Ron Guest

Current status: Onigoroshi

It was a beautiful day on the trail today. Surprised it was so deserted. Spring weather here is off to a great start.

Happy spring everyone!

From 10 years ago today.

Good morning!

Found a good home for my new Drafts sticker. Excited for its macOS release in the very near future.

One advantage of taking the kids to school each morning is seeing lovely sunrises 🌅 📷

No act of kindness is too small… ☕️

Harbinger I’ve gotten outside for exercise a few times this year but today felt different - being outdoors has gone from a rare treat to an expected norm. Just in time for spring which I believe starts Wednesday.

Started out chilly but by the time we were done we had peeled off our layers. It is still a bit early in the year so flowers were lacking but we got a good 3 mile walk in.

Night lines📷

From the window seat ☀️ ☁️ 📷

Current location: Buc-ees.

Working on our 10 year old son’s costume for his speech at school.

I can no longer say I’ve never had avocado toast. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Ever since it came out I’ve been using the Jayson iOS app (you know, for looking at JSON files). All the basic features are free and the app has worked perfectly for me on a ton of different sources. Productivity++ viewing JSON on my iPad while coding on my MBP.

Jayson app

At the high school Performing Arts Center. But for a parent meeting not a performance. Super deluxe with loge seating.

Earlier this year @johnjohnston posted animated GIF images of the sky/weather. Being a bit of a weather nerd the idea appealed to me so I created scripts to capture time lapse MP4s outside my home. Welcome to Window on Weather.

Window on Weather

Earlier this year @johnjohnston posted animated GIF images of the sky/weather based on a Raspberry Pi setup. I’m a bit of a weather nerd and the idea appealed to me especially since I had an older Raspberry Pi and Pi camera sitting idle. But I wasn’t much interested in animated GIFs based on a general aversion but also because the video quality is rather poor.

I set up the Pi with the camera pointed at the sky on the front of my house and created a Window on Weather repo in Github comprised of a couple of bash scripts and a Python script. Every 10 minutes the Pi captures a short set of still images which are compiled into an animated GIF but more usefully to me an MP4 time lapse covering 10 minutes of real time. The resulting MP4 is about 10 seconds in length. I also created a script which creates a 1 hour MP4 compilation which has a viewing time about 1 minute. The file size of a 10 minute time lapse MP4 is a typically less than 10MB and, rather interestingly to me, is smaller than the animated GIF. The MP4 compilation of 1 hour of sky time comes out to less than 50MB. Images for the most recent 3 days are available on the Pi via Apache.

I enjoy looking at the MP4 time lapses on a regular basis. Even when the sky seems uninteresting the time lapse often reveals lovely changes. I feel like I should make stills or the MP4 publicly available but I haven’t yet delved into a hardened and usable method of providing a gallery. Plus I’m not sure there is an audience.

I finally found a use for my old Flickr account 😃 and posted a couple of sample videos there. This is a MP4 from a mostly sunny day and this one is of a day with clouds coasting by. Unusually for Texas the weather the past week has been flipping between severe clear and a pretty uniform overcast, neither of which makes the most interesting viewing. I think this project will be especially interesting when thunderstorm season starts.

The repo includes a housekeeping script that removes old files periodically so the SD card doesn’t clog up as well as the crontab entries I use to run everything.

You have been summoned. Yep, sitting here with 550 of my fellow residents waiting to be called, or dismissed. It was a good chance to talk with my kids about civic duty this morning.

Today’s flight. 🍷

Re-stringing my daughter’s acoustic guitar. The Elixir strings will be an upgrade from the originals. I’m hoping it will now hold tune better and it should certainly be easier to play.

‘Merica. Watching a 🚀 launch on a iPad on my lap with payloads from 🇮🇩 🇮🇱 🇺🇸 .

I found out a new indie coffee shop opened a couple miles from my house. The cappuccino is good, the decor is pleasant and there is great variety of seating choices from leather chairs to community tables to 4 seat table tops. As a plus they are using beans roasted in town by a small indie roaster. I feel all trendy this morning.

Making the final repair from the electrical storm: wiring up a replacement transformer for our sprinkler system.

N.B. I love my Hako soldering station.

It’s in the low 30F here so miso suru and sake feels great.