https://wol.fm/feed.xml Technology, archives, music, ??? http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss https://wol.fm/blog/obsidian.html https://wol.fm/blog/obsidian.html Sun, 15 Mar 2026 09:31:26 GMT This post, assembled and composed in the Obsidian client is intended to be a brief (or as possible as I can while still geeking out) overview of the workflow I've developed since mid-2025. Feel free to skip straight to my setup. https://wol.fm/blog/rv-there-yet.html#winter-update https://wol.fm/blog/rv-there-yet.html#winter-update Mon, 29 Dec 2025 01:02:30 GMT As a perfect gift to some RV-enjoyers on winter break, RV There Yet? creators Nuggets released a winter map with additional options for chaos. The added challenges of snow, ice, and frisky goats can be overcome with new tools. I can't say that the winch has become less useful, but there an awful lot of puzzles that can be solved with just jet fuel and determination. One should definitely be familiar with the fundamentals of the first map before trying the DLC! https://wol.fm/blog/utopian-scholastic.html https://wol.fm/blog/utopian-scholastic.html Sun, 28 Dec 2025 08:16:30 GMT Warning: this post is positively dripping with of media. Please pardon the larger-than-usual webpage size as I geek out, reminisce, and stand on a little soapbox in my little corner of the Internet. Anyone browsing the stacks of a public librarypy around the turn of the millennium would eventually come across the music-and-software section. Brightly colored photos, generally divorced from their original backgrounds were spliced into abstract arrangement along with bold text and wrapped in a plastic clamshell. Sometimes the CDs were in the original box, other times in a library-specific distribution with a text label that required a child to open each case to see see if the CD label suggested it was something interesting. I was just tall enough at the time to idly flick through the boxes, crack open audio book box sets, and flip through the index card racks that would soon be on their way out. https://wol.fm/blog/rv-there-yet.html https://wol.fm/blog/rv-there-yet.html Sat, 22 Nov 2025 06:21:43 GMT I love a well-built game that doesn't take itself too seriously. To that end, I've always appreciated the Swedish studio Landfall's goofy approach to game-making. Totally Accurate Battle Simulator can have hysterical moments but the open-endedness kept it in the realm of toy rather than game. Peak is a brilliantly funny and challenging game that gets more polished every time I play it. Alas I never seem to get any better at it. It's punishing! So it came as no surprise to me that it was another Swedish game developer that made a game that was as silly as TABS, as engaging as Peak, yet balanced enough that I could actually complete it. It's RV There Yet and it's my co-GoTY with Blue Prince. https://wol.fm/blog/notes-on-blue-prince.html https://wol.fm/blog/notes-on-blue-prince.html Sat, 22 Nov 2025 06:20:20 GMT Warning! Spoilery! For fans of tile-laying games, atmospheric mansions, and walking simulators, Blue Prince is a killer game. I don't usually find myself so enthralled with a game that I need to take physical notes. I think the only other time I've broken out the pen and paper for is in the elaborate pre-planning of a Dwarf Fortress compound. But of course that never gets updated once I'm in the throws of the game-loop. Blue Prince, on the other hand, seems like it would be nearly impossible to complete without some form of note-taking. The game itself, in the Nook, suggests writing things down- a form of permanence between each run. Indeed, one of the most compelling parts of the game is that it doesn't really hold your hand in telling you what objective/unlock is next. That'd be nearly impossible with the game's RNG and forking path. https://wol.fm/blog/2025-photo-roll.html https://wol.fm/blog/2025-photo-roll.html Sun, 12 Oct 2025 07:33:59 GMT Northern California autumn has arrived punctually on the first few days of October. Its entrance has provided me time to take a look at some of the photos I've had developed from the first half of the year. https://wol.fm/blog/linocut-ex-libris.html https://wol.fm/blog/linocut-ex-libris.html Mon, 01 Sep 2025 09:27:22 GMT I've always been fascinated by the engraved art style (which explains why many of my tattoos being based on woodcuts). But I'd never much pursued the craft beyond emulating the style in pen and ink. Y, however spent many an hour of her junior high school days carving rubber stamps, many of which survive to this day squirreled away in an ink-stained shoebox. This post is going to be a recounting of our experience interwoven with some of the tips we found most useful/relevant to our DIY printmaking. Sun, 20 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/floppy-disk-archival-process.html I'd (at last) like to take some time to talk about my process for archiving 3.5" floppy disks. I'm by no means an expert in this. In fact, I'm going to do everything in my power to prevent the expert archivist from cringing at this post. But in my defense, I grew up late enough in the 90s that I rarely swapped floppies in and out of machines let alone understood the formatting. Floppies to litle wolfmd were colorful squares that made cool blinkenlights on the Gateway tower when inserted and were the constant consternation of my father. Despite being CD-native, I always found floppy disks and the machines they went to fascinating. Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/2024-developments.html In early 2025, I had over a dozen rolls of 35mm film to develop from the previous year. Having started 2024 by trying to home-develop the film I had accumulated from years prior with mixed success, I decided to send these rolls out to a professional developer. Combined with using unexpired film, I feel pretty proud of this batch if for nothing else than well 70% bear an image of something! Sun, 26 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/stray-cat.html While I neglect the floppy disk archiving blog post that has been cooking for six months, I'd like to take some time to talk about the long-haired calico cat that has been hanging around my house. The cat, currently dubbed Kitchu Cat by my toddler, has meandered through our yard for about a year-- most often as a phantom passing by without much of a discernable schedule. Her infrequency of visitation, I came to learn, was due to her preference for operating at night. Sun, 20 Oct 2024 20:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/book-reviews.html#solomons Drawing parallels with the mythical ring of King Solomon which grants the ability to converse with animals, Lorenz achieves the same feat by watching and cavorting with animals of all varieties with an mind boggling amount of patience and compassion. This book, written casually out of experiences the author had raising a variety of creatures in varying states of domesticity-- geese, fish, songbirds, dogs, shrews, jackdaws in his family's home in Altenburg, Germany in the 1930s. Sat, 20 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/a-bad-dream.html In the idle mental moments in which my hands were occupied putting some toast into my mouth this morning I was wondering what I could write a blog post about. It's been a couple months since I . But there hasn't been much interesting going on around here. Another nature blog post? I feel like I'd be talking about the same things. A cool computer-related write-up? I haven't had the capacity to work on anything technically or even personally interesting in a long time. The projects are piling up and the things I feel qualified to write about is seeming to shrink. However, this evening I was once again struck by the memory of a particular nightmare that has been weighing on me. It's fairly unique in my experience of night terrors-- creeping into my waking hours and tainting what should sincerely be some of the happiest times of my life. I've spent a decent amount of time rolling it over in my head, intent on dissecting the vision and rendering it less potent. Yet it remains. So here I'm laying out a somewhat uniquely raw description and analysis in the hopes that writing it down to be comprehended by another will allow me to step away from it and overcome it. Sat, 11 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/ode-to-a-snow-shovel.html Since the snow is finally melting in a warm rain shower, I want to take a little bit of time to appreciate a metal-and-plastic friend that has been with me through the past few strenuous, but fortunately not disasterous, weeks. Last year's winter storm brought down numerous trees, trapping my then-pregnant wife and I behind downed electric lines. This storm, perhaps due to the weeding-of-the-weak trees in 2022, simply brought an unusual amount of snow to the Sierra Nevadas. It was a blessing for us that we only got half a meter of accumulation. Other parts of the county had three times as much and are still without power or a way to get out of their homes. Regardless, the little blue snow shovel for whom this post is dedicated became my companion. It felt the anxiety in my grip and the exhaustion in my lifts in these drought-breaking, but inconvenient blizzards. Sun, 08 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/old-2022.html If I were to use a scorecard from when I was 25 to judge 2022, the year was pretty rough. I didn't travel anywhere new, get through many books, or even go to a live music event. It was fairly disasterous for my personal savings and I spent much of the year just trying to clean up after a brutal snowstorm from the final days of 2021. But I became a father so my scorecard has changed. Tue, 30 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/headaches.html I love working from home and it has been a blessing for my mental health to be able to take breaks to be with my six-month-old son and walk around outside every now and then. Being away from the bright lights and commotion of the open office has boosted my productivity and allowed me to prepare healthy meals with garden-grown produce. However, about a 10 months into working from home, around the beginning of this year, I began to develop headaches in the early evening. I wouldn't classify these as migraines, though I have a family history of those, but they became sufficiently distracting that I call workdays early, even if I was in the flow state, to go lay down. Thu, 09 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/words-of-sir-john-mandeville.html Earlier this year I came across a copy of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville (you can read it here or here). It's a travel memoir from the 14th century which describes fantastical lands far to the east of Europe based on earlier writings which were mostly based on hearsay. Needless to say, I found what I sought-- the surreal imaginings of the medieval author-- I also came across a trove of fun Middle English words that I heretofore had not encountered (the bulk of the Canterbury Tales and Le Morte DArthur await a rereading upon the bookshelf). The version of the Travels that I read is based on the Cotton Manuscript which is thought to have been written in French then translated to Latin before being translated to English. Needless to say, there's a lot of Frenchness and a dearth of well-composed sentences. Fri, 18 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/misc.html I found a set of fantasy-themed stationary from the early 80s at a local craft reuse store. Lest I ever ran out of the sheets, I've vectorized the images and present them here for the reader's edification. Fri, 18 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/experiments-diapering.html Earlier this year (2022) I became a father for the first time. As mentioned in I have some mixed feelings about parenthood. I am simultaneously experiencing a love beyond anything I've ever known while feeling a nagging guilt of adding another human to a crowded, warming world. Having a child gives one the opportunity to think into a future beyond the self, hopefully one that is as full of life as the one we live in today. Now this is a bit heady for the opening paragraph of a post about diapers, but hopefully it does justify a bit of the rationale for trying something other than the Huggies/Pampers disposable diaper duopoly. Wed, 02 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/sim-swapped.html This is a short retelling of a SIM swap attack against me in early 2022. Perhaps it will be useful to anyone else who has also been targeted. Note: All times in my local PST. Sun, 31 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/book-reviews.html#suckers I love a good informal history, but I also find watered down historical summaries to be pointless. Thus, this book, being deeply researched and full of delightful first-hand stories, is among one of my favorite books to come from the Nevada County Historical Society book sale. Containing both an explanation of the rules of play of many games now out of fashion as well the history of gaming in the major American cities of the 18th and 19th centuries, this book takes one back to a time before Vegas or mobsters. Perhaps of note was how simply ubiquitous cheating by the house was. Even with games like faro or craps which are mathematically in favor of the dealer, deception played a major part of gambling up until the late nineteenth century. Though, I suppose it's somewhat common knowledge. It's the irrationality of gambling as well as my distaste for loud noises and binging on buffet food that has generally kept me clear of casinos. Nonetheless, this book provides the picturesque view-- card games on steam boats, smoke-clouded parlor games of gentlemen, and the exploits of fairground hucksters. Sun, 31 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/memory-collection.html I feel that I have poor memory and retention skills. Because of this [1], I find myself documenting my life as thoroughly as possible. Journaling (physically) (digitally) (my surroundings), photography (gallery), and archiving (email, chats, everything, obsessively) all play their part in helping me recall the moments of my mortal experience in whatever shallow way one can recollect. About 90% of what is saved, backed up, and backed up again is unexciting and may never even be reviewed. Even sitting in a rocking chair many years in the future, I'll probably ask myself why I bothered saving all this nonsense. I pride myself on looking forward, working on new projects, and seeking out interesting experiences rather than thinking too hard on the past. However, some nights I do think back to some of those old sensations that stand out-- the ones that three thousand nights of sleep later I can still sense clearly. I spare the reader and myself the bad memories. I see no value wallowing in regret here. This is an attempt to convey a scene in words as well as I can contrive. Sun, 15 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/some-space-to-tend.html I woke up this [July] morning to find the little raised bed in my backyard that supports some tomato plants, pepper plants, beans, and corn had been raided. The little top to a tomato was all that remained of a particularly large and mature roma specimen. But I surveyed the damage with a smile. This is the year of my first harvest. From maybe $100 of plants and seeds, the advice of many practiced and unpracticed gardeners, and a couple dozen cool and pleasant mornings, I was able to drink lightly in that sacred draught of cultivation and dream of my plans for next year. And how could I remain mad at the sweet deer who often chew on the St. John's Wart right next to the kitchen window early in the morning? It's I who is the new face here. Sun, 18 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/book-reviews-ebooks.html#olaf Over the past few years, I've been seeking to find hints of what the people of the past thought the future might look like. These works of speculative fiction became science fiction in the 19th and 20th century. While H.G. Wells or Verne come to mind, the legacy of Olaf Stapledon took a bit longer to reach me, perhaps due to the sheer density of his work. Regardless, these works are masterful, if not as works of pleasure-reading, then as testaments to the immense worlds that can be conjured up by the human mind. Sun, 18 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/nullbrook-facelift.html On Saturday (that is, April 17th, 2021), I deployed my fairly-long-in-development rewrite of the . Features I'm proud to share in this iteration include the ability to filter by decade or lot as well as search by string. Probably most worryingly for my webserver, the website also supports looking up a random item in the archive. All of these magical features come as a benefit of using an actual web framework and a backing database. It's a new era of legitimacy for my web development skills. Worth noting, there still isn't a lick of javascript on the site. I wanted to start completely from scratch-- trying to match the minimal design of my personal blog while optimizing for caching from my CDN. As of the time of this writing, the site doesn't yet have video support, floppy disks, or even the pogs (which can still be ). Primarily, this was a choice of expediency. I was delighted with the experience of the new website over the hacked-together predecessor. Secondly, an imminent move to a large space gives me an opportunity to rearchive my film and floppy disk collections in a more professional manner as well as reunite with the chunk of collection that remains in the cold storage of a bedroom at my parents' home. I pour one out for all the links I broke, but the has a little taste of how it used to look. I consider this to be Nullbrook 1.0 and I plan to treat it with respect moving forward. Fri, 22 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/book-reviews.html#gulliver Despite the nearly 300 years that separate its authorship and my first reading of it, Gulliver's Tavels remains not only readable to the average reader, but fascinating. It's one of the few books that my father has ever read. While my early attempts at reading the book in elementary school proved too challenging due to the dated verbiage, it's this very feature that captivated me as an adult. Now that I had a sufficient grasp on history (plus a copy of Wiktionary close by), I was able to take in the novel as one takes in Shakespeare in their first real reading of his works. The scenes in Lilliput and Laputa have a dream-like creativity that is hard to find outside of fantasy RPGs and surrealist art. I wished the descriptions of the learnings of the Balnibarbian scientists lasted many more pages. The novel's influence on pop culture and technology are unmistakable. That being said, despite my enjoyment of the British History podcast and all the drama it describes, I found myself apathetic to some of the satiric raves the book hosts. But it's more absurd than extracting sunbeams from cucumbers than to expect all of the gripes of pre-industrial novel to remain relevant so much later. The trip to Glubbdubdrib inspired me to create a tiny little role-playing game encounter. the party disembarks from their ship and follows a cobblestone path through a verdant garden of neat hedges and trimmed trees. Along the way they encounter a standing corpse. It's attired as a gardener, mouth agape, missing an arm and trying to use their remaining arm and chest to get the hedge trimmer to close on a branch. If the party talks to them, they say that they have been summoned from the dead for 24 hours by the necromancer who rules the land. When asked by the party how they like the arrangement, they say through a disintegrating jaw that it isn't so bad. Their nerves have all died so they feel no pain and it's curious to see how the world has changed since they were last awoken. The one downside being their body decays in the grave so they never get any prettier. Seeing as the party is headed toward the castle, they ask the party to wish his/her greatgrandnephew the necromancer well. I've found it rare to be able to travel along with an author's description of an adventure as well as I was able to follow Swift's narration. The great entertainment provided by the magical sights almost undermines the gravity of Gulliver's trip to the land of the Houyhnhnms. Finally, I'm not going to lie-- I really wish there were more pictures in the book. A single print in the beginning of a book does not count as illustrated, American News Company! Fri, 22 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/quarantine-spending-habits.html I've been using Honey Money, a clear-cut budgeting software built around manually entering transactions, to track my spending since 2017. Given the past year (2020) has been quite a change from the year prior, I thought it would be interesting to pull down that data and see what a difference quarantine has had on my spending habits. I wouldn't say there are a ton of surprises and I'm quite limited by my weak handle of spreadsheet software, but it did reaffirm a few things. In 2020 I spent less on travel, lunch, and in total while spending more on groceries... Sat, 16 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/observing-notes.html The middle of a stay-at-home order feels like an appropriate time to reflect on a small pastime I picked up when I was in college. Spurred on by my purchase of a Thinkpad and later an old, strictly-for-note-taking Nokia N900 , I began sitting down in common spaces around campus or public transit and simply writing down (relatively) objective descriptions of the people in the area. The intention was to become a more interesting writer and try to notice the quirks about humans that might typically escape me. Years later I would hear from a friend that he had a similar practice except it was to learn, as a self-described sociopath, how to behave in social situations. While I like to think I had pretty much figured out that sort of etiquette by my late teens, these notes do often point to the fact that I could still be pretty cringe. I kept at this hobby for a few years, starting around the time I was writing music reviews for a friend's blog until I started doing more socially-interactive activities I suppose. Despite the limited number (and honestly poor quality) of entries I composed, I've found it amusing as a trip back to those years of being outside my stuffy apartment, in the presence of strangers in transit to wherever. Maybe once the pandemic is over, I'll pick this hobby up again. It certainly has a flare of the era in which it's written that's not always preserved otherwise. Wed, 06 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/future-projects.html I'd been keeping a list of projects I wanted to see/build some day in a Github repo but now I think a webpage is probably a better spot so here we are. The projects listed here require substantial technical effort hence the descriptions are mostly desired features rather than proper specifications. Thu, 24 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/troika-is-cool.html Tabletop RPGs have been on my list of hobbies to try out ever since I came to understand that being the classical geek is perfectly acceptable and fine. Having grown up as a single child in a family that enjoyed board games, but generally ones that lasted less than an a few hours, it wasn't until college where I had my first shot... Sat, 25 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/book-reviews.html#lem My first run in with Stanislav Lem was through the Tarkovsky film Solaris (1972). Like any Tarkovsky film, it's stunning. However, it doesn't really match the tone that I would later learn Lem was famous for-- humor. While on a search for Summa Technologiae, his non-fiction work on computers and philosophy, I found a few of his fiction works and figured I'd give them a shot. I'm a sucker for Harcourt covers. Mortal Engines (1964) is a magical set of short stories: imaginative alien realms, alternative chemistries, and retellings of medieval narratives on other planets. Despite the humor and whimsy of the tales, they get a wee hard to get through after five or six in a row. Thus, "The Hunt" really shakes up the fantasy dimension with a human-centered story of man vs rogue robot. The setting is immaculate, tickling my love of desolate civilian space stations and space truckers. Here's the first two paragraghs (more like pages)... Sat, 25 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/book-reviews.html#puck I'd spent years scouring used book stores for a copy of this work of mythological fiction. I'd seen its pagan elements compared to The Wind in the Willows and with the way that I have loved The Golden Bough and The Wake, I was certain I would love this collection of stories of English folklore and history. This copy of Puck of Pook's Hill comes from deep in the stacks of White Rabbit Books in Muncie, Indiana and at a whopping price of $4. Which I suppose makes sense, it's illustrations aren't nearly as neat as Sat, 25 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/book-reviews.html#fantasyandsf I got a stack of mid-century editions of (started in 1949) as a surprise from my mother for my birthday. Little does she know, I already have a huge back catalog of vintage science paperbacks in my bedroom. What typically draws me to science fiction from this era is that it still has that optimistic, galactic-manifest-destiny feel which is a nice break from the crushing reality of the Fermi Paradox... Sat, 25 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/minimalism-v-self-reliance.html I've found that I've developed a strong emotional attachment to the stuffed animals my wife and I have adopted since we started dating. The feelings can range from an irrational affection to a grief-like hopelessness. So as a way to get my feelings out, I'm going to write this post. Sat, 01 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/stuffed-animals-and-aging.html This is going to be a long post and perhaps not particularly coherent. The bulk is some rambling about the value of minimalism and self-reliance in post-industrial society and particularly where they come in conflict with each other. Sat, 25 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/we-made-a-pico8-game.html Pico-8 is a fantasy console, essentially a virtual machine emulating a retro 8-bit gaming system that never existed. It functions as a way for game developers to create simple pixel-graphic games with some of the convenience of modern development. Even better, it compiles into javascript that can be played in any browser! Tue, 02 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/setting-up-sdrtrunk-and-icecast-because-boredom.html Oakland has been a whole lot quieter today as opposed to this weekend. The curfew has gone into effect and the police have proven they are serious about arresting people intentionally staying out past 8pm. That said, I still wanted to get a decent P25 decoder set up running for my own curiosity as well as recording for public transparency. This is certainly not the end of the protests and there's much to be gained from dispatch communications, especially since, as stated before, I'm not on social media. Sun, 31 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/rtl-sdr-and-adsb-during-oakland-riots.html This post is just a quick overview of how I was able to set up a tiny ADS-B listening station during the civil unrest in late May 2020. Wed, 27 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/dreaming-without-imagination.html I don't think my fascination with dreaming is unique among humans, but I would like to use this page to share my experiences and more interesting dreams. Sat, 16 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/personal-knowledge-repositories.html This post on Hacker News about Polarized, an online document and note manager, was the first time I read the term "personal knowledge repository." I had long been maintaining systems that served this purpose, but I think this term in particular captures the purpose of something I hadn't quite been able to define in concrete terms. A personal knowledge repository can be a dumping place for thoughts, notes, reflections, interesting content, memories, dreams, bookmarks, or anything worth referring back to later. Mon, 17 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/phantom-vibration-syndrome.html For a time I was looking into getting a product from Thalmic, now known as North or maybe some other sort of body hack that would allow for me to extend my sensory perception. Wed, 12 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/please-unlock-that-cemetery.html It's Halloween-time as I compose this post, my favorite time of year. With the cool autumn air of Ohio filled with the near-inescapable smell of burning leaves and bonfires giving an excuse to pull out thrift-store sweaters I recall trying to summon spirits with a handmade ouija board, wandering aimless and anonymous down transformed neighborhood streets and woods filled with adolescent mystery. Wed, 15 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/getting-dovecot-to-play-nice.html Running your own email service seems to have the reputation of a Herculian effort, unnecessary in the era of free email services and social media. I've come across legends of unstoppable spam attacks and undeliverable mail, ISP clampdowns and botnets. But I feel like it's an important step in regaining personal control of your data, identity, and privacy. Running your own mail server can provide a technical understanding of the protocols underlying the Internet as well take a small step toward re-decentralizing it. Tue, 18 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/enhance-your-salt-pax-dev-2018.html PAX Dev is an annual gathering of video and board game developers before PAX Prime (short for Penny Arcade Expo) in Seattle. The two days of panels and talks focus on sharing ideas, business cards, and demo codes with other industry members before the general public invades the convention center. Sat, 11 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/on-leaving-the-midwest.html Saying goodbye to a region I have called home my whole life has been full of mixed emotions and even if I'm not totally settled into this new state, I figured it would be worthwhile to collect a few thoughts here and reflect on the trip across the country. Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/observability-notes-from-o11ycon-2018.html O11ycon 2018 was a conference organized by the team at Honeycomb.io focused on exploring and developing the concept of observability in the context of distributed systems engineering. Called a co-creation event and y-know, hippieshit by organizer Rachel Chalmers, the conference was open-ended, and I got the pleasure to participate and even present on stage during the "call for failures." Overall, the experience was wonderful and with buckets of coffee I was able to meet people from a variety of industries to understand how we all have dealt with the complexity of modern software deployment and site reliability. Fri, 08 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/monochromancy-and-attention.html I've never been majorly invested in social media or mobile video games, but over the past year or two, I (and many others) have still noticed that I end up wasting a lot of time getting distracted by push notifications, alerts and other digital clutter. This is my experience with turning off the color on my shiny rectangle device. Wed, 06 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/setting-up-a-canarytoken.html Perhaps because I know the kind of people who can survive a plain html website and perhaps because I'm pretentious, I put my most up-to-date resume on this website in plain text. However, I know not everyone who is trolling through resumes is used to such a setup. So I also put a Doc file version right there for anyone who wants to read my history in the gross, table-formatted XML gobblety-gook I've used since high school. Or at least that's what it used to be. Mon, 23 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/reflections-on-colemak.html The stickers are off and the typing tests are over. My coworkers have stopped teasing me. I feel like I have defeated the level of typing speed I surrendered when I decided to switch from QWERTY to Colemak three months ago. Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/fixing-a-wonky-commodore.html I imagine that I will be running into a lot of issues as I begin to tinker with the Commodore 64 so I'll use this page to keep track of some of the problems and solutions. Tue, 06 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/c64/starfleet-i.html So after a bit of time and a move to a different room in my apartment, I decided to pick up this project again. Tue, 06 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/playing-with-the-odin.html I can chalk this one up to the #lesswrong Freenode IRC group. Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/c64/sports-games-ii.html This floppy was on top so I'm going to go for it first. I ask you to pardon the choppiness of the capture. This disk is two-sided, with Championship Boxing and Kung Fu Master on the A side and a ton of other games on the B-side. Unfortunately, a couple were corrupt past the crack screen. Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/a-big-stack-of-pirated-c64-games.html So here we are. I plan on going through these disks one-by-one, recording the highlights, and sharing what I know about them. Fri, 28 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT An overview of a couple workflow enhancements I've made without ever questioning why I would need RSS. Mon, 27 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/theres-a-demon-in-my-gpg-pub-key.html#goodwill-glitch As someone who knows how to save money, but also how to hoard, thrift stores are a pretty frequent stop for me. I often enter without looking for anything and leaving with an armful of something I really don't have room for. Now in this particular case, I didn't leave with it, but rather ogled it while my roommate frowned disapprovingly. Wed, 22 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/in-defense-of-old-in-defense-of-new.html#aging-sound I grew up during the first wave of the vinyl record resurgence. Much has been written about the fight between digital and analog sound, the quality, the aesthetics, the masochistic and wallet-ravaging trend of modern artists and labels releasing on vinyl en-masse. As an Ohioan who couldn't turn a turntable if his life depended on it or even get Berhain's Sven to notice him, I can't really comment on this medium. Instead, I'd rather talk about the arguably less popular, but still growing revival of cassette tapes. Wed, 22 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/how-to-make-a-cassette-tape-loop.html Some people like loops made with precision using 0 Craigslist looper pedals, others like to stick their hand in the aural Halloween mystery box called tape manipulation and see just what comes out of their jukebox. Making a tape loop with a cassette is cheap, simple, and meditative (read: frustrating). I'll get you going with the basics and leave it up to you to find something worthwile. Fri, 17 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/the-secret-scared-by-a-scraper-phisher.html In early 2016, my friend reached out to me with what seemed to be an interesting little puzzle. She began receiving a slew of emails. The emails were pretty clearly broad-targetted phishing scams and all directed at her AOL email address. over the course of a few months, she got maybe twenty-five emails, nearly identical but from unique addresses all from the Yahoo domain. Fri, 17 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://wol.fm/blog/theres-a-demon-in-my-gpg-pub-key.html This is arguably an odd way to start off this blog and I doubt I'll be able to bring myself to regularly update this, but I stumbled a nice little late-night surprise on my quest to set up an email server.