About headlamps

I have two headlamps at this point. The first I bought was a cheap, apparently generic one while then I got a Fenix model for my wife to use. Bottom line: buy cheap and you'll end up buying twice. This model can be had for about $25 on Amazon and seems to be a generic … Continue reading About headlamps →

Of Monsters and Men

I'm afraid of monsters. I know that they exist, but not in the way you may suppose. The fairytales are full of fantastical descriptions of monsters. Grotesque. Larger than life. Inhuman. But they don’t scare me. I believe that those traditions were developed to cope with a fact that the reality of monsters is much … Continue reading Of Monsters and Men →

10k Ring Lights

A great budget-friendly constant light source for your selfies and more. 10K Ring Lights website I ordered the 10" Selfie Ring Light w/ mini tripod model 1 (there's a different tripod style available) a few weeks ago and it arrived today. As with everything else I've posted on this blog I have no relationship with … Continue reading 10k Ring Lights →

Doing some spinning

Well that sucks.

Someone tried to steal my motorcycle early this morning. They didn't succeed and fled when I interrupted them. Did a bunch of damage. They literally tried to drag it up the ramp of a UHaul and backed the truck up, ramming it into a dumpster in the effort.

August 2019 trip post.

I realized I never posted the map of my route. Don't mind the dead-space line; that's where my SPOT unit ran out of battery power. It was a great trip.

Memories of being a university sysadmin

Early in my career I had to maintain the Windows servers but was specifically not allowed to use the SysInternals tools because "third-party free utilities you can just download are unsafe and prohibited." Late 1990s and early 2000s Windows management without those tools - with only what MS provided with the OS and what was … Continue reading Memories of being a university sysadmin →

Describing my style with one picture

Tools of the trade: knives

I previously posted about the original Leatherman Wave I've had since 1999. Now is other knives I carry. Left: Benchmade 3320 "The Pagan"Right: Smith & Wesson assisted OTF. Both are great knives. As you can probably tell from the photo the S&W has more handle wear as I've had it longer. The Benchmade is full-automatic … Continue reading Tools of the trade: knives →

Photo processing.

I use ImageMagick to do some simple processing of photos I take on my DSLR. Originally it was shell scripts that use find, xargs (using the parallel option,) and mogrify with an awk script to generate a trival HTML table. I rewrote this in Python using the WARD API library for ImageMagick and decided to … Continue reading Photo processing. →