I have read the last novel in the Expanse series, Leviathan Falls. It was good, and so was the series. Perhaps it’s recency bias, but I’d say it’s my favorite book series.
Continue reading post "#4567"Toby's Log
My main email app (Fastmail) on my phone logged me out without me noticing for two days. I’ve been trying to not pay as constant attention to my email as it is, so it just seemed nice, but I didn’t even really think about it in that period. Happened to have more than the usual amount of emails when I got back in, though luckily, nothing important. It’d be nice if I could have it only notify me immediately for email from certain addresses or something like that.
Candle incident
Yesterday evening, I lit a candle while watching an episode of Columbo. It’s one of those fat kinds that develops a wall of wax around the outside. Previously, a hole had formed in the wall and some wax had dripped out. I had fixed the hole, but there were still some hunks of this wax left. So I put one in the candle wall yesterday, leaned up against it, hoping it would slowly melt away.
This morning, I woke up and thought to myself that I didn’t remember putting out the candle.
Continue reading post "Candle incident"Mac: 15.4 rsync issues
After running into some problems with some rsync scripts recently, I discovered that in Mac OS 15.4, Apple switched its built-in rsync command from standard rsync to the BSD project’s clone, openrsync. It is apparently not 100% compatible, because my backup and deploy scripts that use it were failing.
JS: Replace page text
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For this year’s April Fools Day, I decided I wanted to replace some text in the content of my site’s pages to something funny, weird, or confusing. Since I’m moving toward a static site, I wanted to do this client side, which meant replacing text with JavaScript. This would be simple with innerHTML, but that completely replaces the DOM with a new DOM, possibly causing usability and performance issues, and could replace text in URLs, breaking them. Probably a better way is to loop through all nodes on the page, looking for text nodes, and replace text in each of those. So I did this, and it worked nicely. Thought I’d share.
This year, my larger redbud tree has only a few blooms on it and seemingly has gone straight to leaf. Last year, it fully bloomed and looked great. This year, it went to leaf right away while almost all the redbuds I’ve seen have bloomed nicely. It does seem to be growing faster this year than last: Must be focusing its energy on growth. So, hopefully next year it’ll be in full bloom again.
My tiny front sapling is still too small for blooms and has also gone straight to leaf. I’m glad it’s still doing fine.
ZSH regex capture groups
In writing a script for the ZSH shell, I wanted to extract some bits from a string. I looked for a regex solution, using capture groups. I could not figure out how to do it with sed but I found that the [[ ]] format of the test command allows this with the =~ operator. If the test returns true, values are stored in a $match array and can be accessed like $match[1] and so on.
Finally got the One UI 7 / Android 15 update on my phone (Samsung S24) today. 15’s been out on Pixel devices for six months, but it took Samsung a long time with this one. I had bought this phone in part because Samsung is supposed to be quick with releases. Hopefully, this doesn’t become the norm.
Not a lot has changed noticeably. My most liked change is that I can have most app icons match my chosen accent color (green) which makes my home screen and quick app drawer look much nicer. There’s also a feature which separates the notification drawer and quick settings slide down, where swiping down from the left shows one and from the right, the other. I’m still getting used to that but may find it results in less swipes. There are a few other aesthetic tweaks. I think there’s a bunch of AI stuff, but I’m not that interested in that.
Using pipes to augment IO of command with bash script
I like the interactive mode of the bc command line calculator because it is ubiquitous, but wanted to augment its functionality a bit to add a couple features I liked from another calculator program. I wanted to make modifications to the text I typed before sent to bc and modify the text it outputted. This can be done on standard POSIX shells with mkfifo, but it took me a good while to figure out how to do this with both input and output and get something working nicely without it freezing or leaving artifacts. So I’m sharing how to do this in a bash script.
Doing my federal (US) taxes this year, I was finding myself unable to create an account on the Free Fillable Forms site. I kept getting kicked back to the start after filling out and submitting my information. This Reddit thread led me to figure out that it was related to my T-Mobile Home Internet. I turned that off and turned on my phone hotspot and used that to get in. My phone is also T-Mobile, but apparently different enough to not have that issue. Later, I was able to get back in with my Home Internet, so it seems to be just related to something on that initial registration process.