Shallow Thoughts

The 2023 Legislative Session, Student Advocates, and Hope for the Future

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 Macías.

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Exploring your Search History in Firefox

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.

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Best Books Read in 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.

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A Festive Tree

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!

View Mail Attachments from Mutt

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 —

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Countywide Internet Outage

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.

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Door Bunny

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.

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Shared Folder in QEMU Between Linux Host and Windows Guest

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.

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