4th as I sit outside and write this post, after quite a few years of wondering if I should type this up. But, I figured, I'm not getting any younger and if I ever get around to writing my memoirs I'm going to put this in there, anyway, and there's no guarantee that I'll remember this if and when I ever do. So, here goes.

Content warning: ( Read more... )

For starters, let me just say that there is nothing wrong with me as I write this. I used the tag "cancer" up there because this post talks about cancer screening. Also, as I finish and polish this post up a few days later I found out that nothing unusual was found, "You're good, see you in ten years."

Second, I'll try my best to not be gratuitous ( Read more... )

I figured that I may as well update my .plan file before things got too busy. The usual warnings apply, of course.

https://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2024-05-28/more-updates-incoming/