Microblog

i’m really wanting a way to sync my ereader highlights and notes to this site, but amazon keeps kindle software so locked down that it would be exceedingly difficult to build a good pipeline

checking out logsec

Oh no, I’m interested in signals again

Are there any good books on the history of Amtrak/the PRR?

i’m falling out of love with my kindle. i hate amazon’s restrictive firmware, and i want better note taking/sharing. i’m liking the features of the kobo libra color. has anyone done any kind of scripting/custom workflows around kobo cloud? email me

I think I want to make a photography portfolio page/site. I’d like to do it statically with 11ty too.

I am currently in the posters mecca (Chicago), and this morning I deactivated both of my Twitter accounts. Goodbye, Dorsey-Musk hellhole, you were never good but you certainly got worse.

I’m thinking about Capture One. I’ve been reccomended it by a couple friends, and my camera came with a trial of it. I use Lightroom currently, and Capture One seems better, but I would still be paying for the Creative Cloud Suite since I use Photoshop, After Effects and Illustrator a bunch. The option to buy once and not subscribe is pretty awesome though.

Holy shit, Palo Alto is incredible. This is the fastest I’ve ever read non-fiction, going to be sad when it’s over.

Just bought another copy of one of my favorite games, Faster Than Light. I already own it on steam but not having steam on my macbook is worth at least $9.99 to me, so I bought the game from humblebundle. I saw a gay couple pair of guys playing it in the observation car and it reignited the FTL itch in me. Maybe I’ll write about a post about why I like the game so much.

Just started reading Palo Alto on the train. So far it’s fantastic.

Currently on Amtrak, seems like I got the last train 6 for a while.

Cassette was cooked too. Really short amount of life to get out of 1/2 of a drivetrain. Hoping better weather will give me longer life on my new chain and cassette (managed to sneak an 11-34 instead of an 11-32 past my derailluer and chain)

Just replaced my chain at 420 miles. A little disappointed with the KMC chain, so I’m trying a CN-HG53 from Shimano.

Wondering if I can get these to run off a dynamo. At full length, they require 24V at 500mA, which is about 4x what a dynamo can provide, but they’d be so awesome for bikes. If you’re more electrically inclined, let me know if this is possible!

parking protected bikelane with concrete raised island loading zone and raised crosswalk across the bike lane save me

There’s now a feed for /things, and /things has been redone! it may merge with the main blog (/posts) at some point, but that point is not now

i should read every herb caen column in chronological order

just watched ghostbusters (1984) and it’s just an incel allegory??

reading about anodizing and wanting to give it a try myself. the ingredients are scary though: sulfuric (battery) acid, hot dye, degreaser. having done the process that is responsible for some of my favorite things would be so cool though…

update: they replaced my case no questions asked. bought a slide lite and liking it so far

realized the MO of my life the past couple months has been adding friction to things i want to do less (social media, using my phone) and removing friction from things i want to do more of (writing, photography, riding my bike)

in one of my disappointed with peak design phases. my mobile case is falling apart again, going to see if i can get it replaced today at their hayes valley store (i’m getting a slide strap)

ordered a 35mm prime from 7artisans (second hand off ebay). this is my first prime lens, so i’m sticking pretty cheap, hoping it helps me continue to remove friction from photography.

384 miles and i already need a new chain on Shrimp. at ~.6% wear as of this morning. it’s been wet but i’m a little disappointed. i think i’ll try a shimano chain instead of the KMC chains I’ve been using

gps doohickey parts come tomorrow or the day after!

I’ve ordered some parts for an EPS32 based always-on GPS tracker. I plan to have it create a daily GPX file (with an additional function to create markers/additional trace files to replicate a bike computer). my camera has a function where it can use my phone gps to tag photos, but it burns phone battery, so i can just attach the metadata later from my little device.

thinking of getting a prime lens for just shooting out and about casually

while in chicago i bought a fuji X-T30 mark II and I’m loving it. most of the photos from this trip will be from it. I also visited chicago central camera, a > 100 year old camera shop, the people working that day all seemed to be queer. the vibes were good, and it was a nice refuge from st pattys day in the loop. thanks sawyer for reccomending i go there

amtrak please let me buy the blanket, it’s so cozy — glacier, montana

Learned recently that not only does Cloudflare love their transphobic clients, they also were providing services to fucking ISIS for a while, so that’s cool. More and more tempted to host this on my own server in a closet, everyone is evil

wonder if bernie’s book is worth reading

site has recieved a refresh, mostly stylistic changes on the front end and some image pipeline stuff on the back, might be a little bit faster now too.

attached my front fender to the rack, hopefully that helps with it finding a new way to make itself rub every 5 minutes. now to fix the back…

books! books.

Rebuilding this website with some new image processing stuff on the backend. will make it easier to post here. working on a website for friends to publish misc stuff! i’m currently on board the amtrak empire builder, heading back home from chicago via portland. took the zephyr to chicago. been taking lots of photos, got a new camera (Fuji X-T30 II), i’ll do a photopost soon!

got turned away from a Golden Gate Transit 130 bus the other day because the bike rack was full. This is the first time it’s happened to me but it’s happened twice this week to Ren. luckily we were able to take the 101 behind it and ride a little longer, but on an hourly route this sucks.

hacked together some amtrak status screens for my tidbyt. Longer piece to come soon.

Setting up a little website for my friends to publish their things. Hopefully I can convince them to get blogd of their own in the future.

I’m considering making this page generated from a dynamic source instead of a yaml file, but that would require unstatic-ing the site a little, either through a Cloudflare Worker or some kind of ISR hack.

Top of my consideration list for cameras right now is the Fuji X-T30. It’s little, it’s powerful, Fuji is good.

I’m wanting a small-ish camera that I can be a little more point-and-shooty with while still getting decent quality photos. I like my Nikon 3400 but it’s big and clunky. I want to be able to shoot from my bike, so auto-focus is a must. is this combination even possible at a price that isn’t insane?

just switched to DuckDuckGo. really hoping it’s better than google. google is enshittifying search so hard.

playing with the colors. i’ve made the background either white or black now (depending on system preference). need to do some reading up on how to have more fun color themes (specifically background color) while remaining accessible.

might play with this package in the future. could be useful for in-text subway bullets a-la nyc.

the electronics store guy telling you your project is cool and novel is the most powerful feeling on earth

changelog: made it trans

leaning more into this being my internet corner with my /books and /stuff pages. might mix up the style a little too.

images in 11ty are a pita. i’ve got friends who want to set up blogs/personal websites, and I love 11ty but until I can figure out a simpler, performant image solution I won’t reccomend it to my tech novice friends.

I wish more video creators had blogs. my appetite for video has been shrinking as I read more¹. some creators like contrapoints at least publish their transcripts, but most do nothing, which strikes me as an accessibility issue.

bought a couple of ESP32s and led matrices and other fun parts from adafruit. going to hack together some fun electronic doodads like a good trans woman

I’m really enjoying Omnivore. btw, I’m reading this fantastic and beautiful piece about art¹ from elisabeth nicula, who is a friend of the shop and rides a very cool bicycle. notes i took while reading it include “wow” and “beautiful”. a body that’s all surface

finally got back on the bike. it’s been weeks. hrt makes losing fitness so easy and getting it back so hard. i’m not weaker but my stamina is shot.

A couple days ago I ordered this network connected LED matrix display, which has what seems like a pretty decent API. I’ll write an article once it’s here!

I’ve got a feed set up now for people who are into that kind of thing. I’m trying out Omnivore. The link to the feed is in the navbar header thing.

I finally got images working! Yet again copying Emily, I’m using a Cloudflare R2 bucket as Git LFS storage for images with some preprocessing.

Thinking about switching to wider drop bars on my Crust. It’s currently feeling a little too narrow. The bars on my Trek are a couple centimeters wider and are much more comfortable. Luckily I’ve got Grepp rewrappable tape so the cost of experimentation is low.

I haven’t ridden a bike in a couple weeks (injured and sketchy storms), and it’s definitely taken a toll on my mental health. Hoping to get out tomorrow.

Working on getting a working XML up for this site so it can get consumed by things that consume XML feeds (RIP Google Reader).

I promise I’ll get images fully working on here (though maybe not on the microblog) soon. I’d like to get them hosted on an R2 bucket and set up some preprocessing (I must make piece with WebP), but I haven’t had the time and energy to battle through figuring all that out and getting it into my 11ty workflow yet.

I feel like the “this is doing numbers” meme, but this site has had 1,500 “unique” visitors in the past 30 days (more, since I’ve only been on Cloudflare for a couple weeks!).¹

LA friends, please vote YES on measure HLA! My friend made a great video on why you should, check it out.

I’ve switched from Arc to Firefox, mostly because I don’t want to be reliant on anything Chromium with Google’s upcoming killing of ad blockers. I wish The Browser Company (yes, that’s what they’re called 🙄) would have built Arc on Gecko, it would probably have a lot less performance issues that way.

I’m feeling a little shitty about using Cloudflare Pages for this site, but the alternative is GitHub Pages or Vercel. GitHub is Microsoft (more evil?), and I don’t trust Vercel to stay free (and I’m not loving the AI direction they’re going).

Driver to people he’s picking up at presidio and california: “I can’t pick you up here, the buses have cameras i’ll get a ticket for stopping in the bus stop.” Hell yeah, it’s working.

The other day I found out my blog post on subway surfing headlined an agency’s internal news roundup,¹ which I think is awesome. It would be really cool if my writing had an impact on this.

If you’ve got tips on how to wash hair/stay clean on Amtrak in coach. I’m going to buy a lounge pass in Chicago and use the showers there, but the Zephyr is three days, and the South West Chief is two. My hair basically needs to be washed daily.

I’m preparing for a lot of time on Amtrak, so if you’ve got book recommendations, email me (please). Also I’m on Goodreads, although in the indieweb spirit, maybe I’ll move my book tracking to here too.

I’m back on Mastodon, and things are far less awful than it was in the beginning of the Twitter explosion. I’ve been on for a couple days, and haven’t seen a single meta-discourse post!

I bought an Amtrak USA RailPass for $500. It came out to cheaper than my upcoming round trip to/from New York City. I’m taking the Zephyr to Chicago and then the Lake Shore Limited to New York City. Excited to spend a couple hours traveling down the Hudson on a train. I’ll be going home via New Orleans, where I’m spending 2 nights. Amtrak is having a flash sale until tomorrow, so if you’ve been meaning to book a trip, you should do that now!

This is in edition to the trip I’ve already got planned for my mom’s birthday in March! We’re going to Chicago on the Zephyr, then Portland on the Empire Builder and back to the Bay on the Starlight! This’ll be my first long trip in a roomette, so I’m excited to see how that goes.

Hoping microblogging here will help me post less on twitter. My not wanting to use a CMS will make it difficult to post first here, especially from the phone. We’ll see how this goes. Maybe I can get GitHub web editing to not be awful.