• Gratitude

    Posted on by Don

    Today was a beautiful fall ride on the towpath after my cello lesson. It was kind of spur of the moment, but the day was so nice (if chilly at first) that I’m now really glad I got out.

    Last night we stopped by John & Donna’s for post-turkey dessert — her brother was in town so they celebrated early — and we saw him and his son, Donna’s parents, Erin and Todd and baby Sloane, Brian and Sam, John’s boys, and Liz H-D. We didn’t stop in for too long, but it was nice to see everyone. (I also got to play cello duets yesterday with Liz’s mom; it was a full day.)

    Meanwhile, back at the official, obligatory Brooklyn-jerks-turned-Buddhist rappers Thanksgiving song post:

    Things I’m Grateful For

    • I’m alive, and I have my health.
    • I have a roof over my head, and food on the table, and financial security.
    • I’m blessed to have the family and friends I have, and I am thankful that we are all still here through these difficult times. Not all my friends can say this, many have lost someone to COVID — or just plain lost someone — but a good chunk of the people I care about most are still here.
    • I can ride my bike, and I’m thankful for the rides I’ve done, and the pleasure I got from them, and for the people I’ve shared those experiences with.
    • I can play my cello, and again I’m thankful for the pleasure it brings me, and the people it brought into my life.
    • I am thankful most of all for my love and life partner, Anne who is busy right now baking pies for tomorrow.

    This is a short and pretty abstract list, but our friend Julie just stopped in with her child Lee (who is here to get some knitting pointers), so I think I’ll wrap things up now.

    Happy Thanksgiving everybody!


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Little Hacks

    Posted on by Don

    Just a few simple solutions to life’s little computer problems…

    WordPress

    When I post photos on my blog (in photo galleries, like the one here), if the photos have captions they show up when you hover over the photo thumbs. So far so good, but when the caption appeared it was at the top of the thumb, as opposed to appearing at the bottom, and the space used by the caption was much bigger than it needed to be, almost covering the thumbnail image. This has been driving me nuts for about a year; I assumed it had something to do with my offbeat WordPress theme, but yesterday I did some Googling and found people complaining about it, starting abut a year ago — apparently the offending caption styling was related to some WordPress update.

    I found several styling fixes posted online, but none seemed to work — it seems that a later WP update might have broken these fixes as well. The nature of these posted solutions gave me an idea though: I used Mozilla’s “inspect element” to get the CSS elements responsible for the captions, and used what I found to come up with a modification that would properly style my gallery figure captions. I added that to my theme’s custom CSS and it worked like a charm.

    Here is the new custom CSS that did the job, in case I need it again, or others need it and find themselves here:

    .wp-block-gallery.aligncenter .blocks-gallery-item figcaption, .wp-block-gallery.alignleft .blocks-gallery-item figcaption, .wp-block-gallery.alignright .blocks-gallery-item figcaption, .wp-block-gallery .blocks-gallery-item figcaption, .gallery figcaption {
     min-height: 5%;
     left: 0px;
     top: auto;
     height: auto;
     bottom: 0px;
     text-align: center;
     margin: auto;
}

    Fonts

    Fonts have always been a mysterious pain in the butt for me. It doesn’t help that I have hundreds of fonts installed by default, many with similar names and meant mainly for non-Latin alphabets. I was experimenting, searching for the right look for a document, and had to scroll through hundreds of useless fonts while trying to find something to suit me — very frustrating!

    I did some Googling, and I found I could just delete font files to get rid of them — but that’s a non-solution since I hate to throw anything away, you never know when you might need the perfect Linear B font…

    A little more research, and I eventually found and installed a simple utility called (surprise) “font manager,” which let me enable and disable fonts without deleting them. I spent some time shutting off my nuisance fonts, and now my word processing life is much simpler.


    📂This entry was posted in tech talk

  • A Quiet Friday, And A Quiet Week

    Posted on by Don

    Anne and I both got our booster shots yesterday, so today we’re just hanging out in case we start feeling sick. So far it’s just a sore arm — two sore arms in Anne’s case, since she also got her flu shot…

    Last night was a visit with Shari W at Lost Tavern. Nothing much to say about that really, it was just a pleasant evening.

    Wednesday afternoon we went over to the Museum of Industrial History with Judy J, starting with a pre-game lunch at La Lupita, and Tuesday was a cello day: practice in the morning and then duets with Donna H in the afternoon.

    I don’t even remember what happened Monday.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Good Day For Cellos

    Posted on by Don

    It’s raining out right now (though the weather is supposed to get nice later), and I am suffering from either allergies or a cold, so today is a good day to stay indoors and play the cello. Its also a good day for it because I haven’t played or practiced once this week…

    The past three days were spectacular, and that’s good because I was working as a Road Scholar guide again. This trip worked out much better than the last one, probably because:

    • there was a more manageable number of participants (12 vs 23), and they were all really nice,
    • the weather was perfect for cycling,
    • the bike transportation infrastructure had been improved,
    • I was not in charge, so I didn’t have to feel as responsible — though I certainly did my share of what needed doing, and last but not least…
    • there were no e-bikes! One guy used the Shawnee loaner e-bike when his own (regular) bike had trouble, but that was it.

    I wasn’t there for the first ride because of Monday’s funeral, so I probably missed the day everyone had to work the bugs out of the system, but things seemed to run very smoothly — the crew, and the participants, were all playing on a higher level than on other rides.

    The weather is improving moment-by-moment as I write this, but I’m sticking with my original plan. The quartet is playing Sunday, duets are Tuesday, and I have my lesson on Wednesday so there is definitely a groove I need to get back into.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • One Day Like This A Year Would See Me Right

    Posted on by Don

    That’s the song that’s playing right now, and it sums up today for me. I met Doug for a ride at Jacobsburg, and we got in about 12 miles or so on some really beautiful trails — blue skies and fall colors, leaves on the ground rustling under our tires. There was still a frost on the ground when we started, though I can’t say we were particularly chilly either riding or standing around. Neither of us were particularly interested in going fast, we just enjoyed tooling around in the woods. Plenty of other people were out too, biking, hiking and riding horses, but the place was big enough that we weren’t on top of each other — there would just be a sociable moment every so often, when we came across some fellow trail users.


    It was an easy day to get up earlier than usual because of the time change, but also because Anne’s sisters were over for a visit, and we all just naturally got up early. They knitted and watched “The Great British Baking Show” yesterday, and while I was out riding they spent the day trying some of the “show stopper” recipes from the episodes they watched. Not a bad thing to come home to…

    Tomorrow is going to be a bit rougher: we have to go to the funeral for a friend’s grand-daughter, who died in a car accident the other day.


    📂This entry was posted in the sporting life

  • Another Milestone

    Posted on by Don

    I ran across this entry the other day on my old blog: it was ten years ago today that we had our first (non-test) firing of the wood-fired oven. The oven is in pretty rough shape right now, we haven’t used it more than a year — it’s something we usually do for parties (the same is true for brewing beer) and we haven’t had a party in, well…


    📂This entry was posted in looking back pioneer arts

  • Halloween Scene About Town

    Posted on by Don

    The Halloween weekend started Friday afternoon with an Oscar Meyer Wienermobile sighting:

    Oscar Meyer Weinermobile

    Not the best shot I ever took, but there it was in front of me on Freemansburg Avenue so I had to capture the moment.

    Saturday was the CAT Halloween Bike Ride. Anne and I raided the last dregs of a Halloween costume pop-up store and scored some fairly disturbing masks, then we rode around town with the usual crew. There were not many people out and about, but we did see some themed backyard parties, here and there in the neighborhoods we passed through. We also saw a few houses where people really outdid themselves with the decorations.

    • Anne and Me
    • My Halloween Mask
    • Halloween Decorations
    • Crazy House
    • Crazy House
    • Crazy House
    • Crazy House
    • Crazy House

    Sunday we participated in Bethlehem’s 100th Annual Halloween Parade, where I got a few shots at the start:

    • Skeleton Dance Crew
    • Police Escort
    • Parade of the Century
    • Grand Marshal

    Our quartet met that afternoon, followed immediately by Trick or Treat. It was a weekend!


    📂This entry was posted in day by day 📎and tagged

  • On Second Thought

    Posted on by Don

    Well, that didn’t take long…

    A few days of actually using the Input app, and I’m ready to throw it away and go back to QField, despite QField’s clunky data transfer method. The need to put my collected data into a PostGIS database (without too many hoops to jump through) is more important than I realized, and Input’s data entry UI had a few quirks that just became more unpleasant every time I used it — there was something just plain off about its text boxes and typing…

    It’s a shame too, because the Mergin update process was exactly what I wanted. (Input can also handle QR codes as data sources, something I have absolutely no use for — but hey, nerdgasm alert.) Well, QField is eventually supposed to get its own cloud service, maybe they’ll be able to upgrade their data transfer process once they have that in place. My luck, they’ll reproduce Mergin’s setup, and reproduce Mergin’s PostGIS problems along with it.


    📂This entry was posted in tech talk 📎and tagged

  • Data Collection II: Input

    Posted on by Don

    Just picking up where I left off here…

    I installed and started working with the other field geo-data collection app, called Input. It has a few drawbacks (so far) compared to QField, but it’s just as easy to use on the phone, and much easier to set up and transfer data back to the home computer.

    Input is basically a phone app front end for Mergin, a cloud-based data storage service built to integrate with QGIS. Mergin stores the data that then can be synch’ed with QGIS on the desktop, or with the app. Data collection does not need to be sent to the cloud in real time if you have no data connection, but can be done later, and is “just push the button” easy, as is synching between the cloud and QGIS. (This is the biggest advantage over QField, which has a pretty clunky update workflow.)

    The biggest problem I found so far has been that the data is not easily uploaded into a PostGIS table; the project relies on GeoPackages for data storage, even on the QGIS end. (Strictly speaking, there is a way to use PostGIS, but it seems involved, and needs to use another program that I have not yet tried.)

    There is also the issue of cloud storage: a free account is limited to 100 MB, and while the actual “location and description” data is usually pretty small, all the accompanying photos, at 5-10 MB each, will quickly bump up against that limit. If I could offload the data and photos, from the cloud-based project into something else (like my computer, and PostGIS), this limit wouldn’t be so pressing, but the workflow is starting to look unwieldy again…

    (Speaking of unwieldy, there is no direct way to store basemap tiles for offline use. Again, there is a way, but it’s not straightforward, and storing the tiles will also consume a significant portion of that 100MB limit.)

    None of these problems are deal-breakers (so far), and the single advantage of easy synchronization more than makes up for the lot of them. I’ll be playing with Input/Mergin some more, but I think it’s the one I’ll decide to keep.


    📂This entry was posted in tech talk 📎and tagged

  • Golem Unchained

    Posted on by Don

    I’ve been using my handy, text-based “to-do” list for a while now, but my use of it was inconsistent, waxing and waning as it occurred (or didn’t occur) to me to use it, and I also didn’t like keeping a text editor open all the time whenever I did use it. So, the other day I added a “desklet” to my desktop, one that displays (the first lines of) a text file. I set it to display my to-do list, which I now can see any time, and open for editing with a click.

    Which is all well and good, but now I find that my to-do list is staring me in the face all the time, and I’ve been using it more, and more, and more… I guess I’m more productive now, as I write down all the things I need to do, then do them and mark them completed, but it seems that the tool I added to make my life easier is starting to get the upper hand, running my life instead of the other way around.

    I have to say that things get done, though.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day tech talk