Ever since I first got the back yard landscaped with lots of plants and ground cover, it’s been a popular daytime hangout for the neighborhood cats. After I had the front porch extended and put some chairs out there, I discovered a group of young cats who liked that even better than the back yard.

Some of them still come by occasionally, and I’ve gotten used to the sound of disappearing cats when I open the front door.

Recently I decided to install some cameras outside the house, mostly to watch for package deliveries and solicitors, but also to keep track of porch cats. I went with the Arlo Pro kit based on a friend’s recommendation (actually, he has the older Arlo; I went with the Pro because it adds local USB storage). Good hardware, easy set up, usually-quick notification of events (~5 seconds), iOS app is a little flaky and sometimes falsely claims that my system is offline. I like it enough that I’m probably going to add some more of the first-gen cameras for the garage and rear entrances after I’ve had it for a month or two.

To reliably detect cats, I had to set the porch cam to the highest sensitivity, which unfortunately generates occasional false positives due to wind hitting my bamboo, but I’ve caught two of them so far, one of whom I hadn’t seen before.

Orange cat has been a regular daytime visitor since he was half-grown, and always sits in the left chair, which gets plenty of sun. He used to sit in the bamboo pots, but gave that up after I added them to the drip system:

New cat comes mostly at night, always sits on the right chair, and vanishes instantly when I open the door. I’ve got some low-res night-vision shots of him, but the best picture I’ve managed so far was a quick out-of-focus snap through two panes of glass as he was making his escape through the back yard.

Clearly I need to hide a camera in the bamboo, so I can get close-up shots with better focus.

I’ve been a big fan of Patricia McKillip’s stories since the ’70s, and I’ve been generally pleased to see her stuff come back into print.

But I’m not going to pay premium prices for reprints, and even more for a DRM’d ebook, so “fuck you, Random Penguin”.

Once upon a time when I shared a house with Doug and Rory, we were all in the habit of drinking one specific flavor of Arizona Iced Tea. Naturally, whenever we went to the grocery, we cleaned them out. Over time, the store we frequented starting stocking more of that flavor, and since there were three of us, we still cleaned them out.

Finally, after several months of this, I happened to be there late at night when only the restocking crew was working, and as I filled the conveyor belt with the distinctive oversized cans, the cashier looked at me and said, “You! You’re the one!”.

Fast-forward 20+ years, and these days my bulk buy is Splenda-sweetened Grapefruit-flavor Refreshe Ice. There are half a dozen different private labels for this bubbly-fruit-water, and I don’t know who actually makes it, but the Safeway and CVS brands seem to taste better than the others.

Naturally, I clean them out. For a while, they responded by upping the stock, but I can’t take credit for the peak period when they had dozens of bottles at the end of multiple rows and stocked it in single-flavor cases (with the Morgan Hill store sometimes having half a dozen cases just inside the front door, which I typically bought two of).

These days, the stock has died down to a more sustainable level, but the stores I frequent generally have twice as much of the Grapefruit as the other flavors.

So it should come as no surprise when on a recent midnight visit to the nearest Safeway (technically, 11:45PM, and a no-prize to someone who correctly guesses why I deliberately arrive at that time), the kid restocking the soft-drink section said, “Oh, hey, I just put some out for you.”

He then offered to see if he could get them by the case again…

A common tactic of activists opposed to US military engagement (often falsely mislabeled as ‘anti-war’) is to libellabel their opponents ‘chickenhawks’, insisting that if they’re not personally going over to fight, they lack the courage of their convictions.

So, a ‘social justice’ activist who wants the government to forcibly silence their opponents surely can’t be called a ‘warrior’. ‘Chickenhawk’ has a nice cognitive dissonance to it, don’t you think? I mean, if you’re not going to personally put a gun to my head to keep me from disagreeing with you (a proposition sure to end in prison or morgue time), how dare you demand that someone else do it for you?

Mental substitution of other C-words is acceptable, of course.

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My work MacBook Pro (mid-2014 edition) only has 512GB of storage. I had tried to order it fully loaded, but somebody upstream fainted from shock, despite the fact that my previous machine was nearly 8 years old.

I’ve got to do a lot of tinkering with VMware and Docker images for working out the IT infrastructure in our new building, and there’s just not enough space for it all on the internal drive. And since Apple solders everything to the motherboard these days, there’s no way to upgrade without replacing the machine. Browsing for small external SSDs, the Samsung T3 seems to be well-rated.

The only problem I can report so far is that it draws more power than the left USB3 port on my Mac can reliably supply. Moving it to the right port got rid of the eject/remount every 2-3 minutes. I’m not using their encryption, because I don’t need it; also, there are some reports of the supplied Mac software being flaky, and I had a few bad experiences with the way the equivalent WD driver works.

By the way, if you use Docker on a Mac, it will graduallyrapidly fill your disk unless you periodically rebuild the Docker.qcow2 file (works best if you supply the names of the images you don’t want deleted). A fix is reported to be in the works.

The pirates you’re hunting can be three systems away from the planet where you got the mission, not two. And it appears their location is pre-generated and they don’t move, so if you never enter the correct system, you’ll never find them. This also means that if you load up on bounty missions, the odds that you’ll run into multiple pirate fleets simultaneously goes way up. When that happens in a system that already has a high chance of random pirates, like Shaula, even a fleet of Shield Beetles can be overwhelmed unless you draw them far, far away from the planet and the incoming hyperspace routes. (pro tip: the “hold position” key can be applied to single ships by selecting them, not just your entire fleet)

[Mac version 0.9.6, based on a small Perl script that does a crude scan of the save file; haven’t figured out how they mark missions as completed yet, though]

The game is free, fun, and desperately in need of a nicely-designed PDF with all the obscure keyboard shortcuts (scattered documentation here, here, and here). You can also get it on Steam for convenience (no DRM applied, because GPLv3).

It’s moddable, replayable, and regularly updated, and doesn’t chew up a lot of resources when paused, so you can easily hop in for a few quick turns while waiting for other tasks to complete. It auto-saves every time you land, and it’s quite stable.

Speaking of free games on Steam, the ancient MMO Anarchy Online showed up there recently. They’ve been trying to get me to come back for about 15 years, and this time I decided to give it a shot. I managed a successful password reset on my old account and created a new character (the old ones were still there but marked “inactive”), and got the dubious pleasure of remembering what it was like before MMOs settled on some basic user interface conventions. I could adjust to the low-res models and textures, but the controls are another story.

As expected, they dodged the usual solution. It is a pool episode with the girls in swimsuits, but it’s not a fan-service filler afterthought.