Joe Martucci

Junk Wax Nostalgic

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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Like many boys who grew up in the 90s, I collected trading cards. I suppose in the days before smart phones a pack of trading cards was like a somewhat curated paper version of TikTok you got a few minutes worth of dopamine swiping through. Add in limited edition cards as inserts and it’s a bit of gambling thrown in for good fun.

I finally went and grabbed the card boxes from my parent’s attic and went through them. Given they came from the 90s they’re mostly “Junk Wax” era cards, which refers to a combination of inflating card production to satisfy collectors and multiple brands entering the market causing runs of base level cards to be… less than worthless. For example I found a complete unopened 1990 Donruss set in the box. You can currently find a box of 15 (!) of them on eBay for $100, with 0 bids because honestly that’s probably high, even though that works out to $6 a set or about .008 cents a card.

Or to show instead of tell, here’s a card of Jeff Granger marked as 1 of 66,000. <Img src={oneofalot} alt="A Jeff Granger baseball card market 1 of 66,000" lightbox/>

Forget about how absurdly over-printed these cards were, they also just printed a lot of crap.

OK, so a lot of these are destined for no place but the dumpster. I guess if a few hundred million of us do the same thing, the remaining ones might escalate to being worth a whole cent instead of a 1/100th of one.

While not exactly Margaret Thatcher bad, I found this Chuck Knoblauch card and remembered that I had sent in a fairly nice card to be signed, and he returned a Post Cereal one with a crease in it. And then admitted to using HGH so, whatever. <Img src={knob} alt="A Post cereal baseball card signed by Chuck Knoblauch" lightbox/>

OK, was there anything good in the collection? Some were fun: <Img src={cards1} alt="A collection of 90s baseball cards." lightbox/>

Wade Boggs (RIP) must have loved baseball cards because he had some great ones. Especially in contrast to his teammate Roger Clemens who looked, on every single card I found, like he had just been arrested for drunk driving. Those Upper Deck “Then and Now” hologram cards were cool. The Topps kids run had some surprisingly fun artwork, and I hope whoever came up with the idea of making fake credit cards for that Studio Gold set went on to a fantastic career, ideally not in baseball cards.

There were some other odds and ends that were fun to find. Willy “The Dupe” Dipkin is a Simpsons spoof of the Bill Ripkin “fuck face” card. Crusade is worth some money because it’s a banned card now. If you’re not a Magic the Gathering play, I give you the quiz of figuring out why. The signed Reggie Jefferson card was from a 1996 Leaf Signature series pack, which was known for being $10 a pack and having 1 signed card in each pack. I wish I had bought more, but that was an absurd price at the time and I was getting out of collecting by then anyway. The gold Pedro and Mo Vaughn are just personal favorites, the incredibly poorly cut Manny Ramirez rookie card was a fun find. The Jason Isringhausen card was another one I sent off to get signed that actually came back with the same card I sent.

At the end of the day was it a little disappointing to see that most of these cards are worthless? Sure. I should have gone full nerd and spent all that money on Magic the Gathering cards. I pulled and sold a few hundred dollars worth of cards from that collection.

There was one card I had, however, that I always looked up when I flipped through the price guides at the magazine stands in the drug store. It’s still valuable! I mean, about as valuable today as it was in 1993, but if anyone wants to trade it for a week of brownies at lunch or a Revised Shivan Dragon, let me know. <Img src={jordan} alt="An Upper Deck Michael Jordan SP1 baseball card." lightbox/>

New York City

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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First, a digression. Growing up whenever I heard "New York City" this played in my head:

But now I can only hear it like this:

I suppose actual New Yorkers hear neither but as a Connecticut kid who drifted up Boston way, that's irrelevant to me!

Anyway, we planned a trip to New York City (read that in your mind however you want) for April break. Why NYC? Mostly it seemed like Lorelei was finally old enough to enjoy going there, and we had some Grand-puppy-parents willing to dog sitting along the way.

Transportation

I don't love driving into NYC plus parking is always either annoying or expensive, so we planned on taking the train. My preferred way to get in is to park somewhere in Connecticut and take a Metro North train in to Grand Central, but our hotel plans had us staying on the Upper West Side so a train into Penn Station made more sense.

So, Amtrak! I took Amtrak all the time in college. It… was ok. Sometimes trains would be horribly late, sometimes way oversold to the point of standing room only. But when it works, it works well.

Well, this time it didn't work. Our train into city was about an hour late getting in, and our train out was cancelled. Like, there was no train at all. While we solved this by getting a car back to our car to Connecticut. If we had planned to train all the way back to Boston not only were the trains cancelled from the South, a part of bridge fell on the tracks to the North. I want to love trains but they make it so hard!

Accommodations

I knew we wanted to stay on the Upper West Side, which has limited hotel options. In the end we stayed at the Hotel Beacon, which is very close to the 1 2 3 lines and Central Park, and has spacious rooms with full kitchens. It was almost like having a little apartment in the city for a few days.

Activities

The main thing we had planned for the trip was going to see Little Shop of Horrors at the Westside Theatre. It was great!

<aside>If you only know Little Shop of Horrors from the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091419/">1986 film version</a> you might only be familiar with the thetrical ending of the film, which is very different than the play. If you can, rewatch the director's cut of the movie, which is closer to the play, but with an additional 10 minutes or so of 1980s style minature-set destruction.</aside>

Being near Central Park we did the New York Museum of Natural History one day.

And the Central Park Zoo on another, nicer, day.

Otherwise we rambled about, litterally in The Ramble which I'd never walked through, did some shopping, ate a lot of bagels….

Food

Alice's Tea Cup. Cute place. Apparently we're trying to make "tea time" a thing we do on vacation now. Not fancy but the food was good.
Pop up Bagels. I guess this is a chain, but it was around the corner from the hotel so it was our first bagel spot. Bagels were soft and warm, cream cheese was great. Butter spread was not whipped butter like I expected but like, a whole stick of butter, which was a bit much.
Viand Cafe. Diner food, downstairs from the hotel. Decent food with the bonus of having tons of seating.
Pizza Collective. Great square pizza. I had a Carbonara pizza, it was amazing.
Frame. Croffles! Cute place, full of people taking up entire tables by themselves. We usually brought breakfast back to our spacious hotel because finding a table for 3 is surprisingly hard.
Kossar's Bagels & Bialys. I've never had a bialy before, so we got some to try here… along with some bagels. Both were good!
Parm. Known for their spicy rotini, I guess? Tasty. Loaded up on carbs then did an incredibly short walk through Central Park.
HEYTEA. I mention this place in passing because it was a bit cramped, I glanced at the menu and ordered some pistachio thing but it was heavenly. Apparently people post videos of themselves drinking it? I sucked it down in the street like an animal.

And to complete the "pretending like we live here" experience we grabbed some groceries from Zabar's and Fairway Market, both within walking distance.

Conclusion

I like New York. I've always liked New York. It's a great city to just walk around and find stuff. I think if I actually lived there I'd be worn down before a year was out, but to visit and pretend is quite fun.

Lorelei gave the trip a 6/10, but she said we lost 4 points for not picking a hotel with a pool. I'll take it.

The Sirens of Titan

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Likely the highest regard you can give a work of science fiction is to say it was ahead of it’s time. I finished “The Sirens of Titan” this weekend and it was amazing to see how much Vonnegut managed to nail a loathsome billionaire like Elon Musk in the character Malachi Constant. Sending him to Mars seems almost spooky, but really it’s just a great read of how a billionaire would behave entangled with an interplanetary plot line.

The following passage jumped out to me in our increasingly AI’d future:

Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren’t anything like machines. They weren’t dependable. They weren’t efficient. They weren’t predictable. They weren’t durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others.

These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame.

And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn’t high enough.

So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too.

And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be.

The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn’t really be said to have any purpose at all.

The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else.

And they discovered that they weren’t even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, “Tralfamadore.”

I will always recommend any of Vonnegut’s books to anyone, but I was surprised to find that of all of his books that I have read so far, this one might have the most enduring story.

Assuming we humans endure at all.

Charleston

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Got back from a late-Summer family trip to Charleston, South Carolina yesterday. While I was keeping an eye on hurricane Erin before we left, it ended up turning before the coast, and we had mostly great weather for the trip. Just the one day where we were caught in flooding from record breaking amounts of rain fall. My notes!

Why Charleston

We enjoyed our trip to Montreal last year for two reasons: we got to explore a new city, and we had a hotel with a great pool.

This year late Summer worked better for our schedule, so I felt like it would be a great time to go to the beach. Maybe not for the entire trip, but at least some of it. I narrowed down options with these criteria:

Somewhere on the East Coast to cut down on travel time.
Somewhere with a beach near an interesting city.
Ideally somewhere off-season (kids in the South go back to school a few weeks before New England kids).
Somewhere warm enough where it feels “tropical”, which kinda meant South of Maryland.
Not Florida.

The three locations that I looked at were:

The stretch from Williamsburg to Virginia Beach to the Outer Banks. Not to speak ill of 1/3 of the East Coast but nothing there really stood out to me.
Savannah, Georgia and Hilton Head island. Hilton Head may be nice but it’s pricey. I want to visit Savannah someday but it seems like it might be more fun for day drinking in a park than traveling with a 10-year-old.
Charleston, South Carolina. My parents visited the city a few years back and returned with good reviews, and it had multiple close beach options that looked nice.

So, Charleston took it.

Transportation

Delta flys direct from Logan (BOS) to Charleston (CHS). It’s less than 2 hours in the air, and CHS is a tiny little airport that’s easy to get in and out of.

I didn’t want to rent a car, so we mostly Lyft’d / Livery’d to the hotels and walked to places. This was... ok. Many of the rides felt like we were passengers in a round of Crazy Taxi. Some of Charleston is walkable, and some of it you’re on a four-lane road with no shoulder and a sidewalk only slightly wider than a tightrope. There is a free bus system in Downtown, but I think I only saw it pass by once.

Accommodations

We split the stay into two locations with three nights each:

The Mills House Hotel in Downtown Charleston. Great location, nice pool, decent food on premise, ok rooms.
The Sweetgrass In at Wild Dunes Resort. At the very end of Isle of Palms, about a 45 minute drive from Downtown Charleston. Great location for beach access, terrible for doing anything else in the area, nice pools, nice rooms, ok (and overpriced, but it’s a resort) food.

Activities

I had similar plans for this trip as the Montreal one: pick a place to go to, then wander back to the hotel for pool/relaxing time. I planned on more pool time and less walking because it’s hot in Charleston at the end of August.

South Carolina Aquarium. Nice aquarium, if a bit small. I got to feed hand feed a sting ray.

We caught otter feeding time, and the spoonbill wanted to be my friend.

Mace Brown Museum of Natural History. Tiny museum inside the College of Charleston. I didn’t realize how small it was, we were in and out in under 45 minutes, but we had other plans in that area anyway so it worked out.

Natural history museum or museum of silly faces?

the Gibbes museum of art. This was right next door to The Mills House Hotel. My original plan was to stop in here to kill some time between check-out and check-in at the two hotels. Interesting collection of art, and Lorelei liked the “life imitates art” set of photos next to some of the pieces where children/pets dressed up to match the art. While we were there we got a flash flood alert and hung out in the gift shop for much longer than planned, watching the sheets of rain fall and flood the roads.
The Isle of Palms beach. Either hurricane Erin or just the storm fronts parked off the coast churned up some nice waves to play in. Soft sand, warm waves, thumbs-up beach in my book.

Wasn’t always sunny but it was always warm, and never crowded.

Food

I have two complaints about food on this trip:

It’s absolutely impossible to gauge restaurants based on Google Maps / Yelp review scores any more. The places in our hotel got high 4-star reviews, and they were absolutely basic hotel food. Some of the places at the resort had been review bombed into the 2s based on “service”, but they were perfectly fine, could have been 4 stars anywhere else.
Never got good ice cream. I dunno if it’s too hot to make ice cream right in the South or something, but it was across the board disappointing. Maybe we have better cows up here.

Places we ate, of note:

82 Queen. Good Southern food. I had Chicken Bog, which sounds awful but the Andouille sausage was delicious and I’m going to figure out how to make it as it seems like a good one-pot dish.
Gaulart & Maliclet. I found this place because we were looking for something “snacky” and their charcuterie board sounded appealing, but we ended up ordering a bunch of things. They make fondue or other dishes partially at your table, the interior seating feels like you’re in someone’s kitchen, and they do chocolate fondue for dessert.
Brown Dog Deli. Good sandwiches. Decorated like someone stuck everything from my childhood closet on the walls so, I liked that.
Harken Cafe & Bakery. Breakfast place, good pastries.
Fleet Landing. Food was fine, probably a fun place to sit on the back deck most of the time but we ended up on the side deck which had a limited view and was kind of hot, and they’re building a new hotel next door so our meal was occasionally punctured by the sound of someone driving rivets into a new pier.

Conclusion

Overall the trip was great. I think we realized we’re not “resort” people. Or maybe I’m not. I really like seeing new things then coming back to a hotel to relax. And we all like eating at interesting places, which is not really a thing you’re going to do at a resort unless you’re like, mega-super-rich and you get there on your own yacht.

But, Lorelei said the day at the beach was her favorite part of the trip, so I’m glad we got out there. If we do a city/beach split trip again I’d probably plan on staying in the city the whole time and doing a day trip (or two) to the beach. Ideally on a day without record rainfall.

Minintendo

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Lorelei was at a “technology and gaming camp” this week. I learned a little late that she could bring a device with her for their free time through the week. I suggested she take her iPad, which she mostly uses for Minecraft, but in a moment of personal responsibility she said she didn’t want to because she had bought it herself, and didn’t want to break or lose it.

Until recently we had a Nintendo 2DS and a Nintendo Switch in the house, but I did a big tech clean-out earlier this year and since neither were used much they went off to new homes via eBay. I have a Steam Deck but I didn’t want to see that get lost of broken. I did have an original Gameboy but it’s entirely decorative at this point.

It seemed like, as someone who has been a gamer his whole life, I should have something around that was relatively portable, cheap, and easy to use to play games on. I’d kind of been aware of the retro emulator handheld market, but since I had the Steam Deck I hadn’t looked to hard at what’s out there. Turns out there’s a ton of options, and some are surprisingly nice for their price.

If you want to save yourself the deep dive into the market (because it is deep), here are my quick notes:

Decide if you want joysticks.

There’s a pretty hard divide in both price and device shape between things that can emulate consoles before and after the introduction of full-direction joysticks (so, the N64 and newer, since the PlayStation released without them). I wanted something on the cheaper end so that ruled out things like the Retroid Pocket Flip 2.

Accept that the Gameboy (original, advance, and SP) were some of the greatest portable device designs in history

A few of the best Gameboy-shaped variations are:

The ANBERNIC RG35XXSP which is a pretty good looking SP clone.
The Retroid Pocket Classic Handheld.
The device I ended up getting, the TrimUI Brick.

Embrace weird Linux distros

All of these devices run on very slim versions of Linux which is fantastic, but if you’re expecting Nintendo Switch levels of UI and setup hand-holding, you’re not getting that. For the most part they’re pretty straightforward if you’re already interested in and have some understanding of how emulation works, but put some reading time aside for learning if you don’t.

Buy direct if you can

You can find many of these devices on Amazon but what you’re actually getting is a real crap-shoot. I did it because I was trying to get one next-day, but it was a game of Amazon roulette with a bunch of random sellers with wildly varying reviews. There’s a lot of companies selling them but the ones that seemed to have the best quality to price were Anberic, TrimUI, and Retroid Pocket.

The TRIM UI Brick

As I said before what I decided on was the TRIM UI Brick. Due to the aforementioned randomness with Amazon listing I didn’t think it came with a microSD card, so I actually set one up with a variant OS called NextUI before it arrived. I’m sure the stock OS is great. NextUI is too. You can customize the boot screen, the color of the LEDs, do some modifications to the emulator layouts, honestly way more than I expected for a device at this price point. And it’s well built, it feels more solid than an actual Gameboy did, and the screen is obviously 10,000x better than the ones you originally played these games on.

Lorelei has named it the Minintendo (please don’t sue us), and the other kids at camp said it was “cool”, so there you go. Personally I might grab it from time to time to try to finally beat Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

On The Internet No One Knows You’re a Dog

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I saw this on Hacker News yesterday: Low-background Steel: content without AI contamination.

An idea raised in the Hacker News comments was how could a user, as a human, even tell if a comment was posted by another human, or a human using AI, or just a bot.

This tingled the part of little elder-Millennial brain where it was beat into me that we couldn’t use any information online as a valid source for writing a paper in school. Why? Because at the time it was understood that anyone could put anything online. Even for a site like cnn.com[^1] it was expected you could back up what you found with a physical version, either in print or a reference to content that aired on TV.

My skepticism for things posted on the Internet has never really abated. Publishing something online in 1999 was not actually as easy as my teachers made it out to be[^2], but with Web 2.0 anyone could write anything. That scaled to platforms like Twitter where you would struggle to tell a person from a bot, and now today we have AI posting content generated from slurping up all of that previously posted content online and making its own.

So how do you tell if content online is valid? You don’t. The first set of sources teachers allowed us to cite were .edu or .gov websites, but, is this government website a realiable source of information? Do we need a system of identifying humans online. Maybe. What if it was run by AI’s biggest shill. Do I think this situation is going to get better in the future?

lol, no.

Between people replacing search and sourcing information with AI spitting back answers and improvements in AI generated video the Internet will only continue to grow to be the largest source of information, both valid and invalid. Figuring out what’s real will continue to be a skill. Not contributing to the noise will be a virtue[^3].

N.B. - the title of this post and the the comic in the header image here is from a comic that ran in The New Yorker. Amazingly it was printed in 1993.

[^1]: For the youths out there, cnn.com was one of the first popular news sites online. Also it was a fun prank back then to download the entire HTML source of a CNN page and then modify it with your own fake news story and re-upload it somewhere else. There is nothing new under the sun. [^2]: …although people who were posting online at the time tended to either be academics posting valuable content or stuff like the Heaven’s Gate website. [^3]: Nothing here was generated with AI, but to the point of what I wrote above, can you tell? Am I lying? Does AI ask questions like this? If I just keep going on and on and on without a point does it seem more human or less or IDK….

TRMNL

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A while back I tried setting up an old iPad as a “family dashboard” of sorts, just a quick way to list out upcoming events, the weather, maybe meals for the week or another important note. It kind of… sucked, for a lot of reasons, namely needing to configure a user for the device and the iPadOS widgets not being an ideal UI for “at a glance (at a distance)” viewing.

I looked at things like DAKboard, but plugging a monitor on the wall feels like a solution for a dentist’s office more than a home.

I saw the e-ink display TRMNL when it was first released, but at the time I had resigned to using a whiteboard to keep track of things, and it sold out before I could really consider it as an option. They came back in stock recently so I picked up a Sage Green one which, as far as color choices on a piece of technology goes, is pretty nice.

Setup was super easy: turn it on, connect it to the local network, go on the TRMNL website and configure some plugins and… shortly thereafter, they show up. The pro and con to it as a device is that to give it a battery life of a few months it makes network requests relatively infrequently. That said, it’s clear at how far apart those requests are when configuring the plugins, unlike iPadOS widgets which occasionally decide to stop getting updates at all, period, forever, for no obvious reason[^1].

The only other downside is the screen is pretty small. It’s 7.5" which is objectively smaller than the iPad we were using before, but the UI is appropriately scaled to use the space unlike an iPadOS home screen. So it’s… ok. If they made a 12 or 13" I’d think about getting that for the kitchen and moving this to my desk.

The TRMNL “playlists” on the website have a nice feature where you can change what shows at different times of the day. So in the morning it sticks to a split view of upcoming events/weather, and in the afternoon it shuffles through a few different screens, including this low res Calvin and Hobbes comic plugin.

[^1]: I’ve only had this for a day so, who knows, maybe that’ll happen here too.

No Job Lasts Forever

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

My first job out of college was working as a Technical Writer in an airplane engine factory. Most of the work was around regulatory compliance, creating documentation to show that everyone was trained on the work they were doing and the machines they were using.

I learned how to do the job from my manager, who cared not at all for the craft of writing, but wanted the documents filed so they could show their manager everything was in order. There was another technical writer who worked on our team who was — to me at the time — old, and he hated the system of knocking out documents and putting them in filing cabinets.

Why? Because when he started working as a technical writer, the task of creating a document took an entire team making thoughtful decisions. Publishing something actually involved typesetting and printing, photographs required a photographer and film processing, edits used pens and paper. But by 2004 one person could do everything with a computer, digital camera, and a printer, and because the process could be completed in such a short time, the goal shifted from producing well-made and thorough documents to checking off a list that documents existed for any process or machine on the floor, even if they were simply one sheet of paper that described very little of what someone would need to do their job.

You might read that as ”technology took away jobs” but it took away more than that. It took away working with a team, and it took away producing a meaningful artifact that other people got something of value from.

The PC eliminated a lot of jobs. Software on PCs eliminated more. AI will do the same. Will we miss the jobs? Probably not. Will we miss working with people to build something meaningful? Maybe.

Hench

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 26 May 2025 14:59:00 GMT

Finished Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots today. The premise of the book is that superheroes and supervillains exist, and there’s an entire ecosystem of employees who need to support them. For the villains it’s henches handling business operations and meat handling… well getting punched or blown up, mostly.

The story follows Anna, a hench who through a series of unfortunate events, starts to really dislike how superheroes are perceived in the world, and comes up with an idea to bring them down to Earth.

Overall I enjoyed it, although I didn’t realize that while it is a complete narrative arc it sets itself up for a sequel. Reminded me a bit of Vicious by V. E. Schwab and A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark. I’ve said in the past that splitting books into a series is not my favorite way to handle narratives but I think this book is enjoyable enough on its own.

Added to books I’ve read.

The Master and Margarita

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 14 May 2025 12:00:00 GMT

I first read The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov about 15 years ago. I’m pretty sure I picked it up after reading that “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones was written after Mick Jagger read the book. I was in the bookstore recently and saw this 50th anniversary edition[^1] and liked the cover art so I bought it and read it again.

If you’re unfamiliar with the book, here’s a real shit summary by Peter Thiel[^2]. I mean yes, the devil comes to Moscow, but it’s also absurdist humor, Biblical allegory, a writer writing about the difficulty of writing in Stalinist Russia, the absurdity of writers in general, and the disconnect between Russians and religion and morality. The titular characters occupy about a quarter of the plot. Jesus shows up but he’s just a nice guy in a shit situation. There’s a cat that drinks pure alcohol and carries a gun.

These are some aspects of the book that I enjoyed more the second time around:

The narrative framing around the story of the devil (Woland) coming to Moscow interspersed with the story of Pontius Pilate as it happened, and as written by the Master, is better than I remembered. If that sentence sounds overly religious to you, I agree, that’s how I felt the first time I read the book too. The context I didn’t fully understand on my first read was that the Soviet Union at the time had a policy of state atheism, and more important than the specific religious connotations of the Biblical figures is the Muscovites’s inability to see Woland as the Devil because they “believe” they don’t believe in religion.
Likewise, the suffering of both Pilate and the Master are allegories for those who suffered under the Stalinist purges. Certainly Ivan the Homeless’s story as well, although I interpret his ending in slightly more optimistic terms.
The dynamics between Woland and Mathew Levi, Pilate and Yeshua, and Woland and Margarita show that the world is morally ambiguous, at best. For a book with so many religious figures, the only thing it really says about living is the worst thing you can do is be a coward.
All of Woland’s associates are amazing in their own way, but I believe that a lot of writers either directly or indirectly owe a debt of gratitude to Bulgakov for creating Behemoth. He’s basically Rocket Raccoon but a cat, and also he can become extra large and sort of appear like a human, and occasionally drinks directly from a primus stove. It’s a level of modernity and humor that you would not expect from a book written in 1930s Russia.
Giving the line ‘Everything will turn out right, the world is built on that.” to the devil remains delightful.
I didn’t fully understand the romance between the Master and Margarita the first time I read the book. After being married for over a decade, I get it better now. I particularly get the line “Well, he who loves must share the lot of the one he loves.” now.

A few things I still struggle with:

There’s some amount of humor and social and political commentary lost in translation, and lost to time. The book’s notes do a decent job of explaining some of the missing context, but a joke is never quite as good if someone has to explain it to you. In some ways the experience of reading The Master and Margarita is like reading Dante’s Inferno — you can enjoy the story as is, but there are so many small references to people and events of the author’s time that you can go an entire level deeper into the people and events that the book is, literally in both cases, wishing the devil upon.
Chapter 25, “How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of Kiriath” is not any easy read, but it’s quite critical to understanding the book. The combination of it being translated text, a story about something that happened in the Bible, an allegory for Stalinist Russia, and an entire conversation where everyone talks euphemistically around the fact that (mild spoilers) Pilate intends to kill Judas is a lot to take in.

Do I think this blog post will convince anyone to read the book? No, probably not! I mean it’s on dozens of “top 100 books that whatever whatever whatever” so there are better people than me out there who could convince you. If anything, just get on board with me hoping for Daniel Radcliffe being involved in a film adaptation. And if you need convincing of that, I can easily point you to A Young Doctor's Notebook & Other Stories.

[^1]: The 50th anniversary copy was published in 2016, which is 50 years after 1966. But the book was published posthumously and was primarily written in the 1930s, which I find somewhat amazing because outside of some of the descriptions of “modern life” not being 1960s modern it reads like something that would fit in the literary environment of the 60s more than the 30s.

[^2]: I just like saying bad things about Peter Thiel. But also you can find this quote all over the place and it’s funny that he calls it “a little more intellectual” and then poorly summarizes the book.

Portland

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 12:01:00 GMT

Portland

A mid-week trip to the Portland of the East Coast.

Andrea and I have done 2-4 day trips up to Portland a few times now, usually over school Spring Break, where we drop the child off at the Grandparents and then make the relatively short drive up to do nothing but relax. There’s a lot of tasty dining options, lots of charming/cute/comfortable hotels, the entire city is walkable and exists in some sort of “not quite fancy enough to fully gentrify” state that means you can still have quirky and interesting shops and cafes with plentiful seating.

Accommodations

We stayed at the Longfellow Hotel, which must be fairly new because it doesn’t show up on Google Street view. It was a nice hotel, the room was large and quiet, the cafe downstairs was good, we went to the spa attached and got massages. Really nothing bad to say about it. The West End has a number of similar hotels, and it’s only a mile to walk to the downtown / Old Port, unless I wanted to go island hopping or lobstering every day I think it’s the better side of town to stay in.

Itinerary

Uh… there wasn’t one. I had a few ideas but all we really did (besides some shopping) was go to the Portland Museum of Art which has a good size to collection ratio. Also this painting of a moose that I like, that I forgot to take a picture of the description of.

I did take up a side project to find the old McDonald’s Garfield glasses at each vintage store.

Food

Now the important part. You could probably spend two weeks in Portland eating fantastic meals without every going to the same place twice, but we went with these restaurants:

Miyake. Very good. The second order of the Lobster rolls was probably unnecessary but they were tasty.
Chaval. The small plates here were good, the larger plates / entrees were ok. Given how many good options there are for eating in Portland I don’t think we’ll be back.
Fore Street. I knew this place was highly recommended and we’ve never been able to get in on past trips, but this was probably in the top 5 meals of my life.
Duckfat. We almost skipped going here, but stopped for lunch on the way out of town, thereby continuing the streak of always going here when in Portland. Good, tasty, appropriate portions.
Tandem. This was next to the hotel so we stopped in for breakfast, great breakfast sandwiches and a sticky bun. There was about a dozen other pastries I wanted to try but I had neither the time nor room in my stomach.
Empire Chinese Kitchen. On a past trip we stopped here for dinner and loved it. Got lunch here and it wasn’t nearly as impressive.
Gorgeous Gelato. Kinda weird how many gelato places there are in Portland. Stopped here for cannolis, which were good, although entirely unnecessary.

Notes for next time

None really. While I wanted to get out and explore a bit more, Andrea did not. And as I said the idea here is really to get away without having to travel far. Maybe I’ll take a solo trip up in the miserable months to go stand by a lighthouse and stare at the ocean like all the landscape painters of yore did.

The Constant Gardener

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 12:01:00 GMT

I’ve been working behind the scenes for the last few months on converting this site into less of a blog and more of a digital garden.

What is a digital garden?

Probably the first (and best) explanation of a digital garden that I came across was Maggie Appleton’s blog post A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden. The basic notion of it is less straightforward blogging and more free form growing of content through inter-linked notes. If you’ve used Obsidian or almost any other note taking app lately, you’ve probably seen Wikilinks, which have become a de-facto standard where you wrap Markdown text in double brackets ([[Like This]]) and it becomes a link to another file. This works great in note taking apps, and it’s how I organize all my personal notes, but there’s a lot of content that I’d like to continue to build over time and share with anyone who is interested. Also it would be nice if I wrote something that did look like a blog post (like this one!), if it was easy to link back to something I wrote in the past.

Attempt one: Content Collections and Tags

My first thought in making this work was to use Astro’s content collections, with different collections mapping to types and all of those types having a field named tags which was an array of strings. The initial pass had types for:

blog - something like this post.
garden - general notes.
recipes - recipes, assuming those would be presented differently.
links - a link to another website, generally something with a tag and a URL but no content associated with it.
books - notes about books I had read or was reading.

I was managing these notes in Obsidian by symlinking the content folder from my Astro git repo into my main Obsidian vault. One nice thing about Obsidian in this use case is that if you create a YAML frontmatter field named tags, it presents the values in that field as Obsidian-wide tags. This is important because it means the tagging system maps locally as well as it does on the website itself.

This was… ok. It all works but I’ve come to the conclusion that directly working with YAML frontmatter in Markdown kind of sucks. While I was once a huge fan of the idea, once you grow beyond a few fields it feels like a crappy UI over a crappy database.

As a more concrete example, here’s a note for this site in Obsidian:

We see the filename at top, a YAML attribute for the “title” (used to generate previews on the site), and then the actual title way down below. For some other types there were more fields, e.g. books had fields for the author, a bookshop.org link, a cover image. It’s just too much to keep in YAML, and the next step up from here is a CMS, which is an additional layer of complexity I didn’t want to deal with for personal notes on the web.

Attempt Two: Publishing from Bear

What I realized after building out all these collections was that the note types were quite similar. There’s a title, maybe an image, a description, and some tags. The differences could be part of the note body itself. So what if the top of that Homeserver note looked like this:

And all of the YAML that Astro cares about was just generated from the reading the markup of the note itself? For this I turned to Bear, which has the nicest formatting of any Markdown editor on MacOS, and a wide range of export options. Rather than exporting from Bear to Markdown directly and managing YAML frontmatter in Bear, (which it can do, although not well), the process looks like this:

Anything I want to publish gets tagged mind-garden.
I export everything as HTML.
I run this script which extracts all of the relevant (to me) details out of the HTML and injects them as YAML frontmatter, then reconverts the HTML to Markdown.

This works surprisingly well. Wikilinks can be converted to real links, created and modified dates can flow from Bear instead of being injected from the file system into the Markdown YAML, and I can quickly and easily write and edit and update any note on this website.

As with anything, the system isn’t perfect:

Any file created outside of Bear as Markdown needs to be imported into Bear and then re-exported from Bear. Which is fine for my use cases but if you’ve got notes all over the place in plain text might be annoying.
Bear doesn’t quite support all Markdown syntax and including something like an embed is clunky, although I don’t know that it’s actually worse than most Markdown editors, and certainly not worse than Obsidian.
Bear doesn’t support image captions, so images won’t have alt text. As a work around I adjusted the script so that if you include an image immediately followed by italic text it will insert the italic text as the alt text in the final output.

Growing Season

Writing this post was super, duper, extra easy peasy, and linking to other things was too! For example the script I used to convert the content (jjmartucci/bear2astro) was mostly ✨vibe coded✨ using Aider, which I listed over on my AI Programming Tools page, which I just included in this post using a wikilink 🥳.

So there we go. Time to get gardening!

The Thing that Gets You to the Thing

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 12:00:00 GMT

Andrea and I binged watched1 “Halt and Catch Fire” recently. The show is great2, and if you haven’t seen it but like computers, you should go watch it. The story is about the lives of a group of people tangled up together in the early days of computing and the Internet. It covers a little over 10 years, from about the release of the first Macintosh to around Eternal September.

There’s a line in it that comes up a few times in different contexts: “Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing”. When it is first said by the wonderfully flawed salesman Joe MacMillan it can be read two ways:

1. Computers are a product that can be sold to make money (money is the thing).
2. Computers are a tool, and the features of a computer mean nothing unless it can do what you need it to do (whatever you’re trying to get done in your life is the thing).

I won’t spoil anything but the meaning of that specific phrase shifts quite a bit throughout the story, especially in relation to Joe’s life. But as the series’ timeline makes it to the Internet, you get the third meaning, a computer is a tool, but the “thing” is not a business problem, it’s connecting with other people. The idea of a computer, or the Internet by way of a computer, being a tool that connects you with other people resonates with me, it’s kind of how I’ve always viewed the purpose of the Internet. Email replaced letters, forums and message boards made social communities that transcended geographic location. The Internet could be an amazing way to communicate with so many people, at such incredible speed.

But I wonder these days if we’re past the Internet being the thing that gets us to the thing and we’ve moved, perhaps catastrophically, to the Internet being the thing. In the past week half the news I’ve seen online has been either geopolitical drama around TikTok or Meta giving up on its fact checking programs. Realistically, and I don’t think I’m just being a cranky elder-Millennial here, neither of these things should matter at fucking all. It’s not like the people on TikTok cease to exist when TikTok can’t be downloaded3. It’s not like facts stop existing because Meta stops verifying them one way or the other.

Anyway. Maybe I’m just a little vexed because recently all of the people who would love for their slices of the Internet to be the thing, who have done so much work to subsume many of the parts of the Internet that I loved, have found the courage to loudly proclaim all of their terrible ideas and reinforce their general shit-bagginess. Maybe it’s because I started reading The Anxious Generation. Maybe it’s time to become a humanities teacher at a private school.

If nothing else, let me help you get to this thing, which is a great little tune to listen to while you think about what the Internet has become.

1: As much as those orbiting 40 binge watch things, two episodes a night, almost every night, until we saw the whole thing.

2: Thanks to Jeff for the recommendation, it’s a great series. You didn’t Jeff this one up.

3: Ok maybe some of them do because they’re fucking AI but that’s too much for me right now.

DNS & mar2c.xyz

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 12:04:00 GMT

DNS & mar2c.xyz

After setting up my homeserver I wanted to do something seemingly simple: visit [service].mar2c.xyz from anywhere and be able to reach that service on my home server via HTTPS.
Here’s a breakdown of the steps to accomplish that.

1. Buy a domain.

Use your favorite domain name registrar. I use namecheap which is fine, but be aware that their intro prices can be wildly different from the renewal price. .com, .org, and .net are cheap but the name you want is probably taken. .xyz, .club, and .website are still relatively open and in some cases cheaper.

2. Use Cloudflare for DNS.

If you’re following along with these steps exactly, use Cloudflare for the DNS. There are other options, but you want a service that can handle API requests for a Let’s Encrypt DNS-01 challenge.

3. Install Nginx Proxy Manager.

Nginx Proxy Manager is going to handle all the requests to our server as a reverse proxy, and manage Let’s Encrypt certificates for our domain. Secure your websites with Let's Encrypt, NPM and Cloudflare is a good guide on gluing these pieces together, the important part being getting a Cloudflare API token that let’s you read Zones, Zone Settings, and update DNS.
There are other reverse proxy options you can use, like Caddy. I happened to like NPM’s web UI, although for more complex setups I can see the appeal of Caddy’s Caddyfile format.

4. Tailscale

The initial inspiration for this project was this video on how to remotely access your self-hosted services over Tailscale:

I’ll leave figuring out how to set up Tailscale for your service up to you. I upgraded my Unraid instance to Unraid 7, which has Tailscale support baked in, so it was just a matter of toggling on an option in the Nginx Proxy Manager container, at which point I had a Tailscale machine name (and IP address).

The one part of the above video that never worked for me was using a CNAME in Cloudflare. But once I pointed my Cloudflare DNS A record to the Tailscale IP address of Nginx Proxy Manager I could reach any service Nginx was reverse proxying via HTTPS while using Tailscale.

5. Local DNS resolution

Being able to get to a service over Tailscale is great, and works well for me, but let’s assume there was something I wanted to run that I wanted anyone in the local network to have access to without using Tailscale.

For that, you need some local DNS resolver to point to the local IP address of Nginx Proxy Manager, and it’ll all work as expected. There’s a few options here:

If your router supports it, map a redirect there. Since I use an eero mesh network, this wasn’t an option.
If your router doesn’t support it, run a Pihole locally, and do the redirect there. I chose not to go down this route because I didn’t want to manage our home’s DNS server, but it would be easy to add on to my Unraid setup.
Use a DNS service like NextDNS or (what I went with) ControlD[^1]

The advantage of options 2 and 3 is you can do other DNS filtering and blocking as well.

Recap

For those who prefer a visual[^2]

Or quickly:

On Tailscale go find the Tailscale IP for Nginx Proxy Manager.
Locally go find the local IP for Nginx Proxy Manager
And importantly if you make the request on the Internet at large…

Also if you’re wondering what the header image on this post is, it comes from this wonderfully odd music video for Warren Zevon’s song Networking, which is some great background music if you want to try setting this up yourself.

[^1]: There’s additional complexity here with eero routers in that their “custom DNS” options are pretty limited, so you’ll need something like Duck DNS to update your IP address for ControlD to work with the custom DNS rules you set up. This whole process has made me annoyed with the eero app, so I’ll likely replace using it as a router in the near future, and keep the other eeros around as bridged AP devices.

[^2]: If you’re wondering about the cat, I’ve taken to naming my devices after characters from The Master and Margarita with Behemoth being, of course, the name of the server.

Technically Screened

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 12:04:00 GMT

As I’m currently in the job search process I have thoughts on the “technical screen” round of software developer interviews. If you’re not a software developer, a technical screen round is an interviewer asking the interviewee to write code, in real time. Could be a small CRUD application, or coding trivia, or fizz-buzz, or something from LeetCode, or something else entirely, but the expectation is code gets written while an interviewer watches.

If you read that and thought “that sounds awful”, well, sometimes! But they don’t have to be, they can actually be fun.

At this point I’ve been the interviewee for tens of these, and the interviewer for hundreds, so this blog post covers:

Things I enjoyed while interviewing that I would adopt for future interviews, and maybe you should too.
Things I have not enjoyed, or thought didn’t work well while I was the interviewer.

This post is specific to front-end developer roles, which are in a bit of a weirder place for these types of interviews than back-end or full-stack roles, primarily because it’s much easier to have a front-end developer actually build something in real-time.

Process improvement: things I’ve seen done better as I’ve been interviewing.

These are things that I’ve seen during a technical screen interview that I thought worked better than either how I’ve done them in the past, or compared to other companies I’ve interviewed with.

Use GitHub Codespaces, or let the interviewer bring their own IDE.

I find it odd that developers, known for spending hours setting up their IDE to just their liking, or spending years mastering VIM, are expected to jump on a call and learn the CoderLeetPadHackBox dog shit coding platform du jour. The one interview I did that used Codespaces allowed me to run the code in my local VS Code and we could jump to a much more complicated full-stack problem very quickly.

Get right to the point.

Many places have adopted an interview style where a 1-hour interview is:

10 minutes of introductions
40 minutes of coding
10 minutes for the interviewee to ask questions.

It rarely works out this cleanly, and honestly leaving the interviewee just ten minutes to suss out if your company is a clown car parked in a dumpster fire is cruel. Just do some “hellos” and get into the coding. If things fly by, have a normal human conversation. Reserve learning more about the candidate to the pre-screen, and give the candidate a lot more than 10 minutes to ask questions with someone else.

Don’t believe code screens are unbiased.

Beyond the obvious fact that most code screens will be with camera on, and most will start with some sort of introductions, there’s also the fact that some people just don’t do well coding in front of others.

Or, they just don’t code the way you do, or think about a problem the way you would, or have the ability to talk thorougly when typing or whatever. When I was the interviewer if someone approached a solution in a way I’d never seen or considered, I’d spend a good amount of time thinking about how they went about it before writing it off as “not the way I’d do it”. I don’t get the impression everyone does this, however, and it’s probably worth some introspection on whether or not you’re really trying to hire someone who thinks (and maybe, incidentally, looks) a lot like you.

Interviews go both ways: red flags I’ve seen as an interviewee.

Here’s the other side of the coin, things I’ve seen as an interviewee that gave me a bad impression of the company I was interviewing at.

If you’re interviewing a front-end developer and you don’t touch on accessibility.

In a perfect world the only front-end technical screen would be:

Here’s an endpoint to POST data to. Make a form with two fields, name and phone number, and have those fields validated client side. There should be one submit button that submits the form.

And if the candidate uses JavaScript, or a <div> instead of a button, they’re banned from front-end jobs forever.

OK maybe that’s going to far, but I will say every company I did end up working for covered accessibility in the interview process, and so should you.

Don’t make your technical screen framework specific.

If you want to offer a UI technical screen in various template languages for people with different backgrounds, ok, that’s fine. I still think plain old “it runs right in the browser” JavaScript is the best option but sometimes you want to see someone go further/faster with a framework.

But, if your entire interview is about, let’s say, React[^1], then I’m guessing your entire front-end stack is a rats-nest of poorly maintained React nightmares. And I say that as someone who has worked with React for almost 10 years now, and maybe made some of those nightmares. You don’t look for framework knowledge unless you’re in some pretty strong technical binds to that framework.

Don’t call the process “pair programming” unless you’re actually pairing.

When I was the interviewer and I said we could treat a technical screen as a “pair programming” session I did my best to make that true. If someone was stuck I wouldn’t make them flounder about, I’d say “hey I’d use x here, why don’t you look that up.” or even send them a link to documentation in the (dog shit) code platform (du jour). But I’ve been the interviewee and had people suggest it was a “pair programming” session then… just sit there quietly. Or when asked a question, respond coyly like they don’t want to give away the answer to the test. This weird liminal state between “we’re working on this together” and “I’m interviewing you” leads me to my last point.

Make it clear what you’re actually evaluating the person on.

One nice thing about getting fixed problems in a platform like HackerRank or LeetCode is you’re just trying to create the most optimal solution to a problem. With human-led technical screens you could be evaluated on:

Code quality and knowledge of a given language.
How much they like working with you.
How you approach the problem given.
How performant your code is.
Whether or not you caught the little gotcha they hid in the code.
How thorough your code is in covering edge cases and how well you test for them.
If they’re hungry, or tired, or just got out of a bad meeting.

I’ve definitely left interviews with the realization that what I was doing and what the interviewer was expecting didn’t line up, which is frustrating but also feels like a waste of time for both of us.

So technical screens are bad?

Oh, no, absolutely not. Before being a software developer I worked in a different career as a contractor, and would keep getting turned down for full-time jobs because I didn’t have a relevant degree. Switching to software development and being able to interview by showing that I knew how to do things was amazing by comparison.

What does the perfect technical screen look like?

The best experience I have had is this:

A short take home assignment. Think something that would take about 30-60 minutes, the same type and scale of problem you’d ask on a technical screen call.
I bring that code with me in my own IDE, get asked about my implementation, and then get asked to extend the code in some small way. One example I’ve seen for a front-end test is having the take-home test be to render a UI based off of static data in a JSON file, then having the in-person test be replacing that data source with one from an API.

I think this format works well for both parties. The interviewee isn’t getting a problem thrown at them in an unfamiliar environment, and when they are asked to code in front of another person they have the tools they like and the context of what the problem is. The interviewer gets a preview of the code before the interview, which means they can get into the headspace of how the candidate is solving the problem, and allows them to tailor specific evaluations they can be clear about during the in person interview.

That’s my perfect interview, anyway. If it sounds like yours maybe we should talk, I’m still looking for my next gig.

[^1]: It’s always React.

The Big Dumb Box of Computer Parts: Linux Edition

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 12:01:00 GMT

Let me start by saying this: I like Macs. I’m writing this on a Mac, I use a Mac every day for personal and work use, I have an iPad and an iPhone and a Watch and an Apple TV. I’m all in on the Mac ecosystem.
That said, I get annoyed that computers have become these little precious things running operating systems that are tightly coupled to both their hardware and the services that run on them. Sometimes you want a big dumb box that can do computing tasks or serve files without asking you to sign into iCloud, or tell you about the latest improvements to Siri, or offer you a free month of Apple Music, or make you confirm 3 times that you understand that the thing you downloaded from the Internet could be malware.
In the past, I’d build this "big dumb box" as a desktop PC and have it run Windows1, usually doubling as a file server and a gaming PC, but these days Windows is an absolute dumpster fire of an operating system. So when I recently started reaching the limits of the external hard drive I had hooked up to my Mac Mini server, I decided to get a bigger hard drive, a big box, and stick Linux on it.

Build Notes

I wanted this computer to:

Be a full time Plex server, and run whatever other apps I wanted to play around with in a Docker container.
Host network shared folders and run as a JBOD with parity drives2.
Bonus points if it could be a decent enough of a gaming rig to play some games I enjoyed on the Steam Deck at better FPS / higher resolution.

The Hardware

I grabbed a bunch of stuff off of eBay.
You might think I’m joking, but no, there’s so many cheap 4-ish-year-old parts out there these days that you can build an incredibly powerful machine for under $200. Mine was:

An AMD Ryzen 3400G build with 32GB of RAM and an ok A320 motherboard. It was about $100.
An Sapphire RX6600 GPU. Another $100. My early testing with running games on the 3400G was not impressive, so I figured why not try this.
The original box I bought had a case and power supply but both were ugly and bad, so I did splurge and get a Cooler Master Qube Macaron Edition because from what I could find it is both the smallest (and most adorable) case that can fit 4 3.5" hard drives4. I replaced the power supply with a Corsair RM850x because it seemed well reviewed, was gold rated, and most importantly, was on sale.
All of the 3.5" hard drives were coming from my long running collection, in different sizes and brands. This mish-mosh of drives is why I wanted a JBOD solution.

The operating system

There’s two paths you can go when building something like this:

Run a Linux distro, run Docker containers through that.
Run a server/NAS oriented OS (which… is gonna be some version of Linux), run virtual machines / docker containers on top of that.

On the surface those might not sound very different, but in terms of ease of setup and mainteance they can be vastly different. I tried both so you don’t have to!

Running with Pop_OS!

There’s about 7000 Linux distros you can choose from, but I decided to give Pop!_OS a try, because:

It’s maintained by system76, a maker of Linux specific hardware, which I find laudable, and I assume means they have a vested interest in making the distro work well.
It seemed to get generally good reviews in Linux communities and have some better out of the box support for Steam and gaming. Although it wasn’t relevant to me, they have an NVIDIA specific install for NVIDIA GPU owners, which is convenient.

If you have experience with Linux from years past, let me say this one important thing: installing a Linux OS in 2024 is easier and works better out of the box than Windows. The installer worked more reliably, I didn’t have to uncheck 14 boxes to keep my information private, there was no suggestion to enable an AI assistant, and on boot the GPU drivers were installed and worked.
As far as getting the goals of this project going in Pop_OS!

I set up Plex and everything else with Docker via Dockge.
Network shares are as simple as enabling shared folders using the UI. The JBOD part can be accomplished with mergerfs and SnapRAID 5.
AMD drivers worked right away. There is the silly Linux problem of “too much choice” in picking which installer to use for Steam3, but after installation you toggle on Proton compatibility and most games work. protondb is a helpful source for figuring out any known issues.

So what’s wrong with this setup? Nothing. It comes down to how much overhead, both in terms of CPU/RAM usage, and in terms of system maintenance (updates and config changes) you want to manage on host OS more than anything. If I was using this computer regularly as a desktop, I think it would make sense, but considering most services I was looking to run could be run headless, there are better options.

Running with Unraid

Unraid has been around for a while, but I hadn’t heard of it until recently. It’s one of many NAS/Server oriented operating systems available today (see also: Proxmox, TrueNAS Core, openmediavault). The basic idea is a a very small host OS than can serve files from shared folders, and also run virtual machines on top of it. Unraid is a little unique compared to the other options because:

Out of the box it’s built to work as a JBOD solution.
It can run Docker containers separate from virtual machines, which means you don’t need to spin up an initial VM to run containers out of.
They’ve abstracted a lot of the common homeserver uses cases into apps that are relatively easy to install and get running.

There were a few Unraid-specific gotchas I had to figure out when setting it up:

It’s not obvious from the UI how the initial storage array needs to be set up and how a cache drive should be allocated. Specifically:
- The drives need to be cleared to be added to the storage array, so don’t plan on bringing in drives with data already on them.
- You absolutely want a cache drive, although maybe not to actually store cache, but as the primary drive for the Docker containers and VMs. Otherwise (and this is obvious if you think about it), you’re trying to run containers/VMs off of 3.5" drives like it’s 1999 again.
If you want to run a VM off of the computer with full GPU and mouse/keyboard passthrough you need to boot and initially run the VM with VNC output until you install the GPU drivers on the VM’s OS. Then it works great!

Unraid has a free trial, but after that does cost some money. For what it handles for you out of the box it seems worth it to me. Currently I have it configured as:

The JBOD solution I wanted.
All of the Docker containers I was running with Dockge on Pop_OS! running on Unraid directly.
A Windows 10 VM that I can boot into that’s connected to the monitor and keyboard/mouse in my office for Windows testing and… yes… gaming. While I was impressed by what Linux could do via Proton I figured if it was easy to run a Windows VM with passthrough that does nothing but run Steam, why not set it up.

Conclusions

Here’s my final take on this: the appeal of the “big dumb computer box” is I could do all of this. The OS didn’t tell me I needed special hardware to run it, I could decide tomorrow to put another 32GB of RAM in and it would take 10 minutes, if I decide I never want to use it for gaming I could pull the GPU and nuke the Windows VM, if I decide I want to run alllll the things on this I could find a CPU with more cores and go nuts and take the existing CPU / motherboard and turn it into a little baby dumb computer for some other purpose.
Sometimes it’s good to remember what made computers fun and interesting in the first place.
Also look at this guy, who wouldn’t want to run an OS with this guy.

1: OK, I tried a bunch of variations of Linux, and maybe BeOS, and maybe a Hackintosh too....

2: JBOD = “Just a bunch of disks”. Parity means there’s an additional disk that allows at least 1 disk in the array to fail without you losing all your data. When I ran a home server like this on Windows I’d use StableBit DrivePool. It’s a pretty good setup for data you either already have another backup of, or things that aren’t super critical but take up a lot of space.

4: It was somewhat hard to find details online for the Qube 500 so let me add this: it can hold 4 3.5” hard drives, but in a bit of a wild configuration. One will be on the floor of the case, one mounted upside down on the top, one behind the motherboard tray, and one you’d need to repurpose the radiator mount to hold the hard drive. If you want a nice, clean, four-in-a-row kind of set up probably just go get a Fractal mid-tower.

3: In Pop_OS! it’s either a .deb or a flatpak install, both through the Pop_OS! store. The main hitch here is that if you’re running Proton you’re running the game via emulation, which the flatpak version has some issues with.

5: Before actually getting mergerfs and SnapRAID set up I jumped over to Unraid. I don’t think it would have been hard, but it was the point at which I started thinking a server specific OS might be the way to go.

Thanksgiving Cooking Notes, 2024

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 12:04:00 GMT

Even though I’ve made Thanksgiving dinner for the last… 14? years now, I’m surprisingly bad at keeping notes of what went well and didn’t or what was good or wasn’t. I also, as an elder millennial, am not inclined to take pictures of food, so I had to go back a few years for the header image here [^1].

These are the notes on what I made for 2024. For items with recipes I created a separate post and linked to it, so if you use Paprika or something like it you can point right to that URL and download the recipe.

An 18 pound turkey, spatchcocked

One year we hosted a particularly large Thanksgiving that required cooking two birds. I solved the problem by splitting both birds up, cooking the legs and wings separately, then the breasts. It was so much easier I’ve never considered cooking an entire bird, intact, since.

Spatchcocking is just pulling the backbone from the turkey and pressing it flat to cook on a sheet. It cooks faster and more evenly and after cutting the backbone out you can hold it in the air like the Predator.

I coat it in mayonnaise and, as long as I have it on hand, this spice mix.

Homemade cranberry sauce

On the “canned versus homemade” cranberry sauce debate, I’m pretty firmly on the homemade side. Canned mixed with mayo on a sandwich is fine, but homemade is really delightful on turkey. The recipe I use includes a good amount of onion, some port wine, and ginger.

Gravy

On the “jarred versus homemade” gravy debate I’ve usually fallen on the side of jarred because making gravy after the bird comes out takes up stove space but this year I made my own and, yeah, ok, it’s a lot better. The recipe was simply 1:1:8 pan drippings, flour, and chicken stock.

Sweet potato casserole

Sure, who doesn’t love a vegetable dish that’s basically a pie. This is the recipe I use.

Buttermilk Biscuits

I’ve made buttermilk biscuits from this recipe every Thanksgiving, and they’re the messiest thing to make and the most temperamental. On good years they come out amazing, on bad years I wish I had just picked up a package of King’s Hawaiian and called it a day. You’ll get the best results if you can find lower protein flour, keep the butter frozen right until you use it, and watch them closely in the oven so the bottoms don’t burn.

Spinach with dried cherries and pistachios

I don’t have a recipe for this one, it’s just wilt a big bag of spinach in some olive oil, toss in as many dried cherries and lightly salted pistachios as you like.

Pecan Pie

We always had pecan pie at Thanksgiving when I was growing up. I don’t know if it was the original Karo recipe or not, but “empty a bottle of corn syrup” has always seemed… a bit gross to me, so I make this slightly fancier version with maple syrup, honey, and bourbon.

[^1]: A good pumpkin pie, although I was outvoted in making another one this year in favor of Jello Cake.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 12:04:00 GMT

Back in 2022 I picked up a well-loved copy of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold from our favorite cat rescue / used book store. I’d never read anything by John le Carré, but after his passing in 2020 I saw all these “best of le Carré” lists that had me intrigued. His work is often described as “the opposite of James Bond”, le Carré[^1] himself worked for MI5 and MI6, and many of the books have a central plot based on real events.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy usually comes up first or second on these “best of le Carré” lists. I picked it up at the library recently and finished it this weekend. It’s an interesting book because, to be honest, it’s quite boring. There are entire chapters dedicated to Smiley, a sad, old man, reading through files and remembering what happened in the past. The latter half of the book, when the intrigue picks up, is primarily conversations between two people. After I finished it, I wondered how the heck they made a movie out of it. I vaguely remembered people liking the movie, but hadn’t seen it, so I decided to give it a watch as well.

The book, like the movie, requires you to pay attention. Missing a line (or a scene) doesn’t ruin the ending, but it does rob you of some of the richness of how well woven together the plot is. If any of this post intrigues you, I’d recommend the same thing I did: read the book, then watch the movie. There were a few small parts of the book that I missed in my reading that are made much clearer in the movie, which made me enjoy both a bit more.

There were also some choices in the movie I particularly enjoyed. Nothing here is a spoiler:

They could have made the scene where Smiley describes his one meeting with Karla a flashback, but Gary Oldman does such a good job of pantomiming the story to an empty chair, and never showing Karla makes his entire existence that much more mysterious.
Similarly with Ann, who we never see face on. Smiley’s feelings about Ann are relevant to the plot, but even in the book she is presented as more an emotional force guiding conversations than a real person, so this is a fitting treatment.
Tom Hardy as Ricki Tarr is much more compelling in the movie than in the book. I think in the book he’s presented as another slippery, unreliable source, but in the movie that’s boiled down to Guillam punching him a few times and getting over it.

OK, now some light spoilers

The one thing I didn’t enjoy about the movie was Prideaux’s treatment. His story, both as a teacher and a spy, occupies many pages of the book. I can understand it needed to be condensed to fit the film’s runtime, but the ending of the book is much kinder to him than the ending of the movie. Not to mention Roach never gets any sort of a redeeming moment. It’s one of those things the richness of a book can cover better than the plot beats of a movie.

And now a large spoiler

About 2/3s of the way through, my wife Andrea, who had paid little attention to the film and previously made claims for almost every other character being the mole, declared definitively, after seeing the scene with Bill and Ann in the garden, that Bill was the mole because he couldn’t be trusted.

Well… yes. But there’s more nuance! Isn’t there? Or is that the whole point, Smiley should have known he was a shit from day one. Or maybe did know. Or maybe Smiley should have picked up some romance novels and realized the cheater is awlays the bad guy.

[^1]: A pen name, but interestingly only needed because he wrote his first two books while working for MI6.

PEM

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 21:03:13 GMT

School has been out this week due to a teacher’s strike so I figured I’d do something mildly educational and took Lorelei over to the Peabody Essex Museum. I’d, somehow, never been, although Lorelei has. It’s quite nice, and a good size, and they had a guitar on display so that’s cool.

We saw most of the main exhibits, did some arts and crafts, then went over to the excellent Essex Pizza across the street for a cheeseburger pizza.

The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 15:15:00 GMT

The last two books I read (Supercommunicators and You Only Die Once) were non-fiction, but I usually have a fiction and non-fiction book going at the same time. This was my most recent fiction one.

I read The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, also by Stuart Turton, back in 2021. Plot wise they both work the same way: a bit of exposition, a dramatic reveal, and then a little puzzle that you don’t have enough pieces to understand to put everything together. The doling out of new information happens frequently enough and the books are short enough that you go along with the building mystery until the end. Basically, if you enjoy mysteries with a little bit of a sci-fi or gothic horror twist, you'd probably like either of them.

The Last Murder at the End of the World feels like it has some thematic overlap with Horizon Zero Dawn, to the point where if I found out Stuart Turton had never played the game I’d honestly be shocked. This isn’t fan fiction by any means, but while reading the book I kept picturing the world of HZD. Considering I really enjoy the HZD series, that’s not a bad thing! And if you like HZD, maybe you’d like this book too!

Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 15:15:00 GMT

I’ve read some of Duhigg’s books in the past, they’re all good, maybe a little “chicken soup for the MBA soul”-ish. Here’s a few quick take aways from Supercommunicators, his latest book:

I love referencing this song, so I’ll do it again, but before having a conversation: “stop, take some time to think, figure out what’s important to you”[^1]. Duhigg summarizes this idea in four rules, which are:
1. Pay attention to what kind of conversation is occurring.
2. Share your goals, and ask what others are seeking.
3. Ask about others’s feelings, and share your own.
4. Explore if identities are important to this discussion.
In any given conversation things work best if you continuously refine the conversation until everyone gets what they want. Or at least gets something they want. As an old co-worker used to say, “everyone should leave a little unhappy”. The book Getting to Yes goes into this in more detail and was, amazingly, the first research to understand that conversations shouldn’t be one person “winning” or exerting control over another.
The Internet makes all of this a lot harder. Duhigg’s four guidelines for talking online are:
1. Overemphasize politeness.
2. Underemphasize sarcasm [^2]
3. Express more gratitude, deference, greetings, apologies, and hedges.
4. Avoid criticism in public forums.

If any of this seemed interesting, go pick the book up, your local library probably has a copy. The examples used throughout are interesting and thought provoking. For example, if you’re pro (or against) guns, could you share your perspective with someone on the other side of the argument? If you’re for vaccines could you convince someone against them to take them? If you had to convince a loved one to change something they’re doing, do you know how to approach that conversation? If any of these seem hard, maybe something in this book will help.

[^1]: Stop! by Against Me! [^2]: Haha, oh no.

You Only Die Once

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 12:00:00 GMT

I saw “You Only Die Once” at the local bookstore[^1], and being one to judge books by their covers and interior illustrations, it seemed fun. It acknowledges some overlap with 4000 Weeks - Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, but with more humor and less philosophy. Also, there’s worksheets and questionaires to fill out, if those are things you find helpful. Overall, Jodi Wellman would like you to live this life:

The book begins with an explanation of the phrase momento mori, and uses it as a touchpoint throughout. As someone who studied Latin at a Catholic High School this was not a new idea to me, but if you need the TL;DR, it’s this: never forget that you’re a skeleton wrapped in meat, sitting on a planet that could be vaporized by space plasma jets at any time, in a universe that will eventually cease to exist. And uh, that’s ok! That’s the point of life. Do what you will with this new knowledge.

I’d recommend either this book or 4000 Weeks (favoring this one only if you enjoy worksheets and cartoons of skulls) but if you hate reading and just want to know how much time you have left, here’s a handy calculator:

[^1]: Shamefully I ended up buying it online, but at half the cover price.

We’ve Moved

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

For quite a while now I’ve had both this site (jmartucci.com) and Built with Coffee. For years this domain has been a simple redirect to Built With Coffee, but I decided to split to two into two different things. Why?

The codebase of Built with Coffee had the refuse of about 8 different framework and CMS implementations, plus what can only be described as a “crap-ton” of weird little React components. As of now both sites have no React on them, only Astro components and a teeny tiny bit of plain JavaScript.
Mixing a blog with a statement of who I am professionally felt weird, maybe more so this year after writing things like this and this.
The new structure of this site overlaps with a 🤫 side project I’ve been working on.
Ideally with everything cleaned up I’ll actually start writing more.

Montreal - Trip Notes

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Back from another family vacation with notes on how things went. This year we went to Montreal!

Why Montreal

Andrea and I went to Montreal for our honeymoon and had a good time. This time around (13 years later) we had Lorelei with us. We had gotten her a passport late last year with the intention of traveling somewhere outside the states, and thought why not start with a location that doesn’t also involve a long flight.

Transportation

We opted to drive to Montreal, with the intention of seeing family in Vermont on the way up, and with a vague notion of stopping somewhere on the way back. The “up” plans were dashed by some rare-for-the-area tornado warnings, and the return trip was much more of a “let’s just get home” affair because of torrential downpours the whole way. Oh well.

Montreal is an odd spot to get to from Boston because you’ll quickly figure out that driving is faster and cheaper than the train or flying, even though both of those options would be convenient once arriving in Montreal. Although we drove up, we parked the car under the hotel and never used it until we left, relying on public transportation (or our feet) instead.

Accommodations

We stayed at Hotel Bonaventure. My review is mixed. I would say in general the way it looks on the website is much nicer than it looks in real life. Also the crowd there was an interesting mix of families, business travelers having meetings on site, and then by the weekend, groups up to party in Montreal. This is probably true of any hotel, but it was perhaps more noticeable here because the one outstanding point of the hotel is it’s pool, which is set inside a little park in the middle of the hotel. The hotel is on the 10th and 11th floors of Place Bonaventure, so it’s like a little urban forest-oasis that pretty much everyone who was staying at the hotel hung out at.

This side of the hotel was poorly maintained, but did have this nice duck pond, which was closed to access almost immediately after we found it.

The pool has generous open hours, and all told we probably spent a good 8 or so hours in it over the course of the week.

Activities

Montreal has plenty of things to do with a nine-year old travel companion. We tried to plan things for the mornings then pop back to the pool for the afternoon. With that routine we could have easily spent another few days in the city, but here’s what we did get to see:

Tuesday - Pool

Lots of pool time. It was hot this day, and Andrea left after lunch to go to Bota Bota for the afternoon, so Lorelei and I did the less luxurious version of it at the hotel.

Wednesday - Art and Tea and Books

After breakfast we went to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. I’ll say this now and repeat it later - we found many of the activities in Montreal to be “reasonably sized”, that is, not overwhelming exhibits, but enough to be interesting.

The museum also had some fun activities set up for kids, including one where you could make your own art via collage, with a bunch of stock art printed out for the kids to cut up and color.

After the museum we went up the street for Tea Time at the Palm Court in the Ritz-Carlton Montreal. Everything was delicious and proper tea-like, and it was a nice spot to relax in.

On the way back to the hotel/pool, we stopped at some bookstores. I’m honestly a little jealous of the bookstores up there, Indigo in particular had shelf after shelf of genre fiction like I haven’t seen in an American bookstore since the pre-Amazon days.

Thursday - Olympic Park, and Cats

On Thursday we took the Metro up to the Olympic park to see the Biodome and Insectarium. As I said about the Museum of Fine Arts, both were an appropriately interesting but not overwhelming size, and had pretty unique layouts. The Biodome is a former velodrome facility converted into exhibits with four ecosystems from North America, each placed into the design of the original facility in interesting ways.

The Insectarium tour starts with you going down under the building into a simulated ant colony, which Lorelei enjoyed. It then works its way up through a few small exhibits of live and preserved insects to the glass section at the top of the building, which is a large butterfly garden.

On the way back we made our way to the Happy Cat Cafe. There are no cat cafes near us where the cats are actually in the dining area, so it was a treat to find one where they were! It struck me as a place that could only exist because Montreal is very accessible but seemingly not yet gentrified.

Cats on the table might not be everyone’s thing.

We took an Uber back from the cafe to the hotel, and our innocuous conversation about chowder[^1] took a bit of a turn when I mentioned the Metro was wonderful compared to the Boston T. Our driver then informed us that America thinks it’s #1 at everything, but it’s falling apart and spending all its money on the military, while us Americans eat up all the propaganda fed to us by television. Well, maybe not us, riding in the Uber, because we were smart enough to see what it’s like outside of America. Anyway, we’d know all this already if we listened to Joe Rogan.

Friday - Street Art (and more cats!)

I looked up what might be happening while we were in Montreal when planning our vacation, and saw the Festival Mtl en Arts would be going on. We took the Metro up and walked down Saint Catherine. It was surprisingly smaller than the Arts Festival here in Beverly, but it wasn’t a bad day for a walk, and we got some art.

After that we took the Metro back towards the Old Port, walked past Notre-Dame (Lorelei could not be convinced to go inside), then stopped and got ice cream at Chat Colate, which is a cat themed cafe that does not have actual cats in it.

Things we didn’t do

There were certainly a number of activities we considered we just didn’t have time for. I would have liked to make it to Mount Royal Park, to have spent more time in the Old Port, or to have made it out to the islands. I also didn’t consider that our hotel was right next to the train station, and we could have taken the train to Quebec City for a day or two.

Food

I don’t have a lot of notes for food. While there’s lots of good food in Montreal, and we ate a lot, I wouldn’t say any place we ate at was particularly amazing. Some highlights:

Fiorellino had pretty good Italian food.
Pigeon Coffee in McGill had the only strong coffee I got in Montreal, decent breakfast, and a relaxing greenhouse-like interior space.
Sushi Rosa was an odd little place but it had good sushi, and was inexpensive. It has become quite convenient for us that on any given day Lorelei would be content eating two dozen avocado/cucumber rolls for any given meal.
After sushi we got dessert at C’ChoColat, which likely appeals mostly to college students with a near infinite metabolism, but the chocolate fondue was… something!

Fin

Overall I think we’d give the trip a 10/10 as far as travel with a child goes. Some closing notes:

One great advantage of the Metro / RESO connections is the availability of clean public bathrooms. This might be a weird thing to note, but compared to Boston, where every bathroom connected to public transportation looks like the one from Trainspotting, it was quite an improvement.
Restaurants in Montreal universally make great Shirley Temples.
As much as we tried to ignore everything about America while we were there, they were playing recaps of the Presidential debate in the Metro stations on Friday.

[^1]:What else does one talk about when someone says they are from Boston.

DOOM! Or, the web developer market in 2024

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

If you’ve ever referred to yourself as a “web developer”, you’re probably aware that the job market right now is not great.

As someone who was out of a job for a bit, this is my hot take on the current state of things.

What is happening!?!

Maybe you’ve read things online about the effects of the end of ZIRP, Pandemic “overhiring”, or the rise of the robots. The reality is the web, as long as I’ve known it, has always been boom and bust, because it’s currently the only place where you can address a market of ~6 billion people with not a whole lot of effort. If you get that right — boom! If you don’t, the “not a whole lot of effort” is also pretty easy to dismantle. It’s just made out of people! Your office might just be a WeWork[^1] and there’s no inventory or machinery. Most of the people who wrote the code wrote it to work without them even! How fortunate for the people running these companies.

But the vibes in 2024 feel different

At least I think they do, for a few reasons:

1. A web developer is not a strategic asset any more

Let’s get some definitions out of the way, because I’m going to use them a few times from here out:

Web developer - A person who makes services and/or UIs that are consumed via a web browser.

Web 1.0 - You go to yahoo.com and search for a local Thai restaurant. You find nothing relevant, but the first page of search results has a link to a blog where someone has documented the history of Thai food in America through stories of working in their family’s restaurant.

Web 2.0 - You you go to google.com and search for a local Thai restaurant. You get a map showing all the ones near you, with reviews generated by other human beings. The order of the restaurants on the page is determined by which one paid Google more. You find one that looks interesting and see that they have a page on Facebook where they last posted three years ago. The blog you found in the Web 1.0 days still exists, it’s just on page 1,275,431 of the results.

In both the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 days, being a web developer was a huge asset. For Web 1.0, there just wasn’t a lot of people who knew how do put things on the Internet. For Web 2.0, you rode the wave of the Internet extending to the whole world, and taking input from the world. Web 2.0 was quickly followed (or overlapped) by the rise of mobile phones, which extended the domain of web developers to these devices and introduced new and interesting avenues of development.

Today though, we as developers benefit from all of those solved problems, but suffer from lack of new interesting ones. For any given company online today, you’ll find 20 similar competitors, all with the same UIs, differentiated more by their marketing or legal departments than anything on the web.

And while each of those services still needs an app and a website, the market for new devices to help solve new problems has dried up, unless you really believe in the AR/VR future. And if you do believe in that future, you’d be better off with a background in 3D game development than web development.

And on top of that…

2. Web 3.0 is very unfriendly to the web

Alright so we defined web 1.0 and 2.0 above, so what is web 3.0?

Web 3.0 - The Internet replaces money. Or, it replaces contracts. No wait, it replaces reality? If that’s too much what if it just replaces websites with a colorful animated blob that reads websites to you?

The blobs reading websites to you might be the most concerning development for traditional websites. While they rely on data from websites (see the big deals made with sites like Reddit and Stack Overflow lately), they also want you to not actually go to the website for information. This has already been a growing issue with Google search, where a simple search returns inline “answers” for results, and even a more complicated search returns primarily ads or the major sites Google wants you to see.

I don’t have any predictions about where this leads us. It seems not great. Certainly there’s nothing stopping anyone from putting a website up on the WWW, but if it’s completely undiscoverable and simply scraped by an AI bot, what’s the point.

Speaking of AI…

3. AI won’t take your job, but maybe it + one of the five billion other people who learned how to code will

I’m not an economist, I won’t make claims about whether the market for software developers is oversaturated or not, but it’s a simple reality that there’s a lot more developers out there than there was 10 or 20 years ago. Part of it is this idea that “learning how to code” is an “easy” way to get into a middle class life, a claim that keeps getting repeated over, and over, and over in sometimes truly absurd ways.

Part of it is simple economics I can understand. 20 years ago when I went to college:

a degree cost x.
you could assume that almost any major[^2] would get you at least x per year as a salary to start.

You could do some math based on expenses and projected increases over time and figure out how long it would take to pay off the degree. To put it in simpler terms, I went to school and got an English degree, which was considered a bad idea if I wanted to make piles of money[^3], but a fine idea if you wanted a white collar job. Today if you’re not in a STEM field the logic looks more like:

a degree costs x
the starting salary is GET FUCKED.

Most STEM fields might get to x = x, but to get to > x going into software is your safest bet.

On top of that most software positions don’t require any professional certifications or further education. If you’re looking to min/max your college education around salary, it’s a pretty clear cut winner.

Also, I’m only talking about the US here. That thing I mentioned before about Web 2.0 reaching the entire world inspired people to become developers around the world. I won’t get into the pros and cons of sourcing talent from other countries, but I will note that we’re rapidly approaching a future where we see the industry assume every role will be part developer, part AI, and junior and mid level roles become a person who knows some code and how to ask AI for the rest. AI might not take your job, but it will make standing out a lot harder.

Now the good stuff

I don’t have a great conclusion here. I am still a “web developer”. Currently I’m working on something that is web based, but you’d never find it unless you work in a niche field. I intend to keep doing this up until we’re at the point where you can yell “go go gadget website!” to generate a fully functioning SAAS.

I will say — I think there’s a lot of opportunity to make things better online. If you venture off the main drag of the Internet, away from the shining Salesforce megatower or Apple spaceship campus or Facebook legless metaverse portal, you’ll find that things get shitty real quick[^4]. Local businesses and restaurants at least made an attempt to be online during the pandemic, but you’re more likely to find them infrequently updated with no online sales presence, or at best using something called STEVESALES that’s a pile of CGI scripts written in 2001 by a guy named Steve who currently raises alpacas in Vermont. My daughter’s school puts report cards on a site that frequently renders nothing but a blank page, every type of doctor I see has a different patient portal that is varying levels of obtuse and frustrating, and the last time we tried using a local bank we gave up because the website appeared to have been made by the apes from 2001: A Space Odyssey that didn’t touch the obelisk.

That went into a bit of a rant, but here’s what I’m saying: we might be past the “shiny toy” days of the Internet, but this idea of people getting information and communicating with each other online is going to go on forever. If you like building things for the web, find the little weird corner that interests you the most, and make it a little better. Maybe that’s not a sure shot to a job where you commute in a car where the doors go up and down instead of side to side, but then again the early days of the web never held that promise, and people built it anyway.

[^1]: uh, unless WeWork is gone? It’s hard to keep up. [^2]: OK, sure, certain degrees even 20 years ago were known to be unlikely to be economically viable, but they were also often studied by people who didn’t have to worry about things like economic viability. [^3]: Unless you went into law. [^4]: I mean the missing legs was shitty but I have not personally built a metaverse, so maybe there’s just complexity I don’t understand.

A Link Trick for Apple Freeform

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 09 Mar 2024 15:15:00 GMT

Apple’s Freeform app is a curious thing. It was released in 2022 and hasn’t seen a lot of updates since then, but it works well with any device (even the iPhone), and it’s great at working like a Mac native app should work. Drag an image in, its sticks to the canvas. Drag a link out of Safari, get a link on the canvas. It’s fairly performant, even if you throw piles of files into it. And (importantly), it animates gifs if you put gifs in.

One other Apple native thing I use a lot is app callback URLs and shortcut URLs (if you’re unaware, you can link to a shortcut on any device with the format shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=Shortcut%20name%20here). They do work, but it took me a minute to figure out how. Paste one in and you get plain text, drag a shortcut in and it bounces out. But, there’s two ways to add them:

One way:

Paste the link in as plain text.
Add a space or return after 😃

Real tricky huh? But not very intuitive if you just wanted the link.

The other option:

Make a link with the “Link” option under images to any valid URL (www.apple.com even, as it suggests).
Edit the URL to be the callback or shortcut URL you want. You’ll see an error (it can’t generate a preview, which is sad), but then you’ll have a big gray button you can click on to run the callback or shortcut. The button is nice if you’re a fan of large tap targets, especially for iPad / phone use. You can decorate it with some text over it, or doodle on it or something to make it less gray.

Here’s a demo video of pasting in the callback URL to the draft of this post, saved in Bear.

Recent Reading: Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! and The Good Enough Job

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

In this period I’m in currently, “figuring out what’s next”, I’ve been hitting the library more often and doing more reading. Two recent library pickups were Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! by Julio Vincent Gambuto and The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work by Simone Stolzoff.

They fall into a genre that has picked up since COVID, the “why the fuck are we doing (gestures broadly) this?!” genre. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman and Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen fall into this category (both are referenced by these two books), as well as How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell, a standout from pre-COVID times. There’s variations of this genre with more specific focuses, like viewing the modern world and it’s problems through the lens of Stoicism, but I tend to avoid those, as many years of Latin class has already informed me that in modern times Marcus Aurelius would have a depressing blog no one reads and Diogenes would be on 4chan all day.

Between these two books, if I was going to recommend one, it would be Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! Gambuto’s writing is as a delight. Two excerpts I particularly enjoyed while reading it:

What happened to the promise of the twentieth century? This is where it was all headed? Here? We worked tirelessly to become the most powerful nation in the history of the world so 2 percent of us could have trust funds and the rest could work round-the-clock? We won world wars and stormed the beaches of Normandy so we could gift the world Facetune? So we could stare blankly at the refrigerator at Whole Foods parsing the difference between cage-free, free-range, pasture-raised, farm-raised, and omega-3-vitamin-enhanced eggs? I just want an egg! An egg! We all just want fucking eggs! There are three hundred shootings a month in Chicago, and 38 million people live below the poverty line in this country, and were asking voice-controlled Al assistants what types of eggs are the best? We have lost our minds.

and:

Sure, I have all day Saturday to sit on this phone so we can somehow find the one person in your mangled corporate org chart who has the power to reverse the double charge on my Visa for an umbrella I bought in the rain because the old one was so incredibly shitty that it fell apart in my hands the first time it encountered water. Bullshit is not even having a customer service phone number. Click here to text with Emma, our Al chatbot who can read real, actual human words and respond with utterly unrelated nonsense, like she was programmed by a Shih Tzu. Don't worry. She learns on her own. In two years, shell be able to charge your Visa whenever you even think about umbrellas or rain or Shih Tzus.

Related, something I read this morning: Klarna AI assistant handles two-thirds of customer service chats in its first month. But, the book is not entirely about how bad AI bots are (although I would read such a book). The central premise is if you treat everything in your life like a subscription to your time, what things are you subscribed to that take away more than they add. His suggestion to figuring this out is to turn everything off “autopilot” and look deeply at where your money, time, and attention are going to. The conceit of referring to everything in life as a subscription works because in a Capitalist society, well, everything can be tied back to consuming things:

Monbiot admits, "I'm not saying the small things don't matter. I'm saying they should not matter to the exclusion of things that matter more. Every little bit counts. But not for very much." Monbiot goes on to explain that "the great political transition of the past fifty years, driven by corporate marketing, has been a shift from addressing our problems collectively to addressing them individually. In other words, it has turned us from citizens into consumers. It's not hard to see why we have been herded down this path. As citizens, joining together to demand political change, we are powerful. As consumers, we are almost powerless."

(Monbiot here being George Monbiot).

The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work covers one small slice of what Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! covers, essentially overcommitment (or oversubscription?) to work. It’s a quick read, and fine, but it’s a book I think would have been better in a blog format. While the stories Stolzoff chose to write about are somewhat interesting, he doesn’t tie them together well, and I feel like more breadth in examples would have gotten to a more interesting point than the ones in the book do, which more or less boil down to “I was considered successful and then I decided to consider myself successful instead of applying society’s meaning of success to myself”, which sometimes feels a bit hollow when it’s someone with a lot of money who goes off to be successful in something that just has more meaning to them. I guess good for them.

TL;DR

Here’s the short story of many books in this genre:

People around the world (but primarily focusing on Americans) have moved away from religions and social groups as the primary drivers for meaning in their lives.
In the absence of the above, it’s up to the individual to find meaning in their lives. In the absence of social safety nets provided by the above, it’s also up to the individual to support themselves.
Both sides of capitalism seek to fulfill the individuals needs, in terms of supporting them (your job gives you money, meaning, health care, a family?), and fulfilling them (ohh new shiny!).
The Internet connected era has not actually improved the individuals ability to find meaning or security, but instead given corporations unprecedented leverage and scale to make us feel less connected and more desirous of things to fill the emptiness in our lives.

So how do you fix it? Well that’s up to you, the individual, to figure out! If you need some background music while figuring it out, I suggest this:

I give 2023 an A (but the A is for Anxiety)

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 21:15:00 GMT

This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while (I started a draft on World Mental Health Day, October of last year!), but in either looking back at 2023 or looking forward to 2024, now seems like the right time to finally sit down and finish it.

What was up with 2023?

Let’s go back one year further: In 2022 I started feeling anxiety more often and to a greater extent. I should be clear, this didn’t start in 2022. My anxiety has ebbed and flowed since I was a teenager, and I’ve dealt with it successfully (or unsuccessfully) since then. Late in 2022 I had a few panic attacks. In 2023 these didn’t magically get better, instead I started having more intense panic attacks with greater frequency.

... define a “panic attack’

A panic attack, for me, is like my brain doing this:

And once I’m in panic mode, I generally feel like I’ve lost control of my body, which could mean feeling like I’m going to die, or pass out, or throw up, or all three. It is a real hoot, let me tell you. It usually starts quickly but then it can last for minutes or… sometimes hours. And unsurprisingly once I’ve had one, my body goes into full

mode. Which means one panic attack is usually followed by another, and another, and… you get the idea.

Well that sounds awful

It is! But 2023 saw both sides of anxiety: having it, but also dealing with it.

How do you deal with anxiety?

Before I go further, let me say this: I’m not a doctor, psychologist, or therapist. I’m also not a dog, nor is this generated by AI, which is to say this is my experience and hopefully someone else finds it and benefits from it in some way. I’m writing this in part because it’s helpful for me, but also because there’s surprisingly few things out there written by men about dealing with anxiety that don’t fall into the bucket of:

I threw away everything in my life and hiked across the country to live on an alpaca farm and find my inner peace.
or: every day I think about the stoics of the Roman Empire and how they would deal with stress.

If that works for you, great! Who doesn’t love alpacas and togas. Or togas made of alpaca wool, if that’s where you end up. But these are some more practical things that work for me, with notes on the pros and cons, presented as they were presented to me.

Exercise! Get on your feet, get up and make it happen.

In general I’m very pro-exercise, I do some sort of workout almost every day. It certainly helps me with anxiety by two mechanisms:

It makes me much more aware of my body and how it responds to real physical stress.
It gives me the sensation of an elevated heart rate in a controlled environment. If I need to back off, I can.

So when doesn’t it help? While it can keep my overall anxiety levels down, mixing physical stress with anxiety I haven’t dealt with can sometimes be a terrible combo. I’ve had some miserable panic attacks while mountain biking. I simply wasn’t present with the activity I was doing (which I usually enjoy!) and instead trapped in the anxiety loop illustrated above. And when your brain starts firing off all the ”oh shit oh no” chemicals just to find your body is halfway there already, well, it’s not a great mix.

Have you tried [insert app name here] for meditation?

There is a very real physical thing that happens during a panic attack where your breathing goes out of control. The whole “breathe into a bag” trope is… somewhat true, in that it’s asking you to focus your breathing on one specific action, and to take deep breaths. Which is all good for dealing with a panic attack, but part of my change in thinking in 2023 was that ideally we’d not have panic attacks at all, right?

As far as meditation goes, imagine the same “anxiety loop” gif above but every once in a while one of the anxious thoughts dissolves to nothingness. I think I’d have to run off to the alpaca farm to have few enough thoughts for that to work reliably.

Just relax! Just do it! Do it now! RELAX!!!

Personally there are times where I have to acknowledge there’s too much bandwidth in the brain pipeline, and cut some things out. If I can. Sometimes it’s hard when those things are anxious thoughts along with like, a job, a family, operating heavy machinery, etc.

Also, it is never a helpful thing to say “take a vacation!” or “take a break!” or “just relax!” to someone dealing with anxiety, because the anxiety is not going to magically stay at home while you’re laying on the beach.

Talk to somebody.

There’s value in talking about anxiety beyond just therapy. It’s part of why I’m writing this blog post. Talking about anxiety to everyone or anyone can be hard, though. If someone at work asks how you’re doing and you reply:

once, ok sure, we all have bad days. If you do it often (or, uh, constantly), let’s be honest, this probably isn’t in Bob’s personal or professional capacity to be able to deal with. Even a good friend or family member might get to a point of asking “ok, but allllllways?” Whereas with a good therapist you’re paying them (or if you’re lucky, insurance is paying them) to always have the patience to say, in this order:

“I hear you”
“your feelings are valid”
“why do you feel that way?”

Over and over until a 💡 turns on in your brain.

New for 2023! The 💡 for me this year was understanding anxiety as not just a thing to get over, but a thing I live with that isn’t my fault, and if I had times where I responded or acted a way because I was anxious, that’s just who I am.

In the past I thought of anxiety more like a broken arm, something that could be fixed, when in reality it’s more like a missing arm. If you kept trying to do things with your missing arm instead of adapting to use the arm you did have, people would think you silly. But when your silly responses are in your head, no one else knows where they’re coming from! And also your brain is really great at convincing you to keep trying to use the missing arm, because with mental health it’s like your brain tricking itself? Hopefully this analogy was helpful. My brain wrote it, so it could be another trick.

We have drugs for this.

I’d had many, many panic attacks before a doctor finally recognized them and said “hey that’s probably terrible, at the very least take Ativan if one happens”. And that stuff works, for me, with relatively few side effects, but it’s a “break glass in case of emergency” solution, not an every day one. Which I thought was fine, until this year, when I finally put it together that anxiety was affecting me all the damn time.

New for 2023! I started taking an SSRI. This was suggested last time I started therapy, but I’d read so many bad things about them that I was hesitant. This time around I was much more in the “well what’s the worst that could happen” camp, so I started one, and it works. If I had to describe how my brain feels with them, take the gif of my brain from above and remove the anxiety loop. I might still have anxious thoughts, but they process and go away, giving me a lot more space to think about actually important things. As far as negative things for SSRIs go, I only have two notes:

I put on some weight. This is less an effect of the drug itself, and more that since I no longer go through long periods of mentally and physically feeling like shit, I eat more regularly. I wouldn’t say it’s a bad thing, on the whole.
For the first few weeks I still needed Ativan handy, because it’s quite common until the SSRI has fully taken effect to have “breakthrough” panic attacks. If a normal panic attack is anxiety building over time until it becomes unbearable, a breakthrough one is like you feeling pretty much fine then HELLO immediate panic attack. I’ll be honest — these were much worse than normal ones. I’ll use another terrible analogy: imagine being hit by a bus. I was used to seeing the bus coming, this was more like I had headphones in and the bus came from behind. But after a few weeks I stopped having panic attacks entirely, which is great!

Let me conclude by saying: 2023 wasn’t only anxiety. Lots of good things happened. Some bad things happened. Anxiety is always there, but in 2024 I’m hopeful that’s a thing I can acknowledge but never really think about, instead of the other way around.

Cozy Gaming Season

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 24 Dec 2023 05:00:00 GMT

Almost every year this time of year I pick up some “cozy games”, which generally means indie games that aren’t overly mentally taxing, have a good story, have a good gameplay loop, and have an “end” or an “I’ve enjoyed this enough” experience that you can hit in a few hours. The kid of thing you could finish between Christmas and New Years.

Here’s an incomplete list of games that have fallen into this bucket, if you’re looking for something to finish out the year. Everything links to Steam but they're pretty widely available. 🌟 = ones I really enjoyed.

Metroidvanias

Games where you explore, power up, and explore some more.

Super Jumpman

Games where hand eye coordination is all you need.

VVVVVV 🌟
Celeste 🌟

Chill racing games

No competition just vibes.

art of rally 🌟
Lonely Mountains: Downhill

Story time

Games with relatively limited mechanics where you’re really just learning about the world you’re part of.

Rogue-likes

Die, try again.

Hades 🌟

Strategy and Card Games

Take some time to think before you click.

Tiny adventures

Like the OG 2D Zelda games.

Death’s Door 🌟
Nobody Saves the World

For 2023

This year I’ve got a Steam Deck to play on (thaaaanks Kyle), which is the perfect cozy gaming device, and I’m giving these a shot:

Yeet

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 00:40:00 GMT

This is just a post to say I was laid off last week. I won’t write an elegy on the love of a corporation lost, I never presumed this was a forever thing and I would hope that no one reading here is naive enough to believe it ever is.

Instead I’m thinking a bit more about the future, in all it’s uncertainty. But the two things I do know now are:

I’m going to take some time off, first. I haven’t taken more than a week and a few days in about 10 years, and that includes a multiple moves and the birth of our child. While keeping an eye out for the next thing I'm going to tackle some personal projects I never got to while full-time employed.
I’m not sure I want to go back to playing the corporate meta-game of leveling and promotions and fighting for access to the right projects and right people. I don’t know what avoiding that entails, but maybe that’s what part of the next few months are for. I’ve switched professional careers three times, I’d like to believe that I’m still flexible enough to find a path that’s going to make me happy in the long run.

What I will say for the past: I worked with a really great team on an interesting project for, at least in my experience, a pretty long time. I still believe in the power of the Internet to help bring people together, and what I worked on did that, every day, for a lot of people. As with most things builders build it will live on without me, but I can say with some pride of this one, “hey, I worked on that!”

More with Less

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 04:00:00 GMT

I read Why did the metaverse die? Because Silicon Valley doesn’t understand the concept of fun yesterday. As the title suggests, it primarily talks to the failure of the metaverse due to its inability to find “fun” reasons to use it. But it also talks about how Silicon Valley is so obsessed with “productivity”. If you’ve ever moved from Notion to Asana to Airtable to Monday to Jira to Trello and back, or used a combination of more than one of those on the same day, you’d probably understand why I put quote marks around the word productivity. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of those apps, but I doubt they’d ever add a feature that shows you some objective increase in productivity / spend metric compared to not using them.

It did have me thinking about how I previously worked alongside a team that ran all of their standups in front of a wall, with their sprint tasks on notecards in a simple three column To Do, Doing, Done arrangement. There’s a lot to be said for this: if someone wanted to change the current sprint, they had to walk to the wall, in front of all of their teammates, and move or remove or replace the card. If you wanted me to argue for in-office work, this is an example of it. People meeting in a physical space with physical entities. Their system did not scale, you couldn’t offshore it, management couldn’t query their past results and look at sprint velocity or how many points a specific developer delivered. On the other hand it cost about $20 in notecards and tape per year (for the whole team, not per user!). And for the people involved there was some actual excitement in moving something to the done column, instead of the empty experience of dragging a Jira ticket, or worse, having automation move it for you.

All of this to say the obvious: you should ask if any new thing solves any problems for you. But Silicon Valley is often an Ouroboros of not-solving-problem companies adopting not-solving-problem-solutions at scale with lots of money, and trickling down these not-solving-problem ideas to the rest of us.

Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 04:00:00 GMT

Triggers ended up on one of my “want to read” lists after seeing it at a local bookstore. I think I mostly liked the cover, but if you look through my past reading list and you’ll see a fair number of books on similar topics. Triggers has some themes in common with books like Atomic Habits and The Checklist Manifesto and Smarter Faster Better, specifically how do you change your routines and thinking about how you live your life to achieve meaningful change. Or, to use the title in a sentence: when something in your environment triggers you, do you respond without thinking, or do you introspectively look at how that trigger impacts you then respond. And can you get to a point where you respond to triggers in your environment as you want to without having to think about them.

One point that stood out to me in this book that was unique to it was the idea of looking at a set of goals with active questions instead of passive ones. The example it uses is changing this type of review:

How happy were you today?
How meaningful was your day?
How positive were your relationships with people?
How engaged were you?

to this:

Did you do your best to be happy?
Did you do your best to find meaning?
Did you do your best to build positive relationships with people?
Did you do your best to be fully engaged?

And keeping a daily 0-10 scorecard of the answers to the active questions. Goldsmith recommends six as a default set anyone could use:

Did I do my best to set clear goals?
Did I do my best to make progress toward my goals?
Did I do my best to find meaning?
Did I do my best to be happy?
Did I do my best to build positive relationships?
Did I do my best to be fully engaged?

Asking active questions does two things: it prevents you from blaming outside circumstances for failures, and it makes you, over time, recognize the places you are actively not doing your best to give you the option to get better, or give up. As a simplified example, imagine you want to exercise every day. You make a grid with every day of the week, and check it off if you exercised for 30 minutes. Now say on Thursday you’re not feeling well, and on Friday there’s an interruption in the morning and work goes late and you meet up with friends after. Simple tracking you’d not check those days. In active questioning format you might put 0s for both days. Or you might put a 5 on Thursday, giving yourself some leeway knowing that rest is as important to an exercise routine as the exercise itself, and a 0 on Friday and make a plan for next Friday to get out for a walk at lunch. If you put 0s for an entire week, there's no need to dig into excuses, you just recognize “I’m not doing my best” and you either stop trying or do better.

The focus of the book is deeper behavioral change more than simple habits. Professionally, Goldsmith is a coach to CEOs and other already successful people who know how to excel in at least one domain in their lives. He states the point clearly later in the book: something like quitting smoking is a great change, but it’s not a behavioral change that’s going to impact the other people you interact with on a day to day basis (short of smelling less smoke). The book is more focused on the ideas captured in his six questions: did I do my best to find meaning, happiness, build relationships, stay engaged. The sort of things that will not only make your life better, but will likely cascade back to your environment as well.

The principle theme of the book can be summed up as “you can‘t control what happens, only how you respond to what happens”. Goldsmith’s advice in the book is also entirely reasonable. He notes that sometimes you don't have the space or energy to change, or do the best thing in a given situation. It’s fine. The important part is acknowledging the triggers that got you to that state, instead of having things trigger you that you don’t notice or acknowledge, which lead you into traps of behaving badly or falling short of the goals you’ve set. Goldsmith references a Buddhist parable as an example of not blaming your environment for why you can’t change, which I enjoyed:

A young farmer was covered with sweat as he paddled his boat up the river. He was going upstream to deliver his produce to the village. It was a hot day, and he wanted to make his delivery and get home before dark. As he looked ahead, he spied another vessel, heading rapidly downstream toward his boat. He rowed furiously to get out of the way, but it didn't seem to help. He shouted, "Change direction! You are going to hit me!" To no avail. The vessel hit his boat with a violent thud. He cried out, "You idiot! How could you manage to hit my boat in the middle of this wide river?" As he glared into the boat, seeking out the individual responsible for the accident, he realized no one was there. He had been screaming at an empty boat that had broken free of its moorings and was floating downstream with the current.

Certainly I can think of many empty boats I’ve yelled at in my life. Overall I recommend the book. If you were looking at it or Atomic Habits I’d go with this one, the strategies outlined in it target behavioral change in as simple of a format but in a more meaningful way.

Newport, RI

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 04:00:00 GMT

It’s not quite yet a tradition but this year and last we dropped our daughter off for an end of Summer week at the Grandparents and then went to Rhode Island. Last year it was Block Island, this year Newport. It was a shorter trip this year, as we planned on spending the latter half of the week doing house projects / staycationing, but it was a good two days.

Accommodations

We stayed at the Mill Street Inn. We would definitely go back, it was close to everything, had a nice roof deck, and every room is a suite. We started to prefer suites after traveling with a child — it’s nice to be able to put them to bed and sit in a separate space — but even without the kid if feels more relaxing to be able to spread out in a small apartment’s worth of space. Also we did in-room massages, and it was set up great for that.

They also did an in-room Continental breakfast, which is exactly the amount of effort I like to put in to getting breakfast when on vacation.

Dinning

The Mooring Seafood Kitchen & Bar - Good seafood, right on the water.
Brick Alley Pub - I guess this place has been around for a bit, it’s got that 80s pizza joint style where they bolt everything they’ve ever found to the walls. Food was good though.
Mr. R - Small plates restaurant, with some pretty interesting combinations of food. In a town full of seafood and burger places, this fits the bill for something a little lighter and more interesting.
Newport Sticks & Cones - Have you ever wanted an ice cream sundae on top of a Belgian waffle? Well wait no longer!
CRU Cafe - Sandwich shop, mixed bag (mine was a great Cuban, Andrea said her chicken salad was nothing interesting). Really the excitement here is watching the chaos that is parking in Newport in the Summer, as it’s just slightly outside of a plaza that has free parking for customers of that plaza, and the distinction is apparently enough of an issue that they needed a security guard to explain where to park.

Attractions and et cetera

Because we were only there for one full day, and got in late on a Sunday where a lot of things were closed, we primarily planned on doing a few mansions and walking around. On Monday we went to The Breakers and did a tiny bit of the Cliff Walk, and then before heading home we stopped at Marble House.

It is tradition that you take a photo that makes it look like you're moving in to your new house, of course.

If we had more time (and they had been open!) I would have liked to go to the National Museum of American Illustration and Newport Art Museum. Also for all the times I’ve been to Newport I’ve still never made it around the Southern tip of the Cliff Walk to the beach!

I will note that one of the very appealing things about Newport if you’re staying in the heart of it is that you can walk everywhere, and if you don’t feel like walking there’s decent public transportation too. Obviously the weather has to cooperate, and you should avoid any weekends where some sort of boating event is going on that will push the restaurants to 300% capacity, but it’s a good town for wandering.

Code is not literature

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 04:00:00 GMT

Another link found via Hacker News: Code is not literature. Start of the second paragraph this had me interested:

As a former English major and a sometimes writer, I had always been drawn to the idea that code is like literature…

I’m a former English major, and I’ve made the argument that coding and writing are similar in the past. But the author of this post went in a different direction than me:

…and that we ought to learn to write code the way we learn to write English: by reading good examples.

To which I recoiled, a bit. The article gets to a conclusion that matched my immediate reaction — no one reads code. We understand it by working with it, but it’s rare to even read it and rarer to appreciate it by reading it.

The overlap between coding and writing, to me, are the mental models you make while doing both. I keep application state in my mind the same way I do characters, locations, plot points. I look at a class with the mindset of “given this class, and the known business logic, how should this method behave”, and to me it runs down similar mental pathways to “given this character, and their known backstory, how would they behave in this situation”. In both writing and coding you’ll produce better output if you take multiple looks and pare down everything to its essentials. Kill your darlings is relevant in writing and code.

I like thinking about coding this way because it makes it easier to understand the challenges of coding collectively, or explaining to someone who doesn’t program one of the fundamental challenges of programming. Books with a single story are rarely written by multiple authors, although they might be worked on by many people. But code is rarely written by a single person — all of those mental models of backstory, plot, character models, need to be shared and internalized by everyone contributing. And that’s hard! Programming might be easier because you can’t argue at length about the motivations of an addNumbers method, but we also often shove the working notes into a “done” column, never to be seen again, or authors leave for new works, and expect new contributors to look at the final work and discern the why from only the how.

The post comes around to the conclusion that rather than reading code, in depth, we should approach it as naturalists:

I think a better model is for one of us to play the role of a 19th century naturalist returning from a trip to some exotic island to present to the local scientific society a discussion of the crazy beetles they found: “Look at the antenna on this monster! They look incredibly ungainly but the male of the species can use these to kill small frogs in whose carcass the females lay their eggs.”

Which I agree with. But if you want to keep the idea of code as literature, or writing at least, consider giving your code a director’s commentary. Record the little bits of deep knowledge about why a particular line got written that might be missed in scope of the full, final work, but will be dearly appreciated by a fellow programmer.

Time Warp

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 04:00:00 GMT

I’ve been reading Saving Time by Jenny Odell. I’m not halfway through it yet, and maybe it’s a bit of a Baader–Meinhof thing going on, but now I’m noticing the notion of shifting the perception of time in more places.

Recently from The New Yorker: Reinventing the E.R. for America’s Mental-Health Crisis

When I first heard about Empath units, I assumed that their main contribution to mental-health care was empathy. This isn’t wrong, but it is incomplete. In my experience, nearly every caregiver aims to show empathy; the question is whether, in an emergency, we have the space and time to do so. In Minnesota, I started to think that the Empath unit’s real innovation is a structural shift in how we think about space and time. We usually consider drugs, devices, and procedures the kinds of medical care that make a difference, but physical spaces can be therapeutic, too. It’s also easy to forget that, in a crisis, every minute matters.

and today, from a discussion on Hacker News, Is slowness the essence of knowledge?

Speed is evidently important in many contexts. Quick reactions and instinctive responsiveness aid survival. But we also have a subsequent ‘slow’ response, which is conscious and deliberative, and may be beneficial for more complex social interactions and moral emotions. Perhaps ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ thinking are really two sides of the same coin – intrinsically related, but with their own independent virtues. In our fast-moving society that frequently prioritises speed, the importance of slowness should not be forgotten.

Not online, it’s August 1st, and someone today said “August already, it feels like Summer just started”. Maybe it did? The humidity finally broke — I’m sitting on the back porch writing this because it’s finally nicer outside than in. What’s Summer but a state of mind anyway.

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 04:00:00 GMT

Found this video on a Hacker News thread about Kevin Mitnick’s death, from this comment:

It’s about life and death and achieving your goals (or not). What I found interesting was Randy talks about wanting to be a Disney Imagineer, and when he got a chance to work with them, the thing he worked on was a virtual reality Aladdin ride. It jumped out to me because I remember that ride from one of our mid-90s trips to Disney World. At the time a bunch of people came in to see the event, but only a few got picked to ride — maybe four, if I remember correctly. Me and my mother got chosen, and my mom recalls someone else in line being mad about it because they thought the people picked should all be from different parties.

Anyway, it was pretty neat at the time, although I remember the helmet feeling clunky, and for someone pretty good at video games I found that VR world disorienting. But the experience is a well ingrained memory from my childhood, and as Randy says in the video, if you can bring that kind of joy to other people, maybe even lots of other people, you probably should.

15 Years of the App Store

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 04:00:00 GMT

App Store turns 15 today. If you had a phone back then (the 3G, the worst phone they made, I broke three of them), you can look at your past purchases in the App Store. Looks like day 1 I picked up:

Facebook (ugh)
Super Monkey Ball (classic that never worked as well as the Dreamcast games)
eBay (still use it today!)
iTunes Remote (displaced by Airplay / the built in remote app)
The New York Times

It's wild scrolling up from there how many apps I've downloaded that aren't being used any more. Maybe 1 in 20 stuck around. These days I don't even look at the app store, it's quite a disaster of ads and games and things I have no interest in, but 15 years ago it did feel a bit like a new era of computing.

Work Pray Code (a book review)

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 04:00:00 GMT

Lately I’ve been picking up new reading by wandering around the “new books” section of the library and grabbing a few interesting books off the shelves after doing exactly zero research about what the book might be about besides looking at the cover. Yes, this is literally me judging books by their covers, but I’ve had some good luck with it. I try to pick up one fiction and one non-fiction book, and last trip the non-fiction one was Work Pray Code by Carolyn Chen. The description on the inner jacket cover starts with “How tech giants are reshaping spirituality to serve their religion of peak productivity”. You could read this two ways, either the way I did, where that sounds awful and makes me want to live in a cabin in the woods, or where that sounds great, what a novel idea, using spirituality to increase productivity, hmm have we considered selling copies of the Bible as NFTs?

The book begins somewhat neutral in tone, describing how in the absence of social/civic/religious organizations in the United States, large corporations attempt to fill the void. They do it for a few reasons:

A sense of belonging — see every company that has a “cute” name for their employees, and, in some cases, even ones they’ve let go!
Having more “perks” like on-site food and daycare and access to special doctors and programs is a way to compete in hiring against their competitors.
Someone who feels they belong and has their needs taken care of by work will spend more time at work.
People who are indebted to their company on multiple levels are much less likely to complain about work, or do something silly like attempt to start a union.

If you read the above list and felt strongly suspicious of their motives, you might be like me, someone in what is described as the “nonbelievers” group:

Who then, are the exceptions, the "nonbelievers"? Who doesn't drink the Kool-Aid? And what relationship do those holdouts have with religion? As it turns out, there is a clear demographic pattern to who becomes a "true believer" and who doesn't. "True believers" tend to be the young, single, and more recent migrants, who are also the majority of the tech workforce. "Nonbelievers," on the other hand, tend to be older workers (forty-plus) and people with families. I found one exception to the pattern. Religious people-people who identify with a religious tradition and belong to religious communities--are"non-believers" in the religion of work, regardless of age, family status, or timing of migration.

The book digs in to the cult of high-performance found in Silicon Valley companies. It’s parodied in the show Silicon Valley, but the book keeps a straight face while describing things like:

In several workshops we assumed psychologist Amy Cuddy’s "victory pose". — arms stretched out above the shoulders in a V — to activate testosterone and put us in a state of confidence and success. And in a few workshops, we danced to “get into our bodies.” In all these practices, the goal is to get engineers out of “their heads” so that they can attend to their bodies and emotions.

and:

At another workshop geared toward entrepreneurs, the speaker encouraged the participants to engage in a "spiritual practice" of asking three questions of themselves: "Who are you really? And keep double-clicking…. What do you really want? And double-click…. And what are you in service to? And double-click. Is it your ego… validation?" Through this practice of re-flection, practitioners go deeper into discovering the "real self" with each spiritual "double click"

Falling strongly into the “nonbeliever” crowd I’d assume anyone asking me to “double-click” myself is an idiot, but apparently there’s a market for such idiocy that pays well, so what do I know.

The book transitions in it’s latter half to how Eastern religions (primarily Buddhism) became popular in the Valley, and how over time they have been repackaged in various ways to appeal to the cult of productivity and corporate Capitalism. Chen brings up the transition in Coke ads from the 70s to today, which had me think of the ending of Mad Men, a perfect encapsulation of her point here: Buddhism, meditation, mindfulness, they’re stripped of all their original religious purpose to drive sales and productivity.

The book’s final chapter is a pretty scathing critique of the Valley (and places like it, some of which aren’t too far from home), wherein tech workers resemble the chosen ones of a cult, who are socially supported by their employers with little subtext that if you don’t work for them, you run the risk of being like everyone else, who struggles to get by as housing costs rise and existing social services disappear to only be found in the campuses or benefits packages of the tech giants.

But what do you do to stop work from being the primary source of fulfillment for people as religion and other forms of social engagement decline? There’s no definite answer. I do worry sometimes about younger coworkers who jump right into the lifestyle of a “tech worker” from college. They have little insight into what alternative realities are, and little time to even contemplate them. But they’re paid well and deemed smart and it’s a sure path to a decent middle class life — a path to salvation, of sorts.

Disney World

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 16:13:36 GMT

This trip was originally planned as a larger family trip in 2019 that got postponed because hurricane Dorian hit Orlando the day our flights were booked for, and the rescheduling of multiple flights and the week’s plans were a lot, so we pushed it to April of 2020. We all know what happened there. Earlier this year we finally agreed at least the three of us should take a family vacation and it’s hard to find as place to divorce yourself from reality with a kid that isn’t Disney.

My last experience with anything Disney related was a small trip to Disneyland in 2018 while we were already in California for a wedding. It was the first week of September so the parks were as close to empty as they could get for Disney — you could pretty much walk on any ride, wait at most 30 minutes for a table at a restaurant, FastPass / rider swap anything. I knew that wouldn’t be the case this time, but things I found online varied from the seemingly insane (wake up at 5am to get dinner reservations, wake up before 7am to book rides) to Orlando-local nonchalant takes like “just show up 5 minutes before the park closes”. So here are some of my notes, a person who does not live in Orlando and is not overly Disney crazy:

Table of Contents <div class="TOC"> <ul> <li><a href="#planning-and-general-trip-notes">Planning and General Trip Notes</a></li> <li><a href="#park-strategy-or-how-to-actually-get-on-a-ride">Park strategy, or, how to actually get on a ride</a></li> <li><a href="#animal-kingdom-lodge">Animal Kingdom Lodge</a></li> <li><a href="#the-parks">The Parks</a></li> <ul> <li><a href="#hollywood-studios">Hollywood Studios</a></li> <li><a href="#magic-kingdom">Magic Kingdom</a></li> <li><a href="#epcot">EPCOT</a></li> <li><a href="#animal-kingdom">Animal Kingdom</a></li> </ul> <li><a href="#dining">Dining</a></li> <ul> <li><a href="#the-mara">The Mara</a></li> <li><a href="#boma">Boma</a></li> <li><a href="#sci-fi-dine-in-theatre">Sci-Fi Dine-In Theatre</a></li> <li><a href="#sanaa">Sanaa</a></li> <li><a href="#skippers-canteen">Skipper’s Canteen</a></li> <li><a href="#yak-and-yeti">Yak and Yeti</a></li> <li><a href="#space-220">Space 220</a></li> </ul>

<li><a href="#conclusion">Conclusion</a></li> </ul> </div>

Planning and General Trip Notes

Go sometime “off season”. I went off this crowd calendar to pick a date, there’s a lot of other sites that have surprisingly deep statistics on the park to help you plan. I personally wouldn’t go any time where most days aren’t below average but you do you.
If you’re staying in the park, reserve dinning the first day you can for every day. You can cancel up to 2 hours before, and you can try to find something that fits better closer to your actual dates, but if I was distilling my advice down to one thing it would be “any plan is better than no plan”.
Disney used to offer free bus transport to and from the airport (MCO), but they stopped recently. We hired a car (Tiffany Towncar, specifically), and they did a free[^1] stop at a grocery store on the way to the hotel so you can stock up on snacks, water, and alcohol at non-Disney prices. Also it’s just you, so they go direct to your resort, which could save 20 - 40 minutes depending on where you’re staying.
If you’re coming from New England JetBlue lands at the new terminal (C) in MCO. It’s basically empty and easy to get through.
More than likely someone in your party will get sick on the trip. I drew the short straw this time. Plan for the best, expect the worst, I guess. We always try to stay at a place with a fun pool to either just take a day off and go swimming or put some buffer in the schedule.
We did everything through the phone app, skipping Magic Bands. I could see getting one for pool trips so everything can stay in the room, but otherwise the app was fine. It has some technical glitches from time to time and going from the wait time map to the Tip Board is painfully slow and unintuitive, as is finding the “unlock room” button, but it works. Occasionally the passes in Apple Wallet or the room unlock will trigger the phone to jump to the first credit card in your wallet which feels appropriate for a Disney trip.

Park strategy, or, how to actually get on a ride

Do Genie+ every day. The app shows standby wait times but the standby lanes are like buying a third class ticket on the Titanic. Even though it costs money I liked Genie+ more than Fastpass because we could plan a few rides before we even got to the park.
If there’s something you really want to ride and it has either an Individual Lightning Lane (ILL) or Standby, pay the mouse and do ILL. If you wanted to save money you should have not come to Disney. If you want to try to figure out what 2 hours of your life standing in a line in the Orlando sunshine is worth, you’ll probably calculate it to be more than what the ILL costs. Also ILL lanes are basically a 0 minute line with some wait time depending on how the attraction boards, so if you do that with Genie+ you can plan two rides in the same hour, ideally near each other.
If something is Virtual Queue and ILL, try for the 7am Virtual Queue. We didn’t get in for TRON, but did for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you do and the time to return is good, great. If you don’t and it’s something you really want to ride, ILL it.
Throughout the day the popular/new attractions would have absolutely absurd wait times (I saw 3 hours for Slinky Dog Dash at one point lolololol) but other rides and attractions were nearly forgotten, including genuinely fun ones like Big Thunder Mountain and Expedition Everest.
If your child says she is afraid of heights, Space Mountain is not a good first ride. We recovered but it took a fair amount of trust building after that.
A lot of the rides at Disney use glasses now for a 3D effect. They never seem to work as well as they should, and for someone who already has visual issues I don’t enjoy having to wear them. Flight of Passage was probably the biggest offender here, if you look straight ahead it looks great, if you don’t things get blurry and (at least to me) increase the amount of motion change you’re going to experience quite a bit. This is to say that if anyone is a little motion sick, some of the rides that don’t move much but use glasses might actually be worse than some of the ones that physically move a lot.

Matches my feelings on the glasses.

Animal Kingdom Lodge

Animal Kingdom Lodge (AKL) offers rooms with two specific experiences, one with a savanna view and one without. The savanna view costs a lot more money more per night, so we skipped it. We ended up with a room that looked at animals anyway. They might not have been as close or there as often but it was cool and unsurprisingly a seven year old ends up blasé to the idea of giraffes out the back window quite quickly.

Giraffes from our balcony.

AKL is split into two “villages”, Jambo and Kidani, about a 10 minute walk apart. The buses to the parks stop at Kidani first. Wasn’t an issue getting a seat on the way in but did make the return trips a little longer. Staying at AKL means you’re taking a bus everywhere. Overall that wasn’t an issue, although getting the ride back from the park sometimes meant ~20 minutes of waiting.

Kidani has the better pool, although we spent plenty of time at Jambo’s as well. Jambo more food options and a more interesting lobby, and a bigger arcade and gift shop/store. I believe AKL is usually the cheapest of the “deluxe” resorts, which gives you some extra perks (that we mostly didn’t use), and I’d overall recommend it unless you specifically wanted to be closer to one of the parks.

The Parks

Experiences from worst to best.

Hollywood Studios

Real bummer because this was my favorite as a kid, and I thought the new Star Wars area would at least be cool even though we’re not big Star Wars fans, but the park had a lot of early morning outages and by the time we had finished lunch the wait times were outrageous. We didn’t do lightning lanes that day either and weren’t going to wait almost two hours for anything so we called it an early day and went to the pool instead. With Rock N’ Roller Coaster closed there’s not enough to soak up crowds here, and the overall park layout is the worst of all of them. On a positive note, we did get on Runaway Railway and that mixed screen and motion and animation style of ride is what Disney does best and is a lot of fun.

Magic Kingdom

With Splash Mountain being closed (a personal favorite) we focused on some of the classic dark rides hitting Pirates and Haunted Mansion twice each. Didn’t do TRON because our virtual queue position ended up being way after we were planning on staying, and Lorelei hated Space Mountain. Didn’t get to ride Seven Dwarfs Mine Train because it broke in the morning and then the wait time was over 1.5 hours the rest of the day. So overall just fine. We did get a visit from Captain Jack Sparrow while eating lunch, which prompted Lorelei to watch the first three Pirates movies while we were back in the hotel room.

He couldn’t convince her to dip her chips in the slushie but he did inspire her to ride Pirates again and buy a cutlass and start talking like a pirate.

EPCOT

Did better planning with Lightning Lanes this day, and got a good spot on the Virtual Queue for Guardians of the Galaxy. An overall fun day but I forgot that this park is huge, and some rides (Frozen) had absurd wait times even with the Lightning Lane. I don’t get that one at all, I loved that ride when it was the Norway ride, it’s now the same ride but with a two hour standby time. I wish we had skipped it (or pushed the Lightning Lane out later) so we could have seen more of the World Showcase. If I had known how Hollywood Studios was going to go, or if we had another day in the parks, I would have done two days here to see everything.

Animal Kingdom

We saved this park for the last because I figured it would be the best, and our last park day would be a Monday so the crowds should be lower. Both things were true. Not only did we get to do every ride we wanted to do we managed to do some of them twice (Expedition Everest, Flight of Passage), and all three of us enjoyed pretty much everything. Well, Lorelei wouldn’t do Everest twice (she instead asked “how do people even survive that”) but Andrea and I did. We got caught in a rainstorm on Kali River Rapids late in the day and ended absolutely soaked but the storm cleared out a lot of visitors giving us some uncrowded time in the animal areas and short wait times post dinner.

Dining

Experiences from worst to best.

The Mara

It’s the quick food option at Animal Kingdom Lodge so the expectations are low but they forgot items from our order every single time. Also the cold brew tastes like it’s made by pouring water over the left over grounds from the hot coffee batches, it’s literally undrinkable. I barely had coffee while we were at Disney so maybe it’s like that throughout the parks.

Boma

Buffet. Like every Disney hotel buffet way overpriced. We did it for breakfast, but dinner might have had a better selection.

Sci-Fi Dine-In Theatre

A place I thought was cool as a kid. Not bad per se, just not as interesting as I remembered it, and the food is quite basic. Also while the restaurant was over half empty we got some weird car setup where a solo dinner was behind us in our car. Definitely got the feeling in there that some of the reservation limits at the restaurants were from lack of staff not lack of seats.

Sanaa

Everything online said the Indian style bread service was good, they really sold it once you got there too. It was good! I love naan. The entrées were just ok though.

Skipper’s Canteen

Good food, decent theming. We were in the main dining area, the rooms off of that seemed to fit the ride theme a little more and be more interesting visually.

Yak and Yeti

Similar to the above. Theme might have been a bit better, food about the same. Owned by a restaurant group that is not Disney so the menu is 10x larger than a Disney restaurant.

Space 220

Great. The theme of going up into space was really well done. You’re not going to be convinced you are there, but you’ll at least forget you’re in Orlando for a bit. Food was excellent although you’re dealing with prix fixe so there no small / inexpensive meal here.

Conclusion

There’s an incredibly small window of overlap in both time and space where parents and children can have fun together, and for all of its downsides (cost, planning, crowds), it’s hard to beat Disney World. Besides all of the things noted above:

When researching how bad the buses were from AKL, I saw a comment that Americans love Disney World because it’s the only place in the country with functioning public transportation. This is… sadly true. Planning trips around a large city with a kid is much harder.
It’s their job, but (almost) everyone you interact with there is friendly and helpful. I’m generally positive about the overall kindness of strangers but it’s definitely much higher in the parks.
You’re never far from a bathroom, drinks, or food. Obviously the last two are mutually beneficial but again, you don’t have to plan around it.
The parks are set up to be accessible to everyone, which trickles down to benefits for everyone. I especially love that the pools are set up in a way to let even young kids pretty much go free. Most hotel pools have awful setups like additional exits from the pool area, or no floaties, or a randomly extremely deep end, but at Disney you can just drop them in and then go enjoy your drink.

Will we be back? Disney World these days feels like it was the place Yogi Berra was referencing when he said, “no one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded”, but I’m sure we’ve got a few more trips in us while it still seems like magic to one (or more!) of us.

[^1]: TNSTAAFL but their rates were reasonable and our driver was chill about the “20” minute stop.

Modem Upgrades

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 02:29:47 GMT

Xfinity sent me an email a while back saying service in our area had been upgraded to 600 Mbps, and that my modem couldn’t handle this extreme new bandwidth. But any network test was showing 550-580 Mbps so… seemingly it could handle most of it. I filed a mental note, went on with my life.

But more recently they sent another email saying speed had been increased even more, and my modem was objectively trash at this point, so maybe consider a new one. This seemed more interesting, so I did some research about which modems are actually ok and not unreliable disasters, and picked up the ARRIS SURFboard S33 which is a name that is both cool and lame at the same time, somehow. I guess we still “surf” the web? Feels like like we’ve got our foot trapped in a rock and the waves just slap us on our head over and over and over.

Anyway, I installed it tonight, and Xfinity was not lying, the old modem was slow and sad and the new one gets us 1 gig down [^1]. Also using their app to register the new modem took about 10 minutes and was entirely painless. It was, I dare even say, Comcastic.

This modem is in theory capable of 2.5 Gbps down, although I do not believe Xfinity will be promising that any time soon, and it would require replacing a lot of other hardware, and honestly, I just don’t think I can click on links that fast.

[^1]: The upload speed remains sad and slow, only slightly better than a man in 1880 repeating a Morse code message down a telegraph line.

Annual Maintenance Again

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 14:56:40 GMT

Last year I wrote Annual Maintenance about the differences in the one day in January of 2020, 2021, and 2022 I sat in a VW dealership. I made a guess about 2023:

What’s my best guess for January, 2023? No masks. Finally hit 10,000 miles but still well under 20,000 and impossibly far from 30,000. I’ll still go to Trader Joe’s after. I’ll be smart enough to do this on a weekday so I don’t get stuck in the weekend crowd. Things change, but things stay the same.

Was I right? I pulled in the service bay with 9992 miles. No one is wearing a mask. It’s a Friday. 50/50 I go to Trader Joe’s after — we’re good on groceries but I do have a mild trail mix addiction. Is everything normal now? Normal as any normal is, I guess.

A New Guitar for a New Year

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 03:02:56 GMT

I wrote in 2020 about fixing up my first guitar, a black Squire Stratocaster. It is (I think) from 1995. My other guitar is a nicer Stratocaster from 1999. When I got that guitar I was torn between it and something more “shreddy”. If I remember correctly I was comparing it to an Ibanez JS1000, but in the end I wanted the bridge and middle single coils, so I went with the Strat.

Well, 20-odd years later, I finally have a “shreddy” guitar, a the amazingly named Charvel Pro-Mod San Dimas Style 1 HH FR M. I picked it up from Matt’s Music Center in Weymouth, worth a trip if you’re in the Boston area looking for guitars. The color is Chameleon and I wanted to get it from a physical store, not online, because the color… photographs as a lot of different colors!

Like, it’s black, right?

Or purple?

Or kind of gold?

It’s fun and I’ve aggressively abused the whammy bar many times already. Now for next year finally following up on something I meant to this year, recording myself while playing.

Smarter Than You Think

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 18 Dec 2022 01:47:31 GMT

I finished Smarter Than You Think by Clive Thompson[^1] today. I started it many months ago, it was a book I read in fits and starts. I thought it approached the subject of “what is technology doing to how we think” well enough, with lots of references to historical precedence (people thinking writing would ruin the mind hundreds of years ago) and non-technical studies of similar topics like shared knowledge and the overhead of organizing large and wide knowledge networks.

One of the more interesting parts, at least to me, was about solving puzzles collectively. He talks at length about video games, and wiki pages for games contributed to by large sets of people, which means every facet of a game can be documented in depth and at speed. He references Skyrim a lot but I found this playing through Elden Ring recently. The game does not present a deep story unless you know what to look for, and many of the puzzles are fair if you know what you’re looking for, but… you might honestly have no idea what you’re looking for. You can search online for the smallest part of the game and find everything you could ever want to know about it. There’s deep backstory on Reddit that you’d think was fan-fiction except it comes with references!

And it’s true of almost everything. I’ve been playing guitar more this Winter, and I like to search for “how did player X get their tone”. The information is out there, and you begin to realize that a lot of good electric guitar players from the 60s and 70s were ok guitar players who had access to the equipment and information that allowed them to get great tone. Today you can Google it and get the same tone in a digital modeler (more technology!) in five minutes. The ease is obvious when you start to search for instrumental electric guitarists in your favorite streaming music platform: there’s thousands of them, and the music skews heavily towards the last ten years or so, when not only did digital recording get easier, sharing information on how to play and inspiration for playing did too. Heck, some of the best known guitarists now don’t even record often, they post on Instagram and play live. Hard to say that’s a bad thing for humanity.

There was one salient bit later in the book about Twitter:

One study homed in on Twitter users who displayed “clear political preference,” as with right-wing Twitter users following Fox News, or left-wing Twitter users following The New York Times. It turns out these users inadvertently got a more diverse set of news delivered via other people they followed, because their friends would tweet tidbits from the other side of the political spectrum. Indeed, 17.8 percent of the left-wing Twitter users were seeing right-wing media via retweets from people they followed, and the right-wing Twitter users saw even more—57.2 percent of them were seeing left-wing media.

So someone right leaning goes and buys Twitter and now how do you think that skews? And what impact does that skewing (and the algorithm behind the skewing) have on us as a society? That’s a question the book can’t answer, we’re learning that one in real time.

[^1]: His blog is sadly and oddly dead. Oddly because it’s mentioned in the book more than once.

The Ten (Insert Superlative Here) Christmas Songs

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 19:07:35 GMT

A list of ten Christmas songs with particular vibes I enjoy.

1. Christmas At Ground Zero - “Weird Al” Yankovic

The best of the “joke” Christmas songs you would hear on classic rock stations, well above “Grandma Got Run Over by A Reindeer” or Porky Pig singing “Blue Christmas”, but it stopped getting radio airplay because after 9/11 the phrase “ground zero” went from the generalized dystopian idea of where a nuclear bomb lands to specifically the World Trade Center (that’s very America of us). It’s on this list so you never forget what we lost.

Listen on Apple Music

2. Santa Tell Me - Ariana Grande

I like this song well enough, but there’s something else to it because it’s the only Christmas song that, when it comes on, anywhere and at any volume, Lorelei starts singing along like she’s an awakened sleeper agent.

Listen on Apple Music

3. Feliz Navidad - José Feliciano

I WANNA WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS.
I WANNA WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS.
I WANNA WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS.
FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART.

Listen on Apple Music

4. Mary Did You Know - every Catholic musician in history

Many years of attending Catholic school as an atheist means I could do with out anything espousing the true meaning of Christmas, but I personally enjoy this one because it strongly implies that Jesus takes over the world with an army of zombies.

I dunno, church?

5. Christmas Time Is Here - Vince Guaraldi Trio

It’s Christmas Eve. You’re sweaty, wrapped up in fleece footy pajamas and under a blanket, laying on a high pile carpet floor, using a Christmas present as a pillow (is it a Nintendo?). You can hear adults around you talking but their words are muffled and the syllables distorted. The edges of your vision are blurred, strange Caldor-color rainbows, but in the center the warm yellow glow of a CRT TV. On it, a dog points his nose at the sky and wiggles his arms and feet erratically. You fall asleep, knowing someone will pick you up and put you in your bed, and in the morning it will be Christmas.

Listen on Apple Music

6. What’s This? - Danny Elfman from The Nightmare Before Christmas

Every time my brain has the thought “what’s this?” it’s immediately repeated (what’s this!) and then this song begins.

Listen on Apple Music

7. Carol of The Bells

With a nod to “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman” as heard on “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24”. The Christmas songs you can headbang to.

Listen on Apple Music (turn to 11)

8. Please Come Home For Christmas - Charles Brown

If you were drinking spiced egg nog while reading this, here is where you skip the egg nog part of the mix. Take a pretty standard blues arrangement, throw church bells in the background and a piano that sounds like sleigh bells, it’s a Christmas song! A really, really sad Christmas song about being alone at Christmas.

The sad, sad part is the Eagles version gets played the most. I fuckin’ hate the Eagles, man.

Listen on Apple Music

9. River - Joni Mitchell

Oh you thought that last one was sad, did you? While “Please Come Home For Christmas” covers Christmas day through New Years, this one starts with “putting up Christmas”, so now we’ve got the day after Thanksgiving through to New Years covered with sadness.

I will acknowledge that “I wish I had a river I could skate away on” probably doesn’t hit as hard for people who grew up in warm climates, but on the other hand every musician who has seen ice once has covered this song so there’s something to those words.

Listen on Apple Music

10. Someday at Christmas - Stevie Wonder

There’s a lot of songs that fit a theme of “it’s the end of the year, and having some time to reflect on the state of things, I’ve decided the world could generally be a lot better than it is”, but this one is the best one. Also a good one to end this list on because as Stevie says, someday at Christmas everything will be right, but it’ll be long after you’re dead.

Listen on Apple Music

Saga, Volume 10

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 02:35:06 GMT

Took Lorelei to the comic book store yesterday. She got some Pokemon cards, I got Saga, volume 10. I’ve been waiting for it for a while, volume 9 released in 2018! And ended on a total gut punch too. Fortunately this one has a happier ending.

Yeah, it’s another rough one. Still a great series. I want to believe there’s a happy (happy enough) ending for Hazel but that looks to be many volumes away still.

Ignore the last post, I fixed it

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 12:57:34 GMT

All the smart stuff in the house is back. I did two things:

The older Apple TV in the basement was showing up as a home hub in Homekit. That might be fine but it’s the oldest device of the available home hubs so I turned off the option for it to be a hub.
Restarted the router. Which with an eero means… pushing one button in the app.

So now my home automation can run, and at sunset today the Christmas tree will turn on and the nearby Homepod will start playing Christmas music. 🎄

I’d flip this table but it’s a smart one and it’s not responding

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 02:39:27 GMT

I wrote about this when iOS15 released, but by far the most frustrating thing about any new technology is that when it doesn’t work there’s absolutely fuck-all you can do to try to debug the issue.

I picked up a Eve smart plug for the Christmas tree. Added it to Home, flipped it off… couldn’t flip it back on. Unplugged it, plugged it back it, flipped it on, off… and that was it. Says it’s “not responding” in home. Then I notice one of the lights in that room (which has worked consistently until now), also “not responding”.

The answers online seem to always be “reset everything”, “power cycle everything”, “toggle every feature on your router”, or some other combination that would be easy if I had a trained monkey to push buttons in sequence.

Anyway, I haven’t figured it out yet, so tonight I’ll be unplugging the tree… from the smart plug.

You can’t catch me

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 01:35:57 GMT

I’m the gingerbread man.

Did some holiday decorating and baking after going out to see Strange World, which I rate a solid “ok”. The central plot (which I won’t spoil) I enjoyed, and some of the visuals were well done, especially the comic book style introduction, but the meat of the story was pretty forgettable. Lorelei’s favorite part: “when the dog licked the thing”. I agree, the dog is funny.

Also I’ve seen the “movie theaters are dying” stories and, sure, COVID, but I didn’t think much of it until today when… we had the entire theatre to ourselves. Early afternoon, and the theater is in the middle of a mall (that also might be dying), but geez, that doesn’t seem sustainable.

I wish that turkey only cost a nickel

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 22:28:48 GMT

We did “early” Thanksgiving with my parents this weekend. We do it the weekend before because then it’s easier for my parents to visit us, and on the actual weekend of Thanksgiving we usually have four straight days to do “not much”.

Every year I struggle to find the recipes/timings/temperatures I used the year before, even though every year I write it down somewhere. So this year, it’s here. Maybe next year I’ll find it.

Turkey. 9lb breast only, spatchcocked, 450° for 80 minutes. Should have covered the skin a little earlier (or dropped the rack down a level) but still good. I coat the skin in mayonnaise and bird herbs.
Roasted red potatoes, coated with oil and said bird herbs.
Buttermilk biscuits with poultry herbs. About 10 years ago now I made these and they rose perfectly and I’ve been trying to chase that magic combination since then.
Green beans with almonds, sautéed with butter and honey with herbs from the biscuits.
Homemade cranberry sauce, which is personally my favorite part of the meal.
A salad (greens, grapes, blue cheese, walnuts, balsamic fig dressing).
Pumpkin pie, although not nearly as nicely decorated as the one in that link. Still tasted good.

I miss the old metaphor for the web

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 02:14:11 GMT

That was an actual web, with webmasters, and crawlers, and spiders. It feels like the current web is a lot more spiders dangling from a very high ceiling on a single thread, just waiting for a strong wind to blow them off.

Can we smoosh iA Writer, Bear, and Obsidian together

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 02:58:29 GMT

I use iA Writer, Bear, and Obsidian these days. I use iA Writer for writing (like writing this post), Bear for notes, and Obsidian at work for work notes. I wish all three could be smooshed together.

iA Writer is the best for writing in. The fonts and layout are amazing, not to mention focus and typewriter mode.
Bear is the best for notes with attachments. Adding a picture in a file based notes app is painful and sad.
Obsidian queries working on individual blocks of text are so cool, and the wikilink previews (and backlinks) are much more powerful than Bear. It makes generating something like a brag document very easy. As you record something, tag it with #brag and then query for each of them.

A quick example of Obsidian queries. Two separate daily notes with a #workouts tag on them.

I’d drop Bear for Obsidian on features, but Bear is miles ahead on UI, especially on mobile. Bear 2.0 seems like it will be released “soon”, but I might start taking advantage of Bear’s export to markdown features to then import in Obsidian for querying.

Setting up an iPad as a multi-user device

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:46:38 GMT

Andrea had a good idea the other day to set up a digital display in our kitchen area to be able to see shared calendars, reminders, other digital debris we individually see on our devices but don’t have a great way of seeing as a family.

We do everything in the Apple-ecosystem, Homekit, iCloud, all that, so it would seem that setting up an iPad to be a simple controller/view screen for this information would be easy, but Apple has made iPadOS the most frustrating OS in existence. Some things I ran into:

By default a device being reset to factory assumes you’d want to restore it as is. It even encourages you to use your phone to start set-up (I was too lazy to enter the wifi password), but this then sends you down some miserable “restore all your settings” path.
I don’t want this to run my iCloud account, in theory it’s a device that sits downstairs for some shared functionality. Someone could grab it to use, say, Paprika, control the Sonos, but not send e-mails from my e-mail account. Seems easy enough, but it’s also very unclear why I should or shouldn’t make this a family account. And the ability to just run as a “guest” (a feature of MacOS, last I checked) is limited to running a single app. Of course I eventually realized that if I wanted to use this to play Apple Music, I’d have to add it to the family anyway, because I can’t simply have a device with one account that logs in to another account for a single service.
To finish a new Apple account, you need a phone number to verify it (why?). To download apps from the app store (even free ones), you need to enter a billing address and phone number. Why!
I signed in to this account, completely detached from my family account, opened the Sonos app, and… my recently played music was in there when I selected Apple Music. This might be a thing Sonos exposes but it seems weird.
When iPadOS finally boots up, Apple News is dead center. This is only one of what seemed like a dozen upsells during the install process.
Enabling location services and then having the default weather widget be Cupertino is some “made in California” bullshit.

Anyway, it’s up and running now, I’ll see how it works out for us. It remains baffling to me that the iPad exists as this “super simple” device for kids and grandparents but also a pocketable super computer. And also why isn’t there an Apple TV with a display. Also why can’t you hide the dock. Also… I think that’s it for tonight.

Tired

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 13 Nov 2022 01:37:57 GMT

It’s a bad pun, I spent a fair share of time today mucking about with tires, swapping a bike one for a trainer tire for the still-not-yet-here Cold season, and putting on the Winter wheels for our Subaru (for the still-not-yet-here Snow season).

They are deceptively simple, especially a bike one. Bit of rubber with some air in it, but quite amazing (or terrifying) when you realize that’s the bit of rubber keeping the wheels turning at 80 miles per hour. Uh, in the car, that is.

Veteran’s Day

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 12 Nov 2022 00:54:08 GMT

I wrote about my Grandfather’s experience in World War II a few years ago. We talked for hours about a few significant days in his life, but at the time it was hard to find any information about it online. Well I searched again this year and found this, a substantial write-up about the Battle of Metz and Fort Driant.

This paragraph describes the main conflict my grandfather saw in the war and described to me in detail:

Irwin broke off the attack the following day and replaced elements of his battered 11th Infantry with fresh troops from his 2nd and 10th Regiments; the two units renewed the assault on October 7. This time, the Americans attempted to fight their way into the underground entrances to the fort but made no better progress; they soon were bogged down.

Also interesting:

The 26th Division alone reported 3,000 cases of trench foot during the November offensive, Patton said.

Which was what eventually sent my Grandfather back to America.

At this point I have to hope Twitter fails

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 23:20:18 GMT

At this point I have to hope Twitter fails because if it’s successful a lot of other CEOs are going to wonder if they can cut half their staff and force people back to offices.

If I had to guess, in a year from now it’ll still be around, but some incredibly pared down version of it’s former self that still lives at twitter.com but isn’t recognizable as anything you’d think of as Twitter. I mean Myspace isn’t even completely dead yet.

0.1x engineer

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 02:45:52 GMT

Why I Strive to be a 0.1x Engineer, bit of a joke title but good ideas in here, especially this one:

Let’s not keep maintaining this feature.

I’ve gone so far as to slip some features into the red-lined diff during a refactor to see if anyone noticed [^1].

Some good quotes from the original Hacker News on this blog post, definitely a little more pointed after recent stories about a particular new social media owner hiring or firing engineers based on lines of code:

Jeff Atwood: “the best code is no code at all. Every new line of code you willingly bring into the world is code that has to be debugged, code that has to be read and understood, code that has to be supported. Every time you write new code, you should do so reluctantly, under duress, because you completely exhausted all your other options.”

Robert Galanakis: “The fastest code is the code which does not run. The code easiest to maintain is the code that was never written.”

Dijkstra: it is only a small step to measuring "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced per month". This is a very costly measuring unit because it encourages the writing of insipid code, but today I am less interested in how foolish a unit it is from even a pure business point of view. My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.

Bill Gates: "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."

[^1]: They did, they always do. They couldn’t explain why it was there but oh boy did they miss it!

Sad songs and waltzes aren’t selling this year

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 23:32:40 GMT

A great list on Reddit of sad songs if that’s a thing you might be in the mood for tonight.

Always not-sad (glad?) to see John Prine at the top. Weirdly missing, this American sadness classic:

JavaScript Generators

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 03:45:19 GMT

With Tim Tams, at Why Would Anyone Need JavaScript Generator Functions, an enjoyable write-up of a confusing part of JavaScript, although I’m not entirely sure I’d ever use them short of a library that hides all of the implementation details.

As noted in the Hacker News comments Redux-Saga uses generators, that’s where most of my knowledge of them comes from. After implementing it once (look at me, very smart!) I took over another project that used it and immediately ripped it out which, based on the replies, I’m not the only one:

I had to rescue a saga based project that went badly off the rails and it was some of the hardest code I’ve ever had to debug in any language. Code flow was very difficult to reason about and forget about trying to use stack traces. source

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 22:06:17 GMT

Happy first 5 PM after Daylight Savings ends. I know Winter doesn’t officially start for more than a month but something changes today. Maybe we need a micro-season for it, like Dark Fall.

…and now too many Mastodons

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 01:18:00 GMT

@threetonesun@front-end.social and @jjmartucci@micro.blog. The first I guess I’ll try as a Twitter replacement, the second just a happy little side-effect of cross-posting to micro.blog.

Mastodon’t, or can’t

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 02:23:30 GMT

I had a Mastodon account on mastodon.technology from a while back (April 2017 my account says — looking for an alternative to Twitter in late 2016 sounds right). Unfortunately the instance is shutting down. I looked about for a new one tonight and a lot of them are already full, waitlist only. Which lead me into self-hosting, but the managed instance service I found, masto.host is also temporarily unavailable.

Seems like a lot of people looking for a Twitter replacement real quick. Might do some more reading this weekend on the Digital Ocean 1-click install option.

It’s free software

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 20:21:43 GMT

I’ve currently got my Helix LT updating to version 3.5. Updates for the Helix are interesting because every update gives you more value for your initial investment. It’s essentially free amps, pedals, better tones. This release fixes a lot of the issues with the stock cabs, including allowing you to easily do dual cabs with a simple delay and pan between them, which is something I used to do with every preset in Bias FX.

It’s nice to get new and exciting features in an update. Software updates are mixed bag these days. Some apps I prefer they never update (like Things, Bear), because I don’t want to learn new features all the time, I want consistency. Others update to the point where I feel like every time I use them I’m getting a new tutorial on how to use them and overwhelmed by the changes (looking at you Confluence). Others push new features at a higher cost that aren’t necessarily wanted.

Which is to say, shout out to the Helix team at Line 6 for continuously making the software more better and not charging for so many awesome new features.

Game Review: Dicey Dungeons and Monster Train

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 00:32:05 GMT

Over the last month I’ve picked up Dicey Dungeons and Monster Train First Class for the Switch (on sale!). They’re both inspired by Slay the Spire, which, to me, was inspired by deck building games like Magic the Gathering. The idea in all of them is that you have a limited amount of resources per turn and a set of abilities or cards to play per turn.

Dicey Dungeons goes for more of an RPG style game with different classes with different abilities and a load-out for your particular skills. The limited resource is determined by (surprise) dice rolls. It’s by far the more frustrating of the two because the dice rolls are dice rolls and even though you can control them to an extent, depending on which class and variation of the game you’re playing, you are often stuck hoping for a lucky six. And once you get above the intro levels the runs can end extremely quickly — one enemy that is strong against your current load out and it’s game over.

Monster Train encourages you to build up an army of monsters to fight invaders on your train. Don’t think too hard about the plot, the main differentiator is there are multiple levels and multiple monsters per level, which gives it a bit of a “tower defense” game feel. It’s deck building is deeper than Slay the Spire because you mix two factions at the game start and build from both, and it gives you a lot of options to remove or modify the cards you have, rather than hoping for lucky draws in the events where you add cards to your pool.

If you’ve never played any of these games, start with Slay the Spire. It’s the most straightforward, and quickly shows you how the gameplay loop works, where you balance building a resilient character as new cards come in, or going all-in on one strategy to exploit it’s ability to do tons of damage, and hope that later draws (or enemies) don’t completely destroy that plan. After that Monster Train, which is more complex, and if you want a fun diversion that’s easier to understand, Dicey Dungeons.

And be warned: while these are all fun games with strategy involved, you might get a long way into a run and then get absolutely destroyed. And also be warned: once you get your first win, you’ll want your second, and third, and fourth, and….

Nanoblogmore

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 16:29:41 GMT

The key to posting a lot on your blog is making it easy to post on your blog.

Leaving Twitter

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 14:17:44 GMT

The unique tragedy with Twitter’s changing attitude toward developers is that so many of Twitter’s early innovations did come from third-party developers. The word tweet, the first use of a bird icon, and even the character counter started in Twitterrific. Twitter’s new leadership displayed an incredible disrespect for the value developers added to both the ecosystem and core platform.

From the Leaving Twitter chapter of Manton Reece's Indie Microblogging. Just a reminder that political and leadership changes aside, most of the joy of early Twitter died years ago.

Returning, Again, to Robert M. Pirsig

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 29 Oct 2022 01:05:44 GMT

This country, they say, is dull and greedy and always misses the point. The possibility of a new type of ecstatic vision and a life filled with meaningful tasks, I imagine, is what drew me and so many other readers to “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” We believed Pirsig could see the Buddha in a well-maintained carburetor. We wanted to see it, too, and we wanted to work as he did, perhaps in large part because we saw very little future for ourselves in the striving world.

From Returning, Again, to Robert M. Pirsig. I keep meaning to reread Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, mainly because even if I don’t love the book, it has lots of great little lessons and themes that resonate. I reference Pirsig’s Brick quite often.

PAGNIs and YAGNIs

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 02:15:02 GMT

YAGNI = You aren't going to need it.

PAGNI = Probably are gonna need it.

Many senior software developers I’ve worked with have had their own PAGNI lists in their heads. YAGNIs, on the other hand, are more of an “argue about it every time” kind of list, not to mention as developers we often end up with “can we try to need this?” lists of things to try and learn that are more likely aren't gonna needs than probably gonna needs.

Some I have from past experiences:

Real User Monitoring (RUM). At some point someone from the business is going to want to see a breakdown of user flows, errors, actions, everything. A one line set it and forget it RUM setup can save weeks of setting up specific logging and reporting.
Preview environments. I push a branch, I get a place to see it. Takes time to set up but pays massively for testing and getting product sign off.
Feature flags, because eventually you're going to have to release something to production and you don't want to have to let everyone at it.
A no-code way to modify production. This one has pros and cons but eventually you'll have simple strings that need updating or images or a configuration that doesn't map to an API anywhere and someone will wanted it updated ASAP. Why break out a code editor when you can edit a value in a CMS and push publish.
Regression test checklists. Not everything will be caught by automated tests. Make a checklist on the first day of prod releases, modify it so it’s up to date over time.
Hard limits on build times, API request times, and asset load times. Because if it’s fuzzy it’ll one day seem slow, and then next time you look it’ll be unbearably slow and no one will totally understand why or how to fix it.

I’m just a performer, I don’t know anything about circuits

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 12:06:17 GMT

Jim Lill has a lot of great videos breaking down what makes a difference in guitar sound. This one might be the best because the guitar market for amplifiers (along with guitar pedals) has had this mix of classic collectors claiming only one amp can get one tone, and deep-state conspiracy theorists arguing one wire makes all the difference (but don’t look at the wire, opening the amp will change everything).

Turns out... nothing matters much except in what order the EQ and gain is added. So yes, a Fender does sound different than a Marshall. Unless you want them to sound the same. And no, your Soviet-era tubes don’t radiate magic sound waves into your signal.

I wish my web server were in the corner of my room

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 02:26:34 GMT

I could hear the hard drive spin up if somebody accessed the machine, and a little chug-chug-chug while Festival (the open source text-to-speech engine I’d installed) generated the voice. Like footsteps approaching before the door opens.

From I wish my web server were in the corner of my room. I enjoyed the Hacker News discussion on this, lots of early 2000 throwbacks about hosting some stupid script on a laptop plugged into a university network, but also some good options if you wanted to serve something from home in the year 2022.

Do you? Probably not, but I do miss thinking of a server as a thing that I can physically know and not some amorphous cloud entity.

TIL: Mojibake

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 00:19:34 GMT

the garbled text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding.

Wikipedia by way of Hacker News, where I learned:

In Russian this phenomenon is called "бНОПНЯ" (read "b-nop-nya") and was caused by taking the word "Вопрос" (meaning: "question") in win-1251 encoding and reading it as if it was in KOI-8 encoding.

Also this is called "крокозябры" (read: kro-ko-zya-bry, nonsense word, no translation) especially when reading a binary file in a text viewer.

RIP The Middle East

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 02 Oct 2022 14:55:23 GMT

A Wilhelm Scream, likely the last show I’ll ever see at The Middle East in Cambridge now that they’ve got the notice on the window to start demolition for a luxury hotel.

Teach Them to Yearn for the Vast and Endless Sea

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 23:43:56 GMT

Three loosely related thoughts on “getting things done”. Entirely not something on my mind after a week of work, for any reason.

Fast · Patrick Collison: Some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Metrics are crucial and it’s good to be data-driven, esp to be clear what you’re shooting for. <br/><br/>However, it's easy to lose sight of the purpose and game the metrics. Chasing things like hitting 100% of goals or 6 nines uptime can mean you’re not innovating and taking risks.</p>— Sarah Drasner (@sarah_edo) <a href="https://twitter.com/sarah_edo/status/1575501694611337216?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 29, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Andrea used to have this quote by her desk:

If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.

How to Beat Worry

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 20:53:41 GMT

I like blogs where people add little cartoons and drawings to the text, which makes me think I should do it more. This one does it, and is a good read: How to Beat Worry.

The last thing a worrier should do is wait around for something to happen. Anticipation doesn’t bode well for someone caught in a worry feedback loop, so the key is to proactively invest thought into a worthwhile challenge instead.

Franklin Park Zoo

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 25 Sep 2022 00:08:01 GMT

We had plans to visit friends in Dorchester today, and earlier in the week I thought “well what else can we do if we have to drive to Dorchester”, then realized the Franklin Park Zoo was nearby, and the weather looked nice, and it was “Princess & Pirates” day so why not.

We went to the zoo in 2020 but not to see the animals, to see the Zoo Lights. I’d never actually been there to see the animals. On a scale of 1-10 I’d give the zoo a solid 7. Going during Zoo Lights but not at night means the park is more decorated, and given that its past Labor day there wasn’t much of a crowd, although a few animals were away. I assume in Florida.

Notes:

The “open air” exhibits were the big hits, like the rooms where the birds could fly around or the butterfly house.
Lorelei: “ocelots in real life are cuter than in Minecraft”.
I’ve always kind of thought of tapirs as being about the size of a dog about apparently some are 600 pounds.
We spent a little over 3 hours there, which included eventually getting food because we had planned on being there more like 2 - 2.5 hours.
look at this absolute Chad.
Driving to a point in Boston has gotten so much more annoying in the last 10 years that it might have been easier to drive to the zoo in Providence had we not already had a reason to be in Dorchester.

THE HIERARCHY IS BULLSHIT, WE CAN DO BETTER.

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 10:10:29 GMT

Why do people climb the ladder? “Because it’s there.” And when they don’t have any other goals, the ladder fills a vacuum.

If you never make the leap from externally-motivated to intrinsically-motivated, this will eventually becomes a serious risk factor for your career. Without an inner compass (and a renewable source of joy), you will struggle to locate and connect with the work that gives your life meaning. You will risk burnout, apathy and a serious lack of fucks given..

The times I have come closest to burnout or flaming out have not been when I was working the hardest, but when I cared the least. Or when I felt the least needed.📈📉💔

From THE HIERARCHY IS BULLSHIT, WE CAN DO BETTER.. Happy Friday everyone.

DOOMCAT

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 23:42:09 GMT

We were out at lunch the other day and after burning through all the games on the front of the kids menu, Lorelei turned the menu over and started Tic-Tac-Toe on the back. Andrea suggested Hangman instead, and started explaining how you play it. It occurred to me that Hangman is… well kind of awful, so I suggested instead of Hangman we play DOOMCAT. Which is drawing a cat: two ears, two eyes, two pairs of whiskers, two teeth and then the DOOMCAT eats you. Which is also a little morbid but at least avoids antiquated forms of capital punishment.

We ran out of paper and then we ran out of food and left. Lorelei mentioned she liked and I thought, well, what if I just made it for you to play whenever.

So… I made DOOMCAT.

Some fun things:

The cat emojis came from OpenMoji. They’re well set up for slicing for simple animations like this.
Rather than set up a new project I made the entire thing in Code Sandbox then exported it to Github. From there I added it as a project in Netlify and made the custom domain a subdomain of this site which, as far as I can tell, worked and didn’t break anything.
The GIF above was made with Gifski.

I Want To Believe

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 01:22:37 GMT

Nice evening in Boston. Met up with the parents for dinner at Citrus & Salt

A Little More Love for Links

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 01:37:55 GMT

I’m going to start treating links as content and not as a separate thing living under links. I started thinking about this by way of Stat’s Page on Jim Nielsen’s blog, which led me to Indexing My Blog’s Links, which got me thinking that all the inline links I post get lost in posts over time, and the posts I created as "link" type posts were... not numerous. There’s a lot of things I read which are interesting, and it’s a disservice to the Internet (alright… it’s a disservice to me when I go to look these things up again) to not treat them as the rest of the content.

So, I updated the links page to show all the external links ever posted here, and I’ll try to get better about re-sharing the good stuff I find. And I’ll remember to share links with the whole link title instead of some clever words because that might be clever but it is not helpful.

The Comedy and Tragedy of County Fairs

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 01:44:43 GMT

We went to the Caledonia County Fair yesterday. I used to go with my parents every Summer when I was a kid, because it was honestly about the only thing to do in the Summer in the Northeast Kingdom back then, short of the day they switched the movie at the theatre in St. Johnsbury.

I don’t remember the fair as much: there were the cows, goats, other small animals being judged (with every single one seemingly winning first place), a demolition derby, a tractor/horse/ox pull, rides that had not seen a maintenance check since the day they left the facility that built them, the usual lineup of crappy carnival games and fair food mixed in with local grub.

This year was a lot of the same. The big hit was the magic show — Lorelei got picked to be the last “assistant”, and was part of an elaborate “pick a card, any card” trick during which she was part of a sham wedding to a Vermont boy and was threatened to have her armed removed.

The card Lorelei picked and how she made it clear it was hers.

But the big difference from when I was a kid was the “guns and Trump” stalls all about the fair. Need a hat with a pistol on it and the words “we don’t call 911 here” above it? Need a Trump 2024 flag? Need a “let’s go Brandon”, uh, anything?

Thirty years ago you’d see some knock off No Fear shirts, or Calvin pissing on whatever stickers, but it tended towards Beavis and Butthead levels of stupid and silly, not blatantly offensive. And it’s not like I think Vermont is the hyper-liberal wonderland some people picture it as (the “no steppy on snek” flags don’t stop at the Connecticut River) but it’s disappointing to see so much of the fair become political Hot Topics for shitfucks.

Above Black Bear

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 17:59:25 GMT

I wish I could post the sound for this photo. Well I can, I guess? There was no sound. You get out early enough here and there’s no other bikers, no road noise, heck even the birds seemed like they’d had their worms and were chilling.

This didn’t help the voice in my head that kept wondering why the trail was named Black Bear. It’s just a fun name… right?

Green Mountains

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 23:00:43 GMT

A pleasant change from the brown yards of home.

You just gotta ignite the light

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 01:52:43 GMT

I mentioned in July I had some less than stellar ideas for watching Fourth of July fireworks without crowds. I made up for it tonight by getting a great spot for the Beverly Homecoming ones.

It’s amazing how well the iPhone Pros can take pictures at night. In the past I’ve tried getting photos of fireworks with a decent DSLR and ended up with blurry lights, now I can balance the phone that I carry in my pocket on my ankle and get something good-enough in 3 seconds.

Elden Ring

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 06 Aug 2022 02:05:11 GMT

Some notes:

Took about 90 hours, not including time spent Googling “wtf is going on”.
Ended up doing two runs, one as a DEX/INT build with Ranni’s ending, and a second NG+ run as STR/FTH that was a speed run to the end so I could do the other two endings via some save scumming. DEX/INT I ran with Moonveil katana and Wing of Astel, and then got enough INT to throw the moon at people. STR/FTH I dual wielded Blasphemous Blade and the Gargoyle's Blackblade. Both were fun. Never used a shield.
If you’ve never played a Dark Souls game, this is the easiest one to get into, for sure, and there are a lot of ways to have fun exploring and not constantly seeing YOU DIED screens.
Definitely a top ten favorite game. Maybe a top five. The open world map is just the right size: huge, and so much to explore, but almost every inch of it has enough to make it unique and memorable.

Now, time to wait for some more God of War.

Leaving the Island

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 16:18:33 GMT

Back on the Cecilia Ann.

Island Night

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 01:35:35 GMT

Clear skies.

Morning View

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 12:00:25 GMT

From the Block Island Beach House.

Cecelia Ann

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 13:35:25 GMT

On the way to Block Island.

An illustrated guide to why I haven’t been posting as much

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 16 Jul 2022 13:30:11 GMT

A few reasons:

It’s been a beautiful Summer

Like, super nice. Lots of times I’ve just gone out and sat on the back porch and done this for a bit:

Granted, it’s nice because it’s been dry, no rainy days, not a lot of humidity, so we’re slowly heading towards a future that looks like this:

I’ve been playing a lot of Elden Ring

Probably not a lot by some standards but a lot by my standards. I’m working on Platinum-ing it. It’s good. That might be an understatement. It might be my favorite game ever, just need to make it through the last few bosses to make a final judgement.

I’ve been playing guitar more

I went all in on Helix and picked up a Helix LT[^1] to replace my Pod Go. It’s cool and makes loud noises at reasonable volumes.

We’ve been doing house projects

Sometimes it feels silly to be redoing parts of a house that’s not even 10 years old, but it turns out that when builders do a new construction you get a decent house built to the latest standards and literally the cheapest versions of every single thing to finish the house. For example, I was at the store today looking for a replacement for our back lights[^2] and I found our current lights. They cost $7. In 2022! The light bulb in them cost more than that.

Andrea has done most of the planning and work, but she subcontracts to me for plumbing and electrical and moving heavy stuff and some amount of demolition although that’s mostly because I want to use the sawzall.

our redone guest bathroom

[^1]: More on this later. [^2]: More on this later too.

Not all ideas are good ideas

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 03 Jul 2022 02:03:52 GMT

The back of our house points towards Salem, and Salem had their 4th of July fireworks tonight. In past years the booms have been loud enough to wake up Lorelei, and we could see the flashes through the trees on our back deck, but it wasn’t “watching fireworks”.

This year, I thought… oh, there’s a trail behind our house, in the woods. Let’s walk back there to where there’s a clear view over the water and watch them. Lorelei is old enough to stay up late, it’ll be fun.

We watched three tiny explosions before I was informed this was “the worst idea ever” and we marched back home. Standing in the (surprisingly dark considering we live in a city) woods was not her idea of a good time. Honestly it wasn’t my idea of a good time either (how long has it been since I was in the woods at night?), but the booms of the grand finale are taunting me a bit right now.

Arts Fest Beverly 2022: Bridge to Nowhere

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 18 Jun 2022 20:12:23 GMT

Took a walk down to Arts Fest Beverly early this morning. Nice weather for a walk, and it seemed like a lot of other people agreed, it was quite crowded. We picked up some prints for the house, and Lorelei went a bit cat crazy:

The walk was great not only because of the weather, but because there wasn’t many cars out because the bridge we take into town is closed forever.

This bridge has always had an appearance of “should we be driving over this?” so the news of its closure was not surprising, but the one day of notice was.

Some prints not pictured were from:

Past Years

2021
2019

Forty

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 30 May 2022 22:48:47 GMT

I turned forty today. It was a nice day at home, and there was ice cream cake. One upside to having a birthday on a holiday: you almost always have it off. One downside: a lot of other people do too. But late May also coincides with peak allergy season for me, so I’m happy with at home cake instead of sneezing the top scoop of ice cream off my cone.

My thirties, by the numbers:

1 child.
3 houses and 1 apartment across two states.
4 cars. Two Subarus, a Honda and a Volkswagen. Real exotics.
Visited 5 new countries: Mexico, Spain, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and two new US states, Colorado and Nevada.
6 jobs (across 2 careers).
1 global pandemic.

The most complete record for those numbers (besides my head) was my Photos library. While I had online accounts that pre-dated my thirties, I deleted two of them (Facebook entirely, everything on Twitter over a few years old), and lost track of a few others (two blogs, including one that was a webcomic that I swear was pretty funny but I have absolutely no record of). I choose to believe that, God willing and the creek don’t rise[^1], I’ll be able to point to this blog post on this blog when I turn fifty.

Notes for my Forties

Last night Andrea said she wanted to document me giving advice for my fifty-year-old self because, “you can’t go back and give advice to your thirty-year-old self”. Fair. Although I wish I could, because I feel like the main difference between my twenties and thirties was that I had to actually learn something. While I could brute-force my way through a lot of things in my twenties (with mixed results) that fell apart early in my thirties. So, here’s some advice for myself for the next ten years from what I’ve learned from the last ten years.

Know what to say “no” to

I spent a lot of my early and mid-thirties saying “no” to things out of avoidance. My anxiety about being anxious when doing something got the best of me, and I wouldn’t do it. I know relationships ended because of this. I missed out on things that were objectively fun because of it. I missed out on career paths because of it. Eventually I went to therapy and now I have the metacognition to know better why I’m saying no, and a historical record to look back and that proves that the alternative to avoiding anxiety isn’t being not anxious, it’s being miserable about the choices you made to avoid it.

Austin Kleon wrote about a similar idea recently, “Would I do it tomorrow?”. I haven’t found the right mental model for me to decide yes or no to things, but I at least know it’s not defaulting to “no”, or choosing “no” because you’re worrying about what the bad parts of saying “yes” are.

Know what choices have been made and no longer require further thought

This is the crux of why becoming an adult is difficult, to me. Looking again at my twenties, I wasn’t entangled with anything. I could quit a job on a whim, move, spend money on whatever. Once I got married, owned a house, had a kid, that all becomes more difficult. Which then breeds a different mindset where you think things can’t or shouldn’t change.

But a) everything changes eventually and b) being adaptable to change of your own volition is important for being able to deal with when change happens outside of your control.

So think of the future like an artist trying a bunch of different mediums, then saying “I’m going to draw with pen on paper from now on”. They can draw anything, but they don’t have to think about what they’re going to draw it with.

Listen to the birds

Sometimes Andrea asks me what I’m thinking about, and I reply “nothing”. I don’t think she always believes me, but I’ve been trying to get better about being bored. It’s like a return to my pre-Internet youth, where when you sat down outside, that was it, there was the outside and nothing else. You could listen to the birds, or look at the clouds. Do we need more than that?

This isn’t me going full “blow up your TV”. I recently bought a really large, very fancy one. It’s more an acknowledgement that I can only think about so many things, and often I’ll think about things in unhelpful ways. So, sometimes don’t think, just listen and watch, or doodle on a piece of paper, or close your eyes and feel the breeze. Brains need rest too.

Take more vacations

…and travel to more places. We made an intentional decision after getting married to spend most of our savings on a house, and then made a lot of other life choices around having a house. We now have a nice house and will never move again (see above about knowing what won’t change. Again, God willing and the creek don’t rise), but it meant there was never a lot of money left over for vacations or travel[^2], or we felt that travel was an extravagance. While I do enjoy spending time in our lovely home, some of the best memories I have and the biggest source of novel ideas came from traveling.

You can respond to everything with this now

[^1]: Even though I don’t believe in God, this is by far my favorite American saying. [^2]: But Joe, you say, you went to 5 new countries. Well, they were all for work. If you want to travel, I highly recommend working for a travel company.

Seven

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 21 May 2022 20:29:53 GMT

Lorelei turned seven this week. We had a party today, with a princess / fairy theme. We did a pile of yard work on Friday to finish off projects in the back yard, then woke up to clouds. Luckily it burned off by the time the kids got here, and they got to play outside for a bit. None of them mentioned the work we did, although I suppose they would have noticed if it was all a big dirt pile still (and, maybe enjoyed it more).

I look forward to a time in the future when I can tell Lorelei how she spent most of first grade pretending to be a cat. All of her friends seem to accept her catness — they all came with cat-themed gifts, and there was a game they played called “pet the cat” where Lorelei got to pretend to be a cat. The parents lamented that none of their kids ever tell them what goes on at school except in bits and pieces, but we pieced together that this is a game that gets played often at recess.

We also picked up an instax Link wide so we could send real pictures of the party home with the kids. This is Lorelei testing it out the day before:

I’ve wrote before about how much I enjoy the instax formats. The wide format is even better, and the printer, which allows you to use your much better camera phone as the source, makes it better x2.

Since yet another Easter has passed and Covid still isn’t over, it was, of course, a topic of discussion. The kids at the party are all in the same class, so the risk of one party is the same as the risk every single other day. Among the parents it was more a sense of resignation: we’re going out, we’re going to work, what else would we do. We want to start talking about “the pandemic” in past tense. Can we? I’m not sure it’s up to us. May of 2022 isn’t the same as May of 2020, but it’s not the same as May of 2019, either, but I guess that’s how life goes.

Books and cats and books and cats and….

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 24 Apr 2022 21:27:57 GMT

Our trips in the past few years have been there-and-back affairs, due to the complications of figuring out COVID hours/openings, the fickle nature of New England nature, and wanting some amount of post-travel pre-work time to relax. But the end of last week we were in Connecticut, Andrea wanted to go to a used book store, and none of the aforementioned issues were issues, so I suggested we go to the Niantic Book Barn, which met everyone’s requests:

Andrea: a large, semi-curated but mildly out of control collection of books.
Lorelei: cats

Andrea found a pile of romance novels:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I just bought a crap ton of paperback romances and romantica dating from the 1930s to early 2000s. Check out my Instagram stories where I’m sharing pics (and commentary of course)!<a href="https://t.co/S578iWQU7P">https://t.co/S578iWQU7P</a> <a href="https://t.co/TzqdudeynW">pic.twitter.com/TzqdudeynW</a></p>— Shelf Love: Romantic Love Stories in Pop Culture (@ShelfLovePod) <a href="https://twitter.com/ShelfLovePod/status/1517970192852299776?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 23, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8" />

Lorelei and I found the cats. Credit to her sixth sense for finding the two under couch.

I wouldn’t recommend going far out of the way to stop there, but if you’re by the Connecticut shoreline already it’s a fun stop. You won’t find a lot of good books unless you snipe one that just got sorted or you pull it straight from the newly arrived section. The stuff that accumulates… well, let’s say they had three entire shelves of L. Ron Hubbard.

As for me, I walked out with one, one dollar book. I think it was a steal.

Museum of Science

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 00:50:16 GMT

We went to the Boston Museum of Science today. I have fond memories of it from when I was a kid, although growing up in Connecticut it was a rare treat, so far away in the big city of Boston.

This time I was not terribly impressed. Neither was Lorelei. I was thinking about why, on the way home, and I think it’s:

No one would pick the Boston Museum of Science as a museum to really wow someone. They make lightning indoors and it’s got a nice view of the river but it’s not even close to one of those “oh man this is so much museum it might be too much museum” kind of museums.
The interest and interaction you can get out of a museum exhibit for a six year old today is so much less than what it was for me as a six year old. You want to learn about nature? Great, here’s birds in 8k video, let’s look up what sounds they make, here’s an AR app to see what kinds of birds live in our backyard. What did I have as a kid? Look up “bird” in the encyclopedia, get a few pictures, maybe go to the library and get a bird book. Bug my Grandfather about bird names until he’d tell me something like “if it’s black it’s a Blackbird” until I went away. Going to a museum and seeing all of that knowledge in one place was mind blowing.

But today a hall of dead (or are they fake? Probably dead) animals isn’t really a draw. A dinosaur skeleton is (if it’s real). A cool physical or interactive exhibit is. The 4D movie theatre was a hit.

But still, we had fun, even though Lorelei pretended she did not when we chose to not eat at the food court there.

I will say if you’re not from Boston and thinking of going, going on a holiday is great. For reasons I cannot explain after living in the area for twenty years, Boston on a holiday is always empty. I have no idea where people go. On the drive in there was not only no traffic, there were parts of the highway where there were no other cars. That maxes out the happiness meter for me.

The Three-Body Problem or the Three-Book problem?

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 16 Apr 2022 14:29:17 GMT

I finished The Three-Body Problem this morning. I’ve been reading it in stops and starts, I found many parts too tell-not-show for my tastes. It’s an interesting sci-fi plot with a graduate-level physics class thrown in the middle. Or it’s not sci-fi at all and it’s an allegory for Communist China’s interactions with the West.

Either way it’s book number one of a three book series and I don’t think I’ll continue. I tend to stay away from books that are part of a series that can’t stand on their own. I’m two books into The Stormlight Archive but I’m not interested enough to keep going. Similarly I finished Horizon Forbidden West recently, a sequel itself that sets the story up for a trilogy and — I dunno, I’m not that interested in hearing more, especially if it’s tens or hundreds of hours more.

On sort of the other side of this, we watched Coda last night. It’s as good as everyone said it was and I don’t think anyone is going to pitch an incredibly ironically titled Coda 2 about Ruby in college. In this era of “more of everything” it’s nice to enjoy something that ends.

Why Didn’t Someone Tell Me This Sooner?

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 02:23:28 GMT

I finished Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? yesterday. It’s a good high level intro into almost everything a person might go see a therapist for. It’s better organized than 6000 Tik Tok videos, which seems to be the de rigueur way to learn about these things.

I took a Psychology class in college, it was pretty useless. I’d much rather someone had just given me this book. Honestly a week reading this instead of an extra week of Freud and bearskin rugs or whatever might have been the most helpful thing for me in college. Oh! This is how anxious thoughts work? And strategies for stopping them? No, useless information. More on Pavlov’s dogs, please.

There’s a lot of overlap here with Atomic Habits by James Clear, it’s even referenced a few times. There’s an idea they share: say you’re out of shape. A bad goal is to say, “I want to run a marathon”. You’ll probably fail (too ambitious), but you could also succeed then never run again. The idea is to not have a goal but to form a habit. Tomorrow say “I’m a person who runs”, then start running, even if just down the block. While “becoming more physically fit” is one easy to understand example, the crux of it is you reframe your thoughts and change how you think about yourself rather than being reactive (I’m depressed, I need to be happy) or problem solving (I’m burned out, I need a plan for relaxing).

If you want the super short version of both books, it’s the song “The Next Right Thing” from Frozen 2[^1].

I recommend the book. It’s a quick read. It unfortunately doesn’t cover finding or affording a therapist because your insurance won’t cover it, but I suppose that’s out of scope.

[^1]: I love this song and reference it often. While the lyrics are like the textbook example of helping someone overcome grief slid into a children’s musical, it’s also just really good advice. 99.9% of the time you can get through life… just doing the next (right) thing. Don’t overthink it! Our brains are dumb!

An obvious bug

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 11:51:56 GMT

Debugging is one of the things I enjoy about programming. It’s like a little puzzle to solve. But as code gets more complicated, the little bugs can hide themselves in ways that make them very, very, annoyingly hard to find. This one, minimally reproduced in this Codepen, got me this week:

<p class="codepen" data-height="300" data-default-tab="html,result" data-slug-hash="ZEvxdZg" data-user="jjmartucci" style="height: 300px; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; border: 2px solid; margin: 1em 0; padding: 1em;"><span>See the Pen <a href="https://codepen.io/jjmartucci/pen/ZEvxdZg">A small bug 🐞</a> by Joseph Martucci (<a href="https://codepen.io/jjmartucci">@jjmartucci</a>)on <a href="https://codepen.io">CodePen</a>.</span><script async src="https://cpwebassets.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>

It seems obvious — an empty input calculates an invalid date. But then imagine the calculated date was never visible, an empty input is considered valid data, and the system that reported this being an issue was 3 microservice hops away.

And the real issue, it turns out, was ever using parseInt. Day.js can do the calculation just fine with strings.

The most writing in human history

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 00:15:25 GMT

I’ve been reading Smarter Than You Think. Chapter 2 is about online writing and blogging, and Clive Thompson mentions how there’s more writing going on now than ever before in human history:

As the historian David Henkin notes in The Postal Age, the per capita volume of letters in the United States in 1860 was only 5.15 per year. “That was a huge change at the time—it was important,” Henkin tells me. “But today it’s the exceptional person who doesn’t write five messages a day. I think a hundred years from now scholars will be swimming in a bewildering excess of life writing.”

What’s wild to me is that I got an English degree between the years of 2000 and 2004, and… no one saw this coming. A few weeks before graduating someone suggested I should sign up on some “Facebook thing, it just opened up outside of Harvard, you can see other people from other schools”, and no one I knew had ever blogged anything. So it wasn’t a miss of what was happening, but it was a miss on what would be happening.

Also, any English program could have ditched Hemingway for some basic communication writing and maybe we could have replaced the E in STEM.

React 18

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 01:48:01 GMT

React 18 is now available on npm.

I started using React back in the 0.14.X days. I still prefer it over other front-end frameworks because it’s not a framework, it’s just a library. That said — these days I prefer to use it with a framework. When I first started using React it was as part of an MVC app (usually) or a truly single-page application. Once we moved to handling routing client-side, and handling all data fetching and state management client side, and handling authentication client side… it’s a lot. There’s a lot of cases where you would have been better of using AngularJS or Vue or an MVC whatever backend and some web components than trying to glue together React + React Router (no wait, Reach?) + Redux (no everyone uses MobX now, wait, now it’s just React Hooks WAIT, no, now we’re using state machines) + the CSS-in-JS library of the day.

You see the problem. Still, I think the React combination of JSX and parent/child rendering updates, and prioritizing functional JavaScript without a lot of magic is great. Do I care about most of the updates in React 18? Not really. I’m glad Next, or Remix, or some other great framework is going to do magic with them.

Two articles on web APIs

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 19 Mar 2022 17:49:54 GMT

The first one: It’s always been you, Canvas2D - Chrome Developers. Lots of nice updates to performance and quality of life for the Canvas API. I have a soft spot for the <canvas> tag — when I was (re)learning web development I spent a lot of time at my non-development related job spinning up little web projects that required no libraries or compilation steps to run in the browser pre-installed on my laptop. The canvas element was the most readily available but also complex web API that runs locally, so I built all kinds of interfaces and animations in it while learning.

Second: Using files with browsers, in reality - macwright.com

The meaning and importance of the file has shifted a lot in the last decade. The Verge wrote about how students today don’t have a grasp on how files and folders work - or they have a very good understanding of the norms of storing information in the cloud, but not on their local computers. The web contains all sorts of things that we never think of or use as files: is your email an Mbox file ? Do you ever directly use the HEIC files that are the native format of Apple Photos? Or consider any rich text on the internet, like a Notion page - does it have a defined file type and an option to download? And think of the mobile web. You can download a file from mobile Safari, but do you?

Worth noting, I suppose, that I’m writing this in an application which does not use files. But I generally prefer the workflow of “don’t make me think about this as a file, but give me the file if I ask for it”, so it’s nice to see this API coming together.

And I enjoyed this bit from that article:

Working with the web platform is dealing with history, with the accumulated matter of quirksmode and good-enough standards. In exchange for the ability to deliver instantly-updating software directly to customers with no middlemen and no installation, you have to absorb a great deal of nearly-useless information that’s entirely about dodging meaningless traps.

Another set of speakers for the $100 speaker shootout

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 00:51:00 GMT

I have a thing for cheap, powered speakers, it seems. In November I picked up an Apple Mini and a Sonos Symfonisk. I noted then that both are fine but neither blew me away. The Sonos was being used in the basement with an old Apple TV for workouts, but because it required selecting it as the output every single time the TV turned on I wanted to find a better solution.

I’ve read many good things about Edifier speakers so I picked up a pair of Edifier R1280Ts. I put them in the office to compare them to the speakers I was using, the JBL 104s. Here’s a high level ranking:

JBL104. Still my favorites. Not as loud as the Edifiers but a better shape for a desktop and much clearer.
Edifier 1280T. Ended up going in the basement workout space, hardwired to the TV out. Gets decently loud, not exactly clear but if I’m listening to speed metal while lifting clear isn’t the highest priority.
Sonos Symfonisk. Sounds good at moderate volume, and the shape (and ability to be a shelf) is neat. Distorted at high volumes, the Sonos app is miserable to use, and very directional sound. Might be better as a stereo pair but I’m suspicious of the overhead of two wireless speakers working together.
Apple Mini. Cute. Fun color. Unless you really need something in this specific size and need it to be “smart” and work with Siri it’s overpriced and anything would be better.

All we need is just a little patience

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 19:28:00 GMT

Two things I worked on this weekend:

I cleaned up all the crap on this site from it being a developer playground over the years. Multiple frameworks, 3+ CMSs, metadata from various and sundry file managers, unused APIs, image optimization code that never worked and was making 100s of additional images every time I built, etc. Now everything is done “the Next way”, including images, because I finally took the time to set up next/image using Next on Netlify. I cleaned up a bunch of components and the typography, so hopefully everything reads better.
For Christmas this year we proposed the East Coast and West Coast families get together for a “paint (by numbers) night”. We ordered the paint kits for everyone, then forgot about it, then scheduled the time, but then people were busy, then we finally scheduled the time, and last night we did it.

Some people were a bit ambitious in their choices and might be occupied by this project until Christmas 2022. 8.5″ x 11″ is a good size. Excited to add this to the rotating art wall behind my on Zoom calls.

Interesting reads from the last week

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 12 Mar 2022 20:03:33 GMT

Throughout the week I throw interesting articles in my Things inbox, to either file or re-read on the weekend. I’m clearing it out, but these are some I thought you, dear reader, might enjoy.

My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

There’s a broad pattern these days of mobile sites being much worse and more restrictive, since they’re trying to push you towards logging in or downloading the app. Ironically, being conscious of my struggle, these moments of friction actually help push me towards closing the site instead. For that, I’m grateful for Reddit’s mobile UI.

Desperation-Induced Focus

My advice to people when they are thinking about instituting a new process is to go to a whiteboard2 and write down the answer to this question: “If you could only get one thing done this year, what would it be?”. If that answer is “institute some new process”, go for it. But if it’s something like “increase market share from 30% to 60%” or “launch this new product that will 2x our TAM”, don’t waste your time on anything else. Just take your best person (up to and including the CEO), make them responsible for solving that problem, and give them everything and everyone they need to make it happen.

Family IT Support Turned Blog Post Turned Anecdote in The Wall Street Journal

In my conversation with Nicole, I tried to explain the idea of “progressive enhancement” and why, I believe, the website my Mom was trying to access should’ve still been accessible.

I Welcome Your Performance

Please-please-please, don’t let the voice of cynicism stop you from sharing what brings you joy. Instead, let us say to one another: Hey! Fellow humans. I welcome your beautiful performance!

‘Performative sharing’ is a small, fascinating window into who we are, what we love, and what’s possible. It takes us out of our own heads, and it challenges our limited view of the world. Sometimes, it’s about nothing but fun, or the base human desire to walk up to another upright ape and show them this thing we found. Isn’t it cool? And what’s wrong with that?

My favorite part of TypeScript is debugging the config

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 17:38:34 GMT

Really nothing I love more than figuring out why a random config option got added 2 years ago by a dev, with no comments, and removing or changing it causes thousands of seemingly unrelated errors.

Take my books, please

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 02:45:33 GMT

I reorganized my office recently and — there’s too many books! So I made a filter on my reading page of books I’m trying to give away. They’re all good books, I just don’t want them any more! Drop me a line on the contact page and I’ll send it your way.

Netflix’s Explained: Coding

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 02:31:23 GMT

I recommend Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software as a great history of how we got to our current world of computers and programming. If you want the < 30 minute version, Netflix’s Explained: Coding is pretty good too.

5 Accessibility Quick Wins (and two for this site)

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 00:41:32 GMT

From CSS Tricks: 5 Accessibility Quick Wins You Can Implement Today.

I like articles about accessibility in this format, how-tos of practical examples you see on almost every website. Heydon Pickering’s Inclusive Components was the first place I saw this, but the site had only a few examples and ended up being short-lived.

I went to implement two of the 5 “quick wins” above that were relevant to this site:

The active page now shows up with a bit of style and the aria-current page. I was doing a gross hack with the window.location to parse out the current page before, and cleaned that up with Next’s useRouter.
I thought the site didn’t have a document language, but it did! Modifying the <html> tag in Next is, like most JavaScript frameworks, somewhat unintuitive. This post shows one way: How to set the HTML lang attribute in Next.js? but I found out it doesn’t work with next export when generating a static site. I then realized I had already done it the other way, using a custom Document.

First ride

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 24 Feb 2022 02:09:32 GMT

I see:

I do this:

Warm days in early Spring used to be my favorite time to ride as a kid. Warm enough you go in shorts and a shirt, but you can goof around on icy patches and catch those cool breezes off all the semi-frozen streams and ponds.

Today… wasn’t as great. Too much coffee and not enough breakfast and amazingly, even though these woods aren’t big, the trails were littered with enough dead leaves and dropped trees I got lost once, or twice, or thrice. But still — some goofin’ on the ice.

Compact discs

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 15:29:06 GMT

The last time I stopped by my parent’s house they handed me a medium sized box full of my old CDs. As an elder-millennial I did have an iPod and a hard drive full of mp3s in college, so these CDs were from the pre-Internet days, and none of them were good enough that I wanted them around after graduating college. So, take a trip down memory lane with me, by way of CD.

Ska one hits

Only 90s kids will remember, but once upon a time if you heard a good song and wanted to hear it again, and it didn’t get radio play… you had to buy the whole CD.

The albums I thought were cool when I was a teenager I haven’t thought about since

Alright… I do think one hot minute is a good album. And there’s two good songs on the Dishwalla album. But I really wanted that Candlebox CD and can’t remember a single song from it.

The cool covers collection

I’m glad animated covers have made their way back to Apple Music. The Alice in Chains one didn’t move, but purple plastic! My kid will never understand the excitement of plastic in a non-clear color.

Lost and gone

I have a number of albums that I downloaded (don’t tell Lars) or had copies of from friends that disappeared[^1], but this one, Gravelled and Green by the Actual Tigers I liked, but it was possibly never released, and doesn’t exist (as far as I can tell) on any streaming platform.

But if you want the vibe, some of their songs are on YouTube.

Deep regrets

Man I hope I didn’t actually pay this much for this one.

Ran out of lives

I bring up this CD in conversation a lot because it included a game on the disc called Virtual Guitar Quest For Fame which at the time was cool. It was also the only way you could reasonably listen to the album, which otherwise sucked.

Wrong place, wrong time

Some CDs just bring up very distinct memories. That long car ride you took where it was the only CD you had so you listened to it over and over. Sad songs that bring up sad times and ska songs that… also bring up sad times. Hangs-ups by Goldfinger always brings up one specific memory for me.

When I was in college I broke my leg, but due to some questionable doctoring it was assumed to be a pulled ligament or muscle for a few weeks, until I noted that it still wasn’t better. So they sent me off for an MRI[^2]. When scheduling it, the hospital mentioned that I would be in the MRI machine for a while, so I could bring a CD to listen to.

Great, I have CDs. So which one would I pick, what music would be most appropriate to listen to while lying still for 30 minutes? Of course, the one that starts off with the most upbeat track from the Tony Hawk 2 soundtrack.

[^1]: The albums and the friends. [^2]: The astute among you will note that an MRI is not a good way to diagnose a broken leg, but it did image the torn ligaments around my knee, which then led a slightly better doctor to recommend I get an X-ray which found the cracks on my femur and tibia. Yay!

Oblique Strategies

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 01:48:21 GMT

At some point I found a webpage that had an entire list of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. I put it in a Bear note but that doesn’t quite capture the “I just need a new way of thinking aspect” of it, so I put the list on a page, and it grabs one from the list at random.

Please enjoy an Oblique Strategy.

And if you’re like “uhhhh what”… just reload the page!

The cognitive dissonance of digital communication.

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 01:06:29 GMT

Two things I read this weekend.

What We Lost: about Zoom versus reality. I’m on the fence, I do like seeing people, but very rarely. Certainly not enough to consider going to an office every day again, but still…

No, I have no idea that everyone hates the idea you just proposed because my ability to read the room has been mostly erased. I can’t tell the difference between “We hate this idea” silence and “We mostly just quiet because it’s a chore to speak during a video conference” silence.

And in reading that I think, wow, Zoom hasn’t improved in voice quality at all during this pandemic. Background blur still makes you look like a spirit passing through a room from another plane of existence. And it’s not just Zoom, I Facetime with my parents and in the middle of saying something important hear, “oh the video just went away” on the other-side.

Gurman: FaceTime for Apple AR/VR Headset Could Rely on Memojis and SharePlay. The flip side of this is it appears (or in the case of Meta, it is known) that tech companies think the problem with remote communication is that we haven’t gone far enough. Maybe they’re right. Voice chat while playing a video game is usually better than Zoom. My Zoom avatar, when I don’t have my camera on, is a T-Rexicorn, why not just animate it and make it 3D and map it to my face.

With so many companies sticking to all-remote for now and in the future, maybe it’s the right move. Get rid of offices, get rid of conferences, get a fancy reclining pod chair in your house and drop in to any “room” in the world. Sure, you’ll have the head of a cat and you’ll only exist from the waist up, but that’s close enough, right?

The motion of the ocean

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 02:49:13 GMT

Some hypnotic snow melt ocean interaction on Vimeo. Found while out on a walk on the beach, as one does when it’s in the mid-fifties on a February day.

My first podcast appearance

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 00:37:39 GMT

Love & Marriage & The Simpsons: The Happily Ever After 10 Years with Joe Martucci

And if you prefer reading, there’s a transcript! We had fun recording this the week of our tenth anniversary. She’s had famous authors on, people with PhDs, and now me, a dumdum who talks about the Simpsons.

TIL, you can download your iCloud data

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 03:29:19 GMT

I learned from a possibly hyperbolic Reddit thread that if you go to https://privacy.apple.com you can download not only all of the data Apple has about you, but also all of your iCloud files. Because Apple insists that the iCloud folder must live on an internal hard drive, making a complete copy to an external drive has always been a chore. The best options are either spend $800 on a 2TB internal drive (which, isn’t a great option on a $999 machine and is only recently even an option) or setting up a Windows machine because iCloud on Windows could be installed in any directory.

There’s still no easy way to do this for family accounts, that I know of. If you know of one, let me know. I generally trust iCloud, but after last week’s outages I realized I might be too trusting.

When you steal your ideas for a self-driving car from Maximum Overdrive

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 00:54:03 GMT

Maximum Overdrive was a film written and directed by Stephen King in which all machines become sentient, including vehicles. It’s probably best known for:

Being the only movie Stephen King directed.
Having the AC/DC album Who Made Who as its soundtrack.
The “main character”, a semi-truck with a goblin face that tries to kill people.

It’s an awful film, but it’s a great “here’s the absolute worst-case scenario for self-driving vehicles.”

Related, Tesla has to recall a bunch of cars because they roll through stop signs. That’s not quite stick a goblin mask on it bad, but as a consumer product it ain’t a great start. Tesla true believers will tell you “humans would do that too”, but in my opinion human drivers are only slightly better than sentient goblin trucks anyway, so maybe we should aim higher.

I find many interesting articles on Hacker News, and sometimes interesting comments. But the first one here is a treat: basically, how should a self-driving car know whether to do the “school’s in” speed in a school zone, or the “school’s out” speed. Can mankind solve this impossible question? What first solution might we try? My gut says if we go double the max speed limit, we’ll be too fast for anyone to catch us!

Effortless

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 23:36:29 GMT

I read Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism back in 2020. It had been sitting on a shelf in our house for a long time, but I picked it up on a sunny pandemic Sunday and read the whole thing in one go. It’s a good book for that type of reading, lots of anecdotes and the central point is “say no to more things” which isn’t a terribly complicated message.

I was browsing Libby the other day and saw his new book, Effortless was available. Sure, I said, why not.

TL;DR: If you were only going to read one of the two, read Essentialism. Really, read neither.

The central theme here starts with the “rocks in a jar problem”. If you have big rocks, little rocks, and sand, and needed to fill a jar, you’d start with the big rocks, then the little ones, then fill in the gaps with sand. Use that as a metaphor for prioritization: big rocks first, sand last. But what if, the book wonders, you have too many big rocks to fit in the jar? McKeown gives a productivity book great hits list as the solution to this problem: time-block your life, make checklists, ask how to make something “easier” by rejecting notions of how it is currently hard. Automate common actions, prefer solutions that have non-linear application, set reasonable goals that can be repeatedly daily rather than burning bright and burning out fast.

My problems with the book:

McKeown frames all of the business platitudes with a story about how he needed to find a way to make his own life more effortless because one of his children suddenly became seriously ill. This is an interesting story he only touches on at the start and the end. You go back to the rock metaphor: if you’re a parent, you can easily end up with too many kid shaped rocks. Not to mention a lot of his great ideas for being more effortless (get more sleep! set a schedule!) become way harder when you have kids. I wanted more of this!
Every book aimed at anyone in business has to name drop Warren Buffet, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos. I find it especially weird (the last two, anyway), in a story book ended about being effortless for your family. Two of those guys suck at it[^1]!
All books of this nature have to quietly ignore survivorship bias. They also have to ignore counter examples. At one point McKeown suggests, as an example of consistency, writing more than 500 words a day, but stopping at 1000. This ignores that someone like Stephen King wrote his best books after snorting a table-full of cocaine.

McKeown suggests not just reading books, but understanding books. Write a one-page summary afterwards. Well, here it is. To follow the lessons of his first book, here’s the 10% version: don’t read it.

[^1]: I know nothing about Warren Buffet’s personal life. Nor do I care.

Wintering

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 29 Jan 2022 23:20:15 GMT

Some ice, and some snow.

It occurred to me, watching Lorelei try to ice skate, how absurdly hard it is to learn unless you’re out on the ice all the time, and even then it’s such an odd activity. Here’s some tiny stilts that make you go much faster, unless your legs get a little bit further apart in which case you’ll fall directly on your head on the hardest thing we could find that wasn’t a rock.

On the topic of skates, I ordered some for myself. While we don’t skate often I figure at this point my feet are this size until I die, so why not get some decent skates. Fate has decided this is a Winter 2022 — 2023 goal for me instead.

It’s fine. I’ll go slip on the front walk and hit my head on that instead.

The End of Everything

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 23 Jan 2022 17:50:58 GMT

Finished The End of Everything this morning. Here’s a fun quote from the epilogue to chew over:

If the universe is going to end, one way or another, I concede that we may as well make our peace with it. Pedro Ferreira is way ahead of me on that one. “I think it’s great,” he says. “It’s so simple and so clean.”

“I’ve never understood why people get so depressed about the end, the death of the Sun and all,” he continues, “I just like the serenity of it.”

“So it doesn’t bother you that we ultimately have no legacy in the universe?” I ask him.

“No, not at all,” he says. “I very much like our blip-ness… It’s always appealed to me,” he continues. “It’s the transience of these things. It’s the doing. It’s the process. It’s the journey. Who cares where you get to, right?”

The Platinum is in Another Castle

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 01:54:39 GMT

I played two games recently: Death’s Door and The Forgotten City, both on the Playstation 5. Both were good (Death’s Door I’d even say great), but one thing they have in common that I don’t love about modern video games is the notion that the story is over, but wait, there’s more! More quests, or endings, or collectibles, or twists on playing the game you just played but slightly differently.

I kind of liked old video games where there was an end, and you could say you beat it, or, more likely with some Nintendo-hard games, didn’t.

Hygge

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 00:22:02 GMT

Annual maintenance

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 15 Jan 2022 20:53:59 GMT

In January of 2020 we bought a new car, a 2019 Volkswagen GTI. It’s become a little touchpoint on the pandemic over the years.

2020

We bought the car because, while we had gotten by with only one car for a few years at that point, Andrea had started a new job that required one, and while I was already mostly remote, various kid related tasks were outside the range of convenience for seriously considering walking.

2021

Volkswagen sets its service schedule as 10,000 miles or 1 year. If it had been used to commute every day, plus various side trips, it probably would have been around that mileage mark. Instead, after having it for 2 months, we found out we wouldn’t be commuting for a while, which became a long while, which by January was looking pretty much like never, ever again. It had under 3,000 miles on it. I waited at the dealership for the service because at that point it was a bit of a novelty to be out in public. It was still pre-vaccine so everyone waiting was avoiding the other people waiting, and most of the people working at the dealership were over it. They had a VW Bug by the front door. I went to Trader Joe’s on the way home, and there was a queue out front to limit the number of people in the store at any time. A cheerful Trader Joe’s employee handed you a cart when they let you in.

2022

2 years, or 20,000 miles. We’re still well under 10,000 miles despite using the GTI for every “trip” we’ve taken in the last two years. They replaced the VW Bug in the lobby with a VW Bus. Everyone is, once again, wearing masks, but it doesn’t feel weird to drink coffee while waiting, or have a conversation at a reasonable, human distance. There’s a 2022 GTI in the dealership in the flat-gray color I wanted to get ours in[^1], but two years later I wouldn’t even think about a new gas powered car. We’ll drive the two we have until they become dinosaurs running on dinosaurs. I went to Trader Joe’s on the way home. There was no queue outside, but the store was its normal weekend levels of packed. I had to get my own cart.

What’s my best guess for January, 2023? No masks. Finally hit 10,000 miles but still well under 20,000 and impossibly far from 30,000. I’ll still go to Trader Joe’s after. I’ll be smart enough to do this on a weekday so I don’t get stuck in the weekend crowd. Things change, but things stay the same.

[^1]: One upside to buying a car where model year = current year -1 is that they can be cheaper, or have better financing deals. The downside is you’re usually stuck picking from black or white for colors.

Adding search to a static site

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 17:59:06 GMT

This blog post is based off this tweet reply. Because I read it and thought “oh, I already did write about this!” then tried searching for it on the site and couldn’t find it by clicking around, so I searched in the files for the site on my computer and couldn’t find it, then searched across my entire computer and found a long blog post about using Lunr to search gifs that I never finished[^1].

So, here’s a finished version in a similar vein: let’s add search functionality to this site using Lunr. We need to build an index for Lunr at build time, which means we need some piece of code that will be triggered to begin looking for items to add. I did this by creating a new Search page (/search). I copied the logic from my index page and removed some logic that isn’t relevant, but the code here gets all of the markdown files in my content folder and then loops through them. In this case we want to build a “document” structure for Lunr to be able to search through:

export async function getStaticProps({ ...ctx }) {
  //get posts & context from folder
  const posts = ((context) => {
    const keys = context.keys();
    const values = keys.map(context);
    const data = keys.map((key, index) => {
      const value = values[index];
      // Parse yaml metadata & markdownbody in document
      const document = matter(value.default);
      document.data.date = singleDateFormat(document.data.date);
      if (document.data.finished) {
        document.data.finished = singleDateFormat(document.data.finished);
      }

      return {
        title: document.data.title || "",
        body: document.content || "",
        slug: key.replace(".md", "").substring(1),
      };
    });

    return data;
  })(require.context("../content", true, /\.\/.*\.md$/));

  return {
    props: {
      searchData: posts,
    },
  };
}

In the actual Search page component itself, we build the Lunr index from the searchData prop:

 const lunrIndex = lunr(function () {
  this.ref("title");
  this.field("title");
  this.field("body");
  this.field("slug");

  props.searchData.forEach(function (doc) {
    this.add(doc);
  }, this);
});

After this we wire up the Search page to have a text input that, on change, searches the Lunr index. This is the code for the entire page[^2]:

function Search(props) {
  const [searchString, setSearchString] = useState("");
  const [searchResults, setSearchResults] = useState();
  var lunrIndex = lunr(function () {
    this.ref("title");
    this.field("title");
    this.field("body");
    this.field("slug");

    props.searchData.forEach(function (doc) {
      this.add(doc);
    }, this);
  });

  const searchLunr = (e) => {
    setSearchString(e.target.value);
    setSearchResults(lunrIndex.search(e.target.value));
  };

  const searchResultsList = () => {
    if (!searchResults || !searchResults.length) {
      return null;
    }
    return searchResults.map((result) => {
      const slug = props.searchData.find(
        (data) => data.title === result.ref
      ).slug;
      return (
        <li key={slug}>
          <p>{result.ref}</p>
          <Link href={`/${slug}`}>{slug}</Link>
        </li>
      );
    });
  };

  return (
    <Layout>
      <ReadingContent>
        <h1>Search</h1>
        <input type="text" value={searchString} onChange={searchLunr} />
        <h2>Results</h2>
        <ul>{searchResultsList()}</ul>
      </ReadingContent>
    </Layout>
  );
}

So that’s cool, and it works, but one thing I noticed here is that this Lunr search runs against the full text of the content, but once you click through, if the post is long it’s not immediately obvious where the term you were searching for appears. Let’s do something about that, at least for blog content.

First, let’s append a query parameter to the link we get from our search results, like this:

<Link href={`/${slug}?searchterm=${searchString}`}>{slug}</Link>

This blog is built with Next so for me getting that query parameter on any given page looks something like:

import { useRouter } from "next/router";

// inside the component
const { query } = useRouter();
const searchTerm = query.searchterm;

All of the post content is written in Markdown, so we can pass the post body to a function that looks for the search term in the string and replaces it, like this:

const wrapSearchTerm = (string) => {
    if (searchTerm) {
      const regex = new RegExp(`${searchTerm}`, "g");
      return string.replace(
        regex,
        `<span class="searchTerm">${searchTerm}</span>`
      );
    }
    return string;
  };

One thing I realized was doing it this way breaks links that might have the search term in it, because the searching is happening on the unprocessed Markdown. Running it post processing would be better, but to be lazy, let’s just search for the word with a reasonable set of boundaries to ignore, like this:

const regex = new RegExp(`${searchTerm}(?![-_])`, "g");`

which eliminates most slugified versions of the word. It’s still case sensitive but the 80/20 among its users (me) says it’s good enough to ship.

[^1]: For good reason, the original post was about recreating Giphy using Lunr and lambda functions. Those parts were fine, but I think I lost the thread trying to make a Slackbot to tie them together.

[^2]: This is React with some wrapping components like Layout and ReadingContent that only handle styling.

A Sunday Post that is not a Weeknotes Post

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 02 Jan 2022 15:49:41 GMT

I said in my last weeknotes post I didn’t want to do weeknotes any more, so this isn’t that, it’s just a post that happens to be on a Sunday that maybe talks about the past week.

We were at my parents house on Monday and Tuesday. This was considerably better than last year’s Zoom-Christmas for lots of reasons but I have to say one big reason is because my mother makes lasagna for Christmas and that’s very hard to reproduce digitally.
As far as we know, no one has gotten COVID in this house. That said school starts back up tomorrow and based on the numbers it seems like either we’ve already had it and we just didn’t notice or we will by the end of January.
I read _If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now _ yesterday, and posted some bits I liked from the book. It’s an interesting story — I liked Christopher Ingraham’s posts for the Washington Post and had read the original article that started the whole story so I enjoyed the book. The book was written pre-Pandemic, and a fair amount of his complaints about living in the greater DC area revolved around commuting. Housing costs were the other big issue, so maybe that last two years have been a wash but I should go see if he’s had any follow-ups on his thoughts about moving the Minnesota.
Starting and finishing a book on January 1st means I’m currently on track to read 365 books this year.
Lorelei has restarted and beat Donut County every day for the last five days.
It was Andrea’s birthday this week. Like every year, we fail to account for the fact that her birthday is on New Year’s Eve and without at least a few minutes of prior planning, getting food from a restaurant is not going to happen.
Also like every year we’ve gone to bed well past midnight almost every night this week, so getting back to our routine tomorrow is going to be painful.

Weeknotes for the week ending December 26, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 26 Dec 2021 14:12:41 GMT

Last weeknotes of the year. Andrea and I were reflecting on something the other day, and we realized how hard it is to separate 2020 from 2021. There were some big, obvious, very good differences between the years but in terms of how things got filed away mentally they didn’t get their own boxes. For me 2020 continued until April / May, when Lorelei went to in-person school, I started a new job, and the adults started getting vaccines.

One good thing though, I can actually look back here and figure out what happened when!

Personal highlights:

Started a new job at Chewy. It’s better than the old job. I’m old enough now that calling out when things got better and not worse is worth mentioning!
Redid the kitchen and fancied up the back yard.
Sent the kid to school with other kids.
Stayed married for 10 years.
Got back into mountain biking. Strava says I put 60 miles on the bike, but more importantly all but two of those rides were with friends.
Got a little into Fortnite.

Meta highlights

I updated my about page.
I switched from Netlify CMS to Forestry and then gave up on both. I’m currently trying Frontmatter in VS Code out. I’m about two more annoyances away from making my own CMS.
I started doing weeknotes mid-May and haven’t missed a week[^1]. After doing it for a year I’m a) glad I did, because I just read through all of them and there was a lot I had forgotten and b) would like to move away from them next year and instead write more often, and break events/thoughts into their own posts with useful titles.
I added the “recommended” button on my reading list page.

etc

Christmas! We don’t make a big deal of it here. I made cinnamon buns from a recipe my dad adapted from a King Arthur Flour cookbook that seems to not exist on their website. It’s basically: make dough, fill with sugar and nuts, stuff in face, but if you want the actual recipe just ask me. It seems easier than the ones they do have on their website.
We started watching season two of The Witcher. It’s good, it’s not amazing. I really liked the first episode which was it’s own little story, but the season-wide plot is too high fantasy “it’s the end of the world as we know it” boring. The game had the same problem. I just want a Columbo style The Witcher. Which of the townfolks turns into a monster at night? What clues will give it away? How great would Geralt angrily mumbling “one more thing” sound?
We also started watching Station Eleven. I read the book a long time ago and enjoyed it, the TV show is different but good in its own way.
Dave Barry’s humor is a hand-me-down from my dad, but at least unlike Scott Adams he didn’t turn out to be a terrible person and I still enjoy his yearly reviews in WaPo: Dave Barry’s 2021 Year in Review

Another improvement was that most stores got rid of those one-way anti-covid arrows on the floor. Remember those, from 2020? You’d be halfway down a supermarket aisle, and you’d realize that you’d gone past the Cheez-Its but you couldn’t turn around and go back because you’d be going AGAINST THE ARROWS, which meant YOU WOULD GET COVID.

[^1]: I don’t think I did, anyway. Making a view of the site that’s calendar is on my todo list. I made the calendar for the album a day project I gave up on so it’s half done.

Weeknotes for the week ending December 19, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 20:29:59 GMT

My father has a few rhymes that he breaks out whenever relevant, and one is a common weather forecasting one:

Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.

Red sky at night, sailors' delight.

The sky was throwing some moods this week, but storms, at least for us landlubbers, didn’t develop in a meaningful way.

Monday:

Tuesday:

What I do love about that little rhyme though is that it’s thousands of years old, and it’s accurate enough that it’s been worth repeating all of those thousands of years.

Seasonal wind-down

This has been an uneventful week. Ideally this next one is too, and the one after that… super uneventful. If humans could hibernate, I would. We’re also all trying to lay somewhat low, we are going to see my parents next week and I’d rather not deliver a package of germs for Christmas.

Of tiny, murderous note, I did start playing Death’s Door. I heard a lot of favorable comparisons to Zelda — it’s not that, but once you get a few crow hops in, it’s a delight of its own.
Also I introduced Lorelei to the idea of the doodle pad. Just a blank notebook you doodle in. Doodling seemed like a foreign concept to her, and honestly it’s been a while for me, as well. I explained it as just drawing shapes, and then seeing where you end up. I remember both my mother and her father having paper all over the house with doodles on it, opened envelopes, marginalia in catalogs, hotel sticky notepads. Just something to do while talking on the phone.

This is where we ended up:

I almost bought an interesting book in Apple Books this morning, then stopped. I’ll get it from the local book store or library. I’ve been adamant about not reading digital books lately, and I’d like to stay that way. Also I have a Winter plan to build a little library[^1] for the yard for Spring, and it needs more souls.

etc

Mess with DNS via/made by Julia Evans
Why would a business push a native app over a website?. Yes, why. I’m living this dilemma these days. One point Chris brings up that’s particularly painful to me is: “Because they get the full feature set of APIs”. Not only the full feature set, but you know which feature set they’re getting, instead of doing the which browser / which features hokey-pokey.
"It's a true frontier of game design": How Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games think about accessibility, which led me to Accessible Player Experiences (APX). If there’s a resource similar to this for the web, please let me know!
Play therapy prescribes video games to combat anxiety

However I recently read that Geek Therapy, a non-profit advocating the use of video games for wellness, promote using world-building games such as Minecraft, Roblox, Animal Crossing, and Fortnite to help people deal with mental health issues.

…creative Fortnite, I assume. The “rooty tooty let’s go shooty” version of Fornite does not reduce anxiety, for me.

Debt Demands a Body. The TL;DR: a mother takes out student loans in her daughter’s name then gambles it away.

[^1]: If Little Library is (TM) then Small Book Shelter.

Weeknotes for the week ending December 12, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 01:09:45 GMT

I was in the office two days this week. I took the train in both days, it was a ~50% as crowded as I remembered it from the pre-pandemic times. It was comfortably crowded, if you can call it that.

I missed the city. It’s not like we live in the farmlands but both days I walked from North Station to just past South, through the heart of downtown Boston, past historical landmarks from the early days of America and skyscrapers not yet a decade old. It is also mind-blowing to take that particular walk, because while I’m not native to Massachusetts I’ve lived here long enough to remember when it was just the noise and exhaust from 93 overhead.

Also I finally got a cup of coffee from George Howell at Boston Public Market. I like our local place more but it was good and I’m very glad for whoever thought to build the Boston Public Market.

Pfots

Got my third Pfizer shot this week. That’s… as exciting as it was. Got a really great nap in later in the day.

What are you watching, Apple Watch

I do like my Apple Watch but lately it’s been… finicky. This was from a bike ride today.

I made it almost two miles without increasing my heart rate at all, and then teleported almost two miles later.

Christmas Prep

etc

Reading from this week:

Finished The Song Of Achilles. Circe was was one of my favorite books of 2019, The Song of Achilles will probably be one of my favorite of 2021.
The Internet Has a Rat Poison Problem. I think there’s a bigger issue about supply sourcing and the large e-commerce retailers but this one is pretty eye opening.
A Better Relationship with the Internet
America Is Running on Fumes via Ran Prieur

Weeknotes for the week ending December 5, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 05 Dec 2021 22:59:04 GMT

Added a December folder. I also spent some time looking for a previous post on this site that I thought existed, but it doesn’t. I can search the files that make up this blog in iA Writer, but maybe it’s time to figure out a search feature for the site itself.

Dusty Domains

Netlify is doing this Dusty Domains thing and I have a domain which is not that dusty but for some reason I bought it and now it’s a website, so please enjoy whatisannft.digital.

Second shot snacks

Lorelei got her second shot so we celebrated with donuts from Half Baked Cafe.

Replay (and replay, and replay)

Apple Music has their year end personalized replay lists thing up, and this is a highlight from mine:

Yeah, we like Centaurworld in this house. We’re very excited for Season 2 tomorrow. You will often hear one of us say “none of us are comfortable until we are all comfortable” (watch from below if you have no idea what I’m talking about. Then go back and watch the entire show).

How long will browsers be the UI target of choice

Microsoft Edge released a Buy now, pay later feature. I only knew from Twitter because, why would I ever run Edge. But more to the point, how far are we from when browsers are their own compile targets. We’re close enough already with web to native frameworks, why not just reduce everything to <BuyButton> and let a compiler figure out what that turns into.

Sometimes, and not enough to keep me up at night, but sometimes, I think browsers are getting boring, the same e-commerce and silo’d text update websites being given all of the priority. Other times I find things like this demo of Townscaper that runs in your browser. There’s still “cool” stuff being made for the web, but there’s a heavily biased incentive to build things that feed the beast, and if AR and VR grow like some companies hope they will, I can only see the monetization wedge being driven even deeper.

etc

Reading this week that was interesting:

Weeknotes for the week ending November 28, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 28 Nov 2021 23:39:32 GMT

Since we did the family Thanksgiving last weekend, the last four days have been nothing but relaxation for us. The six-year old watched TV until her brain melted, my wife read books or did research until her brain melted, and I just kind of chilled until my already melted brain reshaped. Or something. Maybe it’s still a little gooey.

The end of spooky season…

I picked up the RESIDENT EVIL 2 remake around Halloween. I finally beat it this weekend. I’m not usually a fan of games that you have to play through twice to completely enjoy but I went through both the Claire and Leon runs and I'm glad I did. I played the original game on the N64 and never beat it, so this might set a record for the longest time to finish a game.

I also said last week that I would start reading again, and I did. I finished Mexican Gothic, which was a well done little bit of horror. I think pretty early on it became obvious where the plot was going so I sped through the later half of the book but I'd still recommend it [^1].

…start of snowy season

Put up the tree. Immediately the cats starting losing their minds.

We also watched The Shop Around the Corner which is the lesser known of the Jimmy Stewart Christmas movies. Arguably the better of the two.

Remapping my life

Every year around Christmas / New Years I look at the systems I used for my personal life the year before and reevaluate things. This year I wanted to get a head start on it, mainly because in past years if I start something at the beginning of the New Year and then find out three months in it’s not working I think “well I’ve already got three months” in or “well there’s only nine months left?” or some such silly ideas.

Today I sat down and organized Things, Bear, and iCloud to all be in line. Essentially I borrowed the structure from Things (Areas with Projects in them) and used that in Bear and iCloud. So now at the top level of iCloud there’s the areas, and inside of that there are folders that correspond to a project or context for that area. Same with Bear, there’s top level tags for the areas, and second level tags for the projects / context.

Some notes on the process:

MacOS allows you to add comments to files and folders and show them in Finder. Between that and tags I can’t think of a reason to add an external app on top of this to organize files.
There’s a folder in Finder labeled something along the lines of “IDFK what any of this is”. I’ll get to it… eventually. The point is there is only one folder named that now, not multiple.
The remnants of the early days of doing iCloud storage means that the / folder of iCloud is a disaster to organize, so I created this structure inside of /documents instead, and the top level can be whatever apps want to make of it.
Bear has been the hardest to get through, because for a bit I thought I could just map connected ideas by hashtags, so there were way too many top level hashtags. So now it’s either remove the hashtag, or delete the note, or find a better one.

I did find this in one of my Bear notes, from Think Again:

As Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio told me, “If you don’t look back at yourself and think, ‘Wow, how stupid was I a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the last year.”

So I guess I learned something in the last year?

COVID time

I might have more thoughts on this later[^2], but for now I’m just here to point out that with us entering COVID round three…

…we’re looking at two years of whatever we’ve been calling the last two years, and should probably stop talking about “the new normal” or “the way things were” and start living like things are as they are. I suppose it’s a human way of thinking to say “now is bad but the future will be different and better!” but… I dunno, it’s probably not!

[^1]: In case you’re thinking “Joe that doesn’t seem nearly lazy enough for a lazy long weekend” I also made it to the final boss of Metroid Dread, figured out how the loop works in Deathloop and started a second book. This isn’t quite pre-kid levels of lazy but now that she’s old enough to be lazy herself it’s getting closer. [^2]: Is having thoughts on days that aren’t Sunday part of why I reorganized all my projects/notes/files? Stay tuned!

Weeknotes for the week ending November 21, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 00:09:44 GMT

Thanksgiving

We did Thanksgiving this weekend with my parents. I’m a big fan of doing holiday gatherings not on holidays, whenever possible, because traveling and planning is so much easier. Some menu notes from this year:

I spatchcocked the turkey, coated it in mayonnaise and bird herbs and cooked at 450° for about 80 minutes (it was a 12.something pound bird). Came out fantastic. Only tough part is going full Predator and pulling the backbone out.
If you’re going to make sweet potato casserole and attempt to cook it with the turkey at 450°, do not put it under the turkey pan unless you want the marshmallows to immediately caramelize.
I made the easy self-rising biscuits with King Arthur Self Rising Flour. Easy, like it says, came out great.
Homemade cranberry sauce is the big winner (for me). I did it this year with 1/4 cup of red wine we had open and orange zest.
Stuffing and gravy we’ve outsourced to store bought. Both take too long to make for the end result (and you won’t have any drippings cooking the turkey the way I did).
Maple-Honey Pecan Pie for dessert. A++++, would eat again.

I don’t have any pictures because this isn’t Instagram. I made the food, I ate the food.

Speaker of the House

I ordered new speakers / tried out switching around the ones we had. I picked up the two base, not ad-revenue-driven “smart speakers” on the market, the Apple Homepod Mini and the Ikea Symfonisk shelfspeaker. Both are around $100. They’re both… ok. They work for what I wanted them for, the Homepod (mini) is in an office, and the Symfonisk is in the basement literally being used as a shelf. If I didn’t also want a shelf I think a stereo pair of dumb speakers would have blown it away. I also tried the mini as the output for the TV (haha - no!), and tried the Homepod in place of the lower-end soundbar we have. I think a stereo pair of Homepods would sound great. I’d think a stereo pair up front and stereo minis as satellites should work really great. I expect that will be a thing Apple sells and supports just before the heat-death of the universe.

etc

Why SOLID principles are still the foundation for modern software architecture. I liked this article from one of the Stack Overflow emails this week. Good examples of SOLID were always from class based languages, which made it hard to get in my head which had (until recently) only had working knowledge of languages that didn’t have classical inheritance at all.
The secret of the macOS Monterey network quality tool never hit fast.com again!
I haven’t finished a book since early September. Maybe because I tend to read for a few hours on weekend mornings when I am reading a lot, and those hours have been replaced with mountain biking. Or I got stuck on a boring book and found myself overly distracted reading digital ones. Either way, I got some more dead-tree books today. Winter is coming, and all.

Weeknotes for the week ending November 14, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 14 Nov 2021 23:31:19 GMT

etc

Our not quite five-year-old LCD TV has been acting up lately, sometimes turning two solid colors and then shutting down, sometimes not wanting to turn on, sometimes not wanting to turn off. Like any piece of modern technology, debugging the issue is a combination of:
- Check every physical input, output, and also the software settings on the inputs and outputs.
- Check the software settings on the TV itself.
- Reset all of the above.
- If it’s still failing you can narrow it down to a hardware issue. The TV has a mainboard, a T-Con board, and a power controller. Try to figure out, based on what’s failing, which of these is most likely. Given the set of symptoms I’ve seen, they all seem equally likely.
- Do some mental math on whether or not the cost of parts + time is < a new TV, factoring in that the new TV will have 5 years of technology improvements.
- Now do the last equation but factor in that the new TV will also have 5 years of additional software related issues.
- Give up, go outside.

Weeknotes for the week ending November 7, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 01:41:35 GMT

Not a lot of updates this week. It was a super busy one at work, so that was my main focus. When things get busy my journaling falls off first, then scraps of notes, then photos, and I’ve got like two photos from this week so I guess that means something.

Daylight Savings

The Solar Dial is my “weekend” watch face for my Apple Watch. It’s set to show the temperature, when the Sun is going to set, and if it’s going to rain - and also the date because I have never, in my life, had any fucking idea what day it is. Today it gets a bit more fun by lining up on both sides.

Unfortunately for the next months it will slowly descend into a tiny sliver of sunlight. I should put on my bucket list taking it to a location with 24 hours of sunlight.

etc

Some new BMWs won't have touchscreens thanks to chip shortage. Finally some good news from the chip shortage. I never thought touchscreens would catch on in cars. I get it, it’s cheaper to make a UI with no physical constraints, but of all places to add more distractions. I’d like to believe that the lack of chips will lead designers to think — does this need a screen? Does this need a chip to manage controls? Can it be done physically? I know the more likely outcome is another World War to control supply, or countries colonizing planets for materials à la The Expanse, but as someone who is primarily a UI developer, maybe I should be happy for the job security. The robots will fight the wars, right?

Weeknotes for the week ending October 31, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 23:28:53 GMT

Writing this while manning the trick-or-treat duties. Not a lot of kids so far this year[^3], which is surprising. Last year we had a decent turnout even with COVID and it being below freezing.

Y, the First Book

I started re-reading Y: The Last Man. We’ve been watching the TV series on Hulu, but I’d forgotten the exact plot beats of the comic. Y was the first comic I got into when I got back into comics as an adult, and I’m enjoying how the TV series is going deeper into some character’s backstories, being more subtle about others[^1], and splitting other characters into multiple characters (and going deeper into the backstories of both!). I’m glad it’s getting the treatment it deserves.

Elfa on the shelf

I ripped down a bunch of builder’s favorite Closetmaid shelves in our house this week, and replaced them with Elfa shelving. They aren’t cheap, but I do like that you can set the entire thing up with 6 screws in a headrail, and then make infinite[^2] layers of shelves in-between. The only complaint is that every piece has a sticker on it, and about 84% of the installation time is peeling stickers and getting rid of packaging.

etc

Lorelei is back home with a pile of candy. Small turnout this year so… I think I’m gonna help myself to <s>one</s> <s>two</s> a few of these candies we bought to hand out.

Oh and if you’re curious, my Halloween candy power rankings:

Butterfinger. They are way too sweet and I would never eat one outside of Halloween but that once a year sensation of jamming them all up in your gums is chef’s kiss.
Kit Kat. Also not a candy I enjoy outside of Halloween, but I appreciate that they’ve optimized for sharing.
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups/Bats/Vampires/Mummies/whatever. I’m old enough that I find Reese’s peanut butter horrifyingly sweet, but again, once a year, gimme gimme.
All of the sour / fruit flavored stuff.
Everything else. Not because any of them are bad, but because we live in such a land of plenty that anything that isn’t immediately consumed has to quickly fight with Thanksgiving pies and then Christmas candies and then on a day in the deepest, darkest part of February you’ll find a leftover Snickers in the cupboard and eat it and it will bring you no joy, only despair in the knowledge that time marches ever onward, and even the sweetest treats can be reduced to a stale, tasteless lump of its former glory.

Happy Halloween!

[^1]: No spoilers, but the comic starts off by throwing a bunch of theories at the reader as to why all the men died, and the TV series is very much keeping one of them a secret! [^2]: Or like, 8, max. It’s still a clever system. [^3]: By the time I finished writing this we were at about 20 trick-or-treaters, closer to average for this house.

Weeknotes for the week ending October 24, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 24 Oct 2021 23:08:18 GMT

Get in the pit

Went to a concert for the first time since COVID. The show was Crazy & The Brains (first punk band I’ve seen use a xylophone), Bridge City Sinners, better explained in their own words:

And Days N Daze, short one member, but made up for with some mouth trumpet and backup from the previous bands.

Two notes:

I think this was the biggest crowd I’ve been around since the last show I saw at the Middle East, in January of 2020. Go big or go home, I guess.
I adore that no one in Cambridge cares about other people at all. It’s already pretty on-brand for New Englanders to ignore other people, but when a person in a skull mask, leather jacket with studs, and a kilt can walk around with no one saying anything, that’s perfect.

And shoutout to Dan for getting the tickets and convincing me to leave the house. We both acknowledged it’s a lot harder these days.

Professional

An iPhone 13 Pro showed up this week. I wasn’t planning on upgrading my XR (it was fine), but the AT&T trade-in for a decent amount of money only to be mind-controlled by them for the rest of your life[^1] was hard to pass up. Also, the number of cameras. My XR was definitely lacking in Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades energy.

So far that camera has been great for taking pictures of my child who finds the most adorable faces to make.

etc

Just posting this for posterity, so some day my kid can find this and know that I was good at video games (some times, when other people are bad). <div style="padding:75% 0 0 0;position:relative;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/638454126?h=c6695513d2&badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" title="fortnite-endgame.mov"></iframe></div><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script>

[^1]: I was just pushed an update (over 5G, of course), that informed me this is not true.

Even Zecora knows to wear a mask!

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 20 Oct 2021 00:02:15 GMT

From My Little Pony - Friends Forever #21 from… October of 2015. Also worth noting when the find the cure, no one (not even Applejack) makes a fuss about how they can’t be forced to take it.

Which reminded me we watched Six Degrees of Separation last week, and there’s a scene where Will Smith’s character talks about how his father (who he pretends is Sidney Poitier) is going to make a movie version of Cats.

History repeating, and what not.

They finally remade my 2013 Macbook Pro

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 19:23:24 GMT

The very first blog post on this blog is about why I decided to get a Dell instead of a new Macbook Pro. I’m glad to see the new M1 Pro/Max fixes everything. I already bought an M1 Air but someday this touchbar/butterfly workbox will get replaced with one of these, so there’s that to look foward to.

Also, that Dell I went with was fine. I ended up getting rid of it because I don’t game on PC any more. You’d still be better off with any Dell with a dedicated GPU than a Mac for gaming, even if it will pull down 400 watts of power to run.

Weeknotes for the week ending October 17, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 17 Oct 2021 21:29:43 GMT

Let’s start with a riddle:<br /> Q: What do a couch and a baby have in common?<br /> A: If you want one now, you have to wait 10 months.

The Jordan’s HyperMegaSuperstore

We purchased an Ikea sectional when we moved into this house not many years ago. It was fine, it filled the space we wanted to fill, but lately it’s become spine-tinglingly uncomfortable[^1]. We went to the Jordan’s superstore which is… definitely not one of my favorite places on Earth, but the combo of nice weather / COVID / and the fact that every scrap of furniture upholstery is sitting in a cargo ship currently lost in the middle of the Pacific meant there was hardly any one there. We ordered some new couches and a chair and they’ll be in our house (<span role="image" aria-label="fingers crossed">🤞</span>) before I die.

Since it was pretty empty, we took Lorelei to do the crazy indoor ropes course thing they have there. The excitement of it was enough to get her into the harness and up to the first level, but after a few crossings I got two big thumbs down while she held on to one of the landing posts.

After that she came down and did the much closer to Earth version a few thousand times.

Oktoberfest

The team got together in Woostah on Monday. This is the third time I’ve seen them IRL since starting at Chewy. The entire team has joined during the COVID <s>lockdown</s> <s>year</s> era.

Getting into the Spirt of the Season

Growing up we had a few people in the neighborhood I trick-or-treated in who would take things too seriously. Like, put on a hockey mask then hide in a leaf pile with an actual chainsaw seriously. So, I’ve always been a fan of more sedate Halloween decorating. A few pumpkins, maybe some sugar skulls, a couple of leaves I failed to rake blown about. Lorelei had a specific request for spider webs this year. Sure, why not. I had to go to Home Depot anyway, so I brought her along, thinking they always have a seasonal display with some decorating stuff in it. Well, apparently the “season” appropriate for October 15th is Christmas. But! It’s 2021, and “thanks” to COVID there are hundreds of empty retail stores out there for Spirit to sink its creepy claws into. So we found one of those, which, amazingly I don’t think I’ve ever been in. They had an entire rack full of decorative spider webs. The store had probably the most people I’ve seen in a retail establishment since the beginning of the the COVID <s>lockdown</s> <s>year</s> era. We passed on the 7+ foot animatronic Baphomet but man for $300 that puts the animatronics in some local theme parks to shame.

etc

Johnny Decimal. I like the idea of it, I’ve been getting better about keeping folder structures the same in any given context, e.g. Things has areas and projects under it, my notes app has the same areas and same projects, the folders under iCloud have the same areas, etc. I like the idea of adding numbers in, if only to remind you that you need an upper limit on how many things you can keep in your head.

[^1]: Or, I’m getting old. Or it’s both.

Weeknotes for the week ending October 10, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 10 Oct 2021 23:17:19 GMT

Ship it!

Big release at work this week; it all went well, and our application is much more accessible now, so it feels pretty good! Remember if you ever need an on demand video or text consultation with a veterinarian, Connect With a Vet!

RTFM (if it exists)

Three only slightly related thoughts, that mean something to me because I used to write technical instruction manuals for a living.

I installed a blower fan in our gas fireplace this weekend. The description online said it was “pre-wired” and all you had to do was plug it in, but the comments said no, there was more. Some research showed there are three main ways gas fireplace wiring is found: a junction box with cables in it, a junction specifically wired for gas fireplaces (we had this, more later), or just a normal power outlet. The “pre-wired” bit made sense for the normally wired power outlet, but the junction box in our fireplace had a fan outlet which didn’t have power unless two leads were getting a signal from a thermocouple, so the fan only has power when the fireplace is hot. But again, this unit was “pre-wired” so the thermocouple controlled the unit assuming it had power. Anyway, the diagrams included were not helpful, the comments online were not helpful, in the end after pulling some wires apart and realizing that was dumb, I also realized the outlet under our fireplace also had a plug labeled “REM/AUX” which has... always on power. So all I had to do was plug it into that.
For a while I’ve thought it would be nice to associate notes with workouts that are recorded by my watch and saved in Apple Fitness. I’ve had some hacky solutions like sharing the work out to my notes app and adding content there, but I realized this weekend that HealthFit the app that I’ve been using for years to sync my Apple workout bike rides to Strava... has a notes field.
I got a physical copy of Metroid Dread[^1] this week. Whenever I open a physical game I expect there to be something inside, but there was nothing but the game. Instead someone had to design and code the first (at least) 30 minutes of the game explaining things to the player, instead of just giving them those details in a book along with the game. I’ve played literally every Metroid, I’m just here to shoot blobby aliens and turn into a ball, let me at it!

etc

I said last week it’s spooky season, it’s actually puzzle season. Finished two this week.

Frida from eeboo and The Mystic Maze from Magic Puzzle Company.

I’m trying out Craft as a replacement for Bear (at home). I do love Bear but I also have a ton of notes that could use lightweight table markup, or rollups, or just putting two things side-by-side, or a quick preview of a PDF... the list goes on. Bear was a replacement for Notion for me, after Notion got too annoying to use offline. Craft borrows (or, steals) a lot from Notion, but it’s a Mac Catalyst app and it works offline, and you can even BYOS (bring your own storage) and save your content in iCloud instead of their cloud[^2].

[^1]: I don’t invest in cryptocurrency but I do invest in physical copies of Nintendo games. I think I’ve picked the right horse, assuming the course is a few million miles long. [^2]: It’s worth noting since I’m comparing the two that Bear already uses iCloud. It’s also worth noting that Craft has an entire support page on dealing with iCloud because while it’s stable and secure, there’s also a good reason almost every other app has rolled their own cloud storage solution.

Weeknotes for the week ending October 3, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 00:51:20 GMT

It’s October. The wife and I had Friday off, and thought maybe we’d get lunch in Salem. We didn’t really think October 1st, a full 30 days away from Halloween would be an issue, but people take October being spooky season seriously. Instead we ate lunch in town, which is another town that used to be part of Danvers, which is where the “Salem” Witch Trials took place, but don’t tell the tourists that.

A Leaf on the Wind, and The Good Lord Bird.

Before attempting lunch on Friday I went out for a bike ride. One of my favorite things when mountain biking is unintentionally sneaking up on wildlife, slipping through the trees quickly and quietly enough that they don’t notice you until you’re close, and then they jump and run off. Happened with a few deer, but the treat was a Pileated woodpecker jumping off a tree and flying in front of me for a few hundred feet.

Find the deer. Someday I’ll have a phone with a telephoto lens.

Related, an article I read this week about the Ivory-billed woodpecker being declared extinct. As a kid I had a t-shirt that was treated so that when it was cool the silhouettes of dozens of animals were on it, and when it got hot, they disappeared. This wasn’t even a commentary on global warming, it was just — hey, stop tearing down the places these animals live. But, they’re probably all gone now.

By some estimates, populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish have declined by almost 70 percent on average since 1970. It’s the reason you tend to see fewer bugs on your windshield when driving cross-country and hear less birdsong when hiking through the forest.

Also how many animals died to make a t-shirt treated with some heat sensitive chemical. I am not a biozoologist but I want to say the Earth having almost 70% fewer types of things living on it is bad.

Everything is crap

There’s just so much crap being offered for sale or rent today — so much that we’re expected to spend money on and like even though it’s incompetently or carelessly made.

From Snake and Ladders by way of Rhoneisms. We’ve been looking at furniture lately and:

You can’t even get it because supply chains are fucked.
It’s nearly impossible to distinguish crap from not-crap. Furniture brands are spun up out of the ether to repackage the same item at different price tiers, and with so many of the stores going all online, the details of the quality of the fabric, stitching, construction, are passed off to the reviews of previous buyers, who may or may not be real.

I take back that everything is crap, but the paradox of choice only serves to make me think that, by default, something is crap unless proven otherwise.

etc

If you follow me on RSS (or, simply look at the post below this one), you might have seen some odd things pop up. For a while I’ve wanted to be able to post to here “like Twitter”, i.e. from my phone and as easily as possible. The entire site is driven from Markdown files in Git, so I hooked up a Netlify function to take in a JSON POST body and send the picture to an S3 bucket and the content to Github as a new commit on main, and an iOS Shortcut to export a photo from Photos and allow me to append some text to it. And it works! Mostly! I don’t delete my mistakes, so if you click on “permalink” on the post below it, uh, goes nowhere. Once it goes somewhere I’ll write up some details on how it works.

Weeknotes for the week ending September 26, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 26 Sep 2021 23:27:28 GMT

iOS 15

I upgraded all of my iDevices to iOS15 (or… whatever their equivalents are called. tvOS/HomeOS something-point-oh). A few quick notes:

The hassle of micro-services, in your own home!: I had a home automation that was set to turn the lights on at 7:30am. When I set it up, it worked! Later, it stopped working. The lights would turn on at 10:30am. Clearly a timezone issue, but from what? Not my phone, the Hue app and hub seemed to think it was in the same location as us. I checked the HomePod, also EST, updated it and it started working at 7:30am again. Until this week, when it went back to 10:30am. I finally figured out that the Apple TV was set to its original Cupertino time zone (why, though?) and depending on some magical cloud logic the Homepod and Apple TV would switch off being the “home hub”.
Don’t remind me: I used to run the iOS betas on my iPad. I used to use Apple Notes and Reminders. That is, until one iOS update required redoing the Reminders database, and the Reminders app was out of sync between my devices until a new version of iOS and MacOS were released. That was years ago, and yet that remains a problem today. You added tags to your reminders and made a smart list? Neat, you can see them on your Mac in a few months. Maybe, assuming MacOS releases on time. It’s worth it to use 3rd party replacements for both of those apps because you’ll at least get major updates across platforms all at once. It is insane to me that Apple still ties minor software updates to major OS releases. I will acknowledge that they gave us Safari 15 early, but the system browser being tied to the operating system was a bad idea 20 years ago so let’s not be too impressed.

Beyond those gripes, there’s a ton of low level quality of life improvements. The new maps font is nice. Widgets on the iPad are great (although I wonder why it took an extra release to get them), and the redesigned multitasking UI makes it much more usable. The UI team working on the Weather app is amazing.

Hitchin’ a ride

I put a trailer hitch on our Forester on Saturday. I wanted a hitch mount rack for the new bike - it’s way too long and heavy for me to easily get on and off the roof rack, but that necessitated having a hitch to put the hitch rack on first. I decided to do it myself because sometimes I enjoy working on cars, and I found a version of the install that that involved no drilling, only wrenching. Some thoughts:

I used to work on cars a lot. I used to be under my first car (a Subaru WRX) all the time, to the point where almost nothing on that car was original. I used to throw it up on jack stands, hip check the car to make sure it wouldn’t fall off, then dive under it. I would never, ever consider that these days. Somewhere between that car and this car I had cars where I did work on them because it was “cheaper” and messed things up (in occasionally catastrophic ways). These days I stick to easy bolt-on or rewire improvements.
If you’re not someone who works on cars: modern cars are a frame and 40,000 plastic clips holding the body on and that’s it. I had my daughter come out and help put the bumper back on, at first she thought I had broken something (not a bad guess), then she assumed it was much too heavy for her to pick up, then she picked it up and noticed that it was “wobbling all over!”. I let her slap it into the clips along the edges and use a socket wrench to put in the two (!) bolts that hold it on.
I ended up getting a rockymounts MonoRail Solo. Like everything bike related there were a ton of options and most of them weren’t in stock. I like this one because it only holds one bike. For some reason bike rack designers think everyone rides with friends and they drive to the trails together.

Stop, don’t shop

I’ve given up on Stop and Shop. I go there because it’s close, and during the pandemic they had lots of self checkout lanes so you could get in and out pretty quick. But now they’ve done something to the self checkout lanes that basically goes like this:
1. Ring item.
2. Open bag to put place item in.
3. Place item in bag.
4. Error that there is an unscanned item in the bagging area.

It’s… it’s the bag. Why would I put something in the bagging area and not put it in a bag? I don’t know what shit update they pushed recently that made this start happening but the only solution is to either pile everything into the 2’x1’ bagging area and bag it at the end, or get someone to wave their card at the machine every time you add a new bag.

And before you’re like “well it’s Stop and Shop, what do you expect” let me tell you the developers who made that change and the ones who write car automation software differ only in ambition, not intelligence.

etc

Alice Bartlett (whose weeknotes inspired these ones) had this wonderful description of a particular website this week:

At some point I’m going to write something about how being a Tech Director for 6 months has gone. It’s gone well so maybe I should just leave it at that and save the rest of the psychopath’s playground (LinkedIn).

We’ve had a little snake hanging out in our backyard. Lorelei and I went out this evening to see if we could find it. We didn’t, instead we found… baby snakes!

A fresh coat of paint

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 00:19:35 GMT

With Safari 15 supporting browser chrome colors, I thought I’d throw a fresh coat of paint on the site. I made dark mode work again as well, although I think there are some pieces missing. If only I’d made a styleguide for the site instead of throwing everything together as I thought of it.

Weeknotes for the week ending September 19, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 19 Sep 2021 23:01:29 GMT

This week, summed up in two short scenes with my daughter.

Reading is fundamental

Scene: Local restaurant, on the outdoor patio. A rare family dinner outside the house because the grandparents were visiting before they set off on a cross-country train ride.

<span role="image" aria-label="Me">👨</span>: What do you want to eat here?<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Daughter">👧</span>: Hot dog!<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Me">👨</span>: Are hot dogs on the menu?<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Daughter">👧</span>: I dunno?<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Me">👨</span>: Read the menu and see if you can find hot dogs.<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Daughter">👧</span>: I can’t read!<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Me">👨</span>: Yes you can, look at the menu and pick out something.<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Daughter">👧</span>: Pizza! Ice cream! Waffles!<br />

Later, outside after dusk. My father and daughter are talking about stars in the sky.

<span role="image" aria-label="Daughter">👧</span>: Can I see your phone, I want to know what star that is.<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Me">👨</span>: Opens Sky Guide, hands over phone.<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Daughter">👧</span>: Oh, it’s Jupiter.<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Me">👨</span>: How do you know?<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Daughter">👧</span>: Points at screen. Ju-pi-ter. It says Jupiter.<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Me">👨</span>: Picks up daughter by shoulders, turns her 45 degrees.<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Me">👨</span>: What about that one over there?<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Daughter">👧</span>: Venus!<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Me">👨</span>: So you... can read?<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Daughter">👧</span>: Noooooooooooooooo

<span role="image" aria-label="shark">🦈</span>

Scene: at Stage Fort Park, down on the "boardwalk" looking at the ocean.

<span role="image" aria-label="Daughter">👧</span>: Look, a shark!<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Me">👨</span>: I don’t think there are sharks here.<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Daughter">👧</span>: It’s right there!<br /> <span role="image" aria-label="Me">👨</span>: It’s probably just a ro… oh it is a shark.<br />

etc

I’ve used Magnet for window management on MacOS for a long time, but it turns out there’s a free option called Rectangle that works just as well, and you can install it via Homebrew, which is extra great because I have zero interest in using Mac App store apps on my work Mac.
I went too long before getting my coffee this morning (we picked up breakfast on the car ride over to aforementioned shark park), and the coffee was weak compared to what I make at home. Took a while to recover. Maybe I should have gotten onlyfunctionalwith.coffee instead.

Weeknotes for the week ending September 12, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 13 Sep 2021 01:51:50 GMT

Blarg. That’s my high level recap of the week. Nothing bad happened, just a lot of blarg. I think it’s a bit of recovering from the whiplash of going from “school is about to start” to “September is almost half over”.

First grade

So far the reports from Lorelei about First grade have been more about her friends and what she does during the day than her Kindergarten reports, which were mostly about what they had for lunch and how she didn’t get lost at any point during the day. It’s nice that we’ve gone from like, hardened Mafia crime boss who won’t say a thing to low level goon looking to maybe give us enough to let them go.

Take the skinheads gaming

Recently I’ve had a semi-regular “gaming night”, and I was thinking the other day it’s a continuation of “semi-active, semi-social nights” I’ve had in the past. For a long time I was in a bowling league (one in Connecticut, one in Boston), and after / concurrently with that I played in a co-ed softball league. There’s a lot of similarity, you want something that requires some (but not too much) skill, has a few breaks to catch up with the people you’re playing with, and (this part might be crucial) isn’t impeded if you chose to drink alcohol the entire time you’re doing it.

Every once in a while I think “I miss playing softball”, but tonight I took Lorelei to a local park and was watching a game being played on a nearby field, and saw someone slap a line-drive at the second baseman off a carbon fiber bat and I immediately went to “oh no I don’t miss that”. Bowling, on the other hand, I occasionally look at what it would take to open my own lane.

HEY MAN NICE BIKE

Took the bike out this weekend and on the way back someone felt the need to yell, “HEY MAN NICE BIKE” at me from his truck. This is not the first time this has happened, and I don’t understand why! That said, two hours in the woods was a pretty good way to beat the blargs.

etc

Finished The Girls' Guide To Hunting And Fishing. Also added a “Recommended” tab to my books page if you want to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I hit play on Spark Up! by Ball Park Music while writing this and Apple Music started a pretty good playlist for me.

Weeknotes for the week ending September 5, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 05 Sep 2021 21:55:24 GMT

First day of first grade

Started another school year. We’re doing in person this year, and Lorelei (and we) are much happier about that. The town didn’t have open arguments about mask usage, and the kids don’t seem to mind wearing them, and most of the parents seem reasonable around here, outside of some S-tier dumb-assess who showed up to the meet-and-greet day wearing AR-15 apparel[^1].

If you think of everything in seasons, this Fall feels more optimistic than last Fall. Less “this isn’t what I wanted” and more “this isn’t what I expected” which is par for the course of life.

NBD (new bike day)

Last time it’ll ever be clean.

I’ve been biking nearly as long as I’ve been walking, and mountain biking only a bit less than that, but for the last few years I’ve been without a mountain bike. The last one I had was a Santa Cruz Nickel frame that I had slapped hand me down parts on, which was a nice enough bike, but it went into storage for a while and when it came out I realized a lot of those parts needed to be replaced, and if I was going to do that, wouldn’t it make more sense to buy something newer with bigger wheels? Sure. So I sold it, and then put off finding its replacement thinking, well, there’s house projects that need funding, and how often do I really have time with a kid, and all other excuses. I finally decided to look at getting a new bike in 2020 but… they all quickly disappeared. This Summer I finally said I’m going to find something and kept tabs open at all the local shops and online, and found this 2021 Tallboy on evo that’s likely a hold over shipment from last years orders. I’ve been out on two rides, and it’s a lot like the Nickel but with bigger wheels, so in the end I got what I wanted. I will add, mountain biking has gotten harder in the last 4 or 5 years that I’ve been away from it. Like, the mountains [^2] got bigger, or all the rain this year really washed out a lot more roots. It’s definitely not me being older or more out of shape.

etc

Finished A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet. Years of Catholic schooling has left me a fan of ominous, religious literary fiction. This book mixes a few themes: the failings of the generations who came before us, global warming and the changing climate, the separation (or lack thereof) between religion and science. It doesn’t pull them altogether in one driving plot action, but neither does the Bible, so I think that’s the point.

I mentioned last week I re-did my reading list page to pull from the Notion API. I just realized that while it works wonderfully on localhost, the images don’t actually show up here. Something to add to the todo list.

[^1]: One had a particularly dumb slogan on it, so I looked it up and… yeah. Let me tell you I never feel like a FREE person until I put on my $35 sloganized t-shirt. I’m sure they do some great advertising on Facebook. [^2]: “Mountain biking” in seacoast Southern New England is a bit of a funny term. “Small hill filled with tree root biking” would be the better term.

Weeknotes for the week ending August 29, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 30 Aug 2021 01:10:43 GMT

Small update this week, as I spent most of the day on the Mass Pike. I forgot it’s “move in” weekend for the local colleges.

10 years

The main update for the week, Friday was Andrea and I’s tenth anniversary. We went out for dinner. We had (have had) grand plans to travel for… close to two years now, but having little interest in travel in never-ending pandemic times and with our town popping up a strong supply of new restaurants, we instead sent the kid down to the grandparents for the week and just enjoyed free time in our own town for the week.

Babies on our wedding day.

Ten years later.

Andrea is pretty great, and we’ll definitely give this at least another ten years. We recorded an episode for her podcast this morning about our relationship. She might not run it because I mumble too much, but she might! Her accepting that I don’t quite meet her high standards has really helped keep this ship afloat ❤️.

School supplies

School starts this week. As a kid I remember being dragged to the store to pick out new binders, folders, etc, but since Lorelei was at the Grandparents Andrea and I went to pick everything up. That might not sound exciting but we both geeked out over pens and now have probably more than we’ll ever need, but, pens! Including some of these adorable G2 Minis.

Notion API

I spent a bit of time this week mucking about with the Notion API Beta. I’ve used Notion on and off for a long time, it does a lot of things really well, and it for other things (writing, quick notes), it’s a bit annoying. But I’ve always wanted a quicker way to update my want to read / read book list. So far I find the API pretty good for dealing with databases — I migrated my “reading” list to it. It’s not ready for prime time for written content like using Notion as a blog CMS, but I think it might be there soon.

Before the coffee gets cold

Finished Before the coffee gets cold this week. The local library recommended it on Libby under a magical realism category. It’s an interesting narrative device, there’s a cafe where in one seat you can go back in time (but there’s a list of rules, centrally if you want to meet someone else they have to also have been to the cafe, and you can’t change the future or past). There’s four related stories, they’re all a bit Hallmark-y, and I read it while drinking a lot of iced coffee so maybe it was the wrong season to read about coffee going cold, doesn’t get a recommended from me.

Weeknotes for the week ending August 22, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 22 Aug 2021 17:35:54 GMT

A minor change this week, I’m going from bullet points to headers. This week was either chill, or I forgot to write down a bunch of stuff.

Hurricane more like Hurrican’te

Lorelei was supposed to spend the week with her grandparents, but since they live in Connecticut <s>hurricane</s> tropical storm Henri threw a wrench in the works. It looks like this might all blow over (pun intended) and she’ll get down there later this week.

Arts Fest Beverly

We either missed (or intentionally ignored) the arts fest in town in 2020, but since we weren’t shuttling the child off to another state on Saturday, we took a walk into town to check it out. We didn’t pick up any art this year, unlike the last time we went in 2019, but we did get books at the local book store and jewelry. On the way back we stopped at Backbeat Brewing Company which, even though it’s less than half a mile from our house, we hadn’t been to yet. Decent food, impressively good drinks, outdoor patio, A+++ would recommend. Highlight of this year was that we can all walk to town and back now.

Bunny cupcakes

Lorelei watches this show called Bread Barbershop. It’s weird, but this morning the episode she was watching the “barber” made kitty and bunny cupcakes, and rather than the plot being more of, “here’s how you do this as a barber” it was like, a real recipe. I realize that sounds odd if you’ve never seen the show, but stay with me. Lorelei asked if we could do that, and I said yeah, sure, maybe. I had to go to the store anyway. This is what we came up with:

Carrot cake cupcakes, obviously. They’re bunnies.

Fortnite vs. my free time

I played Fortnite this week for the first time years, and it’s fun. I didn’t get it at first, but I played solo games and got it. And then I realized that the Battle Pass for this season has a dance that’s a ska dance, with a matching ska song about aliens, which feels waaaaaaay more targeted at my generation than who I assumed played Fortnite, so I had to pick it up (pick it up, pick it up… you get it), and then set out to win a few rounds, skanking on the graves of my defeated enemies.

Bonus: Balancing things on a cat

I’ve had a lot of cats in my life, but Maggie is the best one I’ve ever had for putting up with people putting things on her head.

Weeknotes for the week ending August 15, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 22:24:19 GMT

We had a writer in residence this week, so while my wife was off doing cool and fun things I was going full Dad with my daughter, enjoying a couple of pints of ice cream and crushing levels in a new video game[^1]. I consider this slightly more appropriate than what my dad used to do with me when my mom was out, which was watching 80s action movies on HBO.
One night the ice cream was accompanied by crying. When I asked Lorelei why she was upset (seemingly out of nowhere) she said she was sad because if she got older, eventually she would die. It took a bit of back and forth to tease out that these ideas had maybe come from a TV show she likes (Last Kids on Earth), but I pointed out that I was much older than her, and still alive, so it was at least not a thing to worry about at the present moment. Certainly it could wait until the ice cream was finished.
Related, I started reading Four Thousand Weeks (Time Management for Mortals). The 4,000 weeks comes from the average life expectancy in weeks. Rather than calling this post “Weeknotes for the week ending August 15, 2001” I could title it “Week 2038 (out of, hopefully, at least 4000)”. If you want the TL;CRAWB[^2] Burkeman’s last Health & wellbeing column in the Guardian covers the highlights.
I finished Rainbow In the Dark, Ronnie James Dio’s autobiography. It’s good, but a bit niche. I didn’t get into Dio my first go round with metal; I think someone convinced me Heaven and Hell wasn’t a “real” Sabbath album (in hindsight, fuck them). It was the Killswitch Engage cover of Holy Diver that made me go look up everything he ever did. 🤘🤘🤘 out of five.
Our kitchen project is entirely done. I got to put the new vent hood through its paces tonight (grits and collard greens). For someone who cooks multiple times per day, the hood and the huge workspace-style sink are the things I like best. It looks good, but oh baby those functional upgrades.
Spent a lot of time in the yard this weekend. Saturday I got a good outside nap in, today we went out for a walk early. We spotted a praying mantis in the yard.

It seemed annoyed by us. We also walked to the beach. There’s a new rule here, if I have to carry home a pocket of seashells, they have to be used for something.

[^1]: A very cool thing about Moving Out is that you can can adjust a bunch of properties that affect the game difficulty. So we found a setting where we both feel like we’re playing the game but it’s still a little challenging for each of us. [^2]: Too long; can’t read a whole book.

Weeknotes for the week ending August 8, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 08 Aug 2021 22:08:08 GMT

Released code at work this week which was a huge refactor that had (🤞) no noticeable changes to the existing application.

I said that last week then learned, well, there were noticeable changes for the end user, mainly in that the old code gracefully handled 500 errors that should not have been thrown in the first place. It drove good conversation around how to do things better in the future (and an investigation into where/why those 500s even exist), but it was a week where being a developer felt a bit like this:

I made muffins yesterday morning. That’s the whole story. It was this recipe if you want a much longer story. And if you want recipes without long stories, I recommend Paprika. Over the years it’s becoming the app with the longest runtime on my devices.
I’ve been reading Bullshit Jobs. It’s unlikely I’ll finish it before the library demands its digital copy back, but it’s putting words to how I felt about my career as a Quality Assurance Specialist in Biotech. That role, which I fell into by by way of being a technical writer who understood how to file the appropriate paperwork appropriately, falls into the “box tickers” category, or, people who “who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not”. I could not better describe how I felt about filing regulatory paperwork that would never be read again. I acknowledge that the long trail of filed paperwork proves useful when something goes awry, and there are plenty of examples where regulatory compliance gets us amazing and reliable results, like the COVID vaccine. But that wasn’t a thing I saw in my day to day work, which is the sentiment the book attempts to put a more scientific eye to.
There’s one quote in the book that jumped out at me:

I managed to maneuver my way into a desk with its back to the wall, so I could spend as much time as possible surfing the internet or teaching myself computer programming.

It stood out because I did the same thing at my last biotech job. We had a week where my team was in-between offices, and rather than our usual dedicated bullpen space, we all had to squeeze into a conference room. Which sounds awful, but I’d get in early and grab the head of the conference room table. That seat, with a wall behind me, was the only time I’d ever had a space “to myself” at that job, and I spent the entire week running JavaScript files in Firefox to learn how the canvas element works.

Weeknotes for the week ending August 1, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 01 Aug 2021 17:13:13 GMT

I took Monday off and the week flew by. Also, it’s August?
Released code at work this week which was a huge refactor that had (🤞) no noticeable changes to the existing application. Another to add to the list of “big red diff refactors” I’ve done. I think I enjoy doing them, but much less than adding features that users get to use, so if I could instead figure out a way to, Terminator style, go back and prevent devs from thinking they need to immensely overcomplicate a handful of asynchronous API calls before building the project that I eventually work on, that would be even better.
Got two rides in this week. One where I had a vague idea of where I wanted to go, went a few miles off course, absolutely abused my poor Masi cross bike, ended up with a flat and had to walk the last mile and a half. Hard to say if it was the rock gardens, riding over a thicket of thorny bushes, or missing an enormous pothole on a dirt road and ramming the back rim of it so hard I almost went over the bars that caused the flat but I appreciate that the tube held out until almost the end. Not the first time I’ve ended a ride walking [^1], but it’s a uniquely dispiriting experience pushing a broken bicycle and while other bicyclists pass you by.
Second ride was a much calmer ride with my daughter which was measured in “would you rather” questions per mile [^2]. Must be a thing the kids are into at Summer camp this week.
The tilers came to tile our kitchen this week, it looks great, but I learned that while you might buy x number of boxes of tile, if they’re from different batches, they might not look as similar as you would think. A few last minute shuffles of where the tile would go took care of it. Agile home improvement, I’ve been calling it.
The weather this weekend is unbelievable. We had touch up painting to do yesterday and opened all the windows and doors to let the breeze air everything out. Our extremely indoor cats have no interest in leaving the house but they do appreciate the smells and extra clear bird chirps.
I updated this blog’s version of react-markdown and cleaned up how it was implemented, the main effect of which is now I can use [^3] footnotes!

[^1]:Nor the worst: I once rode too far for the shape I was in, and my right quad stopped working. I had a fully functional bike but couldn’t physically pedal it any further, and was a few miles and about a thousand feet of elevation away from my car. [^2]: Hundreds, easily. [^3]: Abuse, really.

Weeknotes for the week ending July 25, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 00:22:58 GMT

I set up a suite of tests on a project I’m working on at work that uses Cypress component tests. This might be the most perfect testing solution for me. I like Cypress for e2e tests, and the component tests allow you to use the syntax but mount slices of your application for testing. Not only does it mesh nicely with e2e tests, it makes testing pieces of your application visually without having to invoke the entire application on a dev server a piece of cake.
Finished The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett. Not my favorite Discworld novel but we got it from a library book sale for a few pennies.
Our kitchen has a sink again! It’s big and wonderful and I never want to see a double basin sink again.
We took up a trip to Vermont for the weekend to see my parents who, intentionally or not, live up there in the Summer. Long trip up in the dark, but we had beautiful weather all day Saturday so I’m glad we didn’t wait until Saturday morning to make the drive.
We took a “hike” at Sentinel Rock State Park. It’s maybe a half mile through a field from the parking lot, but it was a good distance on a lazy-day.
My daughter spent a lot of the morning and early afternoon catching (and releasing) bugs. It’s absolutely crazy how many fewer bugs there are up there then there used to be. My dad remarked how when we drove up in the 80s and 90s, the car would be covered in dead bugs. Now? I think I hit two.
It’s our 10th wedding anniversary (soon) so we wanted to stop by the place we were married.
As I said, beautiful weather on Saturday… And then much less beautiful on Sunday. Which is fitting, I think, since we had a beautiful day on our wedding, and then the remnants of Hurricane Irene blew in the next day and it was windy and gross.
I planned ahead more than usual for the drive and we stopped at better restaurants on the trip up and back. The Common Man on the way up, and Dos Amigos on the way back, with a stop at NH Doughnut Co. for some post ride treats.
Traveling with an unvaccinated kid is more stressful than it needs to be because you have no idea who actually has or hasn’t gotten vaccinated. Leaving Vermont we passed some clown show setting up that was demonstrating for keeping the government out of their veins or whatever bird brain idea they had.
I had a little project waiting for me when I got back. The wired mouse had been driving me crazy, so I ordered a new wireless one and figured while I was there, why not color match the mouse to the keys on my keyboard.

Weeknotes for the week ending July 18, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 18 Jul 2021 23:36:11 GMT

🌧🌧🌧🌧☀️☀️🌧
This week was busy, with the general things that makes life busy, plus two social gatherings, which is an increase of 200% from the… entire year before. I said I would take it easy this weekend but it’s real hard to be at home and not do house projects. Now it’s 7:30 on Sunday and I’m ready to relax — right after I do this… and those other things I was thinking of doing….
Lorelei started (what we’ve been calling) school camp this week. Since she’s adamant about not wanting to learn how to read, and a mostly remote year didn’t help that, she’s spending the mornings doing “Summer school” activities then going to “fun” camp. The change seemed to affect her absolutely not at all, which is the best we could have asked for.
Another child note, she likes to knock on our bedroom door in the morning, peek in, then walk away. It’s a subtle “I’m hungry and I might not be able to prepare the food I want today”, but it’s also a decent alarm clock so I don’t mind it. For a long time, when the door cracked open my brain tried to pattern match “child or cat”. The other day was the first time it went for “child or small burglar”. She’s still on the short side for her age but she’s doing a good job of catching up this Summer.

Album a day

I’ve stopped, for now. Might switch over to one finding one song to appreciate every day. For now, please enjoy this song, which has been stuck in my head all week, thanks to the aforementioned child of mine. I listened to a lot of Michael Bolton as a kid, we took long cars rides every weekend in the Summer, and Time, Love & Tenderness was one of the very, very few tapes we had. We later picked up a second tape, the 1991 classic… Brian Adam’s Waking up the Neighbors. Joke Michael Bolton songs couldn’t have a target any better than this elder Millennial.

Weeknotes for the week ending July 11, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 11 Jul 2021 15:02:23 GMT

I spent too many hours dealing with an issue where a previous employer off by one’d my social security number. Double check it! Also, I wonder who this person who is me shifted once is.
Safari will be the death of me. Our app at work was using IndexedDB to store state, and I saw this in my timeline: <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Ran into a spectacularly awful Safari bug in the latest Safari (14.1.1 on macOS and iOS 14.6).<br/><br/>Opening an IndexedDB database fails 100% of the time on the first try. 😩<br/><br/>If you refresh, it starts working.<br/><br/>Bug report: <a href="https://t.co/I61x27obtv">https://t.co/I61x27obtv</a><br/><br/>cc <a href="https://twitter.com/webkit?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@webkit</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/chris_dumez?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@chris_dumez</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/Apple?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Apple</a></p>— Feross (@feross) <a href="https://twitter.com/feross/status/1404568122158313474?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 14, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

But, ok, that’s fine, we were refactoring the app and saving less state in browser storage, and we were going to use localStorage instead because cross-tab communication is easier but haha fuck me right?

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">😬 localStorage is broken in Safari 14.1.<br/><br/>Tabs end up with seperate localStorage for reading, but the same localStorage for writing. This will likely result in data loss for users. (h/t <a href="https://twitter.com/forresto?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@forresto</a>)<a href="https://t.co/5Ljxl4vvbH">https://t.co/5Ljxl4vvbH</a></p>— Jake Archibald (@jaffathecake) <a href="https://twitter.com/jaffathecake/status/1389493762129375232?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 4, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

I use Safari on a day to day basis because it is fast, but also because there’s no better way to find out what dumb things are broken in Safari that will break your app than seeing it broken in someone else’s app. Oh and forget Google Lighthouse, you want to know if an app is good just open it in Safari and see if you get the “this page is consuming significant energy” warning.

Being generally mad at computers due to the above I’ve gone back to taking notes on paper again. I have a stack of index cards on my desk and I write what ever pops up and deal with it later. I have nice Zebra highlighters to go over the notes at the end of the day and flag things that are important.
Our backyard patio project left us with a stack of extra cobblestones and a pile of extra pea gravel, so I dug up some more of the yard and made a nice border around our garden bed.

This used up exactly all of the material, and the grass there is now pleasingly geometric so we’re done with that part of the yard.

I was drinking coffee on the back porch this morning and the air had an intense low-tide smell. I know it’s like 1% salt and 99% dead plants and animals but I love it. I took out the bike and rode down to beach, and it was one of those days where when you get to the road that runs along the beach you can feel the air change, it was colder and denser (and… the smell!).
I dream of car-free Sundays in town. If you get out before 10 in the morning there isn’t a tremendous amount of traffic but being able to roll down any street without having to check for cars would be 💯.

Weeknotes for the week ending July 4, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 04 Jul 2021 19:44:20 GMT

🦅🇺🇸🎆. Or not, we’re just bumming around the house. If we’re lucky we’ll see some fireworks from the back deck.
Our new kitchen cabinets went in this week. There’s so much room now! The finishing touches (sink, hood, counters, tile) are still a few weeks out so it’s exciting but mostly non-functional. My daughter checking out the new island, I guess wondering where the old one went to.
We had some electrical work done in the kitchen as well, and it occurred to me how the piece of paper taped to the inside of our circuit breaker panel is like code comments, most of them are wrong and you can’t trust what they say, but they might help you narrow down what you’re looking for a tiny bit.
I also learned that electrical code now requires you to have AFCI circuit breakers which are good because arc faults are bad but I also learned that some household appliances inherently generate arcs (brushed motors, mostly) and those can trip the circuit breaker. Which is why using the “brush roller” feature on our vacuum cleaner would trip a few of the outlets in our house, but not others, but now the entire downstairs is on AFCI breakers so it trips anywhere if we use that feature.
We watched The Queen’s Gambit this week. I guess everyone else watched it last year? It was really visually interesting, you can play a fun game of “find the chess boards in the set / costume design” while you watch. I enjoyed chess as the narrative frame for a coming of age story, although in my wife’s words, “all I understand is that if you take drugs you can play chess”.

Album a day

Getting a little lazy with this. On the plus side, though, I realized the other day that the 3.5mm jack on my monitor is a line-out, not a line-in, so listening while at my desk got a lot easier. Why did I ever think it was a line-in?

July 4: ‎Butterfly 3000 by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard
July 3: ‎On A Friday Evening (Live) by Bill Evans Trio
July 2: ‎Home Video by Lucy Dacus
July 1: ‎Below by Beartooth
June 30: ‎Swimming by Maple Glider
June 29: ‎Date Night: Chromeo Live! by Chromeo

Weeknotes for the week ending June 27, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 00:15:17 GMT

Packed up the entire kitchen this weekend. We’re getting some work done to the cabinets, new counters, other things. We’ve lived in three houses and in each wanted to do kitchen work to make it more how we’d want it instead of how we bought it: we DYI’d it in our first house and it was an improvement but didn’t really solve any of the fundamental problems of that kitchen (galley kitchen, 80 year old cabinets), we never even started in our second house (having a newborn was enough), this time we’ll finally have the kitchen we made decisions on, instead of someone else.
Complicating the packing process was the fact that my daughter stayed home sick on Friday, and gave whatever she had to me. Between remote school and remote work we spent 2020 germ free, so far 2021 has been more of a normal year.
Went to make an update to my wife’s website this weekend on my M1 Macbook Air. Turns out however I left it last time was entirely incompatible with running the site on an ARM computer, and fixing that problem is... not easy. npm update should solve a problem like this, but some packages waited until major versions to ship a fix for ARM which then brought other changes. It was too much for what I knew was a simple update.
In work notes, I’m pulling apart a Redux-Saga implementation in favor of just using the React Context API. It’s a moderately complex application, I went about it by removing the brain, essentially, pointing all of the Redux state to a Context store and replacing all of the actions with functions. I’m getting to the end of it and wrote some Cypress tests to go along with it. It’s been fun painting myself into many of the same corners that already existed in the logic, going “oh, that’s how that happened”, and then figuring out how to get out.
Finished Deacon King Kong by James McBride. I read The Good Lord Bird two years ago, I really enjoy his writing, lots of individuals who are odd in their own ways that get mashed together by the plot.

Album a day

As always, I get lazy about listening to new things when I’m doing house projects. There’s always music on, it's just not often anything new.

June 25: ‎The Golden Casket by Modest Mouse
June 24: ‎Devil Is Fine by Zeal & Ardor
June 23; ‎Mammoth WVH by Mammoth WVH
June 22: ‎The Golden Hour by Dave Koz & Cory Wong
June 21: ‎EAT (NXT Soundtrack) - EP by Poppy

Weeknotes for the week ending June 20, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 00:50:47 GMT

It’s finished:

Well, “finished”. We still need ~1.5 yards of top soil to make a flower bed, and the light “poles” are a “temporary” solution of zip-tying 2x2s to the chain link fence. As with every time we do a yard project I overestimated how much pea gravel we‘d need, so I‘m trying to figure out a place for what‘s left in the driveway before ordering more stuff to... have dumped on the driveway.

Woke up this morning and when my daughter came down she said “Happy Father’s day” followed by “... do you like salad?”. Me: “uh, sure?”

She came up with the same answer for her Mom on Mother’s Day. We eat a side salad with dinner a lot in this household, but I don’t think either of us have ever been like “oh yum yum salad my favorite”.

The above was made during the last week of Kindergarten. Now comes Summer camp. Summer camp days run longer than school days (yay) but means driving there for dropoff and pickup instead of walking (boo).
That’s it, I think? After finishing up the patio I spent most of my free time just hanging out on it. We did have mojitos with garden mint last night (on the patio, of course).

Album a day

June 19: ‎Life In The City by Turkuaz
June 18: ‎Miracle by Francis Lung
June 17: ‎Interludes for the Dead (feat. Neal Casal) by Circles Around The Sun
June 16: ‎The Night They Came Home (Live) by Mr. Bungle
June 15: ‎Skullcrusher - EP by Skullcrusher
June 14: ‎LIKE NIRVANA by Cub Sport

Weeknotes for the week ending June 13, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 00:07:54 GMT

Watching more TV than usual around here. Went through the entire first season of Sweet Tooth, and now I have to go back and read the comics. I remember the end of the world events being more vague in the comics, they’ve added detail to the TV series but I’m not sure the details make logical sense. Still, I adored the comics, and the first season does a pretty delightful job of bringing it to life (Bobby is…much cuter). Also watched Bo Burnham: Inside, also good. If you want to be convinced to watch it, just watch Welcome to the Internet here:

Read Nothing To See Here. It’s about raising kids who spontaneously combust, which, if you’re a parent, you can immediately recognize is really just all kids. The book included this article at the end, which resonated with me: I Was Worried My Anxiety Would Prevent Me From Being a Good Father. My Sons Changed That
Finished Ori and the Will of the Wisps. Great game, one of the few games out there where your character’s movements make you feel super powerful (Spiderman on the PS4 is another one that comes to mind). I wish the Switch Pro controller had a headphone jack because Ori has beautiful music but I had it on low volume since I was playing after the kid was asleep.
More yard work. This was the end of last weekend: This is where we are after this weekend: It’s so close! And by close I mean many tons of pea gravel away from close!

Album a day

I took a break for vacation last week, and apparently forgot to update the last week of May… but now I’m back. The full list remains here.

June 13: Early Songs & Rarities by The Record Company
June 12: ‎Wakin On a Pretty Daze by Kurt Vile
June 11: ‎No Gods No Masters by Garbage
June 10: ‎Song of the Lark and Other Far Memories by Angel Olsen
June 9: ‎Locked Down - Live from Brighton Electric by Juanita Stein
June 8: ‎Jubilee by Japanese Breakfast
June 7: ‎Blue Weekend by Wolf Alice

Weeknotes for the week ending June 6, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 12:06:23 GMT

Our vacation didn’t quite go as planned, we ended up back and home after the long weekend, but still took the week off. Instead of going to one beach we went to a different, closer beach. Lessons were learned, let’s leave it at that.
Speaking of the beach, my daughter is now at the age where other kids just show up and they start making plans / coming up with games on the fly, so while we were at the beach a gang of children started building a pit of “eww-goo”, their name for sand + water, and then one of the children went to get more water but noticed a dead (what appeared to be an) eel on the way, and felt the need to pick it up and drape it over their arms and parade it around the beach.
Finished The 7 1/2 Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle. Recommended if you’re a fan of Dark or Knives Out or Inception (or maybe even Shutter Island). There was one part of the plot I didn’t think was explored enough but it’s a definite page turner.
Read One Man’s Amazing Journey to the Center of the Bowling Ball. I miss bowling.
As a New Englander my instinct when taking a break from one type of work is to do a different type of work, so I finally started doing something about our backyard situation. It started as:

... and now it looks like:

and all of the materials have been sourced, cobblestones (from here) for edging and pea gravel (from here) for the inside. We debated pea gravel or something else since we moved here, but then our neighbors did pea gravel and it looked really nice so we went for it.

Sourcing yard material is always wild. If anyone wants to make a claim about video games being fantasy they should point at Minecraft. This is like a 20 cube patio in Minecraft and literally 5+ tons of rocks IRL.
Ideally the patio phase of the project will be done by the end of next weekend, but the weather this week is peak high temps for this area and more grass pollen than my face can handle. Really hoping a cold front moves in mid week and... all the grass dies?

Weeknotes for the week ending May 30, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 30 May 2021 16:00:00 GMT

It’s my birthday. And we’re on vacation. And it’s like 50 degrees and raining. I still put May as the second best weather in New England (the end of September / beginning of October being the best) but it’s still New England weather.
But we’re renting a house and who doesn’t love digging through the random mugs at the rental house for the best one (I didn’t pick this, but I appreciate the choice).
We released a new feature at work yesterday, you can now talk to a veterinarian on the weekends. After a year of doing work on an application that had nearly zero users I appreciate working on something that I can see people using.
I finished Can’t Even. I’m a millennial who usually can Can Even--maybe because I’m now an elder/geriatric/ancient millennial, but the book raises a lot of good points, like the switch from pensions to 401ks producing an endlessly growing economic engine that splits society into essentially people who are in debt and people who make money off of money. I have mixed feelings about unions and the death of said unions. My first job out of college I was a contractor working alongside union members and a lot of the stories of "the good old days" were just... white guys taking advantage of the fact that they were white guys. I’m not sure it was that different than in tech today, where white guys hire other white guys for good paying jobs. I still think the book does a good job of hitting the "Greatest Hits" of what’s wrong with our generation.

Album a Day

May 29: Ashlyn by Ashe
May 28: Long Lost by Lord Huron
May 27: So When You Gonna... by Dream Wife
May 26 ‎Driving Music - EP by Mallrat
May 25: The Main Thing by Real Estate
May 24: New Age Norms 2 by Cold War Kids

Weeknotes for the week ending May 23, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 23 May 2021 21:48:09 GMT

Finished Think Again. If you want the TL;DR version, watch this: <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cJMwBwFj5nQ" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Kiddo turned 6. I feel like she turned 5 a few months ago? What happened to this last year. That said, my parents came up to visit this weekend because, unlike last year, they can. Big hit among the presents across all of the age ranges was Ribbon Ninja.
My father was up before anyone else this morning. In fact he was up early enough to discover that the bird feeder in the backyard isn’t getting cleaned out by squirrels, but by a raccoon. Later a hawk started eating from it. I think fencing in our backyard inadvertently turned it into a low-key nature preserve.
I might not be good at video games any more. I picked up Returnal on release day, I just beat the first boss this week, and proceeded to get absolutely destroyed in the second level. I just don’t think I can. I also picked up Cadence of Hyrule and also could not, so I finally settled on Ori and the Will of the Wisps which is beautiful and seems beat-able. Ori and the Blind Forest is one of my favorite games of all time and so far it looks like WotW matches it. Also picked up New Pokémon Snap but that was for the aformentioned now six year old.

Album a Day

May 23: ‎Recover by The Naked and Famous
May 22: ‎Pop War by Imperial State Electric
May 21: ‎A Better Dystopia by Monster Magnet
May 20: ‎Daddy’s Home by St. Vincent
May 19: ‎Lucifer I by LUCIFER
May 18: ‎Van Weezer by Weezer

May 17: ‎Came Down Different by Pardoner

Weeknotes for the week ending May 16, 2021

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 16 May 2021 16:01:00 GMT

First meal from our garden: cucumber and watermelon salad with mint. That might sound impressive, but the only ingredient from the garden was the mint.
Got a decent bike ride in. One thing from this time last year that I do miss was the reduction in traffic, but I can understand why everyone wanted to be out on a near eighty-degree day in May.

Being able to ride to the ocean is a thing I will never stop appreciating.

I’m pretty much back to living my life how I was pre-pandemic, I think, except for wearing a mask indoors. I went into Boston, ran errands this weekend, went to the mall, which, was hard to get me in to ever.
Been messing around with Groovebox and Blocs Wave by Ampify Music, I really love the way they’ve designed these apps, they’re the only music creation apps that I could quickly come to terms with. Hope to have something tangible from it soon.
I’m back to logging my day in Bear. It’s nice to just have it open wherever and throw things I think of or what I’m doing in it. Sometimes I even talk to it on my watch.

Album a Day

May 16: ‎How To: Friend, Love, Freefall by Rainbow Kitten Surprise
May 15: ‎Detritus by Sarah Neufeld
May 14: ‎Delta Kream by The Black Keys
May 13: ‎Build A Problem by dodie
May 12: ‎Sideways to New Italy by Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever
May 11: ‎How Blue Can You Get by Gary Moore

Meatspace

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 12 May 2021 12:27:41 GMT

I went to the office yesterday, and then went out with people I only knew through video chat for food at a restaurant. Wild times.

Massachusetts reported zero COVID-19 deaths yesterday too. I’m not one to jump to “it's all over” now, and as of right now my next visit to the office is scheduled for 2022, but I will take some joy in things moving in the right direction instead of only the wrong one.

An Album Some Days

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 11 May 2021 00:31:46 GMT

It was getting a little noisy around here, so I made some changes. An Album a Day posts won’t show up individually on the home page or in the RSS feed any more, I’d rather do more of a weekly recap post. Also I switched the blog feed to have titles and (if they exist) descriptions with a read more link, not the full post. I was looking for something I wrote the other day and had a hard time finding it which is not great!

String Cleaning

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 01 May 2021 18:55:30 GMT

After fixing up my old Squier Stratocaster last Summer, it became my go to guitar when I sat down to play over my other Strat, a 2000 Lone Star. I started to wonder why, since the Lone Star is (or should be) the nicer of the two. I sat down and looked it over and tried to figure out what was wrong, and this is what I came up with. Note that “at some point below” could have been any point in the last 20 years:

At some point I’d lost the spring in the tremolo, which caused it to either flop around or stay locked into position.
At some point I’d switched it to higher gauge strings, or messed with the action and it was annoyingly high.
At some point I’d wanted to have it push more from the guitar itself, the pickups were screwed up close to the strings.
It hadn’t been cleaned in a while, or lubricated. If you touched the tremolo the G-string would make sound like a train derailing.

Aside: when I bought this guitar I was debating between it and an Ibanez Jem. Looking back at the advertising for it, I wonder what part of it I found appealing. 🤔

I pulled the strings, cleaned and lubricated everything, installed locking tuners and a spring for the tremolo, and dropped the pickups down to lower than they were when I got it. I don’t love the Texas Special pickup in the neck but I do oddly love it in the middle, and I’m too lazy to muck around with changing just the neck pickup out.

Locking tuners. Why didn’t I do this years ago.

Of course, if you really want to test tuning stability, you give your guitar to your five year old and let her do her best Hendrix impersonation. <div style="padding:75% 0 0 0;position:relative;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/544039533?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" title="IMG_4772.mov"></iframe></div><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script>

Throwback Thursday

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 19:00:00 GMT

Picked up some more boxes of “stuff” from my parents house while visiting for Easter. Among the piles, CDs for web browsers for both the Dreamcast and Playstation 2. Funny to think that 20 years ago “going online” was still a thing you had to do on a console, instead of the constant state of modern consoles.

And among a box of floppy disks, one of my early forays into web development! I dumped this entire floppy here. It says the site was generated by Arachnophilia which amazingly still sort of exists. My email address @earthdome.com definitely does not!

Working Conditions

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 10 Apr 2021 16:00:00 GMT

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Three days in the office, two days at home is the ideal combo in my mind, and every time I write about remote work I come across more evidence that lots of people want something roughly similar, but so much of the talk is about all-or-nothing scenarios that most people will hate <a href="https://t.co/eRmii4NJ5Z">https://t.co/eRmii4NJ5Z</a></p>— Amanda Mull (@amandamull) <a href="https://twitter.com/amandamull/status/1377627762224214029?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 1, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

I’ve always been an office employee, and over time I’ve seen almost every combination of working schedules. My ranked list:

2 days in office, 3 days at home.
3 days in office, 2 days at home.
5 days at home.
4 days in office, 1 day at home.
4 days, 10 hours, all in office.
5 days, 8 hours, all in office.

This order has a few caveats: I have almost always had a “long” commute (it’s likely average by American standards but it’s long to me). 1-3 are pretty arbitrarily arranged and mostly based on the jobs I had those schedules at and how often other people were in the office. If 4x10 became 4x8 it would probably immediately jump to the #1 spot — there’s no substitute for an entire day back to yourself, but 10 hours of knowledge work is too much to expect from a brain on any given day.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I've been running a personal experiment on this lately.<br/><br/>I bought a chess timer and start it when I sit down at my desk in the morning. I toggle timers for breaks (scheduled or necessary). I stop counting time when I'm too fried to go on for the day.<br/><br/>~5 hr work ~1 hr not on avg <a href="https://t.co/ir5vmnObzD">pic.twitter.com/ir5vmnObzD</a></p>— madalyn (@madalynrose) <a href="https://twitter.com/madalynrose/status/1379996152985219073?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 8, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

4x8 versus 4x10 and the pandemic schedules which tended to drift into “never in the office but always available” brings up a lot of other questions about availability of time versus actionable time. There were dedicated marketing campaigns for 24/7 office work pre-pandemic, and I don’t think anything has gotten better in that regard.

One of the most important lessons I learned in my working career was from my first job. I was a contractor but I worked with a bunch of IAM machinists, and at shift change, down to the exact minute, they’d be pushing the doors open and running for their cars. Granted, they couldn’t take their work home — some of them worked with tools the size of small house, but that mentality of “the work day is done” has stuck with me.

Opening Day

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 16:00:00 GMT

I don’t follow the Red Sox nearly as closely as I used to, but I at least knew today was opening day. Or, was supposed to be, I saw it was cancelled. The last time I was at Fenway for opening day was 2009, and the weather was about the same, low 40s and rain / something that looks like snow but lands as rain. It was the middle of three events at Fenway that were each so miserably cold that I gave up on going for at least five years.

In a completely unrelated mental thread I referenced Adium today, and remembered that for a long time I had the Red Sox Adium duck in my dock, which made me wistful for a bunch of things, but maybe more non-square dock icons than anything.

Marking the Pandemic by Plane

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 27 Mar 2021 01:00:00 GMT

We live under a common flight path for planes landing at Logan Airport in Boston. We’re close enough that we get airborne advertising — you can read the names on the bottom of the planes. The sounds trailing the planes converges as it passes over our house. I’ve flown over my house and seen it from the plane. It’s as normal to look up and see a jumbo jet as it is a seagull.

Last March, there were no planes. The sky was silent and empty. It occurred to me that in a lot of places, the sky is always like that. But here, it was immediately noticeable that the planes were gone.

Today was unusually warm for March, and we ate dinner outside. Planes flew over the entire time. As much as I missed a silent sky, hearing the planes again made it feel like things were closer to normal.

Electricity

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 18:00:00 GMT

One Year

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 05:00:00 GMT

A year ago was my last day in the office. It was also my first day in that particular office — we were moving out of a WeWork into a new space and I needed to get my stuff out before everything shut down.

The new place had (has?) a decent view. You can see from here that the city was already emptying out at this point.

I was also in the city because my parents were in town, and I met them for dinner. The restaurant only had us and one other table. The train I took home was almost empty.

I looked back at some notes from March of last year. I was very wrong about how long this would last, but almost everyone was. For a few days it seemed like maybe a planned April vacation was still on the table. Some notes that stood out:

It’s the weekend, which I’m guessing is going to feel a lot like every other day of the week for a few weeks.

This was definitely true. During the Summer I was also at least partially expected to be available for work so it really never felt like there was a weekend. The situation is better now: with my daughter having classes the weekends mean something to her again, and I occasionally flip the whole concept and do something like make pancakes for breakfast on a Tuesday. It’s not like anyone is rushing around in the morning, so why not.

Talked to my mom, they seem ok. She said there’s a 30 day ban on all visitors to nursing homes, which she’s pretty upset about. I think worst worst worst case something happens to my Grandmother now and there’s no funeral.

This one came partially true, unfortunately. We did have a funeral, it was a beautiful day in June so we could have it outside, but only five of us could attend. It was also the last time I’d see my parents in 2020, although they’re now half vaccinated, so hopefully that streak will be over soon.

The 30 day ban was, in hindsight, closing the gate after the horse had bolted. After 98 years of living that's a shit way to go, but we are certainly not the only family in the country with this same story.

We made cookies and Lorelei filled up a notebook I’m already running out of ideas.

This was the third day in. I came up with lots more ideas, luckily.

I’m tired of this shit.

32 days in.

Things, honestly, got better. You say “wow, we’re actually pretty fortunate” enough times and it starts to stick in your brain. Some highlights I found:

We went to two zoos we’d never been to before, once for animals, once for Christmas lights.
I made the local news when I, unintentionally, was one of the first people back in a dentist’s office for a regular cleaning.
Went to a bunch of parks I hadn’t been to before, including some by the ocean.
Fixed up an old guitar.
Made a website for my wife’s podcast.
Played with toys.
Made the home office nicer.
Beat a lot of video games.
… and had plenty of time to do little things. Today was a beautiful day, and I thought we should go outside, so I found a pair of socks for my daughter, then went and put one sock each on each of our sleeping cat’s heads, and told her I had an adventure ahead of her to go find them.

Stencil, Markdown, and web components in Markdown

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 00:30:29 GMT

I’ve had an idea floating around for a while: MDX is great, but I hate all of the steps around configuring / building React components with it. If I’m writing Markdown, HTML is valid in Markdown, and Web Components are valid HTML, so why not just stick Web Components in Markdown and call it a day?

That was the idea, anyway, I just never got around to trying it. I still don’t quite grok the actual Web Components spec, but I have used Stencil, and figured with some free time today I’d give it a shot. This is the result: Web Components in Markdown. It works! Of course it does. Probably the biggest difference between it and MDX (besides, React, obviously), is that Web Components in HTML can only accept string values, so in this example rather than passing an array of image sources, I passed a comma separated list, e.g:

<picture-gallery images="https://source.unsplash.com/lvh5L46VWuA/600x600, https://source.unsplash.com/TjbedCFPQdc/600x600, https://source.unsplash.com/caM2RdHVAoc/600x600"></picture-gallery>

One other nice thing here is you can stick fallback HTML into the <picture-gallery> part, and you get fallback content. If the JS loads, yay, a gallery. If not, whatever. I made an example of that here:

<p class="codepen" data-height="452" data-theme-id="light" data-default-tab="js,result" data-user="jjmartucci" data-slug-hash="ExNQVdZ" style="height: 452px; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; border: 2px solid; margin: 1em 0; padding: 1em;" data-pen-title="Progressive enhancement with Web Components"> <span>See the Pen <a href="https://codepen.io/jjmartucci/pen/ExNQVdZ"> Progressive enhancement with Web Components</a> by Joseph Martucci (<a href="https://codepen.io/jjmartucci">@jjmartucci</a>) on <a href="https://codepen.io">CodePen</a>.</span> </p> <script async src="https://cpwebassets.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>

You can see the code behind the site on Github, it’s slap-dash but it is functional.

Rush - ing a repo

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Some notes on moving an existing Git repository into a Rush monorepo structure:

The last monorepo setup I did was with Lerna. I much prefer the documentation and incredibly verbose configuration files of Rush. Lerna certainly has it’s place in specific setups but not the one I was trying to set up.
One point that wasn’t clear: if you have an existing repo you want to add rush to, you have to initialize it with rush init --overwrite-existing. Minor point but the error message from just running rush init didn’t make it clear that I should, and the documentation is a little vague on what --overwrite-existing is going to do (and it sounds worse than it is).
I used their suggestion of creating a package structure two levels deep. In this case /apps/[appname] and /tools/[toolname]. We’ll likely add a /libraries down the line, and migrate some more apps over.

Seems like a decent tool, so far. The requirements here are low, I’m not trying to create an omni-repo of all of our back and front-end projects, just colocating some already related pieces of code in a happy way, and setting up a future state so more projects can become more closely related in the future.

From Netlify CMS to Forestry

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 17:00:00 GMT

I’ve used Netlify CMS on and off on this site (and previous iterations of it) and while I think it’s a really great idea, the execution of the application is incredibly lacking, for a few reason:

The documentation is… not good. It’s ok, and I’m always hesitant to complain about documentation too much given how often I’ve dealt with software that included absolutely zero public documentation, but if I have to dig through Github issues to find answers to configuration problems that’s not a project I would be quick to recommend.
Running the admin panel locally is annoyingly hard. This has been fixed in later releases but still feels clunky.
You have to configure all of your fields in a YAML file, then commit them, then go make changes to the content. If you’re like me and you just move code and content independently this creates a lot of mismatched fields and inconsistency. That’s a me thing, but I don’t think it’s uncommon if you’re working with all of your content in Markdown files.
Sorting never seemed to work, and all of my files were ordered somewhat randomly when I opened the CMS.
Folders, in content and in the media library, didn’t really work either. I like to store my posts by year/month/title.md to cut down on how many I have to look at at once, and Netlify CMS just makes them one big list.

To be clear, the very good idea behind Netlify CMS is that it is a light UI wrapper around your Markdown files, and it requires zero installation. You put a script tag on a static page and it does the rest. There’s no database, no deployment steps, you can directly edit the YAML front matter and Markdown content of your files and commit the changes to Git, at which point if you have a static site and Netlify hooked up, everything deploys and your site is updated. For a while there wasn’t a lot of good options in this market, but now there’s a few, so I started looking at alternatives this weekend. Among the interesting options:

But all of those started with “download” or “get started by installing”. Then I found Forestry.io, which runs the UI on their servers (headless, the kids call it), but against your Github content. Getting started was similar to setting up a site on Netlify, you connect your Github account, pick the repo, pick the default branch. After that you give forestry some config settings (which it saves in a .forestry folder in the repo) and your content, assuming you already have some, sort of magically appears. You can then configure your media library (which, annoyingly, also doesn’t use folders but at least saves correctly to folders if you configure it to), and you can use existing content to build out a reusable front matter structure. I picked one of my “album a day” posts and forestry did (most of) this for me:

(I added the Draft field after, since the post I picked didn’t have that in the front matter already).

forestry also has a bundle of other options I don’t yet need but I’ve needed on past projects that are nice:

It can run a preview version of the site so you can see changes in real time.
Webhooks.
User roles (once you go to a paid tier).

In general I recommend it, and editors like this are easy to recommend because they require almost no setup, and if you change your mind, you just go back to whatever other Markdown editing process you were using.

CDNs Aren’t as Useful as They Used to Be

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 16:42:41 GMT

When I was learning to be a web developer it was beaten into my head that if you were building a site and loading 3rd party scripts on it (e.g. jQuery, Bootstrap), you should load them from a CDN because if a user on your site had been to another site that used jQuery (likely) and they used the same version of jQuery (somewhat likely), and that other site also used the same CDN for jQuery (i.e. https://code.jquery.com/, which was pretty likely given we didn’t have as many widely available CDNs back then), then the browser would pull the version of jQuery you were requesting from the cache instead of downloading it again. Everyone wins! Except the first site to request jQuery that a user hit with an empty cache.

I’d gone on assuming that was functionally true but I needed it less and less as the sites I built started using npm packages and bundling everything at build time instead of requesting resources at run time. I thought it was true somewhat recently, when I decided we could load Google fonts from Google instead of bundling them because “if the user has it in the cache…”. But today I learned it’s not true at all:

If your sites request the global jQuery, modules from unpkg.com, font files from Google fonts or GA's (Google Analytics) analytics.js, users will redownload the resources no matter if they downloaded and cached them for other sites already.

What does this change mean for you? If your sites live on modern hosting that provides a CDN and supports HTTP/2, you can drop the third-parties and should ship all resources yourself. Relying on a third-party provides little value in 2020.

In fact it hasn’t been true in Safari for a long time (since 2013), but as of October 2020 it doesn’t work in Chrome either. It maybe never really worked like we dreamed it did, comments on Hacker News imply actual cache hits were very low. I chose to believe there was a golden age of a long lived minor version of jQuery that got heavily pulled from cache hits, but maybe I chose to believe that just so this little nugget in my brain wasn’t useless all along.

My Favorite Apple Watch App

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 06 Feb 2021 18:33:58 GMT

New about page

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 02:23:27 GMT

I’ve been lazy about putting a new about page on this site, because I wanted to make it look better than the plain text wall I had in the last design. I decided since I’m sitting at my home desk almost always these days, I’d make an interactive version for you to play along with.

So check it out, a new about page. It’s SVGs, HTML, CSS, and 3 teeny tiny JPEGs. The bigger your monitor, the more you can see. If you figure out how to get yourself on one of the screens, let me know.

Fuck Donald Trump

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 23:28:41 GMT

Days after, or even the day of the 2017 inauguration, I was in North Station and someone was singing just the chorus of “FDT” over and over.

That’s been in my head a lot for the last four years. I’m not sure it will ever leave, but maybe the mental play count drops a bit after today.

I’m still a tiny bit optimistic that four years of fuckery has engaged a lot of people in the Democratic process who weren’t before. I’m very, very, slightly hopeful that people finding channels outside of main stream media eventually swings towards hearing unheard voices, not amplifying the loudest and worst. If I can be glad for one little thing today, it’s seeing the President wearing a mask, because this never needed to be as difficult as it is.

Who uses Safari

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 02:09:18 GMT

I’ve saved this screenshot for the next time I need to have a debate about dropping older browser support. It’s from My PlayStation, and the browser is Safari (desktop and mobile!). Literally no way to view your account on an iOS device without downloading the app. Some light Google-ing says there’s over 100 million people with Playstation accounts so it’s unlikely I’m the only person annoyed by this.

Finding is better than folding

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 01:35:43 GMT

I was reading this thread on Reddit about how to structure your React files. In the past I would have said something like:

components/
	layout/
		component_name
	data/
		component_name
	other_domain/
		component_name
	...

and used an index.js in every folder for the root React component. These days I’m much more inclined to do:

components/
	component_name

because I find both deeply nested folders and files with the same name annoying. I also think it’s ideal if you can quickly move through files with linked structures (F12 in VS Code if you’re using Typescript) or search for files using the Command Palette rather than trying to guess from / down where a file might be.

Hawk, guy

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 02:49:12 GMT

Our backyard is a tiny stretch of trees before a river, but there are a lot of trees. If you asked me how many, I couldn’t guess, if you asked me what kinds I’d say “tree kinds”, but if you ask me to look at the back window and spot a bird through the hundreds of thousands of branches my brain will pick them out in an instant every time. Just don’t ask me what kind of bird.

This feathery friend keeps showing up in our backyard, on the same branch every time. Or, feathery foe, to at least some of the other animals nearby, although I wouldn’t know it, he usually hangs out for an hour then flies away.

Photo is tightly cropped from a 200mm DSLR lens. Every time I see him I tell everyone else in the house, but it’s cold and they give up before finding him.

What’s a new year anyway

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 16:36:31 GMT

I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions. I think that is, in part, because I’ve lived in New England my entire life. Why start something in January - the month of short days, cold weather, general malaise, and then hope it sticks through February, the month I will always argue does not need to exist.

I set a goal for 2020, which was to go to a concert every month of the year. I made it to February (the worst month) and the concert, which was at the end of the month, was covered with an air of “should there be this many people in a building?”. Any plans for March were immediately scrapped. I tried to get tickets for an outdoor concert in the late Summer but the venue was so limited it sold out immediately. What’s the importance of January 1st, if I want to try this again? There’s no “new year” where I could do this until vaccines are widely available, and concert venues are open again. That might be later this year, that might be 2022. The calendar has no bearing on it.

This year, there are no goals based on the calendar, but things to think about a season before for the season after. In Spring I want to plant a tree and put a garden bed in the back yard, and mulch over a dead zone of grass between our driveway and the sidewalk. I thought about that last Spring, but everyone else stuck with nowhere to go but their front yard and back yard did too. So that’s my New Year’s “resolution”, of sorts — spend January thinking about a tree for March.

instax

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 27 Dec 2020 19:35:58 GMT

Got the kid an instax mini 11 for Christmas. It’s an instant camera that develops on 1.8’’ x 2.4’’ film. Some initial notes:

Will the camera survive a 5 year old? Probably. It’s a sturdy feeling plastic construction, if anything is going to go it’s the lens cover.
Operation is two buttons: 1 pushes the lens out and turns the camera on, one takes pictures. The flash is always on and it does some behind-the-scenes exposure correction.
It has a “selfie” mode, which also works for close up pictures. It extends the lens barrel slightly. They stuck a tiny, tiny mirror on the lens so you can see yourself while using it, which is genius.
Having used digital cameras for so long, you forget that film has to be optimized for indoor or outdoor. We went to the beach on a sunny day and everything was expectedly washed out.
The kid absolutely does not care about the quality, it’s all about getting the prints out. I got this for her because she was previously using her Nintendo 2DS to take pictures, which has the world’s worst camera sensor, and every indoor picture is just some indecipherable shade of brownish-gray. This is a huge step up, even when she jerks the camera around mid-capture.
The shutter button is a little bit sensitive, as you can see by the picture in the bottom right, which is mostly my hand as I handed the camera over to her.

Hilda

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 20 Dec 2020 00:34:16 GMT

👨: “Hey, do you want to watch this show Hilda? I’ve read good things about it.”

👧: “NO. I HATE IT. I WANT TO WATCH DRAGON RIDERS”

months pass

👧: “…her name is Hilda, and there’s trolls, this is the best show, I’m going to watch it forever.”

👨:

Waikiki Beach

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 00:32:35 GMT

Hawaii is one of the places we’re allowed unrestricted travel to right now, but this is a closer, possibly ironically named Waikiki Beach.

Happy Little Clouds

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 01:38:33 GMT

...that get sad. Some Procreate doodlin’ on a Winter weekend.

The Tools I Use

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 00:52:37 GMT

In the past I’ve kept lists of apps to install for new Macs/PCs/iOS devices, but usually on scraps of paper. I figured this might be useful to someone else, or my future self, so now I just have them on a page on this site.

Monoprice 35in Zero-G Curved Ultra-Wide Gaming Monitor

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 14:31:06 GMT

please ignore the messy cables

I picked up a (deep inhale) Monoprice 35in Zero-G Curved Ultra-Wide Gaming Monitor during the CyberblackFriMonTurkeyWeek sales. I’d been debating a new monitor for... a long time. I had a 24ʺ Dell 16:10 WUXGA monitor that was “good enough” — I had 27ʺ QHD monitors at work but they didn’t feel noticeably better, and I didn’t like the idea of scaling (or paying for) a 4k monitor.

At 3440x1440, this monitor is ~1.7 times wider and a bit taller with no bezels in between. Feels like a good compromise. As someone who works in a code editor with 5 primary colors the colors are fine, and the viewing angles are good enough for the curve, assuming you don’t try to hang from the ceiling to look at it, or peek from another room. I set it up using the calibration guidelines from this Tom’s Hardware article and then ran through the MacOS expert display calibration to make a color profile that you can download here.

Game of the Year

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 01:37:42 GMT

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Here are your six nominees for Game of the Year at <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/TheGameAwards?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#TheGameAwards</a> <a href="https://t.co/ikRltsnBrm">pic.twitter.com/ikRltsnBrm</a></p>— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) <a href="https://twitter.com/geoffkeighley/status/1329109716891357184?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 18, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

“Thanks” to the Coronavirus for keeping me in my house, I made it through four of these. Of them, The Last of Us Part II had the best story, Hades is the best video game, in that it is fun and has great mechanics, and art, and sound. Ghost of Tsushima was a fun open world game, but wouldn’t make a Playstation 4 top ten for me. Final Fantasy VII remake likely would make a top ten list, but I’d hesitate to recommend it to people who hadn’t played the original.

Markdown is going on tonight

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 13:42:58 GMT

Let him who hath understanding reckon the markdown of the bear

Cross posting from a next.js blog to micro.blog

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 18:02:03 GMT

I like the idea of micro.blog, and I’ve lazily cross-posted my blog to the site via RSS for a while, but the feed always ended up in the format of [post title] - [link to post], which doesn’t capture the spirt of microblogging.

I reworked the RSS feed in general when updating this site to next.js, but I thought I'd take a stab at getting micro.blog crossposting working too.

Since I couldn’t find much in their documentation on what parameters were used to construct the micro.blog feed from an RSS feed, I found users who were cross posting, looked at their feeds, and then tested out a couple posts to see how they showed up on the timeline.

Notes:

It's much easier to use a JSON feed. This is perhaps not surprising since Manton Reece drafted the spec and created micro.blog.
Microblogging is strongly against using titles for posts.

I ended up taking the same loop my index page uses (gets every single markdown post, but then returns the latest ten) and running it through this function:

import siteConfig from "../data/config.json";
var md = require("markdown-it")();

const makeJsonFeed = (posts) => {
 const feed = {
   feed_url: siteConfig.jsonURL,
   title: siteConfig.description,
   home_page_url: siteConfig.siteUrl,
   author: {
     url: siteConfig.siteUrl,
     name: siteConfig.author,
   },
 };
 const items = posts.map((post) => {
   return {
     author: {
       url: siteConfig.siteUrl,
       name: siteConfig.author,
     },
     id: `${siteConfig.siteURL}${post.slug}`,
     url: `${siteConfig.siteURL}${post.slug}`,
     date_published: post.frontmatter.date,
     content_html: md.render(post.markdownBody),
   };
 });
 feed.items = items;

 return JSON.stringify(feed);
};

export default makeJsonFeed;

And on the index route, I use it like this:

const jsonFeedObj = makeJsonFeed(postsToUse);
fs.writeFileSync("./public/rss/feed.json", jsonFeedObj);

While I do have titles on most of my posts, they are optional, and I chose to leave them off the JSON feed. If they are added, micro.blog goes back to the [post title] - [link to post] I was trying to get away from!

You can see the result at my micro.blog timeline or in the JSON feed.

Big Sur

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 00:58:18 GMT

Trying two things: updating my old Macbook Pro to Big Sur.

And testing titleless posts for micro.blog RSS integration. Big Sur definitely didn’t work, let’s not go 0 for 2.

Spirographs

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 11 Nov 2020 19:13:27 GMT

We were cleaning out toys this weekend and found a gear drawing set for making spirographs. A family member bought it for my daughter to take on a flight when she was younger, but she was too young to enjoy it at the time. We had more fun with it this week, and finally got around to using these Zebra pens I had.

But, the programmer in me said, “hey, sometimes the gear skips, what if we did it in code”, and made this.

The colors are random, have fun reloading / changing the variables.

Obligatory Simpsons gif:

SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 02:18:41 GMT

Attempts at recording the RC car in slow motion. They’d be better if my kid didn’t get such a kick out of running off with the tripod.

When the all wheel drive kicks in.

I’m gonna send it.

I just like the sound on this one.

Pumpkin Leftovers

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 01 Nov 2020 00:58:18 GMT

Day One (two, three, seven-hundred and thirty...)

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 19:51:41 GMT

I've gone back and forth on where to journal things for a while, but I've been using the MacOS/iOS/iPadOS/WatchOS app Day One for two years now. And I know it's been two years, because Day One has a feature where it shows you what happened “on this day” in previous years, and yesterday was the first day it had an entry from two years ago. And no, the entry wasn't “the end of 2020 is going to be terrible!”, it was about a job interview, which became theme in 2019.

I'm not going to say Day One is the perfect app, and I generally don't like apps with recurring fees, but it does a few things really well:

You can see your posts on a map. If you usually write on your phone, or take pictures on your phone, it will infer the coordinates from that. You can then search for posts by location, or just zoom around all the places you've been.

You can record sound from your Apple Watch. Sometimes if I'm just out in the woods/by the beach/listening to my kid sing a made up song, I'll turn it on.
The aforementioned “on this day”, which has been wild in 2020, looking back at times when we did exotic things like “travel” and “see family members”.
You can split the journals up by theme, but also view them all in aggregate, so I have one that’s just for food, one for rides/hikes.
You can turn on end to end encryption on everything.

It has some silly features, like prompts. Some are interesting, others are like this:

I’ve never considered printing it, a service they offer. I back it up, you can export the whole thing to HTML. Should I print it? Maybe. I’ll make a note today and see how I feel in two years.

Adventure Princesses

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 19:51:41 GMT

CDs were better than this

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 19:51:41 GMT

Me: “Hey Siri, play Disney Radio”

Siri: “Now playing Radio Disney, presented by iHeartRadio”

🎵 weird tween pop starts playing 🎵

Me: “Hey Siri, play Disney songs…”

Siri: “Now playing Disney Radio”

🎵 mix of Disney soundtracks with extreme bias towards Mulan starts playing 🎵

Reading List Oct 4th - 11th

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 11 Oct 2020 19:51:41 GMT

I was trying to keep up with what I read in the last week on Friday mornings, but it turns out Friday mornings are crazy. Sunday mornings, not so much.

First up, some light reading about the Pandemic.

Will the Pandemic Socially Stunt My Kid?

The short answer is: The majority of neurotypical kids will be able to socialize just fine, even if we’re still wearing masks in a year.

This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic

Even in an overdispersed pandemic, it’s not pointless to do forward tracing to be able to warn and test people, if there are extra resources and testing capacity. But it doesn’t make sense to do forward tracing while not devoting enough resources to backward tracing and finding clusters, which cause so much damage.

Related: ‘What are we so afraid of?’

I read a lot of stories about Eddie Van Halen, who passed away this week. As a guitarist, I think the appeal of Van Halen was that he was one of a very, very small number of guitarists who could make a rhythm part as interesting as a lead. Hendrix was the other guitarist who could do that.

Eddie Van Halen’s Otherworldly Sounds

But by the late nineties, bands like Van Halen—who mostly eschewed profundity in favor of uncomplicated pleasure —were being supplanted by the more brooding and introspective rock music emerging from Seattle. Grunge was a pointed rebuttal to hedonism and excess. The eradication of joy was collateral damage.

Where Did My Ambition Go?

After the economy collapsed in 2008, we were told to get off the path entirely, to think outside the box but still inside the system. Ambition was no longer limited by traditional power structures. Don’t let yourself be defined by the role you have in someone else’s company—create a new role at your own company. Social media allowed us to carve out our own identities online, and quickly we all became managers of our own “brand.” We had to monetize our brands. We started to hear the adjective “entrepreneurial” all the time to describe what our aims should be, even those of us who just wanted to create, who cared very little about managing the business side of creating.

Welcome to Your Bland New World

Of these values, the environment is the hardest circle to square, since even the greenest blands are hell-bent on growth. If the best thing an individual can do for the planet is have fewer children, then surely the genuinely eco-entrepreneur might wonder whether the world really needs a Wi-Fi controlled smart oven ( June ), or a Bluetooth-enabled coffee mug ( Ember ).

Statamic on Digital Ocean App Platform

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 19:51:41 GMT

Digital Ocean released their App Platform the other day. It's similar to Heroku, which has been around for forever, but I never really got along with how Heroku works and have always really liked Digital Ocean's guides/documentation/shark loading animations, so thought I'd see what it's about.

I decided to try this site but as a full-fledged Statamic site, not the statically generated version you're looking at currently, hosted on Netlify. It was pretty easy, Digital Ocean has a sample repo for Laravel, but if you point it at a Statamic repo in Github you get all of the same settings. After that it was just adding some environmental variables, and letting it deploy.

Am I going to use it? Probably not. It was a neat test case, but the leap from this to what Netlify provides, where all of the content for the site is cached neatly on CDNs somewhere, is more than I feel like figuring out right now. A more likely step would be to deploy just the control panel to a Digital Ocean box, then let Statamic’s Git integration kick off a Netlify build and deploy.

Here’s the important parts of the App Spec file I ended up with, if anyone else ended up here trying to figure out how to get this working, with secrets obviously obscured:

name: bwc-statamic
region: nyc
services:
- build_command: “php please stache:clear \nphp please static:clear”
  environment_slug: php
  envs:
  - key: STATAMIC_LICENSE_KEY
    scope: RUN_AND_BUILD_TIME
    value: 1234
  - key: APP_URL
    scope: RUN_AND_BUILD_TIME
    value: your-app-address-here
  - key: APP_KEY
    scope: RUN_AND_BUILD_TIME
    value: 1234
  http_port: 8080
  routes:
  - path: /
  run_command: heroku-php-apache2 public/

Coolidge Reservation

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 19:51:41 GMT

The kiddo and I set out for a hike yesterday. We planned on going to Ravenswood Park, but when we got there the parking lot was full. A sign outside said “if the lot is full, come back some other time”. On the way we had passed another parking lot in the woods with a sign that I didn’t get a chance to read as we drove by, but I figured, “it’s a trail, it’ll get us in the woods either way”.

So we drove down the road and pulled in. The parking lot sign read Coolidge Reservation. We found a trailhead and walked in, but picked the one that didn’t have a map, so I looked one up on my phone. Seemed like the trails were short and the other end was a big field by the ocean. Ended up being just the right amount of hiking for a 5 year old, about 2 miles with a little hill that looked out over the ocean, a huge field to run through, and nice rocky Atlantic Ocean cliffs.

Bungalow Hill, towering a whole 110 feet over the ocean below

this slightly angry face was brought about by me insisting she could not climb down the rocks to get closer to the water

Book Notes

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 19:51:41 GMT

Updating some book entries with interesting quotes from them. Probably my favorite this year:

Traveling across America, they were astonished at how deeply violence is embedded in our culture, how it has become the culture, what’s left of local color. We are a grisly nation.

My favorite book so far this year has been How to Do Nothing. I captured some things from there, but I recommend reading the whole thing, if you can.

My Year of Meats How to Do Nothing Smarter Faster Better Big Magic The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

builtwith.coffee 3.0

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 19:51:41 GMT

It's 2020 and I'm stuck in my house watching Democracy fall apart, why not rebuild my website again, and why not go full on "old man yells at clouds" while I'm at it.

If you've been here before you'll notice that the layout has changed, but behind the scenes so has the entire stack the builds the site. This site was originally:

Gatsby 1.something
Contentful CMS hosting the content.

I wanted my writing saved locally and wanted it searchable, so I replaced Contentful with Netlify CMS. Netlify CMS was... underwhelming. It was an interface that made sorting/creating Markdown easier, but I wasn't excited to use it. Adding to that:

graphql, for a personal site, is dumb. I apologize if I ever told anyone it was a good idea. I am filled with deep regret. Is it great for stitching together various APIs? Yes! Do I want to deal with it to make CMS content show up? No never.
Gatsby decided to go for VC funding and turn from questionable to terrible. Look at the rest of the JavaScript stack it's 98% React based (yay, Facebook, great).

That's me being grumpy about things, which, in 2020, I think I'm allowed to do. Wanting a change, the 3.0 version of this site is:

Statamic 3.0
Statamic SSG
Still Netlify. It's going to be a while before I want to deploy a database for a personal site again.

I started as a developer hacking on PHP sites, so maybe this isn't a huge change. Statamic 3 released very recently and part of the release notes was this:

Which got me thinking. I'd used Statamic in the past and was familiar with how it stored content, it's all flat-file Markdown files, so that covered what I was trying to do with Netlify CMS before.

The outstanding question was, how hard would it be to move over what I had, and would I prefer the Statamic site. Given that you're reading this... on the Statamic site, you can figure out how that ended up.

Notes

I wrote approximately 3 lines of JavaScript and two lines of PHP to build this site. 98% of the code is antlers templates (HTML and CSS).
The way statamic handles variable scope is beautiful. I recently did hair-tearing work on a .NET app trying to pass values to the layout.
I switched the whole (admittedly small) site in ~three days. Maybe four. Who can really keep track of days.
I've been using headless / roll your own CMSs for so long that I forgot that ones that are focused around content come out of the box with a lot of the features you need. I went to make a Date field to set to the post date, but while I was setting that up I noticed this in the collection configuration panel:
The "push button, make website" experience was slightly worse than a JavaScript project, but way better than the last time I used PHP. Adding to the project (like setting up the SSG) was easier than anything I've done recently on the JavaScript side. There were some odd errors, like:

I never figured that one out. Laravel Valet was another prickly point, it installed but missed at least one service, which required reading through Stack Overflow for a while.

The content field/layout/creation experience:

And that gif shows up in the Preview tab in the Markdown editor!

In summary, I'm pretty happy with it.

It's Not The Internet It's You

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 19:51:41 GMT

I read It's Not The Internet It's You this morning (in a chain of RSS reader → here → there). It touches on a lot of points I’ve been thinking about around Twitter and other social media, but it felt particularly relevant today, the 19th anniversary of 9/11. I’ve often thought about what that day would have been like it Twitter/Facebook had been around then.

I have one point of comparison, I learned about the Boston Marathon Bombing on Twitter. My wife was working in Boston at the time (although outside the city that day), so it obviously had immediate relevance. I checked Twitter nearly constantly in the days that followed, as though there was secret information there that the local news didn’t have. It certainly pretended it did, there was the whole Reddit junior detective squad shitshow, and a bunch of Internet sleuths playing CSI-Boston with the video/photos that they could get their hands on. There was at least one day between the bombing and the shootout with the Tsarnaevs where my wife went into the office, and the official line from places in Boston was “we are investigating it, and we are keeping an eye out”, while Twitter/Reddit was convinced it was a trap to lure more people back into the city for a second attack. Very healthy for the brain.

The pattern repeats itself over the years. Something happens (2016 election, this Coronavirus thing you may have heard of) and you go looking for an explanation for “why”.

Manipulation by platform developers only goes so far towards hacking your brain. What I quickly realised was that I had a choice to do these things or not, it was internally that I was so susceptible to the triggers used.

But there is no answer. The Internet is the checkout line at the grocery store, at best there's a poorly written recipe book, at worst it's the National Enquirer and its ilk. There isn‘t a call to action here, but there is an acceptance that 2020 might get worse before it gets better, and no, no one on the Internet has any idea what to do about that.

New Art for the Office

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 19:51:41 GMT

I feel like, between the two of them, they sum up my feelings these days quite well. From False Knees

A Picture of Change for a World of Constant Motion

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 15:06:05 GMT

I’m always jealous of the developers who get to build the interactive / scrolling features for the New York Times. I read A Picture of Change for a World in Constant Motion this morning while drinking coffee. I found it calming. I learned that Mount Fuji appears in The Great Wave off Kanagawa, a picture I’ve seen a million times.

While I was reading it my daughter was bouncing around the back porch taking pictures on her Nintendo 2DS. She figured out yesterday that it had a camera, and today she’s explaining to me that you can take pictures, “with A, or L, or R!” and showing me how to go back and look at all the pictures you’ve taken. It’s fun to give a kid a camera, because you realize how they look at things. It’s doorknobs, the cats, every place her name appears in the house, close ups of textures and fabrics, a paparazzi style shot of the FedEx guy dropping off a package. Everything is close and immediate. We were at the park the other day, and there was a bird sitting on a rock off in the river, and I spent minutes getting her to see it. She was looking, but kept getting distracted by things closer to her, other birds, flowers, the shoreline. Eventually she saw the bird, and then it became “let’s go see the bird”, let’s get as close to it as we can. We got closer, but the bird flew away. We started looking at the seashells by her feet instead.

The 20 year history of a Partscaster

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 15:06:05 GMT

The 90s

Back in the mid-90s, after finishing middle school, my parents agreed to get me a guitar. I’d been in band, but I was playing the flute and I didn’t enjoy it. They probably didn’t consider, at the time, that I would try to teach myself by playing “Iron Man” through an 8’’ Fender solid-state amplifier.

The guitar I ended up getting was a black Fender Stratocaster, Squire series. It’s an interesting product of globalization, there's a detailed history here, the TL;DR version being: while Squier was known as the cheap version of Fender in the 80s (and it is again, today), the Fender Squire series was American made parts, assembled in Mexico, with Asian electronics.

The 2000s

It was a good guitar for my bad guitar playing, but after a few years I got a nicer Fender Lonestar Stratocaster and the Squire series sat in its case most of the time. I spent a lot of afternoons in Guitar Center back then, and I saw a Tom DeLonge Stratocaster, a one humbucker and a volume knob guitar, and thought the Squire would be a great base to recreate that with.

A Tom DeLonge Strat. I think I liked the colors and the CBS style headstock more than anything else

I picked a Seymour Duncan JB for the pickup, got a single humbucker pickguard and wired it up. It worked fine, but the JB is known for having a lot of high end tones, and at the time I didn’t have a great setup to make the sound pleasant, so I thought I should wire the volume knob to a push/pull volume/tone knob so I had the option to roll the tone back and have a little less high end. Some combination of either bad pots, or bad soldering skills left with with a JB humbucker with about 2’’ of wire coming out of it, and a guitar that didn’t work.

The 2010s

I put the project aside — for about 15 years. Time passes, and one day the guitar comes back with me after a trip to my parents. It sat, in pieces, for a few more years.

The 2020s

I’ve been trying to either fix or get rid of things in our house, and I decided to do something with it. Fortunately for me and my soldering iron, solderless solutions have become abundant since I last tried this. Mad Hatter Guitar Products sells a few, more oriented towards mix and match solutions or guitars without pick guards. I ended up getting one from Obsidian Wire, who sells all in one solutions wired up with a lot of common wiring mods, e.g. their humbucker, single, single model runs the humbucker through a 500k pot, where most Strats that were single / single / single before had 250k controls. Trust me, this means as much (or little) to you as it means to me.

In redoing the look of the guitar, I harnessed my inner 15 year old and drew inspiration from the car we recently bought. It’s a black Volkswagen GTI with the usual red GTI accents, so I thought, sure, black guitar, black pickups, red trim black pickguard. A quick search found the Fender Noir Stratocaster to prove that this wasn’t the worst looking thing I could make.

Fender Noir Strat. Granted, it has a matte black finish…

Warmoth sells the three-ply black/red/black pickguards. I got one with some black control knobs and wired it up with the existing neck and middle single coil. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 20+ year old bottom of the budget-bin pickups don’t sound great. They sound better than I expected, in as much as one can expect from wire around magnets, but I figured at this point I was all in on this project, so I picked up two DiMarzio Area 67 pickups for the neck and middle spots.

When you’re bad at soldering you end up in a lot of questionable situations

So now it’s all bolted together, and it looks like this:

It plays and sounds pretty good. At some point in the past I had screwed the bridge down and put five springs on it, so it’s nearly a hardtail. It could probably use some nicer tuners and a black input jack to match the Noir, but the pickguard and the parts bolted to it cost about three times what the guitar cost, so I think it can wait another 20 years or so.

But what does it sound like

Another thing I'm trying to get better at is recording my guitar. I finally have a decent input device and I know what at least three of the buttons in Garageband do. These are all prime examples of the internal tempo of someone who has played alone most of their lives.

Original neck pickup.

<audio controls> <source src="/assets/audio/neck-pickup.wav" type="audio/wav" /> <source src="/assets/audio/neck-pickup.mp3" type="audio/mp3" /> <source src="/assets/audio/neck-pickup.m4a" type="audio/mp4" /> Your browser does not support the <code>audio</code> element. </audio>

Area 67, the new neck pick up. Wee bit clearer.

<audio controls> <source src="/assets/audio/area-67-neck.wav" type="audio/wav" /> <source src="/assets/audio/area-67-neck.mp3" type="audio/mp3" /> <source src="/assets/audio/area-67-neck.m4a" type="audio/mp4" /> Your browser does not support the <code>audio</code> element. </audio>

Area 67, neck and mid.

<audio controls> <source src="/assets/audio/quack-area-67.wav" type="audio/wav" /> <source src="/assets/audio/quack-area-67.mp3" type="audio/mp3" /> <source src="/assets/audio/quack-area-67.m4a" type="audio/mp4" /> Your browser does not support the <code>audio</code> element. </audio>

HomeRun

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 15:06:05 GMT

I’ve been slowly “smartening” our current home. It started with some Ecobee 3 thermostats (the ones not yet haunted by Alexa), then a HomePod, and more recently some Hue bulbs. I bought the bulbs for our master bathroom thinking it would be nice to have lights that adapted to the time of day; very bright during daylight hours and dim and warm when the sun has set. What I didn’t realize is that the bulbs have a boot up time, so if you turn them off with a conventional switch, when you turn them on they won’t immediately set themselves to whatever time-based settings you have them on. I moved them all to the office, where I can now turn on the overhead light and desk light at the same time. It’s… an ok trick.

There’s two things I don’t love about these smart devices, beyond the fact that you’re best off with wifi connected buttons to operate them:

The interfaces of the native apps and the interface of Apple Home have a lot of overlap, but also a lot of inconsistencies.
I don’t want to carry my phone around my home - I have an Apple Watch, I want it to control everything.

The best solution I’ve found so far is the HomeRun app. You can assign it HomeKit scenes with custom icons, and run them off of the watch. They usually work, and it’s better organized than the Watch’s Home app that shows a grab bag of scenes at the top followed by every little device you own. At the very least I can now walk into the office at night, without my phone, and turn the lights on.

Note ↔ Note, thinking outside the folder

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 15:06:05 GMT

I’ve used a bunch of note taking apps over the years (Evernote, OneNote, Apple Notes, Goodnotes, Notion, Bear) and I’ve almost always used them similarly to how you’d use a file system: folders for organization, notes as files. I’m always a little curious about new note apps and how they organize things. I was using Notion for a while, and got along well with using it’s concept of relational databases to make connections between notes. If you create notes in a database in Notion, you can make it look like Google Keep, you can make it correlate notes to a calendar (ala Agenda, another app I’ve tried, if only for a few minutes), or you can organize them in columns Trello style and use your notes as todos. It’s all the same set of notes, just with different views of the database. There’s a somewhat clunky way to associate one note with another, or one tag with another, and only if you’re using a database of notes (i.e, not just a “page” style note), but once you have that you can organize your notes in almost any fashion you can think of. A relational database + a nice UI is really just a primitive app building platform in the tradition of Access on top of Excel.

The main issue I had with Notion is that it’s slow — it’s really a wrapper around a web app, even in native form. On top of that, it doesn’t play nicely with built-in MacOS features. One small example, if you copy a link to a Things project into Notion, clicking on the link… does nothing. It doesn’t know what to do with callback urls.

So I’ve drifted from a combination of Notion and Bear, where Notion was project level and Bear was for quick capture, to Bear and Things, where Bear is project level and Things is quick capture. Everything is faster and it works across all my computers, my iPad, phone, and watch.

Bear uses tags as organization, which means you can refer to a note in multiple directions. It doesn’t live in a given folder, it lives where ever it is relevant. That said, the tags end up being used mostly as folders, it’s just you might have the same file in multiple folders.

An interesting idea I’ve seen floating around the web is associating all notes with links between notes, and using backlinks and graph views to understand where notes connect. Bear has supported “live links” or wiki style links for a bit now, you can have Note A and reference it in Note B with [[Note A]]. If you rename A, the link updates, and you never have to think about where Note A is. If you want to find all of the references to Note A, you can search for [[Note A]], and you can use Bear’s x-callback-url API to save that search at the top of Note A, so you can click on the link and find all of the notes referencing that note.

Some newer apps like Roam Research and Obsidian[^1] make backlinks the main focus. You might start the day with a log, and then just tag other notes as you record what you’ve done, like:

```
- Did [[HIIT workout A]] for 30 minutes
- Met [[Cool McPerson]] for lunch at [[Local Establishment]]
- Read article about [[Rust]] at [article](link)
```

then in the note HIIT workout A you can see all of the times you logged that note. Graph view is just these associations, but rather than buried in text, in a nice visual format. Bear can’t do this, but it’s not exactly magic to make a chart of associations, and Bear has the API to support it. There’s a python script that will generate a Graphviz view of your notes for you on Github. It includes a handy —anonymize option so I can even show you what my Bear notes look like, graphically:

Is it useful? I dunno. I’ve recently started daily logging with backlinks in my notes at work, and it’s proving helpful being able to click into longer running projects and see all of the times I associated it with a Jira issue, a person, a meeting, etc. The idea is that you can, with pretty low effort, record every thought in your head as it comes, then look at the graph and see what the core areas you’re thinking about are, and what areas can probably be pruned.

[^1]. Obsidian is interesting to me, and I’ve started using it at work instead of Bear. It’s a little clunky at the moment (it’s in a beta) and it’s clearly an Electron app, but it works off plain text files on a local file system, which is surprisingly hard to find. Ia Writer works that way, but doesn’t support backlinks.

TIL: graphvis

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 15:06:05 GMT

I worked for a number of years as a low-budget technical writer, producing documentation and technical diagrams at a few different companies. I say low-budget because these were manufacturing companies, not software companies, and the documentation was more “we need to keep this on file” than “we need this to function”. My go to tool for diagrams was Visio, and by the end of my stint as a technical writer I could do 3D diagrams in it that would put Autocad to shame, but lining up boxes for 2D diagrams was always a chore.

Fast forward many years, today I needed to draw a diagram for a new architecture, and I was going to default to pen and paper (or, iPad and Pencil) as I usually do, but I vaguely recalled there being an app out there that did sketchy-style diagrams. Some googling found it, but it didn't have a drag and drop GUI, it uses graphvis, which it turns out is the best thing ever. Why spend minutes moving arrows around when you can just a -> b it!

<div><a href='//sketchviz.com/@jjmartucci/89d18bc4f700e592667461623579df47'><img src='https://sketchviz.com/@jjmartucci/89d18bc4f700e592667461623579df47/5a61a8b15efcc3bb8933aa3b2fed04820baf07db.sketchy.png' style='max-width: 100%;' /></a><br/><span style='font-size: 80%;color:#555;'>Hosted on <a href='//sketchviz.com/' style='color:#555;'>Sketchviz</a></span></div>

A11Y in the Last of Us Part 2

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 15:06:05 GMT

Some inspiration for the next time you think making a dropdown menu accessible is hard.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">A few things I want to point out about our audio related accessibility options in The Last of Us Part 2. THREAD 1/7</p>— Robert Krekel (@robkrekel) <a href="https://twitter.com/robkrekel/status/1267534713230508032?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 1, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Reading List, May 29, 2020

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 29 May 2020 15:06:05 GMT

I split my mornings between reading a book or combing through my RSS feeds. This week skewed more heavily towards reading a book (How to Do Nothing), but I did find a few things that avoided my “read later” list.

Daring Fireball: ‘What Time Is It in London?’

So every other service that tries to answer “What time is it in London?” gets it right. Only Siri gets it wrong.

If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

Opinion | What if We All Vacationed at Home Again? - The New York Times

At the end of last year, an Ipsos Mori poll found that 79 percent of British people believe that their country is “on the wrong track” — a sentiment echoed in countries around the world . Much of this can be attributed to the attenuation of opportunity that followed the financial crisis of 2008-09. But some of it stems from a lost sense of belonging and the gulf that has emerged between those who still cling to the liberal dream of heterogeneity and those hankering for a more parochial past.

The fact that so many of us now spend our moments of maximum happiness overseas has surely played a role in deepening this fault line. And many of the pleasurable experiences of social intermingling that might once have offered a counterbalance, like a day out at the seaside, have been sacrificed to consumer choice.

Please Print (A Journaling Rant)

netlifycms

I moved the content side of this site to markdown, but wanted an easier way to update content than making markdown files, commiting and pushing them, so I added Netlify CMS to the site. It's a little rough around the edges still, but for what I was trying to do it hits 100% of the features.

increment

I have a soft-spot for magazines, when I was re-learning how to program I had two days a week where I would kill some time in the day flipping through the coding related magazines at Microcenter. This issue is all about frontend development so its extra relevant to me but the past issues look pretty good too.

TIL: porcelain versus plumbing

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 29 May 2020 15:06:05 GMT

I guess I haven't spent enough time living in the git documentation to notice this before, but a Stack Overflow answer for something I was trying to do with git diff used the term “porcelain” function to describe diff versus diff-index, which led to another Stack Overflow answer to what the concept of a porcelain function was, the origin of which appears to be from this email conversation in the git project

If you don't want it, I won't do it. Still makes sense to separate the plumbing from the porcelain, though.

It’s interesting to me that software prefers plumbing metaphors to electrical ones (switches from the circuits, in this case), but I guess what travels through the plumbing is critical to the metaphor.

DEAD LORD - Distance Over Time

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 25 May 2020 15:06:05 GMT

(Elvis Costello + Thin Lizzy) * 11

Reading List May 22, 2020

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 22 May 2020 15:06:05 GMT

Things I read over the last week. At first glance this week might appear to have a theme of “everything is broken!” but I prefer to read it as “look at all these things we can do better!”.

Second-guessing the modern web

But the cultural tides are strong. Building a company on Django in 2020 seems like the equivalent of driving a PT Cruiser and blasting Faith Hill’s “Breathe” on a CD while your friends are listening to The Weeknd in their Teslas. Swimming against this current isn’t easy, and not in a trendy contrarian way.

Low-Challenge, High-Skill Tasks in Terrible Times

For the last month I’ve found myself subconsciously jumping on “easier” tickets where I feel a high level of expertise (CSS tasks, layouts, prototypes) and I’ve struggled to get through tickets that have a high learning curve or cognitive load. Those deep work tasks are hard to sustain when reality, in the form of kids or breaking news, comes crashing through my door. That’s where the broader concept of Flow is helping me. If I understand the psychology correctly, lowering the challenge level raises my relative level of skill and that gives me a sense of control in an otherwise uncontrollable world. I’m able to move fast and not break things.

A Static Future

A thorough (and well illustrated) explanation of how static site builders like Gatsby work.

Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle iPhone photos

One of my favorite books is To Engineer Is Human by Henry Petroski, particularly the stories of uncaught or seemingly minor issues that went unconsidered that resulted in catastrophic failures. I don’t think there’s a software engineering equivalent (if there is, let me know!), so I have to find them in news articles like this.

Chris Coyier had a somewhat related tweet this week. You’d think operating systems and software would fundamentally get image formats and text formatting correct, but it’s been an ever-repeating problem since computers had screens.

Your Day Care Probably Won’t Survive the Coronavirus

While nearly every other developed nation supports child care as a public good, the United States treats child care providers as private enterprises — more like gyms than K-12 schools. ... The child care sector, like your favorite fitness enterprise, is propped up mostly by private dollars paid into the system.

There’s a whole Greatest Hits album worth of things that parents in the US get screwed on compared to other countries, but the #1 best seller is the fact that child care between the ages of 0 and close to 6, basically one third of the time the child is under your care, is on the individual structurally and financially. I have a lot of other thoughts on this but they mostly involve 🤬 so I’ll stop here for today.

Reading List May 15, 2020

joseph.martucci@me.com — Fri, 15 May 2020 15:06:05 GMT

Modern CSS Solutions

CSS continues to improve, and browser support for modern solutions continues to grow, so all the ways you used to do things might have better versions today.

JavaScript’s ecosystem is uniquely paranoid

Three factors have caused a widespread cultural paranoia among JavaScript developers. This has been inculcated over years. These factors are: JavaScript's weak dynamic type system; the diversity of runtimes JavaScript targets; and the fact of deploying software on the web.

Why does writing matter in remote work?

“But what if the problem is juicy and we can’t solve it through an asynchronous discussion?”

My response to this is to still default to an asynchronous discussion because asynchronous discussion makes it clear when it needs a meeting. Many people aren’t agreeing. The Slack thread is 148 messages deep and no one made a decision. These signals mean that the discussion needs to be a meeting.

Notion-Powered Websites

I find what people are trying to do here with Notion super interesting. Notion can create a URL for any page you make, but it’s styled like Notion styles it, and it gets metatags as Notion decides it should. So people are using undocumented Notion APIs to build their own sites using Notion data, or cloud functions to take public Notion pages and build a site from that.

Notion has promised to release an official API “soon” but I think what’s driving people to jump the gun is that it’s UI is astronomically easier to use than almost any headless CMS out there I can think of, both in terms of constructing the information architecture and editing content. Technically there are a lot of differences, e.g. if you used Notion as a real time content source I think you’d be very sad, but I can at least hope that the UI and ease of adding content structures is something other CMS solutions adopt.

Stop Motion

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 09 May 2020 15:06:05 GMT

My first Macbook was also my first laptop with a camera in it, so I asked a somewhat dumb question when I was buying it, which was, "can the camera take pictures?". I think what I was asking was essentially what the app Photo Booth is, but the sales person at the Apple store, for some reason, thought I wanted a camera to make stop motion videos. They said they weren't sure if it could, but that would be cool. I agreed. I never tried but I can imagine it would have been not cool, since the camera on those plasticBooks were about .1 megapixels and shoved in the top of the lid making for some awkward angles.

Jump forward 14ish years and the little pocket computer I take everywhere has both a camera good enough to use for stop motion videos and the processing power to edit them. We've been rebuilding my childhood Lego collection lately, so I used some minifigs as actors. The wizard's... hat... was from an earlier video.

I later tried to get the child to help me make a stop-motion video her mother might appreciate on a certain day that's upcoming, but she didn't seem to impressed by moving picture technology. I stitched these together using Stop Motion Studio which is straight up amazing at the cost of free.

Kernektikut

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 07 May 2020 15:06:05 GMT

Plenty of maps mess up New England states because they're small and the states are small, but to have so much room and end up here... I dunno. This does at least depict (sort of) my long standing opinion that the nub should be part of New York and Long Island should be part of Connecticut.

Shelf Love Podcast

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 03 May 2020 15:06:05 GMT

Late last year my wife started a new podcast called Shelf Love.

I built her a website. It was not good. It worked, but brought us both great shame.

To be fair, at the time there wasn’t a lot of content, and most of what she needed/wanted from it was theoretical. But, time has passed, and now there’s 38 episodes with many more to come, a blog, and a newsletter.

Beyond a visual refresh, the back-end of the site was changed from pulling episode content from Storyblok to pulling it directly from Simplecast which means content isn’t living in two places. Storyblok is still in play for page content and blog posts. It’s also still a GatsbyJS site distributed through Netlify.

Anywho, go check it out.

Testing, testing

joseph.martucci@me.com — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 15:06:05 GMT

1,2,3.

Some site updates:

Moved everything out of Contentful and Pocket to being pulled from local Markdown files. I've started moving everything I read/write to local file systems, whenver possible, so it made sense to move this too.
Some new colors, and some font tweaks. It was too white and I much prefer Lato over Barlow and felt the site could use some serifs in the titles.

I probably broke some stuff too, so if you see something, say something.

Bookmark memory lane

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 20 Jan 2020 15:06:05 GMT

There’s a bookmark folder in Safari across all of my devices titled “HTML/CSS”. I don’t use bookmarks that much, but I did when I was first getting interested in web development. I’ve gone back to Safari on all of my devices lately, mostly to use handoff and have consistent sharing options, and I thought it was time to take a look at those bookmarks and see what was worth keeping.

Your Web, documented. · WebPlatform.org

Notice: The WebPlatform project, supported by various stewards between 2012 and 2015, has been discontinued. This site is now available on github . New documentation can be found at MDN Web Docs .

Scout - Compass and Sass without all the hassle
Masonry. From when everyone wanted to look like Pinterest.
Color wheel, a color palette generator | Adobe Color. It was definitely called Adobe Kuler when I bookmarked it.
http://www.danshort.com/HTMLentities/index.php?w=greek 403’d
Grid

Grid is a great learning tool but no longer supported.

How Big Is Space – Interactive version. Seems to load a background image but the page no longer appears functional.
Foundation for Emails 2 Docs
Conditional Media Query Mixins | CSS-Tricks
Home - Pencil Project. I not only never used this, I don't even remember it.

Oct 19, 2019 Pencil 3.1.0 is released

Sketch App Sources - Free design resources and plugins - Icons, UI Kits, Wireframes, iOS, Android Templates for Sketch. I've never used Sketch in anything but read-only mode.
8 Essential Design Tools for Front-end Web Developers. Oh yes, so essential.
Web Platform Daily. Now Web Platform News I guess.
Alerts · Bootstrap. No one wants to make their own alerts, right?
Fontello - icon fonts generator. Icon fonts, a simpler time. No wait, they were a PITA to make.
Ceaser - CSS Easing Animation Tool - Matthew Lein. This is still a good tool!
Hover Effect Ideas | Set 1. I was really into these for a long time.
Beautiful Free Images & Pictures | Unsplash. I think when I bookmarked Unsplash I assumed it was going to be a great resource until they got hosed by bandwidth fees but boy was I wrong there.
Beautiful web type — the best typefaces from the Google web fonts directory. I don’t think this has been updated with newer fonts but these are nice examples.
Using UnCSS and grunt-uncss with WordPress – Liam Gladdy. This is so specific and I don’t remember using any of it.
Alan Trotter dot com, for all your Alan Trotter needs. Dunno why I bookmarked it but I do like it! http://christopheviau.com/d3list/. Still haven’t used D3 for anything.
CSS Shapes Editor - Chrome Web Store. Still haven’t used CSS shapes for anything.
https://heydonworks.com/practical_aria_examples/#hamburger 404’d.

No pizza for me

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 22 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

I set a goal to read 40 books in 2019. I didn’t hit it.

I did come a lot closer than I thought I would though, ending up at 30 books, with two in progress as I write this, one of which I might finish by the end of the year. Some notes on what helped me read way more this year than the year before:

I set a goal.
I kept track of everything in Notion. I created a kanban board, and whenever I find something that looks interesting, it goes in the “want to read” column. This makes finding something to read at the library, or when I’m just looking to pick up something new much easier.
I generally read a non-fiction and fiction book at the same time. Not concurrently, but I might be reading the fiction book on the weekends and non-fiction on the train.
The bulk of my reading came from weekends when I woke up, made coffee, picked up a book and started reading with no distractions in between. Having physical books (when possible) and forgetting internet connected devices existed made that even easier.

Started and didn’t finish

You Are a Badass at Making Money: Master the Mindset of Wealth by Jen Sincero This book is terrible.
Michael Chabon’s the Escapist: Pulse-Pounding Thrills by Michael Chabon. I liked the idea of this, the “found” tales of a fake historical comic book superhero, but couldn’t get in to any of the actual stories.
Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn. Back cover made it seem interesting….
Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari. This was one in a huge stack of books that went to the beach house this Summer. Read a bunch of the others, just never got around to finishing this.

Started and will probably finish someday

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott. I feel like 100% of the point of this book is in the title, but maybe I’ll revisit some day and be proven wrong.
Rubik by Elizabeth Tan. I only got a few pages in (library due dates!) but I have it still in the “try again” column in the kanban board I track my reading on.
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath. Just found some other non-fiction books that were more interesting and kept throwing this one in the backlog.

Alright, let’s move on to the books I actually read.

Read but wouldn’t recommend

This is, fortunately, a relatively short list.

Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living by Elizabeth Willard Thames. I think the critical responses to this book (read any comment on Goodreads) are a bit overblown, but it’s fundamentally pitched as being about living a frugal lifestyle when it’s really about making choices that matter to you with your money. Framed differently, I still wouldn’t recommend it, but I’d feel less like I wasted my time reading it.

Graphic Novels

I’m not sure these need to be separated out, but these ones all have pictures with the words.

Saga, Vol. 9 by Brian K. Vaughan. I ❤️ everything Brian K. Vaughan does.
The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui.
oh no by Alex Norris. This book is 1 joke for 100 pages but I loved it all 100 times.

Read but I suggest you just read the Wikipedia entry instead

All of these are perfectly good books, but they’re a lot of words around a main point that’s maybe a five paragraph essay.

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande. Checklists = good.
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz. Choice = hard.
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher. Most of this is obvious but definitely read the Wikipedia on BANTA.

Read, career related

There’s a few books in this category that I started but have not finished nor given up on (Code Complete by Steve McConnell being the big one), a lot of work related books I read in very short sessions when I’m looking for something specifically relevant to what I’m doing.

Inclusive Front-End Design Patterns by Heydon Pickering.

Read and enjoyed, non-fiction

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport. I definitely didn’t need to read both, but my wife had them both on hold at the library at different times so why not. If you were going to read one, I’d go with Deep Work.
It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy by D. Michael Abrashoff. I’m usually not crazy about military related stories, but Abrashoff writes well and even if you’re not interested in the managerial aspects there’s some interesting anecdotes about how people learn and succeed in the jobs they’re given.
10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works by Dan Harris.
It’s Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness by Sylvia Boorstein. Two books primarily about meditation. 10% Happier was close to the “just read the Wikipedia” article section but it feels weird to put books about meditation in the “instant gratification” bucket.
How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe. Long format XKCD.
Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan. I found this book utterly fascinating. As someone who has a higher than normal amount of health related anxiety, the idea that your whole body and mind can fall apart and you can come back from it is… literally mind-blowing.
The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston. This book is interesting because it’s really three stories with a central thread, and they’re all quite interesting. If you’re primarily interested in the titular city, you will probably leave disappointed, if you just go with it there's a lot to learn about artifact smuggling, the end of civilizations, and global warming and the spread of infectious diseases.
Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon
Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon. Austin Kleon does something right, and the short, fun format means these might reappear in the 2020 list.

Read and enjoyed, fiction

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. Good book, but I think if the moon was crashing into the Earth you could survive inside the library bound edition of it.
The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. Another “let me get my lectern” monster. I read it digitally. While both of these have lots of words, Sanderson is the better world builder. I don’t know if this series will ever actually be finished, but I’m currently reading Words of Radiance so I’m excited to see how far it goes.
The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers. Maybe not a surprising read on a site called builtwith.coffee. A super interesting look at the roots of coffee and starting a business in a war torn country.
The Parade by Dave Eggers. I read this book in one sitting, it had a nervous tension that made me want to keep going to find out what was going to happen next.
The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett. Not my favorite of the Discworld series, but I’m working my way through them. I may have made a mistake by reading them in “best” order.
Vicious (Villains, #1) by V.E. Schwab. Fun, quick read, can see myself going back to read the next book in the series in 2020.
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman. I read this right after finishing God of War and I was mostly impressed at how much the game stayed true to the source material.

Read and Loved

Neuromancer
Count Zero
Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson. Read them all back to back. I got hooked on Gibson’s writing style a quarter way through Neuromancer and couldn’t stop.
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride. A slave boy, inadvertently freed by John Brown, travels with him dressed as a girl and bestowed the name Onion. Things only get stranger from there, but this book is an amazing take on “the truth is stranger than fiction”, it’s the real events that surround Brown’s life that seem insane, while Onion just tries to make it by, swept up in Brown’s storm.
Circe by Madeline Miller. The idea of taking someone most people know as a minor character in the Odyssey and turning them into the main character is brilliant, and the writing in this book is beautiful, turning the Greek “tragedy of a god as metaphor” into something entirely human.

Floppy Memories

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

This week is my last week as a software developer at Education First. I’m off to something new, but before going I wanted to take a look back at my first EF trip. I went on two trips while working at EF (Spain first, then Ireland and the United Kingdom), but my very first one was as a customer, back in high school, when my Latin class went to Italy on a tour now called Bell’Italia.

When I went looking for some sort of evidence of that trip to Italy, I realized all of the pictures I took had never made it to any form of modern computing storage — they were still saved on some floppy disks back at my parent’s house. The timing was fortunate though, my parents were coming up for Thanksgiving anyway, all I needed to do was order a USB disk reader off of Amazon.

Technical aside: The floppy disks are from Mystic Color Lab, where we got all of our film processed, circa 1999 (take that, Y2K!). The pictures were processed then scanned, and saved at a mind-blowing 600×400 resolution. If I remember correctly that was close to what you got from a low end digital camera at the time, and it probably gave them some overhead to always fit 1 roll of film on 1 floppy disk. I think our computer at the time had a 800x600 display so I’m sure they looked great on it. Impressively, all of the 20 year old disks could be read without issue, but sadly no one seems to know where the printed copies of these photos are, so 600×400 might be the best I’m ever going to have of these. Also worth mentioning, two years later I had a digital camera that took pictures at 1280×960 and Mystic Color Lab was out of business.

Of course I’m not in any of these pictures, so there’s no proof that I really went except for me having these random pictures of Italy, but I assure you I did. It was maybe the most memorable experience from high school, even before finding these photos I knew what was on all of them, and it was one of the primary motivations for wanting to work at EF. I’m sad to go, but I’m excited about what’s next, and I’m betting that they’ll pop back up in my life when my daughter is old enough to travel.

kids playing soccer in an alley in Venice, which is peak Italy as I remember it

Michelangelo’s workshop in Florence

light from the center hole in the Pantheon

Spanish Steps in Rome

Florence from the Duomo

Venice from St. Mark’s campanile

the picture every Latin student has to take, from Pompeii

St. Mark’s square

the countryside around, if I remember correctly, Assisi

Spirited Away - Studio Ghibli Fest 2019

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 27 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

I took my daughter to see Spirited Away at the local theatre today, part of the Studio Ghibli Fest 2019 , reshowing the films on big(ish) screens. Some thoughts:

The dad in the movie is peak dad. When they’re driving down the dirt road at the beginning of the film and Chihiro says they’re lost, he responds with “Don’t worry, I’ve got four-wheel drive.” and proceeded to floor it. Again near the beginning, when the parents are eating all of the food, and Chihiro warns them that they’ll have to pay, he replies with, “Don’t worry, you’ve got Dad here. I’ve got credit cards and cash. “ The dad is emblematic of the themes that carry through the movie, that technology doesn’t solve problems and money isn’t the answer to everything, but they nailed that in all of three lines from him.
That said, the dad’s Audi is pretty nice. Those late 90s A4s were a classic style.
My daughter was terrified of the parents turning into pigs. It is scary in a “this is just too weird” kind of way, and the close up of the pig parents is intentionally horrifying, but I didn’t expect her to react so strongly to it. What I realized as the movie went on is that Chihiro doesn’t get a break for a long time. Until she washes the river spirt (which is, in itself, creepy) she’s dealing with weird monsters, terrifying heights, and the emotional drama of having watched her parents turn into pigs and being forced into indentured servitude. Compare that to something like the The Lion King, where Simba watches his dad die and 20 minutes later he’s singing “hakuna matata”.

My daughter, I think because Halloween is coming up, started listing the things she isn’t afraid of the other day, which went something like “not ghosts, not goblins, not alligators but I am afraid of crocodiles a little bit” and I guess she can add her parents turning into pigs on there with the Nile crocodiles now.

On a similar point, my daughter was really nervous that No Face was going to eat Chihiro. She certainly never thought the abominable snowmonster in Frozen was going to eat Anna, and the difference highlights the tension that runs through the film - you’re never really sure what Chihiro’s fate is going to be.

The only other movie we got to see this year for the Ghibli Fest was My Neighbor Totoro. It was definitely the better pick to see with a 4 year old, but even in that one there’s an extended scene where everyone thinks Mei has drowned, and while Totoro is fuzzy he’s far from warm and fuzzy. We missed Kiki’s Delivery Service but I’d like to watch it with her at some point, I recall it being the most Americanized of them, but who knows what parts I’ve forgotten that she’ll find strange.

That time I went to Kyrgyzstan

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

This was a great bug from my iPhone 3G that just keeps on giving every time I open Photos.

We were joking at work the other day about how dealing with timezones will only be worse once space travel is common, but imagine getting someone results for the closest pizza place on the wrong planet. Also, I couldn't find what you call geotagging on Mars (maybe still geotagging since geo usually relates to lower-case earth not Earth), but fortunately there's a microformat spec proposal for it already.

The best part of the library is the random bookmarks

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Definitely my favorite thing in the library, finding random things used as bookmarks. Notecards with lists on them are a common one, but this is another level. Who is this person? Why did they make this list? Why did they read this book!

This is Amazing!

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMT

When you think, "oh, I have an idea for something I can code," and you Google it and there's a blog post explaining exactly how to do it in the language and environment you were going to do it in:

Any Given Saturday Afternoon

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT

I watched the "Any Given Saturday Afternoon" episode (S3:E7) of Documentary Now! on Netflix this weekend. Documentary Now! is a great show to begin with but this one really killed me because I bowled in a league for many years, and it's a nearly one-to-one spoof of A League of Ordinary Gentleman which every bowling nerd watched when it came out. Spoof might not even be the right word, the source material is as ridiculous as the Documentary Now! version, with the exception of way more Alf references. I think. Honestly if the Alf stuff was in the original and I just forgot I wouldn't be supris

If you watched "Any Given Saturday Afternoon" and weren't familiar with who Tim Robinson and Michael C. Hall were portraying you'd miss out on most of the humor. A League of Ordinary Gentleman is worth watching, but if you're short on time Tim Robinson's character, Rick Kenmore, is an almost unaltered portrayl of Pete Weber, and you can understand Pete Weber from this amazing, 26 second long YouTube video entitled "PETE WEBER GOD DAMMIT I DID IT WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE".

Arts Fest Beverly, 2019

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 16 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Our haul from Arts Fest Beverly this year. We definitely have a style we like, specifically down to how many legs a fox should have in the air.

Fox with grapes by Maura OConnor.
Bear by Hastings Studio.
Fox with butterflies by Kim Ferreira.
Little Mermaid by Brian Gubicza

2019 - the Year of Publishing Your Own Content

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 01 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT

There's a running – joke? commentary? zen koan? – in the Linux community about the "Year of the Linux Desktop", meaning the year where people finally start using Linux instead of Windows. You can find an endless number of hot takes on the web about whether it has happened, is happening, will happen, will never happen, has happened but by way of the Android operating system... you get the idea.

Recently I've seen a similar theme on how now is finally the time for people to take control of their content on the web – the "Year of Publishing Your Own Content". There's strong takes like "Can we all please stop using Medium now?" and more nuanced takes on "Own Your Content". There's always Manton Reece's slightly opinionated thoughts on the subject or Eugen Rochko's Mastodon feed. We're even into the part of the cycle where people start to show demos of how they moved off of Medium to another platform and how to do it in gif form, analogous to the "how to delete Windows and install Linux" articles from the last turn of the millennium.

The points raised are all valid. The main hosting platforms are each their own brand of awful – Twitter (full of character-limited hate crimes), Tumblr (censorship), Medium (adwalled), and Facebook/Instagram (still run by Mark "I don't know why they trust me" Zuckerberg). What these treatises ignore is that publishing your own content isn't easy, and monetizing what you own is ten times harder than that. There might be more and more articles popping up now about how to move away from Medium, but go back two years and you'd many of the same people arguing for moving to Medium – it was the hot new platform and had all of the eyeballs. Everything that gets popular on the web will eventually get hit with the "nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded" line, but if you want to be seen, you need to be where it's crowded, and it you want to make money you need to be where it's incredibly, unbearably crowded.

posting on Medium seemed like a great idea before all of the content got stuck behind this pop-up.

I have some bias in the "should you self publish" argument as you're reading this on a domain I own, but I also realize I have the technical and financial means to do so. Also, I'm not trying to sell you anything, and I don't particularly care if you even show up. This quote from Khoi Vinh on "Own Your Content" resonated with me:

...I’m not suggesting that what I do has any superior worth at all, but what I will say is that the difference between content that lives on a centralized blogging platform and what I do on a site that I own and operate myself—where I don’t answer to anyone else but me—is that what my writing on Subtraction.com has a high tolerance for ambiguity. It’s generally about design and technology, but sometimes it’s about some random subject matter, some non sequitur, some personal passion. It’s a place for writing and thinking, and ambiguity is okay there, even an essential part of it. That’s actually increasingly rare in our digital world now, and I personally value that a lot.

My advice? Post whatever you want wherever you want, but keep everything backed up as plain text. Be skeptical of any system that makes that difficult, and avoid entirely any one that encourages people to be awful. If all else fails, consider selling chapbooks at the closest highway rest area, that's real self publishing.

Don't worry, bee happy

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 21 May 2019 01:00:00 GMT

alt: don't worry, bee happy.

I'm super jealous of that scooter. Best thing I had at that age was a tricycle that weighed 80 pounds with pedals that would crack your shins in half if you went downhill.

HTML, code, and databases

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 15 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Found on a Hacker News thread about PHP in 2019.

I don't write any PHP these days, but the sentiment of a single file that combines HTML, JavaScript, and database queries to quickly knock out simple projects resonates - that's the exact setup I have for the Gatsby powered files that generate this site. There's no <?s any more though, it's GraphQL queries and JSX that covers both the JS and the HTML.

I can't see ever going back to PHP - I'd prefer Python and I know more C# than it at this point - but I'll never complain about it being a quick and (sometimes) dirty language.

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 17 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

I finished "Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport last weekend. I assumed, from the title, the book would just be this:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Delete your account. <a href="https://t.co/Oa92sncRQY">https://t.co/Oa92sncRQY</a></p>— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) <a href="https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/740973710593654784?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 9, 2016</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

repeated for 300 or so pages. It wasn't! The 2016 election and Twitter comes up at least a few times, but the book is more about forming good habits to replace digital distractions. My favorite quote from the book:

You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types or rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia.

The book resonates with my belief that the value of the internet is fundamentally found in two things:

As a repository of nearly infinite amounts of information.
As a channel for nearly infinite pathways of human to human communication.

As an example: I play guitar, I'm interested in building my own guitar. There are many thousands of videos on YouTube on how to do this, reviews of every single piece I might be considering, and more forums than I can even find with detailed instructions and helpful tips from other people on how to build almost any combination of guitar. This was nonexistent when I was a kid - if you wanted this level of information you were lucky if a book existed, otherwise you had to find someone who knew how to build guitars, maybe at the local music store, if you happened to have one and someone working there knew something about guitars.

The Internet supports these activities, but most of the attention economy (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc) is driven by users being distracted by other things. Facebook might help you organize real-life events, but wouldn't it be great if you also paid attention to these people you never see in real-life? Twitter might be a great place to follow your favorite author, but wouldn't it be great if you also saw some retweets about a political argument from a friend of a friend? YouTube might be a great place to watch instructional videos, but hey also have you considered that 9/11 might have been perpetrated by the US government and here's a 3-hour long video about that from OffTheGridLifeAmerica you might be interested in. Accepting these platforms as they would like you to accept them (i.e., in a way that makes them money) can only be done in a way that is inherently detrimental to your free time and quality of life.

My main takeaways from the book:

Delete / block anything digital that doesn't improve your real-life experience. Going back to the guitar example above, if a digital experience makes you want to play guitar more, great! If you spend all your time on Instagram looking at guitars, stop it. The rule of thumb here seems to be if you want to spend less time on the digital activity and more time on the IRL activity it fosters, it's probably ok.
Assume every addition to your life is a net negative unless proven otherwise. This isn't a "digital minimalism" philosophy, it's just a minimalism philosophy. It's seemingly a trend, or else Netflix wouldn't have produced that Marie Kondo show, right?
Build or create something every week. I liked this idea. I started blocking out my time better in 2019, and keeping track of things like "exercise 3 days a week", but the things I keep track of don't completely fill up my free time. Doing something with your hands is usually completely analog - unless of course it's building a guitar while watching videos on how to do it. But at the very least it's not passively digital, which is the point.
Own your shit. Or, phrased more politely, own your turf. I dream of a day I can go online once or twice a week, hit an RSS aggregator and catch up on the activities of all of the people I care about. That was nearly a reality in the early days of the web, but the social media giants would prefer to own your content and make it hard to access unless the reader is also inside their bubble. To that end, I deleted the links on this site to other places (LinkedIn, Mastodon... not Github, that's actually useful, and not really social media) - if you found me here, what more of me would you wish to find.

In conclusion I give the book ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (out of 5), not on Goodreads or any other platform, just here. Also, true to form, I read the print version, and we got it from the library so we could work on real world minimalism too.

Twenty years and I still can't add a script tag right

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 04 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

2019 marks twenty years since I first pushed a website to the internet, yet today I was trying to set up a project and I got caught on something very... silly. I was testing a webpack configuration for a React library so it would run in Internet Explorer 11, but I couldn't get the application code to execute when running the development server. I dug through the code and searched for anything I could think of to narrow down if it was the fault of webpack, the dev server, my application code, or the polyfills I had added for IE11 support. After a (too long) search, it came down to this:

<script src="main.js" />

This is not the first time I've made this mistake, and in case it's not immediately clear to you, dear reader, script tags cannot be self-closing. Every time this has tripped me up it's been a particularly baffling error because a self-closing script tag will appear to load - the script will show up in the network tab of the dev tools, and all the code will be there, it just won't execute anything.

Since first learning web development, I've done the very basic task of adding a script tag a lot of different ways:

In some PHP function that tied into a CMS's loading hooks.
In .NET MVC ScriptBundles.
document.createElement("script"); then assigning the script source.
Not at all, letting the magic of something like Gatsby or webpack add the script tag for me.

On top of that, my mental context for when or when not to close tags comes from a mix of knowing HTML, XHTML, and currently working with React - there's some conflicting ideas of what must, should, and should not be self-closing going on in my head.

The project works now - and supports IE11! - and however many years from now, when I forget that a script tag can't be self-closing, I'll at least have this blog post to look back on. Or, all of the browsers will have started supporting a self-closing script tag, or I'll have moved on to yet another abstraction around loading the script tag that removes the brackets and I'll have forgotten how HTML works entirely.

Don't Let Ad Blockers Break Your Website

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 27 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

If you're a web developer working on a website running tracking or analytics scripts of any type, you absolutely need to make sure it works for users blocking third-party scripts. This is just the latest example, from fabric.com, but I've seen this happen many times: a completely blank screen when Ghostery is blocking scripts.

In this particular case the site threw the error:

Uncaught TypeError: window.cmRecRequest is not a function

I personally run Chrome with Ghostery in "shut it all down mode", or set to block everything. The issue is always the same: a piece of code that fires a call to a tracking script (usually set as a global variable), that doesn't check that the variable exists before making the call. It's not often you find it on page load, but turn Ghostery blocking on and watch how many call-to-action buttons on marketing sites stop working.

Even less extreme ad-blocking can cause some unwanted behavior. This is from css-tricks on Firefox running uBlock Origin.

I don't need any help managing my projects, but it still took me a bit to parse what exactly was going on with this sentence, until I viewed it in another browser and found out it was uBlock hiding text that was a doubleclick link.

The ad blocking wars are only going to get worse going forward, especially now that Apple is blocking ads at an operating system level, while Google and Microsoft are trying to prevent ad blocking at that same level, and the browsers and lining up on opposite sides of the same battle, with Safari and Firefox helping users block ads and trackers out of the box, and Edge and Chrome have a business interest in delivering ads and tracking their users.

Stenciling

joseph.martucci@me.com — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

I spent a little time over the holidays playing around with Stencil, a JS compiler for web components. I wanted to look at it because we've been comparing component libraries at work, and we were finding a surprising number of them that were going all-in on web components, usually generated by Stencil. Some quick notes about it in general, and comparing it against React, our current JavaScript library of choice:

Stencil reminds me a lot of the joys of jQuery plugins, where deciding between creating an element and passing in children or creating an element and passing in attributes is just a flip of the coin kinda choice. That's not to say React is better - see the arguments for or against higher-order components - but at least in React everything is in React, unlike web components where your children / attributes are in HTML and the handling is in JavaScript.
I hate carousels. I wanted to try to recreate a carousel that's on our current public site - it kind of magically appears when the viewport gets small enough and is just a glorified overflow slider. I feel like I've built variations of carousels a thousand times now, so there's a certain appeal in building a web component and never ever doing it again.
HTML doesn't understand TypeScript. I use TypeScript on all my React projects, and having attribute completion is 💯so going back to "just" HTML made me a little sad. It also made me realize how long it's been since I've written anything in an .html file that wasn't just <div id="app"></div>.
... but it is just HTML + JS so it works anywhere.
... but Stencil is a compiler that requires a build step, so you haven't quite gotten away from build steps in your front-end development process, but you're closer for every project that uses the Stencil-generated components.
I would have killed for this setup 3 or 4 years ago. TypeScript? Sane JavaScript templating? Not having to transport the same stupid widget between HTML, Angular, and React projects? It would have been amazing. Now that I do everything in React it's less exciting.

Overall I was impressed by Stencil. The documentation could be better, but they make it pretty easy to fire up a project and figure it out, and TypeScript + JSX is by far my favorite combination for JavaScript templating. Some of the decisions are close to React but not quite the same, like having props and state but not state update batching, or at least not that I could find. Digging through the shadow DOM in the Chrome inspector is painful compared to using React dev tools, especially if you're using child elements, which exist in some sort of alternate reality that allows you to interact with them like normal DOM elements. I built the carousel as a web component that accepts any children because that's how I would do it in React, but dealing with children beyond using the web component <slot> tag required some Stack Overflow searches and some solutions that I'm still not sure I grok.

If there was ever a chance we were moving away from doing everything in React I'd jump to web components in a second, but when we are building everything in React, adding in another compiler feels like it's overcomplicating our development tooling. But maybe I'll regret saying that when we switch to Vue and have to build another carousel.

I put the demo up on GitHub, it's probably broken in IE. I hate carousels.

Defending the presents

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 25 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

I think our cats might be half chicken. They've never tried taking the tree down - they're content to just roost under it.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

A11Y

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 16 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Accessibility is hard. But it is no harder than security, performance, usability, internationalization, or quality code. And frankly, we don’t put up with software companies (even open source ones) saying “whoops, well you know, security is hard, so it fell by the wayside, sorry”. -- <cite>Anne Gibson</cite>

Yes. And that's a great list of bullet points for anyone starting a new project. Define what accessibility, security, performance, usability, internationalization, and quality code mean for your project when you start - not halfway through, or at the end.

Electron

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 08 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

My most used apps, on a day to day basis, are:

Visual Studio Code
Slack
Notion

Just in case anyone wonders where I stand on the Electron debate.

Veteran’s Day

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

I always knew my grandfather fought in France in World War II, but the details were fuzzy. As a kid I’d ask dumb questions like, “did you ever shoot anyone,” and he’d reply with, “I shot at them, they shot at me, who knows where the bullets went,” before shooing me off. In High School I was given an “Interview a World War II veteran” assignment for an American History class, so I asked him some more formalized questions, but he couldn’t quite remember the names of places he had been to, or when exactly things had happened. At the time I wondered how it would be possible to forget something like fighting in World War II, but he was there as twenty year-old in 1944, this was maybe in 1998, he was trying to recall fifty-four year-old memories of things he probably didn’t want to remember.

I asked again, every few years, about what he remembered. At some point we got him a computer, and installed Google Earth, and he would mouse around France trying to figure out where he was. He would do some searches for the places he had been, but his misspellings of mispronounced locations in France didn’t return much. At some point he remembered (or saw on a map) that he had been in Metz, and we figured out that the fort he fought at was called Driant, not Durant or Verant, as he usually pronounced it. In 2009 I sat down and asked him a few more questions and actually recorded it.

My grandfather passed away two years ago, but I listen to the recording every so often, and search around for any more details. Coincidentally, someone added a Wikipedia page about the battle in 2009, not long after I had talked to him: Battle of Fort Driant. The initial entry refers to it as a “minor skirmish” in the larger Metz conflict. This year I finally got around to transcribing some of our conversation so it was saved somewhere other than my iCloud Voice Notes. A lot of it is sort of - as he remembers it, not in a clear chronological order. Or it was pieces of conversations that I knew I had with him in the past the he was interjecting. But there’s one part of the story that was always clear in his mind:

“...the fort was big. When we left the fort, two o’clock in the afternoon, they come down with a British (unsure of the word used here) they called it. See we only had a piece of the fort, we only had a little piece. And they put that in the tunnel, and they blew it. And the blew into the hole, because it was plugged. So they blew it out. So they sit there with machine guns firing at us, and they sit there with a machine gun firing at them, down the tunnel. You know, back and forth? And you know the back of the damn machine guns sit like there, and they had ten satchel charges here (1), they weighed 18 pounds a piece. TNT. And a bullet, or a uh, they don’t know whether it was a bullet, or... the door was right here, whether they put a hand grenade in. They blew up. And you know I was gonna go into the door, cause we were all retreating then, because they tell us, “everybody on that side of the fort get the Hell out”, because they were afraid the Germans was gonna break through. So we were all crawling through, and when that blast - the five guys in front of me they had faces like hamburger. The two guys in front, medic said they wouldn’t live, but the two guys in front, the lash above the eye was even gone, and the other guys they had their lashes but the meat was like the powder of the satchel charges, they were in the flame in other words. And the five machine gunners that were sitting there by the hole they were gone. I got blown across the room there, helmet fell off. Stunk! I mean the smoke, couldn’t even breathe. I got my handkercheif out, put it over my nose, then I could breathe, because it saved the big punches from coming in. Then we got out of there. When we got over to the next part, there was a tunnel that went into another opening. And that’s where we, we were so tired then we were just sitting and snoring so loud you’d wake yourself up. Because the last two or three days we didn’t get much sleep. And after that, they took us out.

We went up with a hundred and forty-nine, went over with a hundred and forty-nine, and we came back with forty-nine.“

1 - I believe he was pointing across the room while saying this, indicating the machine gun wasn’t far away from the charges.

At some point in the recording you can hear my Grandmother chime in with, "I'm glad you didn't have to go to war Joey". Me too, Grandma.

In case you worried UI development wasn’t important

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 28 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

From a Reddit thread on Texas voting machines. This is a pretty egregious failure on the part of some UI developer somewhere, but it does speak to an often overlooked part of UI development: if a user can see an interface, they're going to try to interact with it, and it's your job to make sure that they can. If you don't have a good understand of what interactive means (or what can block it), Phillip Walton's recent post, "Idle Until Urgent" is a good read.

Shop Local

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 20 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

A great article on the problem with the idea of "shop local" saving small businesses, and an old school styled blog to go along with it.

It paints a picture that lines up with what I've observed, that major city centers will eventually all look the same because only "big retail" can exist there, and smaller cities will take up the unique stores that big cities once had. If you want to save big cities, it might be time to switch all of the "keep CITY NAME HERE weird" slogans to "the rent is too damn high".

Window Goblin

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

I always set out to make Halloween decorations that are creepy-cute, like something from Tim Burton, but end up with things that are disturbing-cute, like a bunch of clown dolls in an attic.

Book Thoughts: From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 13 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Let me start this by saying: I like cemeteries. I find the quiet relaxing, I like wandering around looking for unique headstones, and I make a game out of trying to find the oldest grave in the park. I especially love the colonial-era headstones you can find in New England, with their hand-hewn skulls that are either dopey or terrifying or reverent or some mix of all three.

I was also raised by a father who thought that the maybe-true story of Eskimos putting the elderly out on ice floes when they became a burden was a good idea. So, reading a book with a section about the dead being fed to vultures was kind of right up my alley.

I learned some surprising things while reading this book. I always thought a funeral pyre was a neat idea, like a dramatic cremation, but it turns out they're not great for the environment. I would have assumed a dead body in the wild would be gone overnight, but it turns out unless you have the right kind of animals around, it's unlikely something is going to show up and eat your body. I learned that, in general, it's actually kind of hard to get rid of a body, especially the bones, and it's mostly regulations and price gouging that requires you to take something that is already hard to break down and wrap it in a bunch of metal and wood and cement enclosures that are even harder or impossible to break down.

More than anything, the book reminded me that death in the United States is an inglorious thing, and there's really not much you can do about it. The options for alternative burials are incredibly limited, and the system is setup in a way that means end-of-life for most people involves dying in an uncaring hospital environment and picking a pre-packaged plan from a funeral home, with the nice plan giving you two hours to grieve and please make sure the photos we're going to display on the TV in the lobby are formatted correctly. Or as the book puts it:

In our Western culture, where are we held in our grief? Perhaps religious spaces, churches, temples - for those who have faith. But for everyone else, the most vulnerable time in our lives is a gauntlet of awkward obstacles.

I am not religious, so I understand this. If I was, and I could pick a religion that I thought would respect my death in the way I want it to be respected I'd go with the religion of the ancient Egyptians and be buried in a rock pyramid with my cats. Since that's probably out of the question, cremation seems like a fine backup plan, but after reading about the Bolivian Ñatitas, I kinda want someone to keep my skull around too. Doesn't even have to be a family member, a future web-worker can make me a crown of USB cables and I'll help them decide which JavaScript datetime library to use, or something.

Anyway, I recommend this book. It's a quick read, it's mid-October, you can finish it before Halloween, when Americans dress up as ghosts and ghouls and pretend that death is terrifying, and most of the rest of the world throws a party to celebrate the part of life that is death.

The Great Gatsby - Upgrade

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 21 Jul 2018 00:00:00 GMT

If you're reading this, huzzah, it worked!

I made a few changes to this site, namely:

It went from Gatsby 1.0 to Gatsby 2.0.
It went from pulling content from markdown files saved in the git repo to pulling content from Contentful and Pocket.

Why is this better?

A few things:

Contentful can issue a webhook when I publish content, and Netlify can listen to it, so I don't have to push code to Netlify to kick off a content build. That separates the code from the content nicely.
I find a lot of links I want to keep track of and share, but I'm terrible at following through on it. Saving those links in markdown files didn't make it any easier, but I already use Pocket. Now the flow is: save a site to Pocket, read and archive it, tag it with bwc, and Gatsby will add it to the site's graphqland I can merge it with the content I've created on the home page.
The content here isn't particularly complex schema-wise, but I am a UI developer so I'm very aware of how a few seconds here and there messing with formatting and structure can, over time, become super frustrating. Moving the markdown metadata into nicely formatted Contentful fields makes the process of creating a new post much more enjoyable.

What's left?

I'd like to find a way to connect the Pocket archive task to a webhook so that also does a Netlify deploy, but it's a low priority.
Getting the site working offline as a progressive web app. 😁

I’m Posting this from my iPad

joseph.martucci@me.com — Mon, 28 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

This is my first attempt at updating this site from my iPad. "Wait, how hard is that," you might wonder. "Just log in to your CMS and write something and hit publish."

Sure, that would be easy. So maybe I should clarify: this is my first update to this site from my iPad, and this site is completely serverless. The magic here is simply:

Working Copy is a pretty amazing iOS app which lets you pull down, modify, and push git repos. It has a decent editor built in, so I wrote this post (in markdown) in the app. It's also possible to use Working Copy as a file source in iOS's Files app, so you can create a markdown file and then open it in your editor of choice. If you don't have one for iOS, I'm a big fan of iA Writer.

After that, you commit the new file and push it. Netlify is setup to look for any changes on the master branch, it runs a Gatsby build script that compiles all the markdown content into blog posts and violà, the site is updated.

Downsides

There's still no way to preview this site on my iPad. Someday, maybe, we'll live in a world where iOS and MacOS overlap enough that you can do actual development on an iPad - what a crazy idea that you could build iOS application in iOS, right?

Until then, I'm just happy to have a very convenient way to update and publish my site from my iPad.

Chop wood; carry water. Do the dishes. Sweep the garage. Milk the cows.

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 27 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

She decided to dye her hair.

A silly thing to do, if you’re a universal idea, like Death or Spring or Music or Peace. But Suzie had learned something interesting about people: They knew the wisdom of simply being busy sometimes.

Chop wood; carry water. Do the dishes. Sweep the garage. Milk the cows.

Dye your hair.

-- <cite>“Reincarnation Blues” by Michael Poore</cite>

Unbridled Enthusiasm

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 27 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Every morning, on the way to the office, I walk by a dog park. It's in a nice part of the city, so it's a lot of fancy dogs with hypoallergenic hair and such, although I doubt the dogs know that. What I always enjoy about the dog park is how excited the dogs are. Excited to chase a ball, excited to sniff other dogs, excited to roll in the grass. You never see a dog walk after a ball, even old dogs will run their slow wobbly-kneed run after a thrown ball.

It's not just dogs, I see my daughter do it as well. If she sees a friend on the way into daycare she runs all the way to the daycare door. If we say she can watch TV, she runs to the couch, tell her she can have a cookie she runs to the table and waits for it. She could walk and arrive concurrently with the cookie, but that thought never crosses her mind.

You rarely see adults run out of sheer joy. The dog owners usually stand around, many looking more interested in the prospect of being able to leave the park than being at the park. The parents at daycare don't run along with their kids, and I assume they, like I, do not run to work if we meet a co-worker on the way there. You see someone running in something other than obvious jogging attire and you wonder what they're late for, or if they're really moving, what they're running from.

I haven't started running out of excitement. I do some days stop and watch the dogs do it.

Sunday Slothsday

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 08 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

This sloth’s relaxation game is my new life goal. Spotted at Southwick’s Zoo.

Amish Barn

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sun, 15 Apr 2018 00:58:18 GMT

The only thing where you need a big group of people to do something is when you’re building an Amish barn.

-- <cite>George Lois</cite>

Build and Deploy a Website in Under Five Minutes and Fifty-Five Seconds

joseph.martucci@me.com — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT

At first glance, five minutes and fifty-five seconds seems like a pretty arbitraty unit of time to measure something by. Does it read better as 1 “Bohemain Rhapsody”?

I had a goal to show off how to create and deploy a website as fast as possible -- and after a few tries, I couldn't do it under five minutes. But six minutes... plenty of time! Especially when you've got a sweet Brian May guitar solo to give you a little boost 4 minutes in.

I demoed these steps at a weekly work meeting, but everyone in the room had about the same background as me, so for you, random Internet stranger, some assumptions:

Assumptions (If you really want to get this done in under six minutes):

You have a github (or bitbucket account), git installed on your computer, and know basic git commands.
You have node and npm installed and a general idea of how npm works.

If these assumptions don’t apply to you, you’ll need to budget some more time. If you’re just getting started with git or npm, you might need the entirety of Live at Wembley '86. If you’re brand new to development, consider loading up the entire Queen discography.

Now that you’ve got a reasonable time bound for this, let’s get to it.

Create a Website

We’re going to use Gatsby for this. Gatsby is a React based static site generator. There’s some comprehensive getting started instructions here, but here’s the TL;DR version.

npm install --global gatsby-cli

from your favorite command line, pick a folder and then:

gatsby new gatsby-site
cd gatsby-site
gatsby develop

and once it’s done loading, like magic you’ve got a website at localhost:8000.

Set up Git

Create a new repo at your git host of choice (bitbucket or github). Either of them will give you instructions for pushing up new code, basically:

git init
git remote add origin [your-origin-here]
git push origin master

but follow their instructions if you’re unfamiliar with git. You can refresh the repository to verify the code is there.

Deploy it Using Netlify

I cannot speak more highly of Netlify, but if you’re doing this at “Bohemian Rhapsody” speed for now I’ll just say that Netlify makes Gatsby deploys crazy easy. Sign up for an account, ideally using the login for your git host (github, bitbucket, etc). Once you’re in you’ll see a dashboard with a big “New site from Git” button. Click that then:

Pick your git host.
Pick your repo.
There’s a third step to set it up, but Netlify already knows it’s a Gatsby site so everything is set up for you.
Hit deploy and... that’s it, you’re done. Within seconds Netlify should have a semi-randomly generated URL for your website.

Why This is Awesome

The charade of creating a site and deploying it in under six minutes aside, this is awesome for a few reasons:

We never actually built the site. Running gatsby develop spins up a hot-reloading development environment, but Netlify actually did the build step for you. There are other services that will do this, but there’s usually a few more hoops involved to get it working.
Netlify will let you change the randomly generated URL to a domain you own for free. They do one-click installs of HTTPS too.

Once you’ve done this once, you can spin up and deploy static sites to your heart’s content. And these sites are only quasi static, Gatsby is based on the idea of the (JAMstack)[https://jamstack.org/] - JavaScript, APIs, and markup. You can even feed Gatsby content from live sources hosted elsewhere, like a WordPress site or Butter CMS - basically anything with an API endpoint. Even Netlify is only quasi-static - they have features like form handling to deal with most of the tasks you might have needed server side code for in the past.

That’s it. Hopefully you followed along and got a website up and running. If not, at least you got to enjoy some Queen.

Dude You Got a Dell

joseph.martucci@me.com — Sat, 03 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

About a year ago I was ready for a new computer.

I had money set aside to buy one, and was just waiting for the release of the new Macbook Pros. And then they released it... and I didn't get one. I had a number of older Macbook Pros that I 💖, and when I had them you couldn’t convince me to ever use a Windows laptop instead. But in the years that passed since the last owning a MBP, a few things happened on the Windows side:

Windows 10 released, and while I have issues with it, it’s the best release of Windows so far.
I’m more OS agnostic than I used to be. I use a Windows PC for development at work, and there are no apps that I have a strong preference[^1] for that exist only on MacOS.

...and a few things happened on the Mac side. The last MBP I had was a 2012 model and it was great for the following reasons:

It had an SD card reader! That was amazing at the time, and made importing photos off of my DSLR so much easier.
It had an ethernet port.
I had an Nvidia GPU in it, which made you believe Apple actually cared about gaming.
You could upgrade it. It came with 4GB of RAM and a 250 GB spinny-disk and left my possession with 8GB and a sweet SSD.
I bought it from Microcenter for under $1000. Actually, well under at $899, brand new.

So Apple decided to get rid of all of the things I liked, and focus on things I didn't care that much about, like making the computer incredibly light and adding a useless touchbar, while increasing the price.

So instead of a Macbook, I am now the “proud” owner of a refurbished Dell Inspiron 7577.

Pros:

It has a GTX1060 (MaxQ) GPU in it. It can play Overwatch at 60 FPS on high settings without breaking a sweat. Attempting to do that on a Macbook Pro would have required setting large piles of money on fire on something like an external Thunderbolt GPU box and dual booting Windows.
It has an SD card reader! And an ethernet port! And an HDMI port! And a Thunderbolt port so I can attach a dock and get an entire second set of all of those ports!
It has one screw that keeps the bottom on, and if you take it off, you can upgrade / replace whatever you want in there.
I picked up a refurbished[^2] model and it cost about 50% less than a similar refurbished Macbook Pro would have cost.

Cons:

The screen isn't great. I’ll conceed that Apple’s retina screens are pretty amazing.
It weighs about 3 times what a MBP would weigh, but again, I didn't need it to be super portable.
I’ve never used a Windows laptop trackpad that was half as nice to use as a Mac’s, although I will say that this one is better, and has multitouch support.

It’s worth noting here that I have an iPad Pro that I’m pretty enamoured with, and it was a driver for not needing a laptop running MacOS. 95% of what I used MacOS for exists on iOS, and the iPad is lighter, cheaper, and (in some cases) faster than a MacOS running laptop. If the two OSs ever merged, I’d consider getting a Mac laptop again, but until then I’m happy with Mac apps running on an Arm processor and everything running on a much cheaper Intel box.

<hr />

<span id="fn-1"><a href="#fnref-1">1</a></span> I will admit that there's no good Windows replacement for Tweetbot, and not being able to use Sketch is annoying, but I am equally annoyed that they won't support Windows. And my favorite writing app, iA Writer, has a kickstarter for a Windows version!

<span id="fn-2"><a href="#fnref-2">2</a></span> I try to buy refurbished computers and electronics whenever possible. Best case, they're just a computer someone returned, worst case they failed in some way and then got fixed, but that just means someone else took the early part of the bathtub curve for you. Also, some times you get unexpected free upgrades.