Ever since I read about the ESP8266 in Make magazine in 2015, I’ve been wanting to build something with it. I picked up a Sparkfun ESP8266 Thing Dev board at Creatron, probably a year ago, and let it gather dust.

Enter 35 degree weather. I have a window air conditioner, that I install in a metal sleeve built into our wall. For some reason, the sleeve is sloped such that water flows INSIDE. When the A/C runs on humid days, the water it collects from dehumidifying can leak inside, creating an unpredictable annoying mess that has to be cleaned up.

This website is running WordPress on an Amazon EC2 instance.

If I were looking to keep a blog, this is not how I would do things, I’d just use a service.  The micro EC2 instance is slow, I have ensure Linux is patched, Wordpress is patched, etc…  But playing around with the server is as much fun as writing the blog.

Here are a few changes to the site recently:

In 2010, I joked “I don’t think any child born in 2010 will get the chance to hear the music of their parent’s youth”, as DRM encumbered media would be unplayable.

Even in 2010, we’d seen Microsoft’s “PlaysForSure” music (launched 2004, RIP 2008) not play on Microsoft Zune (launched 2006, RIP 2015).

Today, Microsoft announced that it is revoking the ability to read books purchased on its book store. It is refunding its customers.

My Epson XP-830 started dropping black ink globs on my prints, which would smudge and wreck photos. As I had recently installed $150 worth of ink, I didn’t want to just go out and get a new printer. I also liked the compact format of this printer, and wouldn’t just buy the same one, as this was starting to look like a doorstop after its 2nd set of cartridges. I wasn’t concerned about breaking the printer at this point, because I was ready to throw it out.

My manager has been on secondment to another team for the past 8 months. He stepped into a recent team meeting, where we were re-visiting challenges with our release process, and re-starting an initiative that had been displaced by other priorities.

As he stepped out, he joked (I paraphrase): “Good to see nothing has changed while I’ve been away”

In the next couple months, my manager will return to this team, back to where he started, back to re-visit familiar challenges.

In my primary school years, I’d read my Dad’s “Compute!” magazines. Recently, I discovered they’ve been published on Archive.org https://archive.org/details/compute-magazine , and I browsed through a few issues.

I came across this ad in a 1981 issue: