Shallow Thoughts

A Questioning Attitude is Cultivated

At the bottom of the truck route (the main highway going up to LANL), the lab keeps a sign, usually advertising things like Motorcycle Awareness Month or Work Safety Month. I think they change it more or less monthly.

A few days ago, this curious sign appeared.

Don't Dart.
Cross Smart.
A Questioning Attitude
is Cultivated.

It includes a logo of the Institutional Worker Environment Safely and Security Team, or IWESST.

I have no idea what they're trying to get across with this sign. If you want to cross this 55mph highway, don't dart across it because it's smarter to saunter slowly? And what does darting, or crossing, have to do with a questioning attitude?

Or does this relate to some deep secret known only to LANL badgeholders, so if I figure it out they'll have to kill me?

Well, I guess they've succeeded in one respect: they have me questioning the sign.

Tags: sign, humor, los alamos
[ 17:58 Jun 03, 2023    More humor | permalink to this entry | ]

White Rock Kite Festival

The weather is great for this year's Kite Festival, going on right now at Overlook Park. It's a little hazy, but there's a good wind, plenty to keep the kids' small kits aloft, though the big, fancy kites were struggling a little.

Continuing through Sunday night; if you're in the area, go take a look!

A few photos: White Rock Kite Festival 2023.

Tags: photography, kites
[ 15:43 May 20, 2023    More misc | permalink to this entry | ]

I'm Glad I Don't Run Wordpress

Last week I spent some time monitoring my apache error logs to try to get rid of warnings from my website and see if there are any errors I need to fix. (Answer: yes, there were a few things I needed to fix, mostly due to changes in libraries since I wrote the pages in question.)

The vast majority of lines in my error log, however, are requests for /wp-login.php or /xmlrpc.php. There are so many of them that they drown out any actual errors on the website.

Read more ...

Tags: web, apache
[ 10:28 Apr 13, 2023    More tech/web | permalink to this entry | ]

A Fake File Manager

After learning how to prevent RawTherapee from intercepting requests for a file manager, I'm happy not to have unwanted RawTherapee windows randomly popping up whenever some program decides it wants to show me a directory. For instance, in Firefox's Download Manager, there's a little folder icon you can click on -- but it doesn't do anything useful if you don't have a file manager installed.

I suppose I could install a file manager; thunar is relatively lightweight. But it seems silly to have to install a whole GUI program I'll never otherwise use just to find out where files were stored. Once I know where to look, a terminal, with shell autocomplete, works fine for navigating my directories, and is much faster and less RSI-inducing than a mouse-based file manager.

Which raises the question: can I make the system do something useful on directory requests, and just show me where the file was stored, or give me a terminal already chdired to the right place? Sort of a fake file manager?

It turned out to be fairly easy.

Read more ...

Tags: linux, mime, cmdline
[ 11:24 Apr 04, 2023    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]

Zoom Pops Up a Window for ... RawTherapee??

I've been annoyed for some time by the way that Zoom, when it finishes processing a recording after a meeting, pops up a ... Raw Therapee window??

RawTherapee is a program for handling RAW image files, the kind that many digital cameras can generate but that most image apps can't read. It's a fine program. But it's not a file manager, nor is it a video player. It makes absolutely no sense to pop it up to handle a video file. And it's very slow to start up, so I would leave a Zoom meeting, and then half a minute later this weird window would pop up for no apparent reason.

I've seen a few other programs, like wine, pop up these RawTherapee windows. I've been trying for many months to figure out why this happens, and I've finally found the answer, and a fix.

Read more ...

Tags: linux, cmdline, mime
[ 16:26 Mar 27, 2023    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]

Rsync: Combining Includes and Excludes

I back up my computer to a local disk (well, several redundant local disks) using rsync. (I don't particularly trust cloud providers, and in any case our internet connection is very slow, especially for upload, so waiting hours while the entire contents of my disk uploads isn't appealing.)

To save space and time, I have script that includes a list of files and directories I don't need to back up: browser cache directories, object files, build directories, generated files like thumbnails, large video files, downloaded source, and so on.

I also have a list of files I do want to back up even though they'd otherwise be excluded. For instance, I sometimes have local changes in my GIMP source directory, outsrc/gimp-master/gimp/, even though most of outsrc doesn't need to be backed up. Or /blog/tags/build in my local mirror of the shallowsky website, even though I have a rule that says directories named build shouldn't usually be backed up.

I've been using rsync's --include and --exclude to handle this. But I discovered yesterday that I'd been using them wrong, and some things I thought were getting backed up, weren't. It took some reading and experimenting before I figured out how these rsync flags actually work — which doesn't seem to be well explained anywhere.

Read more ...

Tags: backups, linux, commandline, python
[ 16:11 Mar 19, 2023    More linux/cmdline | permalink to this entry | ]

Fun with InstaMorph Plastic

Like many cyclists, I always carry a small tire pump on my mountain bike. I've had the pump for many years, and it still works, but the plastic holder that screws into the water bottle cage holder has gotten brittle over the years, and broke a few months ago.

As a stopgap, I lashed the pump to the bike frame with velcro strips, but I was never very happy with that. But you can't buy just the mount for a bike pump; you're supposed to buy a whole new pump.

But you know me: I hate throwing things away, especially plastic things, if I don't have to. And I found the perfect solution.

Read more ...

Tags: art
[ 13:28 Feb 10, 2023    More misc | permalink to this entry | ]

The 2023 Legislative Session, Student Advocates, and Hope for the Future

This year's New Mexico legislative session started Jan 17 and runs through Mar 18. As usual, they have a full schedule.

Also as usual, I've been scrambling with updates to the New Mexico Bill Tracker. This year's new feature is tags; I seeded it with a few tags I use, like health and elections, plus an LWVNM tag for bills the League of Women Voters is tracking and advocating for or against. But the list has grown quite a bit from there, and it's been fun to watch what tags other people are interested in.

One bill of particular interest this session is HB134: MENSTRUAL PRODUCTS IN SCHOOL BATHROOMS. It's driven by three Albuquerque Academy high school students, seniors Noor Ali, Sophia Liem and Mireya Macías.

Read more ...

Tags: government, politics
[ 17:59 Feb 01, 2023    More politics | permalink to this entry | ]