General

According to my registrar, Unxmaal.com is 9000 days old.

In that time I’ve

• gotten married
• had 4 kids
• had a dozen jobs
• had 6 houses
• had 6 cars

and haven’t posted all that much.

Against all better judgement, I spent way too much on a fancy Balsam Hill Christmas Tree. The prior tree lasted 10 years. If the price to performance ratio holds true, this new one should last 30.

The tree has built-in lights made by Twinkly, which has a mediocre IOS app for controlling them.

Not satisfied with using a mere phone to manage my Christmas tree, I found a Rust-based CLI utility: glow-control.

I’ve realized I haven’t posted much here because, after some introspection, I’ve realized that I really hate interacting with Wordpress.

So Wordpress is gone, and I’ve migrated the site to a git repo.

The workflow is super simple:

• make a change to some text files
• git add, commit, push
• a Github Action runs Hugo to build the site

Plus this means my hosting bill is now $200/year cheaper.

I found a G4 Mac Mini on Craigslist, intent upon experimenting with MorphOS. It arrived packed well, but the hard drive was dead. I cracked it open, and swapped the drive, but no joy. I tried another drive, and even from the option-boot screen, the Mini didn’t see the drive.

I booted from several install discs, and none worked. In a fit of masochism, I even booted into Open Firmware, but couldn’t get that to work either. I plugged a USB IDE drive sled into my Mac Pro, and restored the Tiger DVD to it…. nope. Mini couldn’t see it.

I’m writing this on a PowerMac “Mirrored Drive Door” G4, running Classilla browser on MacOS 9.2.2.

It was built in or around 2002, and lived at a printing company until they closed at the end of last year.

I sought out a MDD G4 specifically, as it is the last G4 that can boot MacOS 9. From what I’ve read, Apple produced it, grudgingly, to appease designers and musicians who didn’t want to migrate thousands of dollars’ worth of software and hardware to OS X.

I’ve held off from buying a Raspberry Pi Zero for a while, in favor of Teensy or Pro Micro controllers, because what can a $5 controller really do?

I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the Zero so far. $5 got me a computer that’s half the size of a credit card, with HDMI video out, two USB ports, a GPIO header, and WIFI. Frickin’ WIFI!

Performance-wise, well, it’s pretty slow. But it’s fast enough for prototyping and running LEDs, which is great for my current project.

How can I answer my kid when he asks what he should be when he grows up, when the job I have wasn’t invented when I was a kid?

Furthermore, who wants to work at a job that has been around for more than twenty years?

Rachel found a 13″ Sony Trinitron CRT (KV-13FM13) at Goodwill today, and snagged it for me for $8.

The kids are playing Super Smash Bros Melee, as is their birthright.

My New Year’s resolution is to stop using Facebook as a blogging platform.

There’s decent money to be made in storage auctions. At least, there used to be, before the reality TV shows made everyone think they could get rich quick. The unit was crammed with old boxes and some furniture. The furniture caught my eye — a refinished vintage desk from the fifties or sixties could sell for quite a bit. The crowd was sparse, and I won the auction for a steal. After the auction, I drove the box truck back to my warehouse, and began unloading it. My warehouse was a small prefab metal building with a roll-up garage door that my father had used, when he was alive, to store junk in, and to dream about building race cars. To my knowledge, no car had ever graced the concrete floor of that building.