Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Realized that my long distance driving playlist doesn't have any Ar Tonelico in it. Correcting that now.

I miss Hypercard. Computers should go back to including something like that.

The drive was uneventful.

The cat was relatively cooperative with being moved to a different house while I'm out of town. I hung out with her long enough that she went into nap mode before oozing her into the travel box. One sad meow at the front door, but then there were economists on the radio and she was good with listening to that instead of throwing a fit.

Got a follow up email from the company that sold me the new computer. Not sure how I ended up getting the attention of an "Enterprise Account Executive" but I used the opportunity to mention a couple things that should be better which can hopefully get passed on to the right people.

I think the postage rate may have gone down a little. This is not a surprise as I got an email from the company that does the labels for my web shop (USPS has an API but it's awful enough to be worth having another company in the middle to make that sane) letting me know that most packages will be getting cheaper to ship. They of course framed that in terms of their mad negotiating skillz but it seems the truth is just that USPS is charging less.

Most of my out of state customers are people who used to be local, moved somewhere else, and failed to find an equivalent local source for what they liked (which I'd always recommend trying first because you'll get both fresher and cheaper not paying me for the postage). Today I learned that my newest out of state customer bought their new place from one of my older out of state customers and they buy exactly the same the same thing from me.

Noticed an odd thing about the political ads I'm getting this cycle. The ads from Ds have been 100% text messages on my phone that name the candidate and say something good about them. The ads for Rs have been 100% postal mail that name the D instead of their (unpopular incumbent) guy and are scare mongering on non-issues. Not a single R ad I've received names their candidate.

Some of the software that I like doesn't play nicely with hybrid graphics mode so I'll have to just keep the GPU on all the time it seems. That's fine, I guess.

New computer can now update the shop's web site. Needed to move over both ssh and gpg stuff. Haven't tested, but should be able to get into all of the servers that I need to be able to get into now.

I'll be guest instructing at Firedancer for next week's CSP Roaster Intermediate course so if anybody out there is in the Schaumberg, IL area and wants to pay a bunch of money to pick my brain about coffee roasting, that's a thing you could do: https://www.firedancereducators.com/

Also got a PM from a forum moderator advising me that it's fine to report my own posts if I notice that I've accidentally torpedoed a thread. I have a lot of experimental experience so it happens distressingly often that I'll toss out an observation that should be well known but isn't and it'll completely sidetrack a discussion. Hitting the report button lets me flag a moderator on myself to get the topic split and hopefully make more room for both conversations.

People are calling to find out if we're open during the tornado warning. Of course we are because it's way safer for everybody to stay in the building where it's quite safe from such things, but do they really want to head out in that weather for a cup of coffee? So far the answer has been yes, they do want to go out in the tornado warning for someone else to make their coffee for them.

So far the biggest hassle in getting things moved over and set up has been that the Pop!_OS repo has inadequate dependencies for KMail leaving me unable to receive mail on one account and unable to send mail on any of them. Finding the correct package to satisfy the missing dependency fixed that.

The new computer doesn't keep the keyboard backlight settings between boots. I know how to query and change those settings from the command line so it shouldn't be too hard to just throw together a couple scripts to save and restore those.

First post from the new machine. As usual, I'll need to do significant customization.

Box of computer arrived a day ahead of schedule.

The cat is leaning on me.

The bug was actually two bugs in the new range timers. One that would happen if the batch was planned to end before the start condition for the given range and another if the batch was planned to end before the end condition of the range. Easy enough to fix once I had some time to look into it. Also pushed the earlier bug fix that side-tracked me the last time I tried to work on this.

New laptop has supposedly shipped. Also fixed a bug that's been bothering me for a while.