Software

Smash and grab

About a month ago I got notice that the hosting company I was using got bought by GoDaddy, which sucks. I was also due to pay for another year of service so I decided to move on (I’d transferred my domains out of GoDaddy years before). For the last 14 years, my blog has been self-hosted WordPress. I haven’t had any major issues over the years, but I don’t think I’m actually a sysadmin or could keep the blog together for another 14. I’ve moved to paid hosting on WordPress.com. It has built-in backups and 2FA, two technologies that should keep this blog fairly resilient. In an evening I exported all of posts from my self-hosted install and imported them into the .com. The importer did not like the javascript embed wrapper Flickr currently uses for embeds (the majority of my photos). My blog also predates the built in image uploading for WordPress so many of my self-hosted images broke. I’ve imported all of the images though and have been fixing posts as I find them, starting with the ones stats tell me people actually view. Thank you for continuing to follow my blog and reading all the way to the end of this post I’m using to test the RSS feeds.

Standard
Innovation

The Ephemeral Office

Buffed

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Warren Berger’s Wired article Lost In Space. It’s about Chiat/Day’s bold experiment in 1994 to build a virtual office space. The story is a great read about the pitfalls of the open plan office which thankfully no one builds anymore… The office this originally took place in, “the binocular building”, was leased by Google eight years ago as they expanded operations into Venice.

Standard
Illustration

Sweetums Unrestricted

Back when Tumblr was preparing to remove adult content from the service I was apparently too busy deleting my actual porn blog to realize they had started flagging content on my very chaste Sweetums account. I only found it today when getting a message that they had reviewed my appeal (my what?). sweetums.tumblr.com was launched in 2013 mostly as a way to entertain people that used to follow me on Google Reader. It has a Twitter account too. I think the content flagged as adult is pretty funny and rarely adult so I present it to you here in its entirety as a 6.9MB image hosted on Yahoo!’s finest service: Flickr. Links to the relevant content at the end. CW: Female presenting nipples Continue reading →

Standard
Innovation

Fire Hydrants Are Designed To Shear

Sheared fire hydrant

We came across this scene while walking to lunch the other day. It was clearly a standpipe missing its fire hydrant with a bit of water slowly weeping out. The missing fire hydrant wasn’t too surprising; people hit those all the time creating a giant geyser. What was weird was the little worms of silicone sticking out of the bolt flange. We realized then that the 3/4″ fire hydrant bolts are designed to shear off when hit. I suspect this is so that the impact doesn’t damage the vertical pipe which would require excavation to replace. It might also reduce the force of the accident better than hitting a truly fixed object. It looks like this flange is too low and will have to be dug out before they can put a a new hydrant in.

Standard
Hardware, Portfolio

Teensy LC Breakout

Teensy LED breakout boards assembled

I work with Teensy dev boards and LED strips fairly often. Connecting the two to each other seems to be something I’m constantly reinventing. Here’s my most recent attempt at a board I could use for both quick prototyping and permanent installs. While I mill a lot of prototype PCBs, this is only the third board ever that I’ve had professionally manufactured. This time via Oshpark. Continue reading →

Standard