Problem: filling a Kong without it rolling around and dispersing its contents and then freezing without tipping over and oozing peanut butter. I found a couple of solutions for smaller Kongs, this one fits a Kong XL perfectly.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
3D Printing a Kong XL Holder #etc#3dprint#openscad#thingiverse STL file and OpenSCAD code for 3D Printing a Kong XL Holder (no more freezer mishaps).)
"An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it."
Important antimemes in my life are other parent's names and all of the fucking single use apps I'm plagued with. My kids in particular have at least one app for every aspect of their lives.
Let's say I need to know where a soccer game is. The location is hidden in an app, and for the life of me I can't remember which one.
Eventually I remember it's LeagueApps, because TeamSnap is the other kid due to some San Francisco soccer schism on a par with what material to put on the pitch (I had to vote on TWO ballot measures on this subject).
Feeling inordinately proud of myself and like I have a few years left before 24-hour nursing care I search my phone for LeagueApps and it's NOT FUCKING THERE. Because they called the app 'Play'. Not LeagueApps Play, just Play.
App developers, if you're not Gmail how about including a little more context? Like 'LeagueApps Play - where is the soccer game?' or 'Toddle - your kids homework' or 'Procare - did you remember to sign your kid in'.
They won't, but next time I'm looking I'll at least be able to Google this post.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
Give your stupid niche kids app a useful name please! #etc#apps If I'm not using it every day, I need help ever finding it again. Please don't get too cute with the name.)
I've used a reMarkable paper tablet for a few years. It's a distraction free eInk writing device with a long battery life and no app store. At least half of productivity is getting stuff out of your head. The reMarkable excels at this without the risk of losing anything.
My dream was always to blog from written notes but the handwriting recognition isn't good enough. Or maybe my handwriting is just too bad. I probably could have got into medical school on that basis alone.
reMarkable recently released a keyboard case and I just got my preorder. With a few small changes to handle its HTML email format I'm up and running. There is still no app support, but you can send email and happily that's been how I post to my blog for over a decade.
It won't work for everything but it's great to have a new option.
So far the only thing I'm missing is a spell checker. Not my strong point so any typos are reMarkable's fault. Hopefully this will be added in a future update.
Having sworn off Google Nest I just ended up with two more cameras. I didn't pay for them. Google has announced that the original DropCam units are no longer supported. Rather than just knife me in the kidneys like the rest of the smart home industry they provided free replacements.
I stick these in a window looking out. I learned this the hard way after a Nest Outdoor was immediately cut from its secure wiring and stolen. And then a second one. The police thought this was hilarious and whoever stole them is/are now enjoying worthless lumps of plastic. The DropCam was nicely designed to clip out of its mount and into whatever accessory grabbed your fancy. The Google Nest Cam Indoor Wired Gen 2 (snappy name) has a heavy and barely articulated base that makes it worthless for many applications. It also doesn't look like it will detach.
There doesn't seem to be any elegant solution here so I came up with a brutal one.
Step 1: Hacksaw. Just cut off that base as close to the camera as possible.
Step 2: A chute to introduce the camera to the window at a reasonable angle and block indoor reflections. This gets attached to the window with strong double sided tape.
One more horrible hack to confess to. My filament kept getting tangled while printing this. I have it on an under-counter spool and I think it's just too loose so the printer pulls out more slack than it needs and then gets in a mess. Seems like it should be a common problem but all the advice I could find was worthless. I wrapped the spool with kitchen towel until I created some friction but with enough give that the 3D printer could ingest the filament. There is probably a better answer with a more expensive spool that has some tension built in, but this was enough to get the part to print for me.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
3D Printing a Window Mount for a Google Nest Indoor Wired Gen 2 Camera #etc#3dprint#google#nest#thingiverse How to 3D print a reflection blocking window mount for a Google Nest Cam (Gen 2))
For a long time this blog has been black with some splashes of International Orange. The favorite icon and logo was some weird grid of dots (and yes, I give Google crap for Material Design). Now that Google has brought icons to the desktop search results as well as mobile I wanted a rounder favicon. Their direction is round icons all the way, and my weird dots don't look great in this format.
The new logo and favorite icon is a dynamic pie chart. This updates daily (the favorite icon will lag a bit due to caching) and shows the category distribution of posts over the last two years. The logo text is just a random permutation of the category colors. This is stupidly precise and geeky and also a lot more cheerful. I may add a few more splashes over time.
I started with some online tool for the palette and used International Orange as a starting point and its color wheel complement to pin the other end of the range. This looks terrible. I then had a long conversation with ChatGPT 4 and told it what I liked and didn't like about each palette it came up with. I was pretty high maintenance but the AI was patient and I'm pretty happy with the color scheme we ended up with.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
More Colors #etc#ithcwy ITHCWY has a new 8 color palette, logo and favorite icon generated via a conversation with ChatGPT.)
If you're into reading ESRI Shapefiles in .NET my library has migrated to .NET Standard and is now on NuGet. Read more. And enjoy this shapefile based zoom to my neighborhood.
Related posts are now way more related thanks to moving from Word2Vec to OpenAI embeddings. I've also been reluctantly moving to Google Analytics 4. Here are some API tips.
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