Think where you would like to be when you’re thirty, then work backward to now and figure out what you need to do to get there.

Also, don’t be afraid to take chances.

Adafruit and Sparkfun have decent tutorials on how to connect, power, and control these types of strips.

Here’s one: https://learn.adafruit.com/rgb-led-strips/overview

Years ago, I used to live in a neigborhood just down from what they called ‘the projects.’ Those who couldn’t get into Section 8 housing would spill over onto the streets. One time we had a pretty harsh cold snap. Several people died. A few of us started buying tents, sleeping bags, and blankets from Costco and handing them out to those camping on the sidewalks or side streets.

Now, we live in an area that has pretty good food and housing non-profits, so we donate to them every year. I generally don’t give to individuals, hoping our donations, aggregated with others, will reach more people in need.

During COVID, a local non-profit with an urban garden set up an outdoor fridge and pantry for those sleeping around the perimeter. The non-profit would load it up with any excess produce. But word got out and people started donating, usually leftovers from restaurants. We started going to discount grocery stores and buying bulk foods and stocking up the fridge once a month. Took the kids and had them do the stocking up, just to normalize it.

We’re beyond lucky not to be in that situation and feel strongly that we should help where we can. Paying it forward and all. I don’t think anyone who is pinched should feel bad, but those who can afford it, should.

We’ve never mentioned any of this to any friends or family. I only bring it up here, hoping more people feel inspired to step up.

Poker. And proper bluffing.

That I know how to fix problems with their printer. That includes members of my own household.

The Twilight Series books and DVD sets.

The main reason a lot of people still stick around Twitter is because the journalists are there. If Mastodon goes down this path and adds more features to help news organizations and individual reporters, the more likely people will move over.

I talked to Japanese colleagues about this a lot. The issue isn’t just plain old xenophobia. In a lot of cultures, when someone gets married, there are considerations about marrying ‘the right kind’ for the family. As silly as that might sound to U.S. ‘melting pot’ ears, these could be tribal, economic, linguistic, geographic, class, education, age, gender, and yes, race.

In traditional settings, the elders have to bless that marriage, welcome the person, and ideally have the families mesh together and be on the same page.

Inviting foreigners with vastly different backgrounds on almost all those axes, it’s a pretty tall order to ask everyone to change those attitudes. And saying one family should close their eyes and do it for the sake of the country while their neighbors hold out for a ‘suitable’ match is going to be tough. The demographic ‘time bomb’ has been a known issue since the 80s and people are still resistant to change.

At some point, though, realities catch up.

My bet would be it would take a generational turnover and a few years of popular sitcoms normalizing it.

Was just listening to the latest episode of Dot Social podcast where there was a discussion with CEO of Ghost (alternative to Substack). They’re integrating ActivityPub into the platform, but where they’re going with it is that you can use your Fediverse ID instead of email to sign up.

Once they have that worked out, any likes or comments automatically migrate back to the fediverse. Replies back to replies also show up in your timeline and your followers can see them. This makes discovery pretty effortless. They can also use the stats to keep track of engagement across all fediverse services.

It also means turning one-way streams like RSS (podcasting), email services, and commenting services into common two-way communities.

You’re now going beyond just catching up to existing services and doing things just not possible in closed silos. Real “Aha!” moment.

Kids, always have a trade you can fall back on.

Good to see proliferation of presence detectors. Good for turning things off when nobody is around.

In my last job I got to play a bit with the SeeedStudio mmWave presence box. What was interesting (and a little confusing) was that it took multiple add-on boards for things like on-device fall detection (for elderly). For the time I had with it, it worked fine with HA: https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/mmwave_radar_Intro/

‘Steve and I were talking about children one time, and he said the problem with children is that they carry your heart with them. The exact phrase was, “It’s your heart running around outside your body.”’

– Eric Schmidt, quoting Steve Jobs.

Holi Puppy!

They got a PhD in science from a well-known university and worked on research for a while. Last I heard, they got married and ended up selling real-estate.

Don’t know about kids, but “Clifford, the Big Red Dog” sure traumatized Grandma.

On the Mac, I can run MacOS, BSD Unix, and via VMware, Windows and Ubuntu.

On phone/tablet, I can build an app that works on every mobile device of that class shipped in the last 6 years.

On Windows and Android, I have to test apps across a massive combination of features, and even then, there are some with strange configurations that will break the app.

Don’t do what they did: https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/wells-fargo-fires-more-than-a-dozen-employees-for-faking-work-using-mouse-jigglers-and-keyboard-simulation

For starting basic structure, have had good luck with Plottr. If there’s a complex timeline, Aeon Timeline is pretty handy. And once ready to write, Scrivener.

They’re propping each other up.