Just a couple of coffee photos. This was a tasty cup.

I picked up Arco for myself to play this long winter’s holiday, and, wow is it good! Highly recommended.

I volunteered to do some copyediting of the web page for my kid’s school, and naturally the best way to do that was to spend a couple of hours learning how to use {rvest} and writing a short script to scrape the site into a set of Quarto files. I’m right on track to get started with the copyediting in early 2025, give or take.

Lowkey one of the best devices I’ve ever owned, my 10-year old Synology just keeps working, and Synology continues to keep it up to date and supported. It’s really impressive.

My little Shiny app to visualize my last.fm data continues to tick along. This graphic shows the top artists of my year not in my top all-time played list. My favorite new album of 2024 is at the top of this list: Nick Cave’s WILD GOD is a tremendous, moving record.

If you’re still scrobbling, you can see your own data at deardestiny.shinyapps.io/tuner.

December 22; the longest night of the year is behind us. I have a warm coffee, I’ve worked out and made myself breakfast, and I’m finished with work for a long rest.

I started playing Balatro and, alas, it’s such a good game! I don’t care much either way about poker, and Balatro adds a fun, challenging layer of modifiers and risk that makes it awfully hard to to put down.

I didn’t know that Lucinda Williams had a couple of rollicking cover albums, of The Beatles and Tom Petty. Man, I’m a cryer for Wildflowers.

The “Christmas ships” tour stopped by the neighborhood beach tonight. I love that there’s a neighborhood beach here.

I’ve been hosting my little set of domains with Pair.com for nearly ten years (!), through a handful of small price increases; eight bucks a month to put my random junk online has always been fine. Now Pair is increasing my shared hosting plan to $14, nearly doubling it! Hmm.