• Fun With Bash

    I got to play with shell scripts a few times over the past few weeks, thought I’d talk about them:

    Wordle Helper

    I have a script I use to help me make my guesses when I play Wordle; it basically generates a list of available words based on my results, analyzes these available words (by checking the overall letter frequency, then scoring the words based on which letters they contain), and returns the word list with their scores, sorted by word score. This is especially helpful as a process of elimination, and most especially in the first rounds — I can confirm or eliminate the most common letters and quickly narrow down my choices (well, usually).

    I decided at a certain point that multi-letter combinations might be even more useful, so I wrote another script to score words based on the frequency of two-letter combinations. This worked well enough that I wrote a three-letter scoring script, and then realized that I should just write something generic that would score based on however many letters I would want in my combinations.

    For some reason I brought my laptop on vacation, and when things got quiet I broke it out and wrote the multiple-letter scoring script — it works like a charm. What I found though, is that there are diminishing returns for the letter combinations: there is no real advantage to use more than two letters. Still, this is a script that I use every day.

    Getting SSL

    Every 90 days I have to get a new SSL certificate for this website, so I can use the more secure “https” rather than plain “http.” This was once a pretty easy process, until my (free) certificate-generating organization got taken over by someone else. I found a much more onerous (but still free) web-based method and have used it for years, but I knew there had to be a better way.

    I eventually found something called getssl, a bash script that automates the process used by that onerous web-based approach. Ufortunately it’s meant to be run on the computer where the website resides, rather than on my local machine which is what I preferred, so I never really messed with it… Then one day I just set it up and ran it, and it basically did 99% of the work, generating the certificates and storing them on my laptop. All I had to do myself was install them manually, which was pretty easy. Awesome! The whole process went from an hour to about a minute, and I’ve been using getssl for almost a year now.

    But it still bothered me that I couldn’t get the whole process automated, and then last week I found an extra feature in getssl that would get me that final one percent; the only problem was that the extra feature would need to be modified to run on my machine rather than remotely. (This modification turned out to be fairly straightforward, which was a bit of a surprise actually.) I managed to make the code change just a few days ago — again, while out of town with my laptop — and my current certificate was installed, fully automatically, using the modified feature.

    Neither of these little projects were hard, but it’s so seldom that I do anything like this anymore that I was pretty proud of my accomplishments.


  • Ant Bait Recipe

    We have an infrequent, but still recurring ant problem: every few years or so, we find ants coming into our kitchen. Now is one of those times, and our go-to solution is to destroy the colony using homemade ant bait — a cotton ball soaked in sugar water (which also contains borax) brings them swarming, they bring the sugar water back to the hive and feed everyone else, and the borax kills them all over a few days. I currently have a cotton ball near their entrance point, and it is literally covered in ants…

    Anyway, when I went to set the bait I found that our previous batch was almost all gone. I couldn’t remember the exact proportions for the recipe so I had to do some Googling, and then I prorated what I found to fit in our container. For my readers, and for my own future self, here is the recipe:

    • 1/4 cup sugar
    • 1 tablespoon borax (we have this for our DIY laundry soap)
    • enough water to make 1 cup of the mixture

    Mix the borax and sugar into the water until it dissolves, then put it in a container and toss in some cotton balls to soak. That’s it!

    I put one cotton ball on the kitchen counter, and one at whatever entry point I can find, and change them every day or so when they dry out. This is a bit harder to do right now, because it takes as long as a week to wipe out the hive, but we can’t leave the bait out when we have Iris over. Still, it seems to be working; the ants are not in the kitchen anymore and I’m sure we’re almost done.


  • Vacation Photos

    Here are some photos from our Adirondack vacation. These photos are the ones not connected with any activity or event in particular, just shots I took while out and about.

    A lot of the nature shots were from walking around behind the cabin, near the Ausable River which was literally in our backyard. I also got a few good photos of some tree trunks behind the cabin:

    We did a few bike rides and a hike, and I got some photos on those as well but I think I’ll give them their own separate posts. Enjoy!


  • Greetings From The Adirondacks!

    Posted on by Don
    Our Cabin

    We’re away in the mountains near Upper Jay, NY — the AuSable river runs behind our place; Whiteface Mountain and Lake Placid are only a stone’s throw away. It’s Anne and me, Emmi & Kyle with Iris, Joe & Laura, Lorraine who arrived yesterday, and Ben & Jenny who arrived today. (The bulk of us have been here since Saturday.)

    We’re just hanging out, going for hikes and bike rides and brunches and shopping sprees — today I bought a hiking book, then coming home, dipping our toes & butts in the river, and just sitting around reading or playing with Iris. It’s been unseasonably warm for this area, but not too crazy.

    I’m feeling kind of lazy, and I’m pretty deep into “vacation mode” so I probably won’t post more until we get home, but we are having a great time.


  • Cancel The Exorcist

    Posted on by Don

    I’ve had a creaking near my mountain bike’s bottom bracket for a few weeks now. I was pretty sure it was either the crank or the bottom bracket itself (rather than, say, the suspension pivots), since it seemed to happen with every pedal stroke, as in an unbalanced load on the BB, rather than with the bike suspension flexing.

    I tightened the cranks — no luck, so i took them off, lubed them and reinstalled them. Still no luck, so I took them off to get to the bottom bracket, cleaned and lubed the threads and reinstalled them, and still had the squeak. Maybe my bike was possessed?

    I thought maybe I didn’t do the job well enough, so I took the cranks and BB off again, and this time I also took the rear wheel off to access the suspension grease port and pumped it full of grease. I put everything back together, and this time the creaking was gone. No idea what actually worked, but the pivots really did need the grease…

    Of course, the bikes never stay perfect for long: the MTB shifting is now a bit funky, and the touring bike had a flat tire when I checked on it. It’s always something.

    Saturday was a ride at Nockamixon with Tim C, someone I know from the Museum, and Sunday was a ride up the D&L to a coffee shop in Weissport. Hot rides, both days!


  • More Iris Photos

    Posted on by Don

    Here is a quick photo dump, some of my recent Iris pictures.

    These are from about a month ago. We had her over maybe two weeks ago and I took these:

    Finally, some pictures from just last week, when we rode the Bob trailer over to yet another park, and also visited friends who had chickens:

    At The Playground

    Our little lady tends to seize her days…


  • New Toys

    Posted on by Don

    Whelp, I’m now a kayaker…

    Anne and I planned to get kayaks as our Christmas presents to each other, and were doing our research when her brother & sister-in-law gave us two of theirs as a gift. We tried to pay them, but they refused — I think we did our part to help them clean their garage out.

    We got life jackets and paddles from them too, but we still needed some way to transport the kayaks. We did a little online searching, found some used roof racks for pretty cheap, and installed them just the other day.

    Today we put the kayaks on the roof and took them to Mauch Chunk Lake for their “New (To Us) Maiden Voyage.” Driving with them on the roof was a bit unnerving, but they did just fine. We got to the lake, got them in the water, and despite the windiness of the day, we had a great time with our new toys.

    So now we have the boats, and (some of) the infrastructure, and we’ve christened them — we are kayak people now!


  • The Things We Carry

    Posted on by Don

    Anne and I just did a section hike on the Appalachian Trail, walking the New Jersey portion with several friends. More (probably much more) on this later, but one of the things that struck me was how meditative just hiking along can be — songs, other earworms, and various musings would take up a lot of the mental landscape.

    I’d built a QGIS project before our trip, with info about our section of trail, and put it on my phone. It had some distances in miles and others in kilometers, and I was mentally converting back and forth when it struck me: a kilometer is about 0.6 miles, while a mile is about 1.6 kilometers. In other words, their reciprocals differ by one. Is that true, and if not, what number would it be true for? I worked out the quadratic equation:

        \[x^2 - x -1 = 0\]

    (hmmm, seems familiar)… and I found the answer to be:

        \[1 + \sqrt{5}\over2\]

    otherwise known as φ (phi), the golden ratio. Interesting, and a fine bit of mental bubblegum to chew on as I walked along…

    When I got home, I broke my internet fast with some Reddit, and the first thing I see there is a photo of a tee shirt, with the golden ratio written on it — meaning, in this case, the “most irrational” number, as in “I am most irrational.” Anyway, just a coincidence, but a strange and striking one.

    Click To See The Shirt

    (You can see the shirt by clicking the image.)

    The other thing I carried with me in my head? “The Alley Cat,” a perfect earworm for my hiking rhythm, though I noticed that I changed the tempo as the terrain changed.


  • A Tale of Two Paths

    Posted on by Don

    I sometimes get myself into Native-Path-adjacent GIS enthusiasms (other than my original projects), two of them in particular being the original path of the Walking Purchase, and the Mason-Dixon Line.

    There was very little information I could find about the actual path of the Walking Purchase “walk” — certainly no publicly available GIS data, just a few scanned maps here and there, along with many depressing accounts of the whole sordid incident and its aftermath. This shouldn’t be too surprising; it seems that the perpetrators took steps after the fact to obscure what exactly happened. This information is probably not lost to history, but it is probably well buried, and it seems that not many people like to dig for and play with shameful data from the past.

    By contrast, the Mason-Dixon Line is pretty well established online, but then the line itself has been a part of state (and colonial) legal boundaries for more than 250 years, and a cultural boundary (and touchstone) for almost as long. It was a large and highly scientific project for its time, and well marked at the time with massive milestones and a great deal of documentation, and it has had multiple restorations over the centuries. In other words: not shameful, but a point of historic pride. It has received a great deal of attention in recent years, as surveyors and others have been documenting the GPS locations of the original (and replacement) milestones. More info from the Mason & Dixon Line Preservation Partnership can be found here.

    Anyway, just some things I’ve been thinking about.