Yesterday evening I went to Blossom to see the Cleveland Orchestra perform Carmina Burana (Orff) and En Saga (Sibelius). The former is one of my favorite classical works and I think this was my third time seeing them perform it. As usual, it was done quite well, and powerfully.
Continue reading post "#4611"Toby's Log page 3
New phone: Minimal Phone
I got a new phone, the Minimal Phone. It is an e-paper phone with physical keyboard, both rarities in current smartphones. My Samsung S24 is a bit over a year old, pretty much new for me, but I’ve been wanting an e-paper phone for a long time and the S24 was somewhat disappointing in some ways. I’m hoping the e-paper display will reduce eye fatigue, reduce screen time, and help with sleep issues. I haven’t switched over and won’t until I get a case for it, plus there are some issues that I’m hoping get fixed with an upcoming software update.
Continue reading post "New phone: Minimal Phone"Ideas: Library after-hours lockers
Lockers would be installed outside of a library facility, accessible after hours. If a patron can’t get to the library during its open hours, but wants to take something out, they could request after-hours pickup. A librarian would get those items and put them in a locker. The locker would have a scanner based lock that would be set up for the patron’s library card. At any time, they could come, scan their card, open the door, grab the materials, and close the door.
Continue reading post "Ideas: Library after-hours lockers"Openrsync issues resolved (I hope)
I think I have finally worked through and fixed the issues caused by Mac OS 15.4 switching from rsync to openrsync. With the switch, many of my backup and other rsync scripts broke, throwing errors and not finishing the sync. As of that last post, I had gotten things mostly working, but had to disable incremental snapshotting and still sometimes had failures that I had to deal with.
Continue reading post "Openrsync issues resolved (I hope)"Got a smartwatch: Bangle.js 2
I bought a Bangle.js 2 smartwatch from Adafruit. I haven’t ever owned or played with a smartwatch, and haven’t even worn a dumb watch in 15 years or more. But I got to thinking that I look at my phone a lot for time and notifications, and this could reduce phone use and simplify that behavior at the same time. An e-paper screen could make it less like looking at a mini phone on my wrist. It also could do some other things like step counting, sleep monitoring, and heart rate monitoring that might be useful, and timers, alarms, and stopwatch so I don’t need to reach for my phone for those either. The Bangle is open source, lightweight, and seems feature filled enough to fit what I’m going for, cheap enough ($89) to not worry too much if I want more later.
Continue reading post "Got a smartwatch: Bangle.js 2"Looks like my Macbook Air (2020 Intel) will not be supported for the next major MacOS update, Tahoe. I knew that was coming at some point when they switched to ARM architecture. Luckily, Sequoia should still receive security updates into 2026 or 2027, and that’s all I really care about. By that point, I will probably transition to a Linux computer for my main, and if I need a new Mac for other stuff, may just get a refurb Mini.
I have read the last novel in the Expanse series, Leviathan Falls. It was good, and so was the series. Perhaps it’s recency bias, but I’d say it’s my favorite book series.
Continue reading post "#4567"My main email app (Fastmail) on my phone logged me out without me noticing for two days. I’ve been trying to not pay as constant attention to my email as it is, so it just seemed nice, but I didn’t even really think about it in that period. Happened to have more than the usual amount of emails when I got back in, though luckily, nothing important. It’d be nice if I could have it only notify me immediately for email from certain addresses or something like that.
Candle incident
Yesterday evening, I lit a candle while watching an episode of Columbo. It’s one of those fat kinds that develops a wall of wax around the outside. Previously, a hole had formed in the wall and some wax had dripped out. I had fixed the hole, but there were still some hunks of this wax left. So I put one in the candle wall yesterday, leaned up against it, hoping it would slowly melt away.
This morning, I woke up and thought to myself that I didn’t remember putting out the candle.
Continue reading post "Candle incident"Mac: 15.4 rsync issues
After running into some problems with some rsync scripts recently, I discovered that in Mac OS 15.4, Apple switched its built-in rsync command from standard rsync to the BSD project’s clone, openrsync. It is apparently not 100% compatible, because my backup and deploy scripts that use it were failing.