Jan. 12, 2025
The weekend after Thanksgiving I made a quick road trip through central Idaho, over Lolo Pass and down into Montana - spending the night in Butte. Butte is a fascinating city, built on the richest hill on earth, with the fancy buildings in uptown to show off its wealth. There are a lot of mining towns scattered throughout the west, but I think Butte is the biggest. I got up early in the morning to watch the sunrise from The Granite Mountain Speculator Mine Memorial. The pictures on this post are from that general location. If you ever spend any time in Butte, be sure to get a Pork Chop Sandwich at Pork Chop Johns.
Nov. 25, 2024
My earlier post on Podman Quadlet showed how to install Podman Quadlet, but included secrets as plain text in the container file. This isn’t exactly the best practice for handling secrets. Podman has a built in secrets management utility that integrates with the Quadlet containers.
Nov. 24, 2024
I have been working on a bot for the social network Bluesky. My initial effort was non-interactive. I used a Cloudflare Worker with a Cron trigger to post a random road sign picture every day. I wanted to learn how to make the bot respond to “@mentions” with various commands. This would mean having to host the bot in a slightly different way. Instead of it being a serverless application, I would want to either listen to a stream of events, or poll on a fairly regular caedance to check for updates. I will post details about the bot at a later date.
Nov. 10, 2024
Recently I learned about the Babashka which is bills itself as a “Fast native Clojure scripting runtime”. It has most of the benefits of Clojure, but has the fast startup time associated with the GraalVM, on which it is based. While, it is not necessarily a Clojure replacement, it does make Clojure more accessible to everyday tasks one might do on the shell. In fact, since I have discovered this tool, it is the first thing I reach for when I need to write a shell script.
Nov. 5, 2024
1Password is a password manager, that in addition to normal management functions, has some nice features that are geared towards the development workflow. Two of the features that are worth calling out are SSH Agent, and the 1Password op CLI.
Nov. 5, 2024
One of the neat features of Bluesky is how that platform handles account verification. With Twitter/X, the system relied on a verification checkmark that famous people would get access to, through some process. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, those verification checks became useless, when they could be bought for a monthly fee. Stories of obviously fake accounts, that had a verifiation check was a predictable result.
Nov. 2, 2024
Bruneau Dunes State Park is about 60 miles southeast of Boise, on the south side of the Snake River. In the midst of the desert landscape, are giant sand dunes. Next to the dunes are small lakes, that attract a large amount of waterfowl. In addition to hiking and climbing the dunes, you can also rent sleds and “sandboards” that you can carry up the dune and ride down. This area of Idaho is good for star watching, and the park is home to an observatory which you can visit in evenings.
Mar. 1, 2020
Small wilderness area encompassing a Joshua Tree forest outside of Searchlight, Nevada.
Oct. 21, 2019
Well maintained road connecting Golconda, Nevada with NV-226 near Tuscarora. The Midas Road passes by several mines, the community of Midas, and Willow Creek reservoir.
Oct. 21, 2019
Gravel road connecting NV-225 near Mountain City, Nevada and NV-226 north of Chicken Creek Summit. Road crosses the Independence Mountains at Maggie Summit.
Oct. 21, 2019
Gravel road I-80 near Emigrant Summit that descends into the Humboldt River canyon at Palisades. The road crosses the Humboldt River and ends at NV-278 south of Carlin. Can be made into a detour from interstate driving.