Brent - lesser daemon

25

Jul

Reading, Playing, Watching - July '25

It's been another hectic month! I went to Nova Scotia for a week to clean out my mom's old cottage, something in retrospect I shouldn't have chosen to do alone, and have been traveling pretty much every weekend since then for either wedding or family stuff. A couple of longer writing/creative projects are germinating but I haven't had time to do them justice, so here's the stuff I've been consuming this month.

Reading

Same Bed Different Dreams (Ed Park, 2024) - I went in with zero expectations and ended up deeply loving this book. The story of a Korean-American

3 min read

15

Jul

Making An Evil Jupyter Notebook

I recently came back to an idea I started playing with back in January: sticking a game into the Jupyter notebook interface. The key problem to solve here is that, while Jupyter is designed to run the code you see and explain it, for game purposes I want the code to do the opposite: control the interface itself (and do so while being at least lightly obfuscated from the user).

Adding, Running, and Removing Cells With IPyLab

IPyLab has been a great (and really fun) tool for this purpose. You can use it to execute Jupyter app commands directly within

2 min read

25

Jun

I Want To Believe

I think it was when Eric Adams got elected that I lost faith in the system. It's kind of funny - you'd think it would have been Trump 1 or Trump 2 - but really it was Adams that broke me. Here was an obviously corrupt and incompetent candidate in one of the most progressive cities in America with two or three perfectly valid other candidates that by all accounts should have at the very least won in the later round of ranked choice voting. Instead we elected the vibes and bitcoin guy who naturally near-immediately started doing crimes and

4 min read

20

Jun

Home Assistant Is Astonishingly Easy To Set Up On Synology

Just a quick shout-out to Home Assistant, who have relatively easy-to-follow documentation for setting the app up on a Synology NAS. Just download the container, add your time zone, make sure it's set to use the "host network", and make sure port 8123 is open on your firewall. I'd been putting off setting this up given the usual amount of lift involved in getting something new runing on my homelab, but it only took me about 10 minutes. Finally no more fiddling with the Hue app, and K can purchase (some) smart devices without me getting all mad about proprietary software and security.

17

Jun

stopping 100 days

Almost a month ago I wrote about the slow decline in frequency of my attempt at a hundred days of blog posts. I think, given that I'm down to a less-than-weekly cadence, I cannot call this a hundred days project in earnest any longer. In the spirit of "learning in the open" and being honest about failing and doing things poorly I thought I'd officially declare that I'm throwing in the towel.

I'm not terribly torn up about this - if you've been reading, you are well aware that it's been a hell of a year. I took a long

1 min read