Shallow Thoughts
Akkana's Musings on Open Source Computing and Technology, Science, and Nature.
Wed, 01 Feb 2023
This year's New Mexico legislative session started Jan 17 and runs
through Mar 18. As usual, they have a full schedule.
Also as usual, I've been scrambling with updates to the
New Mexico Bill Tracker.
This year's new feature is tags; I seeded it with a few tags
I use, like health and elections, plus an LWVNM tag for bills the League of
Women Voters is tracking and advocating for or against. But the
list has grown quite a bit from there, and it's been fun to watch
what tags other people are interested in.
One bill of particular interest this session is
HB134: MENSTRUAL PRODUCTS IN SCHOOL BATHROOMS.
It's driven by three Albuquerque Academy high school students,
seniors Noor Ali, Sophia Liem and Mireya MacĂas.
Read more ...
Tags: government, politics
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17:59 Feb 01, 2023
More politics |
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Tue, 10 Jan 2023
I wanted to find something I'd googled for recently.
That should be easy, right? Just go to the browser's history window.
Well, actually not so much.
You can see them in Firefox's history window, but they're interspersed
with all the other places you've surfed so it's hard to skim the list quickly.
I decided to take a little time and figure out how to extract the
search terms. I was pretty sure that they were in places.sqlite3
inside the firefox profile. And they were.
Read more ...
Tags: web, firefox, google, sqlite
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16:54 Jan 10, 2023
More tech/web |
permalink to this entry |
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Sat, 31 Dec 2022
It's the last day of 2022, so I guess it's time for a "Best Books"
list for 2022.
Note that these are books I read in 2022, not books published in 2022.
2022 was actually a disappointing year, book-wise. I only finished 36
books, about half of my usual number (though only one was a re-read).
I'm not sure why the number came out so low.
Worse, none of them really excited me or was in
the running for an all-time best list. But there were a few worth
recommending, plus a couple I want to mention for other reasons, even if
they don't really deserve a "best" label.
Read more ...
Tags: books
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15:47 Dec 31, 2022
More misc |
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Fri, 23 Dec 2022
Dave and I took our bikes to Knife Edge trail last week to see how it
stacked up as a biking trail.
Answer: most of it is ridable, except for the short "knife edge" section
that inspired its name ... but it's pretty rocky and bumpy, making it
not as fun as other nearby trails. Still, it's a beautiful place with
great views.
But there was a reward at the end. Someone had decorated a piñon
tree at the very end of the trail. Even better, they used edible
decorations — popcorn, berries, pretzels, and what looked like
seed balls. Should be popular with the local wildlife!
If you can't make it to the end of Knife Edge, have a festive holiday
season anyway!
Tags: humor, bike, trails
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18:29 Dec 23, 2022
More humor |
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Sun, 18 Dec 2022
Back in 2015, I wrote a script for the mutt mailer (or any
plaintext mail program, really) to
view
MS Word documents (or other unfriendly formats) attached to emails.
(This is unfortunately something that comes up constantly in email
exchanges with League of Women Voters people —
Read more ...
Tags: email, mutt, programming, python, linux
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18:52 Dec 18, 2022
More tech/email |
permalink to this entry |
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Mon, 12 Dec 2022
Yesterday we had an event that really brought the community together:
the entire county lost internet.
When we woke to discover our internet was out, the first step was to
pull out a phone and try to load the CenturyLink outage page. But
it wasn't loading ; nor was anything else. Apparently both CenturyLink
and the Verizon cell network were down, though the phone
showed one to two bars, as good as we ever get here at the house
without going upstairs to the north deck where we can see the tower
directly.
Read more ...
Tags: internet, los alamos
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10:54 Dec 12, 2022
More misc |
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Sun, 04 Dec 2022
I've been down for a week with the Flu from Hell that's going around.
We think it's flu because the symptoms match, and
because I got knocked out by it, while Dave caught a much milder case
— and Dave got the double-dose-for-seniors flu shot, while I
only got the regular-for-younger-folks shot. (Our COVID tests are negative
and there's no anosmia or breathing impairment.)
So I haven't been getting much done lately, nor writing blog articles.
But I'm feeling a bit better now. While I recover, here's something
from a few months ago: our annual autumn visit from the Door Bunny.
Read more ...
Tags: humor, photography
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08:27 Dec 04, 2022
More humor |
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Wed, 23 Nov 2022
Unexpectedly, one of the hardest parts of
Migrating
a VirtualBox Windows Virtual Machine to qemu/kvm/virt-manager
was finding a way to exchange files between Linux and Windows.
In virtualbox, setting up a shared folder is trivial.
In QEMU, not so much.
Read more ...
Tags: linux, virtualization, windows
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17:37 Nov 23, 2022
More linux |
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