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Next Star Trek Rewatch Plan Complete – my first rewatch of the 21st century series
I’m currently less than a month away from completing my latest rewatch of the 20th century Star Trek series (that is, made in the 20th century, not set in the 20th century). And as I was wondering how I would rewatch them all next (which means how to sort the episodes), I had a different…
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Mitochondria and Chloroplasts
I skimmed a mildly interesting article from Wired.com yesterday morning: Scientists Re-Create the Conditions That Sparked Complex Life. A quote: Examples of endosymbiosis are everywhere. Mitochondria, the energy factories in your cells, were once free-living bacteria. Photosynthetic plants owe their sun-spun sugars to the chloroplast, which was also originally an independent organism. Interesting. I think I’d…
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Best Cable Organization Ever (for me)
As I recently mentioned, I have a pretty good system for organizing my computer cables. It’s easily the best system I’ve ever had. Which isn’t saying much, since all previous systems were simply huge tangled rats nest messes, with zero actual organization. The approach is simply to use gallon-sized zip lock backs, labeled with the…
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90º Charger
The other day, one of my kids was having problems with a USB charging cable in their bedroom. Their devices wouldn’t charge, despite being plugged in on both ends. As it turns out, on the wall-side, the cable was plugged in to a typical little USB wall wart that stuck out about an inch, and…
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Winter Wonder Week
We got about six inches of snow on Sunday, 1/5/25. That was enough to cancel school on Monday through Wednesday, which meant extending the kids’ Christmas vacation for three extra days! Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get my snow blower to start… I’m guessing the issue is a combination of trying to use old gas,…
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Arete
Over the past weekend, I listened to Dan Carlin‘s 2nd Hardcore History episode about Alexander the Great, in which he used the word “Arete” as one of the key defining characteristics of the protagonist. From the wikipedia page: Arete (Ancient Greek: ἀρετή, romanized: aretḗ) is a concept in ancient Greek thought that, in its most basic sense, refers to “excellence” of any kind[1]—especially…
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2024 Year In Review
One task that I have pop up every week on my Reminders “Weekend” todo list is filling in a weekly log note in Obsidian. In each week’s log entry I have a few headings pre-populated, for the general categories of things I try to write down that I did every week. I’ve found it a slightly…
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The Old Adage about Shut Off Valves…
The old adage proved true again this morning for me… that any time you have a plumbing project that starts by turning off a shut off valve, that you actually have two plumbing projects, the first of which is, replacing the shut off valve… Off to Home Depot 🙂
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Debugging Print Statements – Light!
Today I (re)discovered a potentially-quite-useful option in the IntelliJ debugger: If you go into “More” when right-clicking on a breakpoint, then turn on “Evaluate and log” and enter an expression, it’s basically the equivalent of adding debugging print statements, but without actually dirtying up your code with them. When coupled with un-checking “Suspend” (e.g., making…
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2024’s Birthday Ice Cream Cake
We had a 15th birthday celebration in our house this week. To celebrate, we made one of our favorite desserts: an Ice Cream cake. I think we got the recipe out of a kids cook book several years ago, and we actually don’t have a paper or digital copy. Instead, we just make it off…
