RasterWeb!

This post is mostly photos but I wanted to document a build a did back in February. I was contacted by someone working on a film who needed a prop. A large (202mm x 202mm x 83mm) device with two buttons that would light up when pressed. Banana for scale. This is a laser cut (and etched) banana but it’s approximately banana-sized. US quarter for scale… just in case you don’t like bananas used for scale. Usually (when I build USB devices) the bottom cover is just a flat piece that gets screwed…

I recently got an Insta360 X3 Camera (affiliate link) because it was my birthday and somehow there was a sale and it’s been two years since I bought a camera. Disclaimer: I had some credit card points to use up before the card goes away next month. The camera was $230, minus $90 I got it for around $150 USD. I got a GoPro back around 2012 and used it to film the Power Racing Series until around 2019. I did not use it in 2020 because pandemic, but I did use it as a webcam for a bit. Then it sat…

I’ve been arguing with people online. Maybe I should do less of that and ride my bike more. But I’ve also been trying to call out ableist behavior, which I think is important. People have also given me grief because I ride an ebike. Here’s my question to those people… First, imagine you like to ride a bike. Now imagine you get older, you get injured, or your body just doesn’t do what you want it to do without pain. Do you give up riding a bike, or do you figure out a way to keep riding a bike?…

For years I used yt-dlp which is a “feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader” and most importantly, can download YouTube videos. But yeah, it is a command line utility, easy to use for simple things but sometimes a GUI is nice too. Enter MeTube, which is a self-hosted YouTube downloader. I’ve got it installed on one of the servers in my house and whatever computer I am using I can just load up the local instance of MeTube, drop in a video’s URL and download away! It can even do full…

It’s been a week since the last update and the good news is… I feel better! I’m still free of all nerve pain, so at this point I’m going to just assume we’re done with that. Done. No more nerve pain! I’ve still got some back pain, but since it’s only been three weeks and I’m still recovering and I am trying to work my way up to “normal” activities but I still get exhausted some days. I think the exhaustion is from a few things. First, still recovering; second, I haven’t exercised, and honestly…

It’s been over a year since I first mentioned testing out TrueNAS and uh, over a year since the last update. Sometimes no news is good news, or no updates means things got boring because they just work. I had one little issue with the TrueNAS server. One of the boot SSD drives died. Now, that was not a big deal, because I had two of them. I did worry about just running one of them though, so I got a spare and dropped it into place. I also added a bunch more drive months ago so there are now two…

I am past the pain (mostly) so let’s look back on how I’ve been sleeping. It’s not great. (View it large if needed.) Red is bad, and means fewer than four hours of sleep. There’s a lot of those. Of course it’s not “fewer than four hours” It’s “fewer than four hours of CPAP time” which would happen every time I would wake up after not even four hours of sleeping, typically in a lot of pain, and move to another room to as not disturb my partner. There are some good chunks of blue though. I thin…

When last we met… Today has been two weeks since surgery. As I mentioned in the last post my nerve pain is gone. It’s been amazing. I have my life back. A little back pain, but it’s manageable. Ibuprofen it all I take now. I saw the doctor yesterday (and thanked them profusely) and we discussed my progress (good!) and the surgery (eww?) and things are all positive. The cyst was removed along with about piece of my spine about 9mm wide. No worries, I still have plenty of spine left. There is a…

I didn’t mean for this to turn into advocacy. A local business posted about their new bike racks on Facebook. I thought that was awesome! But I had some questions… The first one was, “It it anchored into concrete?” which was based largely on the fact that I often drive to a place and see a 6 foot long bike rack that is not attached and I was able to easily pick it up and carry it around. It’s so insecure I would never lock my bike to it. I didn’t want to come across as a complainer so I asked a…

I live in Enderis Park, a neighborhood in Milwaukee. For the first 7 years of living here I mostly left my home and returned to my home by car. Traveling by car is certainly one way to see things. You see things at the speed of car travel. That might be 25mph in your neighborhood, maybe slower sometimes, and definitely faster for some drivers. We’d go on the occasional walks now and then, and at a slower pace you can see more. You have time to take things in. You are also not locked into a…

You might want to see the previous update… Okay? Good. Here’s the good news. I had surgery last week Tuesday. It is now the following Tuesday. I am doing better. I am, of course, cautiously optimistic, but I believe the surgery has solved my problem. This is big. This is huge! Remember when I got the injections in April and… they did not work. The reason is due to the synovial cyst on my spine that was discovered later. It’s been a week and the pain I felt is gone. Gone. I do not have the pain…

Back in Goodbye Google Search! I said: “I think it’s our duty to find alternatives and try them out and see if we can move away from big tech, either by choosing self-hosted alternatives, more ethical companies, or ways to subvert the existing system.” I also talked about quitting Google (Web) Search, or should I say Google AI Answers? Anyway, Google Web Search is dead, so it’s time for something else. I covered a bunch of options in the last post. Meanwhile, through some discussions in a group…

Previously, in pain, and so on… Remember when I said: The surgery could get moved up if I start to lose control of my bladder and bowel… And then I also said: I’ve already gone over 120 days in pain, what’s another 70 or so? Well the good news is, I did not lose control of my bladder and bowel… and I do not have to wait 70 whatever more days! The bad news is, my pain did start to worsen. There was also a scheduling conflict with the original surgery date, and we looked at pushing it back even…

Since last time (and this) I figured it was time for an update. I saw the pain management doctor (who gave me the injections) and he said I needed to have part of my spine widened since the injections did not work. The “spine hole widening” is a surgical procedure, so he suggested I see a surgeon. So I did. The surgeon looked at my MRI and said “You’ve got a senovial cyst!” So yeah, there is a cyst on my spine pressing against the nerve that runs down my right leg, hence the terrible horrible…

I awake 3am, 4am, maybe 5am it’s not enough the pain begins will it be a few hours or all day I never know time disappears so many hours in pain lost time a lost year I take the pills it was 1, then 2, the 3 four… five… and it’s still not enough to dull the pain the pain persists so much I want to do so much I cannot do while the pain is in command sometimes I feel alright but it doesn’t last the pain returns each morning or it creeps up anytime during the day when unexpected when unwanted a…

It’s been a while since I posted about bookmarks. Remember del.icio.us? (or Delicious?) How about Ma.gnolia? Scuttle? Oh, Pinboard! I quit using Pinboard in 2025. Not because it’s bad, in fact, it was quite good! But it seemed like it lost some of the “network effect” that it once had when all my pals used it. I think they also started asking for money, so instead of continuing to use it while not paying (or paying) I moved to a self-hosted solution, which I’ve wanted to do for a long time.…

I started using Firefox in 2004. I mean, I was probably using beta releases before it was officially released. I think it was called m/b even? Anyway, it’s been a long time… I’ve also been a supporter of Mozilla for a long time. I am a Thunderbird user (also for over 20 years) so it’s safe to say… I’m a fan, but… Mozilla has made a lot of mistakes in recent years, and while I’m not about to switch to Safari or Chrome (or Chromium) I have switched to LibreWolf. What is LibreWolf? LibreWolf is a…

Remember last year when I quit Google Mail and also quit Google Docs? Well, my efforts to DeGoogle didn’t end there… I quit Google Search. Yeah, Google Search… which I’ve been using for a quarter of a century. I even had a Google t-shirt back in… 1999 I think? No more. I switched to DuckDuckGo, which is a bit more focused on privacy and doesn’t use my search history for advertising purposes. I don’t even have an account to log into. You can still change some settings, which should persist…

Hey, look! I made some bagels! I was a bit intimidated by this one, but I’ve made those pretzel buns a few times now so these were not too different from those. I got 8 bagels, just around 100 grams each, which seems a little smaller than the ones we’d get from a bagel shop. The boiling water had barley malt syrup in it, instead of baking soda which I use for the pretzel buns. The topping I used were “everything bagel seasoning” and kosher salt. I did a poor job here. I learned that when you…

See the previous post… Done? Okay! I waited three weeks. Well, technically I waited 20 days, but on that 20th day I had the exact same excruciating and debilitating pain I had before the injections. And since the injections I’ve not had a day without pain. Some days were definitely better! Almost… normal. Minor pain, mild discomfort, but I could mostly go about my daily routine, which starts with an hour (to a few hours) of pain, then mostly pain-free the rest of the day. I say “mostly…

I got called a “weenie” and a “nerd” for admitting I drive the speed limit. I don’t care. My number one concern is that everyone arrives at their destination safely. If it takes a bit more time, I am fine with that. I get passed all the time. I was on the parkway going approximately 25 (meaning, I may have been going 24, or 25, or maybe 26 or 27!) and a car got in the oncoming lane, sped up to pass me, and kept going fast. I’d guess they were going between 30 and 35. I saw them turn right, I…

This is a short post about something that happened, which is in no way remarkable, but I thought it was important to write down and share. Last week my wife Dana and I went out to eat. After we were sat a man showed up with a stroller and a small child. He got the child out of the stroller, folded it up, and stowed it out of the way. (It’s a restaurant without a lot of space.) A height chair appeared and the child was sat in it. And then I realized this guy was on his own. I thought perhaps his…

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We can work together to make things better...

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