Garden status 2025-10-10: Selection of weird squash.

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September went quickly. I got sucked into my new classes, of which I am taking four: Second semester organic chemistry, first and second semesters of physics and physiology. It’s already intense. But over in the garden, some of the squash are starting to be fully developed. Most exciting, I have tomatoes! But they are very small!

Garden status 2025-09-17: Starting to be able to harvest tomatoes. Some of them taste so good!

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In August I started to get some mature cucumbers and a few beans and zucchini, but not much else. I upgraded the tomatoes from 5 to 7 gallon buckets and added cages in that process using 4 inch square wire fencing.

Garden status 2025-08-26

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July is when most of the squash started growing well, and I realized I planted way too much too close together. I also started getting powdery mildew on the pumpkins and aphids on the kale.

Garden status 2025-07-17: Now we're getting pumpkin flowers every day. So cool.

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In June the potatoes and butternut and acorn squash really started to take off. Everything else I transplanted barely grew at all. I started to consider if I should plant fresh seed to avoid transplant shock.

Garden status 2025-06-26: Transplanted the squash into their final growing spots. Probably too tight, but we'll see.

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It wasn’t quite as quick and cheap and easy as I was hoping, but I have painted a new pride flag instead of buying yet another replacement for the one that faded too quickly. Pictured at left is a 210D polyester flag flown about 12 months from June 2024 to June 2025. At the right is a much cheaper one flown about 6 months from November 2023 to May 2024.

My newly painted pride flag between two sadly faded ones.

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The time came to use more of the 2 in. x 12 in. x 12 ft. boards to make a third garden bed. I realized the second one was already too high up into the shade to be very useful, so this one needed to go lower down the hill. I hoped to put it at the top initially, but now it will need to eat into my wood chipped dog chilling area. It also needed to cut into my drainage trench unfortunately, but not a big deal.

Third raised bed complete!

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In May I finished transplanting seedlings into the first garden bed and tomatoes into 18 pots.

Garden status 2025-05-22

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The first garden bed ended up being nowhere as big as I thought once I actually planted things, so I built another one up the hill from the first. This time I bought new lumber from Home Depot, which was out of stock of everything I hoped for. I had to go with much larger 2 in. x 12 in. x 12 ft. boards, which were naturally much more expensive as well! But it turned out all right.

After cutting all the branches in smaller pieces, they compacted down pretty well. I'm sure there are tons of air gaps though I won't be able to fill well.

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The rest of April’s gardening activities included starting potatoes, kale and butternut squash outside and many types of tomatoes inside.

Planting potatoes.

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Last week I got inspired to build a garden bed into my backyard hillside using some discarded fence boards and other wood lying around my property. It took me a while to decide where to put it, but once I got going, it was mostly done within a day. I’m quite happy with the space!

Completed first raised bed using mostly salvaged wood.

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Yesterday I did a fairly long run in downtown and west Oakland past some slightly taller buildings than in my first set of GPS comparison tests last month. I’m glad I had the Garmin 67i for this one, not only because its track logs were the cleanest overall, but because both my Fitbit Charge 6 and Pixel 6 Pro Runkeeper app had problems preventing me from having a complete tracklog. At least this put me over 55 percent completion for Oakland for my running every street project!

Sample A

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I recently picked up a Garmin GPSMAP 67i off eBay to compare the GPS accuracy to that of my phone and my Fitbit Charge 6. Long story short, the results have been so wonderful I will henceforth carry an extra device heavier than my phone on every run and hike.

Sample A

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In an effort to make the best use of my fairly small master bedroom, I designed and built a king size loft bed. It was a few months in the making and took far longer to build and puzzle together than I expected, but I’m glad I did it. The original need was to accommodate two dog crates underneath, and while I was at it I wanted to make space for a small couch to allow for a few more people to watch a movie if the opportunity arises. Maybe some day there will be space for media viewing in the living room, but right now it is full of plants!

Final assembly

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Over the past few months of using Anki consistently, I have been trying to streamline my process of adding and organizing cards, as well as making them somewhat pretty. It has not been easy!

anki-code-editor.png

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I had seen and run the defaults command many times on my Macs, usually in the course of following a tutorial to change some behavior Apple had removed the ability to easily modify. I never looked into the command much, but now that I did, I am glad I will be able to automate more of my setup!

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I designed and built an aquarium stand this past week as my first foray into woodworking, and it turned out well. I used about $60 in wood and other materials. I’m now thinking about what else I should build!

The finished aquarium stand with adjustable shelves. I designed and built it from scratch as my first foray into woodworking. Despite running out of stain, I am quite pleased with it!

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Back in April, I ordered a large magnet to have some fun. I intended to make some sort of art project using pieces of metal suspended by thin strings, but before I got that far, the magnet ended up as a centerpiece on our dining table for most of the year.

Iron filings on mirror on neodymium magnet

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Two winters ago I bought a faux fur coat at a secondhand store The Retique in Milwaukee. I intended to take it to Burning Man in case it got cold. And it did, but I forgot the coat. This year I intend to not forget it, and I also managed to spend some time putting lights into it today. I hope to improve it, but I am documenting it now lest I never get back to this.

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Today I received a newsletter from Mapbox that linked to a tutorial for JavaScript based heatmaps. It looks pretty cool, and I wondered how it might look used to plot runs.

I wrote in November about Runkeeper heatmaps and a method to generate images from run data on a computer …

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Two of my roommates let me know Friday the Internet sucked in the kitchen. I knew this used to be the case, and I suspected our metal framed kitchen table of causing issues, but I thought it was solved.

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We’ve had some network issues lately, so I dug out one of the Raspberry Pi Model Bs I got for free from Adafruit with my first couple of orders in September 2013. I then set it up to do network monitoring using Smokeping. Since it takes 10 or 20 seconds to generate the graphs, I switched to a master-slave setup where the graphs could be generated on my web server, but the measurements taken from the Raspberry Pi on my home network.

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A few weeks ago I got addicted to installing SmartThings in my house, and I wrote of my initial woes getting that set up. This is just to say I managed to get mostly everything working as desired, mostly using the default provided “SmartApps”. I am still having consistent problems …

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Soon after I moved in here last year, there were a number of suspicious incidents in the shared garage. I’m told a rental car was stolen and later found by police, and another time a rummager took some items, including keys to some motorcycles. At least one of the incidents did not involve the door being accidentally left open, but we weren’t sure if they had a key or taped a lock open or something.

Anyway, it seemed some more theft might be imminent, so Paul bought a Nest camera and installed it in the garage. It’s worked pretty well, sending notifications to all our phones on activity in the garage. There are false notifications due to light changes from vehicles driving by, but it’s alerted me to the door being left open many times. One such time, we got the alert in the middle of the night and found a video of someone poking around. He took a few things, but we’re not sure what exactly.

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I finally got a fast Fourier transform working on an Arduino Due! This is not exactly a final product but just a documentation of progress. I am working my way toward beat detection, but am still getting a better feel for FFT processing and observing different types of music and beats. Below is some information about how I got up to speed, and at the end are videos of where I am now.

Listening to Superlove by Avicii and visualizing it with the free iSpectrum app" class="mt-image-none" height="1820

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I’m just starting to get my feet wet with the Arduino Due, which apparently can read from analog input a hell of a lot faster than the FLORA I have been using for sound reactive projects.

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In a recent journal entry I said I would post more details on the lights I’m using in my apartment. I wanted to spend some more time on the program itself first, but the weekend disappeared too quickly, so that will be an ongoing process. For now, here are some parts lists and information on setting up. I’ll also try to make a similar post for my rainbow spirit hood.

Room lights diagram. Note the NeoPixels image has the data and +5V switched. The data is actually between the ground and voltage." class="mt-image-none" height="2033

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The super cool lights I set up in my Tokyo apartment made the journey back to the United States, but they’ve been incapacitated after I was tinkering and then got slammed with work for months. I finally sat down to organize some of the code and get the sound reactivity back, and it’s better than ever!

Hardware details in a separate post.

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In the made prep for Burning Man 2014, I went in with more knowledge than I had the year prior; I knew I needed lights. Now I have an ongoing project that is an exercise in programming and attempted durability.

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As explained in my journal, I built my first hackintosh this week. While it’s functional enough, I hope, I still have some potentially major problems with the USB ports, lowering my confidence about using an external drive to store all my data.

About This Mac

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Today marks my first Chrome app release! Embedder is a Chrome packaged app for generating embed codes for Google Photos and Picasa Web Albums content. It is available in the Chrome Web Store.

Embedder, a Chrome packaged app" class="mt-image-none" height="716

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One of my work clients is undergoing a migration from Movable Type to WordPress, and the decision was made to change the URL structure of basically every piece of content. While not ideal, this move can make sense, especially if the old structure wasn’t very future proof and started causing duplicate URL conflicts.

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This morning my friend Walter sent me a link to his cycling heat map on Strava, and it was pretty cool. Even cooler than my silly temperature + Fitbit history chart maker app, Weatherbit .

Update: Check out an example map from CityStrides.

Walter's cycling heat map

This morning my friend Walter sent me a link to his cycling heat map on Strava, and it was pretty cool. I figured there must be a web service that creates these based on Runkeeper data, so I Googled "runkeeper heatmap." Apparently there isn't a readymade service, but the top result gave me exactly what I needed to do it myself.

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I don't remember exactly how I came up with this idea, but when I was looking at some D3.js powered charts, I decided to make something so I could play with them. Somehow I chose to try pulling my daily step counts through the Fitbit API and graphing it against temperature data. I found a neat weather data API, Forecast.io, and used my Foursquare history to determine which location to use for weather data each day. Once I got this working, I created a web page so others can create their own graphs. And I called it Weatherbit.

My Weatherbit chart

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My mom needed arrange for 18 new employees to meet each other via a series of group sessions of four groups meeting at a time. In order to make each session as long as possible, she needed an efficient set of combinations to have each person meet each other person in as few sessions as possible.

She ended up manually grouping all the employees and came up with a solution that required nine sessions, which is pretty good. But I wrote a program that solves her problem using only eight sessions. And it only takes a few seconds, versus the much longer amount of time to do it manually.

Item Grouper source code

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