Shallow Thoughts

Los Alamos No Kings Protest

The Los Alamos No Kings protest on Saturday went well. I won't try to estimate how many people showed up (I haven't seen estimates in the papers, either) but there was quite a variety of signs and people were having a lot of fun.

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Gratuitous Firefox Changes: Wider Minimum Width in Firefox 144

I just updated to Firefox 144 and discovered that when I narrow my Mastodon window to its minimum size, it no longer fits in the space between my mail and IRC windows. I suppose I could reduce the IRC window even further, but I don't want to; the sizes I was using yesterday were fine.

I ask you, what was the compelling reason that Firefox users had to be prevented from using a 450-pixel wide window? What is up with Mozilla developers? (And why do I still put up with random time-wasters like this?

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Split a Multi-page TIFF Into Separate Files

My cardiologist wanted me to wear a heart-rate monitor for two weeks.

I'm still hoping I can get the raw data eventually (the company's tech support promised me it was possible), but meanwhile, the data available for download on the medical portal was a text file plus a large TIFF. It turned out the TIFF had 14 subfiles (which is apparently what you call separate images inside a TIFF). I don't have any viewing tools that will let me easily page through TIFF subfiles, so I wanted to split them so I could step through them easily.

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Flying Fluff and Spiderwebs

On a recent bike ride up at the East Fork trail, Dave had to go back to the car to get something he'd forgotten, leaving me guarding his pack.

It turned out that was a blessing in disguise. While I waited, looking up at the spectacular backlit sky high above the ponderosas, I saw hundreds of little fluff pieces floating by, highlighted and glowing from the sun behind them. Occasionally, I'd see long filaments drift past: I assume they were strands of spider web, perhaps with tiny baby spiders attached, invisible at that distance.

I tried to capture them on phone video, but unsurprisingly, the video wasn't good enough to capture them, and neither were the still photos.

Apache has decided websites shouldn't have their own /javascript

Someone sent me an alert that my Galilean Jupiter's moons simulation and SatSat Saturn's moons simulation pages weren't working.

Sure enough, they weren't. The error console said Loading failed for the script with the name of a calendar widget I use, along with the CSS it uses, both loaded from a directory inside /javascript on my website, the same website where the moon simulations are running.

I checked the logs: sure enough, references to those files were returning 404 in the access log, with nothing at all in the error log. The files were clearly there, and world readable, so it wasn't a permissions problem.

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Decoding a Specialized E-bike FIT file

My Review of my Specialized Turbo Levo Kids ebike mentioned that the Specialized phone app had some fun features, but also some annoying problems. (I'm using it on Android. Dave doesn't use the app on his iPhone, so I don't know how the iPhone version compares.)

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Operation Snakeweed Reseed is a Success

We don't get as many wildflowers here as I'd like, but one reliable bloom every year in late summer was the snakeweed.

Terrible name. In fact, it's quite a nice plant, which around early September explodes into a carpet of yellow flowers.

Until 2023-2024, when a severe drought managed to kill it all.

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Mythical Creatures

(A Toastmasters speech on Jul 14, 2025.)

Humans have told stories of mythical creatures for as long as there have been humans.

Creatures like mermaids, or unicorns, or fire-breathing dragons. But of course, today we know that mythical creatures don't really exist.

Or do they?

Let me tell you a couple stories of mythical creatures I've seen -- or not seen.

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