Saw this while walking the dog today. I don’t normally walk on this side of the street and had never noticed it before. I hope somebody had fun making it. PS: I need to figure out how to get Hugo to make thumbnails. But this was taken with the iPhone 11 I have in my pocket. Man, it takes amazing pictures. Tree House for Fairies. Or Squirrels. North side. ...

Our family is carefully planning the holidays. For my wife’s birthday we went and saw her parents. They stayed in the dining room near the gas fireplace while we stayed near the open patio door. Masks were worn except for eating and drinking. For Thanksgiving, we’re planning on hosting one brother and his two kids. Outside, with a heater attached to a propane tank. Maybe two. And, for Christmas, maybe it’s all via Zoom. That’s not traditional or even fun but if it keeps people alive, well, it’s worth it. ...

Rt.live shows the Effective Reproduction Rate, or Rt, for the whole US and specific states. The rate for Oregon started high, came down, went up a little, came down, and is now going up. What’s really scary is My oldest is doing her freshman year of college online at home. My other two are doing their high school classes 100% online, including Intro to Industrial Arts for one and Band for the other. With the onset of bad weather, it’s been weeks since we had somebody over since we can’t socially distance in the house. ...

Mozilla Observatory will test your website and assign it a letter grade based on how well your website implements things like implementing a good Content-Security-Policy, blocking clickjacking, enforcing HTTP Strict Transport Security, and so on. When I started, this blog was rated F. After a few changes, it’s now rated at B+ and I’m heading for A+. One of my other blogs started at A and became A+. That’s because the other blog uses Hugo and a very recent theme. ...

One way to install packages is via Pip. pip install django Pip will install not only the program you want but anything else it depends on. Further, you can use pip to upgrade a program and its dependencies. pip install --upgrade django I’d set up a cron job that would do this: pip install --upgrade django requests pytz certifi httplib2 Eventually I added a second and third line. But there’s a better way: use pip-review ...

I have been using uBlock Origin for many years on my Mac. Recently, I tried replacing my 2015 MacBook Pro with a 2018 MacBook Pro. There were a lot of things that I liked about the new MacBook Pro but what bothered me was that it had only 8GB of RAM whereas the older one had 16GB. I would listen to the fans howl and eventually I replaced it with a machine I described in The Perfect Mac. But as happy as I am with my Mac Mini, it’s not portable. So I added an iPad Pro to the mix. That’s been pretty good but the ad blocking on the iPad doesn’t seem anywhere as effective. ...

Gilbert Heights Elementary School Grade 6 1973-1974 Top row: unknown, John McIntosh, unknown, unknown, unknown, Liz Silva, unnknown 3rd row: unknown, Lisa Mullen, unknown, unknown, unknown, Ray Teuber?, unknown 2nd row: John Speck, unknown, me, Pat Dye, unknown, unknown, unknown, Mrs. Margeson first row: Denise Buckley, unknown, Charlotte Trapp, unknown, Debra Halvorsen?, Jim Greenslade We moved and changed school districts the year before. So I only had year at Gilbert Heights Elementary School before this photo and a year after. Still, I’m surprised I can’t remember more names. ...

Ran across a neat graphic that sums up what it’s felt like waiting for the results of the 2020 Presidential Election results felt like. Updating my old blog, I was surprised at how many links broke over the years. So I decided the image for posterity. When I went to download the GIF, it turned out that Twitter had converted it into an .mp4 video. When I used a website to convert it back, it grew from under 10k to just over 50k. ...

There’s an excellent article in Vox about vote by mail in Oregon, focusing on how it started and how it evolved. It’s difficult to forge someone’s signature on a ballot. Not impossible, not if you have access to something with their signature, but difficult. And it’s hard to see that scaling to any numbers. It’s pretty much impossible to insert fake ballots into the system. There are bar codes on the envelopes mailed out to voters and it’s pretty simple to reject any bar codes that don’t match what was sent out. ...

How to Read RSS in 2020 is a nice article on how to use RSS. RSS is a great way to follow people who post longer content on their blogs. You fire up your reader of choice and it pulls in the articles without you having to visit all those websites. If there’s no change, nothing shows up in your newsreader. Some of the neat uses of RSS to follow someone’s Twitter or Instagram without having to follow them on Instagram have faded away as companies put up walls to keep you on their property. ...