Category: Uncategorized

I wrote previously about how, as part of prepping for my sabbatical, I’m converting a Raspberry Pi 4 with 1GB of RAM to use as my primary computer for at least the three months I’m off. If it goes well, I’ll probably continue using it to further separate work and life. I wanted to upgrade […]

Where I work, we have a creed and in it we say that open source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. The Philtel program and Futel in Portland seem to exemplify that idea. The pay phone was an important part of connectivity infrastructure when I was a kid and long before. […]

Lake Mendota is one of Madison, WI’s principal lakes: Monona, across the isthmus, Waubesa, and Wingra are the others. Mendota, lately, has drawn a lot of attention for excavation of some important artifacts: Canoes. We’re not talking Old Towns or We-no-nah canoes, these canoes are dugout canoes, carved from single pieces of Oak thousands of […]

One of my soft new year’s resolutions for this year was, to borrow a phrase from Dan Pashman: read more and read more better. By that I mean: I wanted to read some of those books that have been sitting on the shelf, read new stuff, and read all of it with more care an […]

We had a crop of pumpkins surprise us in the yard this summer. Most of them, somewhat inconveniently, grew under the Whitespire Birch tree we planted last year. This made finding the pumpkins an interesting game, and we had to improvise a trellis to keep the vines off the grass so the pumpkins wouldn’t rot.