deathmtn

I tried really hard to find work for my 2007 Mac Mini tonight.

I first thought of running Plex on it, but realized I’d have a hard time finding a copy of Plex that could run. Then, I thought it could work as a DVD player because it’s one of the rare devices we have with a DVD drive.

However, it can’t connect to my fairly modern display, nor to my TV, which would actually take a VGA connection, but instead of VGA or DVI or S-Video, it has a Mini-DVI output. No combination of adapters I have can connect it to a display.

So, I thought I’d put it out to pasture after seeing what was on it and cleaning it out. I tried to screen share to it from my other really old Mac, but that didn’t work. Only when I connected them directly via Ethernet, could I screen share.

I then saw that there were photos from 2007-2010 that I’m not sure I had backed up elsewhere. So, I tried to rsync them to my archival Pi, but I kept losing the wireless connection.

After trying to hook up an old external hard drive without much success, I remembered that old photos are much smaller. I fit it all on a thumb drive, and tomorrow, I can wipe it and dump it.

I did think about still keeping it around to rip CDs, but if the only way to connect to it is going to by using another old Mac connected to it by cable, that would be painful.

It still somehow seems like a waste of computing power!

For my current project, I decide to use PostgreSQL over my standby, LevelDB, to a small degree because my data fits a relational structure, but mostly because of the tooling.

The hidden cost is that it's way harder to set up. But now that's behind me, and I'm easily inspecting tables and getting query errors pointed out to me by a web app, I feel a little better about my decision.

In this episode of Longform, Melissa del Bosque talks about a story she reported in which Texas public safety tried to shoot out the tires of a truck from a helicopter and instead killed people in the truck.

Texas denied her freedom of information requests for two years. She kept at it for two years to get that story.

I should probably keep at things a little harder.

35-minute run, 13 pull-ups. It was nice out; it snows tomorrow.

I went to bed at 10, then was wide awake at 3 AM. I forced
myself to stay in bed and fell asleep maybe an hour later. Then, I got up for a second for my alarm at 5 and slept for the next three hours.

So, in a complicated way, I got nearly nine hours of sleep.

I don't know if you use Pinboard, but I have for years.

It provides a bookmarklet that bookmarks the page you're on while also putting whatever text you have selected in the description of the bookmark. This is cool, but it has bothered me for years that it doesn't put quotes around your selected text, which is always what I want.

I just realized adoy you can edit the bookmarklet to do that; it's just a tiny bit of JavaScript. So, here it is. You can drag this to your bookmark bar on your browser:

Save to Pinboard with quotes

This episode of Reply All starts with a doctor becoming rich by inserting goat testicles into human scrotums. Then, it actually becomes more bewildering. A really interesting study about human nature and communication.

10 burpees, 12 pull-ups, 5-3-1 deadlifts.

I've been up for 18 hours. Which I is a situation I probably should avoid!

I know it's a church, but I want to live in this house.

33-minute run, 12 pull-ups. One more data point in favor of me being motivated to run slightly faster when it’s cold.

People are creating repos on GitHub with `aoc` in the name, and I'm like, whoa what's this Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez code about? Turns out it's Advent of Code.