Friday night project: shoe shining.

A pair of Doc Martens Chelsea boots, black, with a mirror shine.&10;&10;Next to them, a pair of Samuel Hubbard wingtips, whiskey colored, a cream polish gloss.

In case you wondered if kids ever get cheaper, this just happened:

Kid: Hey Dad, uh, can you pay my tuition?

Me: When’s it due?

Kid: sheepish grin, looks at wristwatch

We’re watching the Netflix “Senna” series, which is fun to see, and in which you learn that he was a flawless, dedicated, morally perfect saint surrounded by wonderful supportive people, except for the other drivers.

Word of the day: hagiography.

Currently reading: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway 📚

Our living room smart lights had been turning themselves on randomly for the last few weeks. There were no automations triggering this. Not even motion sensors in the same room! And yet, I’d stand up and the lights came on.

Today I learned the new Nanoleaf switch has a motion sensor built in.

Finished reading: The Bhagavad Gita by Eknath Easwaran 📚

Me: Use the open sriracha before you open a new bottle.

Kid: OK! opens the new bottle

Me: Why did you open that?

Kid: I couldn’t find the other one.

This is literally where I found the old bottle when I opened the refrigerator.

An open refrigerator with a half-empty bottle of sriracha on the very front of the middle shelf, label facing forward saying “SRIRACHA”.&10;&10;There is another open bottle of it in the background. It is not the 3rd one that the kid just now opened.

I just released Frozen BBS v1.3.0. It has a boatload of backend improvements, not all backward compatible. I think this will be the last change this large. It now has all the base infrastructure I’d imagined from the start. Future releases should be more incremental.

It happened! It happened! Berkeley Mono v2 is here! It’s a Christmas miracle!

This year’s winner of the “Most Random Present” award: my buddy who gave me a set of throwing axes and some night vision goggles. I’m still not entirely sure how this all goes together.

2 crossed axes and what looks like black binoculars

My kid wanted to watch Airplane! tonight. This is the best, goofiest movie ever. I could watch it 1,000 times.

My sister worked in infectious disease control at a large hospital. Her department head asked her to write their flu response protocols, so she did. When their state wanted to have flu protocols, they asked around to the hospitals and ended up using her work. When the CDC was writing their national plans, they heavily cited the state’s.

She would have wept — wept! — at the idiocy we’ve brought upon ourselves.

I take some consolation that she never had to see what we’ve done.

The state of local AI today: llama3.1 (the 8B version) runs well on my MacBook Air with 24GB of RAM. I run it with Ollama. There’s a decent FOSS terminal app, Aider, that lets you do useful things with it.

Install those and you can have a reasonable coding assistant that’s 100% free and 100% local.

Chill, like Jort.

A brown striped kitty lays on a bedroom floor, smiling slightly.

‘Tis now officially the Christmas season.

Photo of a TV showing the opening of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”.

First light of my new Frozen BBS Meshtastic message board.

It’s not beautiful, but it works.

Screenshot of a Meshtastic direct message window.<br><br>Sent:<br>Hi!<br><br>Received:<br>Welcome to Frozen BBS!<br>Commands:<br>B : Board list<br>Bn: Enter board #n<br>? : Tell me where I am<br>H : This help<br><br>Sent:<br>B<br><br>Received:<br>Boards:<br>#1 Board Talk: Discussing this<br>BBS itself.<br>#2 Meshtastic: How did we get here?<br>#3 Local: Things happening nearby.<br> Screenshot of a Meshtastic direct message window.<br><br>Sent:<br>B1<br><br>Received:<br>Entering board 1<br><br>Sent:<br>N<br><br>Received:<br>From: !cafebead/FRZB:Frozen BBS<br>At : 2024-11-28T17:43:13<br>Msg: First post.

One of my very first non-trivial coding projects was trying to write a BBS for my Commodore 64 so that other people could call my computer like I called theirs. I didn’t get very far.

Today I played with some of the BBS software people have made for Meshtastic, and they’ve inspired me to try again. So far tonight I’ve learned how to use SQLite and an ORM with Rust. It may never work but I’m having fun trying.

We’re dog sitting a chihuahua. I just had this conversation with their owners’ kitchen spybot:

Me: Dingus, Monday morning at 8AM, play “I Want a Dog” by Pet Shop Boys.

Spy: OK. Would you like me to make that your default alarm tone?

Me: …yes!

My wife: LOL

Don’t leave me alone with your electronics.

We’re dogsitting Holly. She thinks my jokes are hilarious.

An old black and brown chihuahua mid-yawn, like she’s laughing uproariously.

The new cajun place next door finally has muffuletta sandwiches in stock. First, they’re every bit as delicious as I remembered from first trying them many years ago. Second, I now know how I’ll die, and that I’ll die smiling contentedly.