Shallow Thoughts

Wall Snake

When they installed the mini-split heat pump in the bedroom (and this year was the year to do it! it's been a lifesaver this month!) the installers drilled a hole in the wrong place. One of them noticed my crochet kingsnake in the living room and suggested that rather than filling the hole normally, I could crochet a snake to put in the hole. I loved the idea and told him not to fill the hole.

It took a few tries: I thought the hole was bigger than it actually was, and I didn't drag a ladder upstairs to the bedroom until after I was half done with the snake, at which point I discovered my snake was too big and I'd have to pull it apart and start over with a smaller snake. But I'm happy with the result.

How Many Photos Have I Taken?

I was visiting relatives, and we were looking through some photos when someone asked me, "How many photos do you have, anyway?"

I had never thought about it. But I have a Linux laptop with all my digital photos on it, so it shouldn't be too hard to answer that at least for the digital ones. (I'm not going to go count the slides in the albums on the closet shelf.)

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A Linux-Based Video Player Appliance

Our MP4 player box died. It was a little cheapo device that reads video files (mostly ripped from CD) off an SD card or flash drive, then plays them on the TV over HDMI.

We've had a couple of them, and they're not great: the user interface is terrible, the playback is sometimes laggy and doesn't always have good audio/video sync. But they're cheap, they do play videos, more or less, and they're easy to drive from an infrared remote. On the other hand, I've also read about how this sort of device is often riddled with malware. That's maybe not a huge risk because we don't give them access to our network, but still, it seems like a bad idea.

"Let's use a #RaspberryPi as our media center", I said. "It'll be so much better than those cheap MP4 players. And I'm sure there are options for training an IR remote, or maybe a way to use a phone as a remote." Little did I know what I was getting into.

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Overriding Emacs' Broken Bookmark Position Code (Updated)

(Note: I've updated this post: see the solution at the end.)

Emacs has a useful function called bookmarks, where you can make short names for files you visit often.

But bookmarks has one terrible misfeature: it also remembers your position in the file.

That sounds like a good thing, right? But the problem is that the bookmarks system only records these positions sporadically. So it's easy to get stuck on a position you were editing months ago.

For example: I have a bookmark for the file where I keep track of appointments and other calendar entries. But lately, every time I open this bookmark, it opens it with the cursor positioned on September 24. That's three months away; its not the part of the file I'm interested in right now.

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Full Self Driving

They're doing roadwork on the highway near the house.

This is the sort of paving where they melt the old pavement, chew it all up into little pieces, mix it with tar or something then smear it back on the road.

They do it all at one time: there's a procession of trucks that each does a different step, and they all move together at a slow walking pace.

We rode our bikes over to watch it happening, and we noticed something interesting.

There's no one driving any of the trucks! They all have a cab, but the driver's seat is empty.

There's a person walking alongside the lead truck. He isn't holding any obvious control mechanism, though.

I never knew that road paving was an application where they're already using "full self driving".

Video Streaming from Linux

As part of a set-top video project, I looked into streaming. Just local streaming: we have a fileserver in one part of the house, running Linux, and the set-top box by the TV (also running Linux though that part is less important); how can I stream a video from the fileserver and play it using mpv on the set-top box?

I thought that would be a dead simple question to answer. But there's surprisingly little related to that that shows up in Google's increasingly broken web search, and what I found in the actual documentation for various programs I tried didn't work.

TL;DR It turns out I probably won't be using this, because it's actually much easier just to mount the fileserver's video directory with sshfs and pretend the video files are local files. Still, I'd been curious about how to do video streaming, and I did find several ways to do it. So here's what I learned.

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LineageOS on a Pixel 3a

I installed LineageOS on the old Pixel 3a that's been sitting in a drawer! I've been meaning to try that forever, but never got around to it. The installation experience was pretty good, and Lineage works great, giving a new lease on life to a device that otherwise could be leaching out toxic chemicals in a landfill. (Though I confess it was actually sitting in a drawer, in case I ever found a use for it, like all my other old phones and laptops.)

First, I want to stress how very old the Pixel 3a is. It was first released in 2019 and discontinued in 2020. It's wonderful that LineageOS still offers an OS that works on a phone this old. It means that rather than throwing old phones away, contributing to e-waste, an old phone can be repurposed to do something useful.

Installation was remarkably easy on the 3a, though not totally without hiccups.

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ICE Detention Numbers

This image, from Indivisible, has been floating around social media. I saw it on a Mastodon post though curiously, it doesn't seem to be on their website anywhere.

But is it true? I wasn't going to share it until I knew that. So I investigated.

A few people on mastodon asked, and other people (not whoever posted the image for Indivisible) replied with two links: a Common Dreams article about ICE planning to buy/rent lots more warehouses for more detention centers, and an MSN article about the history of concentration camps. Neither article addresses the "first six years" claim at all. The MSN link says that Hitler had around 50,000 people held in his roughly 70 concentration camps in his first year (that turns out to be way off according to Wikipedia; I'll address that later).

The first question: how many people is ICE currently holding?

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