The kids have a wall in the corner of their room that just collects crap. There was a crazy amount of stuff sitting on the floor that needed to be picked up. So, I encouraged the kids to clean up that area with the promise of a fun reward if they completed it. The idea was to turn their wall into a giant chalkboard. This way, they could go crazy and draw whatever they want without getting yelled at for making a mess on the walls.
The kids and I sat down to discuss designs and colors, which was their favorite part. The girl chose purple, and the boy chose blue. The picture below is a terrible representation of the final product, but it looks pretty slick after some quick work. The effort was fairly minimal, with most of the time spent taping edges and waiting for the paint to dry.
I’ll steal some chalk from my workshop so they can stay busy while we clean for tomorrow’s party.
Fireworks
There’s a big amphitheater across the street from work, where events happen nearly every day. There’s always something going on there. For the 4th of July, they have a big fireworks show with musical guests. The traffic is horrific, and I would absolutely lose my mind sitting in it. Work would always notify us in advance so we could leave early and avoid the mess. My kids haven’t had the chance to see fireworks in person yet, and since I was in the hospital last year, this was a perfect opportunity for them to have some good ol' 4th of July fun!
So we went to another part of campus where there’s a large parking garage, thinking it would give us a great view of the amphitheater’s show. We didn’t end up seeing any fireworks from that direction, but right across the street, there was a block of houses that went full hardcore for nearly two hours straight without stopping. It was incredible! It was easily the best show I have ever seen. It was intense, bright, loud, and non-stop. About an hour and a half in, I was getting tired and thinking about packing everyone up.
The point of my story is that my work’s security came by and kicked us out before I had the chance to finish that thought. He asked for my badge, which I showed him. He then asked for my wife’s badge and immediately said she needed to leave, and only I was allowed to be there. I argued with him and called him a stupid fuckface but eventually decided to leave without throwing him from the top floor of the parking garage.
That really upset me, and of course, I left quietly¹ and calmly. Tossing kids out of my employer’s parking lot while they’re watching fireworks is just wrong no matter who you are. They’re well-behaved kids, causing absolutely no problem, and having a great time celebrating an American holiday. What could it possibly hurt to let the family of a current employee sit and watch fireworks after hours? What do they think would go wrong?
What happened to you Google? Not at all happy about this.
¹ Not exactly.
Plasticizing
Food around here needs to be planned in advance due to obvious dietary reasons. There’s always spinach and salad ingredients available for those nights when I just don’t have the time or energy to cook. Unfortunately, Spicy Nacho Doritos are also typically found around here.
Since global warming, cooling, and/or climate change is the new hot topic (lol), companies have certainly jumped on every opportunity to make more money. If they’re not pushing the latest trend on their packaging or advertisements, they’ll be missing out on sales. I get it and don’t necessarily have a problem with it. However, the part I do have a problem with is when it affects me in the physical world.
Everyone I know in this area is all up in arms over the use of plastic now. Before it was the current political race, it was vaccines, masks, gut biome, healthy fats, blockchain, wearables, streaming platforms, the metaverse, gig work, and cloud computing. You get the idea. Well, now it’s plastic and carbon.
The local Safeway started cutting back on the packaging for their spinach and mixed lettuce. They clearly have brilliant execs over there because they were able to turn a negative into a positive. The lid might as well say, “We’re saving material costs and pretending we care about the climate while you’ll pay the same price to feel an incredibly short dopamine hit and wander around the store happily purchasing other products like me!”
Of course, I’ll still buy these products because I’m stupid and a creature of habit. But as soon as I get home, they’re transferred into one or two giant Ziploc bags, bringing the net plastic usage to well over 200%. We’re all just part of this consumer feedback loop, so why fight it? Now I need a plastic Ziploc dispenser and a plastic storage organizer for the fridge. “Don’t ask questions. Just consume product and then get excited for next product.”
Random
If you haven’t noticed, I’m using my site as a sorta makeshift Github. The code snippets here are constantly updated as they’re getting tweaked and updated with functionality.
One of the snippets I use to game search rewards is below. It grabs the top 250 article titles from today’s Wikipedia and adds words in front of it to sounds human-ish. Free to use / copy if you’re also up to no good.
random.py
import wikipediaapi
import random
user_agent = "WackaMole/1.1" # this can be anything
wiki_wiki = wikipediaapi.Wikipedia(user_agent=user_agent)
# Get a list of featured articles
featured_articles_page = wiki_wiki.page("Wikipedia:Featured_articles")
featured_articles = list(featured_articles_page.links.values())
# Take the top 250 articles
random_top_250_articles = random.sample(featured_articles, 250)
# Save the titles to a list
WIKI = [article.title for article in random_top_250_articles]
# Search terms
TERMS = ["Describe ", "What is ", "Photos of "] # add in more terms here
for i in range(1,30):
value = random.choice(TERMS) + random.choice(WIKI)
print(value)
Output
Photos of Pokémon Channel
Describe William Hardham
What is Fez (video game)
What is Heian Palace
Describe Missouri Centennial half dollar
What is PlayStation (console)
Describe White Horse (Taylor Swift song)
[...]
DIY Food Stuff
It’s crazy how simple things are to make that people generally don’t consider doing themselves.
Salad dressing is one of the easiest and most customizable food ingredients¹ in the kitchen. All you need is a base, acid, emulsifier, and flavorings. My go-to as of late is 2 parts olive oil, 1 part red wine vinegar, some honey, some horseradish mustard (so good), salt, pepper, and oregano. Mix it together for a few seconds with a fork, or whatever, and the emulsifiers will keep it together. It stays good in the fridge for a few days too.
Croutons are just as easy. Cut up some bread, throw on some oil, garlic powder, and oregano. Mix it all together, then bake it at 350° for 15-20 minutes.
Granola, beef jerky, cold brew coffee, and pasta sauce are all things you can make with very little effort. Plus, every time you do, you’re healthier, wiser, and less poor.
I expect a check in the mail for all the money these tips will save you.
¹Backstory needed
Kitchen Lighting
This was a quick project that was too little effort to throw together, that it wasn’t worth adding to the main site. So here we go on /blog.
There’s this section of my kitchen that doesn’t get quite enough light and I’m far too lazy to walk over to the kitchen switch to turn on the overheads. Sometimes I just want to slice a quarter of an onion or fill my bong real quick. Those things don’t need flood lights and a small hike, when focused LED light would get the job done.
So I added an LED strip to the bottom of this shelf to toggle a bright white glow onto the counter below. I originally had it timed, like my stairway lights, but it was too distracting when my office looks like Tron. A bright white light, among multiple video game colors and ambient lights, doesn’t exactly add to the aesthetics.
So, I added a pushbutton toggle, in the form of a blue arcade button. There are plenty of them lying around from other projects and they needed to get some use. The script below listens for a button push, then toggles to the next state. The same pin0 applies here, but I’ve added the arcade button to pin19 (GPIO14) and the ground pin on the Pico. This could have easily been done with a basic RP2040, but I didn’t feel like switching them out. Either one is (before inflation) ~$5, so whatever. I’ll just grab more another time.
Switching from PULL_DOWN to PULL_UP fixed a problem I was stuck on for a while. Here’s the difference:
Pull-Up: Pin defaults to high, pulled to low when externally connected to ground.
Pull-Down: Pin defaults to low, pulled to high when externally connected to voltage supply.
main.py
import machine
import neopixel
# LEDs
num_leds = 30 # Number of LEDs in your strip
pin = 0 # GPIO pin where the LED strip is connected
# print(f"Setting up {num_leds} LEDs on pin {pin}") # Debugging
np = neopixel.NeoPixel(machine.Pin(pin), num_leds)
# Button
button_pin = 14 # GPIO14 (physical pin 19)
# print(f"Setting up button on GPIO pin {button_pin}") # Debugging
button = machine.Pin(button_pin, machine.Pin.IN, machine.Pin.PULL_UP)
led_on = False
def set_led_strip_color(r, g, b):
for i in range(num_leds):
np[i] = (r, g, b)
np.write()
print(f"LED color set to ({r}, {g}, {b})") # Debugging
def toggle_led_strip():
global led_on
if led_on:
set_led_strip_color(0, 0, 0)
print("LED strip off") # Debugging
else:
set_led_strip_color(255, 255, 255)
print("LED strip on") # Debugging
led_on = not led_on
while True:
if button.value() == 0: # Button pressed (inverted logic)
print("Button pressed") # Debugging
toggle_led_strip()
while button.value() == 0:
time.sleep(0.01) # Wait for the button to be released
time.sleep(0.2) # Additional debounce delay
else:
print("Button not pressed") # Debugging
# Small delay to avoid high CPU usage
time.sleep(0.2)
It might look like a mess now, but I’ll make it look cleaner sometime in the future. For now, it’s functional. A flat, 90° power plug will be first to get swapped out.
Yosemite
We all just returned from celebrating Juneteenth in Yosemite. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what Juneteenth is all about (and I honestly couldn’t care less), but a day off from work sounded like a great excuse to spend time together.
The kids and I went on an adventure to lower falls, where they loved touching the water and feeling the mist of the waterfall. Despite my constant dad alarm going off, they enjoyed the rock climbing and kept pushing themselves to try harder routes. My little girl is quite a bit more bold than my son, so my phantom hand was always at her back.
For the rest of our trip, we just relaxed, went for hikes, and enjoyed the fresh mountain air. We left with a few bug bites, but overall it was a much needed getaway.
Smoked Turkey Roast
Took a quick break from staring at data all day to quickly smoke a turkey roast. These things are great! You toss whatever seasoning you want on them, let them sit for a bit to suck up all that flavor, toss some cherry or pecan wood on the smoker, set the easy bake oven to something like 325° for about two hours, throw it in the fridge to chill overnight, then thinly slice in the morning. They’ll make turkey sammiches for days.
These take so little effort, but taste amazing no matter how hard one tries to mess it up.
Totally forgot I made this page until last week, but have used it nearly every day since. It certainly helps when writing recipes since it has a quick copy for ½ (halfsies) and ° (degrees).
If you want a customized copy for yourself, just right click > save link as...this link, and add your symbols accordingly.
Grillin Season
Turned the grill on today and, unsurprisingly after a year, it started chugging heavy black smoke. I shut all the vents, moved it away from anything flammable, and ran to grab the fire extinguisher (just in case). There was clearly a lot of stuff it needed to burn off. So after letting it incinerate everything at 1,000°+ and giving it a thorough cleaning, I tossed some chicken thighs on it.
Man I missed the smell of grilled meat. Watching my protein intake is one of the hardest parts of this new life. It’s incredibly difficult to avoid grabbing a double cheeseburger with bacon or diving into a 16 oz. grilled ribeye. All is not lost though. 60g of protein a day is what those diagnosed with Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) 3A+ need to strictly adhere to. I’m only stage 2 CKD given that my single kidney is doing double the work. Food is the one thing I can 100% control, so why mess around? 100g of chicken is ~25-30g of protein, and that’s more than plenty for two chicken wraps.
