I learned a lot making DewDrop, and have been really enjoying using it. So I was thinking about other things to do. Bless SomaFM, it's a lovely service, but my god the Mac app is hideous. So I thought I might take a whack at that. Thus, SQUELCH.

Squelch doesn't offer all the same features that SomaFM's own app does (you can't favorite songs, see playlist histories (yet?), see all their news and updates, and that sort of thing). I might add some or all of that later, but simple feels nice, and I feel like it's pretty neat as it is. I'd built a website for someone who makes lovely crafts with color customization, which made me really want to do that in one of my own projects, and this seemed like a good fit. Meanwhile, the visualizer was a fun learning experience; it taps into the computer's live audio using CoreMedia and the vDSP framework to do frequency analysis, then maps the audio into the bars with custom weighting – notionally I wanted it to feel authentic without actually bouncing around to the distracting extent that reality dictates, haha.

Anyhow. Still a couple of issues (mini-player quirks, and uhh that visualizer I was so proud of doesn't work when you're using other audio destinations e.g. AirPods as some people are prone to do), but I think it's pretty neat. Plus this time I actually remembered to build in an update checker from Day 1, so when I fix those issues it'll tell you...

Since my post in January, Van continued on its journey of tremendousness, good vibes, and robustitude. However, in a classic “but then life did a life”, Van has departed. As has the Element. As have the Trail 90s. With my wife and I’s work for the Forest Service approaching, three cars and two motorcycles have become a CR-V Trailsport. Van was an ideal “home base” for our California Naturalist certification, in that it was not too big, too thirsty, or too pretentious for the field trips. It kept us warm and happy on rainy nights, and grew a raven shrine. An article about it showed up. We’re very sad to see it go, but it sounds like it has a wonderful new home (it’ll be in the Placerville Pride parade!). I’d never gotten attached to a car/bike as quickly as I did to Van, and I’d never had a car for as long as the Element (nor had one as generally-excellent). I was reflecting on selling the Element, which has been a good friend and had a great many adventures, and was sort of surprised that (as with Van) I was sad, but not really sad. I just feel lighter. When I’d bought the Element it was sort of a dull used car, but I kept it nice and now it’s sort of a thing, where people want to talk about it. “What were you going for with your Element build?” Well, I was going to Post Creek Guard Station, so I put bigger tires on it. I didn’t “build” anything. It’s just a happy guy. I dunno. Same with Van. And in ditching all this, friends have kindly been like “ah, now you can afford *this* cool car, or *this* cool bike”. How cool is a car which sits in a garage in Davis for driving up 128 every third weekend? My '92 Miata has a hallowed place in my memory, but what a dull liability a Miata would be now. The Element wasn’t a cool car because I kept mine nice and garaged while the others rotted so now it’s socially-acceptable to like the survivors – just like us, its adventures and its stories made it cool. One of my earlier car memories is crawling up Mount Rainier in my Grandpa’s Super Beetle, and hiding inside it as he hucked snowballs at the window. I don’t remember whether it was a nice Super Beetle or not. I think that Super Beetle had some good stories to tell at the REI parking lot in 1998, though. Car shopping with this mindset was particularly liberating, too. I thought I’d love the Passport, but seeing one up close I’m like oh, what a porker. The Defender is hilarious. So on and so forth. As a result, now I love my stupid CR-V Trailsport. I’m going to be the most smug little bastard in the world when someone with a Wrangler goofs on it online and I’ll get to be like “well, it worked fine when I was a Forest Service ranger”. So, I'm happy that after 20 years of being a car weirdo, I've made it to "buy a single boring car, love it, and spend life being weird in it". I suggest it! Either that, or I’ll keep my dumb CR-V nice and give ya a good deal on it once it becomes socially-acceptable to like them.

Just as an FYI to folks who have been trying (hopefully getting a kick out of) DewDrop, I've just released a new version that incorporates automatic update-checking – obviating the kind of post you are now reading. Of course, by the time I got around to doing that I'd also had time to incorporate all the features I'd actually wanted, meaning updates will probably be far more sparse. Listen, this is A Stupid Year for everyone.

I used JPEGMini forever. First it got annoying (they added a bunch of meh features), then it got expensive, then it got annoying (constant callouts for features even when I already paid), and now it's been subsumed into something called Framer and I don't even know what it is anymore. So, no. I tried a couple alternatives (e.g. Tyniy), but they just weren't doing it for me. I wanted something drag-and-drop which could easily replace files in situ. I didn't want a platform, a file picker, video support, etc. I just wanted to be able to easily export files from Lightroom then size 'em down for web stuff. So I channeled my frustration into Xcode! The result is my first Mac executable – DewDrop! I am certain it's "dumber" than JPEGMini (or at least, JPEGMini back when they actually had a focus on minifying JPGs...), but it is free-er. The behavior is what I wanted, the look is what I wanted, and the options are hopefully flexible-enough... As my first Mac app, I was worried about the "officialization" process – how notarization and all that works. That was fine (modulo Apple's $100/yr developer fee), but there was basically no way it was going to be sandboxable without being a nightmare, and thus it'll never be Mac App Store-able. Which, whatever.

Escape Campervans was a company which customized camper vans, then rented them to tourists. They went out of business, and their vans were fire-saled! We picked one up cheap. This is its story. They'd named ours "Crayola". It's a 2012 Econoline with 337k miles on it. We went to collect it at a weird facility in Antioch; it had no plate or title, but we'd determined through VIN snooping that it had been registered and smogged in California. So, we embarked upon a less-than-legal drive home. I got it smogged pretty quick – easy pass. The first real roadblock was just how much of a pain in the butt it is buying an auctioned car in California. Even with the smog pass, AAA wouldn't touch it, and the DMV was a fuss with wanting counter-signatures from Escape (tricky, when they no longer exist). However, we got it registered eventually. The first step was to clean up the dashboard. The power plugs were all chewed away, and covered in duct tape, and it had a poorly-mounted radio. - We hit on the idea of finding black plastic, cutting it, then using it as a "faceplate" for the accessory plug. Doesn't look factory fresh, but it is very solid, and it was three dollars. I'd backed both that and the existing cigarette lighter with epoxy putty, so they're very rigid. (Fun Van Fact™: The "12v hole" on the left is a cigarette lighter, but the "12v hole" on the right (and the one hidden in the glovebox) apparently cannot support the amperage of the cigarette lighter accessory, so the manual is explicit that there is only one lighter! We don't smoke, so hey. I wish they were hot on ignition, not hot all the time, so that's something to address in the future.) - I put in a cheap ($100) wireless CarPlay headunit, and ran the rear camera stuff. "Power Akoustik" is *not* the best brand, but it works rather well, and it did allow me to do a custom boot-up image. Crucial. At the same time, I also replaced all the interior bulbs with LEDs. The second step has been to clean up the interior, which was worn and rather gray. Good fundamentals, though, and the kitchen was designed pretty nicely. We'd set a low budget, and got started. - For the curtains, rather than pay for new blackout fabric Sam decided to get nice tulle and just sew it right over the top. Great! - For the floors, I'd cleaned them up, then laid down cheap peel-and-stick wood. - For the table, I'd cut a new one out of ply, covered it in contact paper, and done some edging. It also gained a little trick – countersunk rare-earth magnets to hold lamps/etc. steady. Cheap stuff, but it feels a lot nicer indoors now. This was all maybe $100. Really quite pleased with how all this has gone. It's currently getting all its fluids changed, and it will have its first trip in a few days. After that, I have new suspension parts will go on, and the van will inherit the Geolandars off of my Element when that car gets new tires shortly.

We spend a lot of time doing weird stuff in the woods. It's often quite nice to have some sort of rectangle while doing so, particularly for playing music. But doing so brings a surfeit of objectionable intrusions, e.g. bright screens and the clock. These are solvable problems! E-paper Android devices exist, and I assumed there was some way to entirely disable the clock. So, I got a Boox Palma 2, and this is a quick note on using it as a "being weird in the woods" buddy as I had a couple questions I couldn't find answered online. The first question was whether it worked well as a music streamer. And yes, it runs Apple Music (and presumably Spotify) totally normally, with offline music being no problem. The Boox software allows per-app customization of quality and refresh rates, so scrolling is even *okay*. The only hitch was that the Boox software also overwrites the built-in Android "run in the background" prefs, which wasn't super-obvious to me. So, to prevent it closing in the background, I'd just needed to use the Boox "Optimize" menu, as well as turning on "use BT while asleep" at the device level. Otherwise, great. The second question was whether you can turn the clock off. Yes! There are quite a few menu bar tuning apps, e.g. Super Status Bar. Easy. No unwanted intrusion of timekeeping. As a reader, it's small but totally fine. It supports using the hardware volume control as page-turn buttons in both the Kobo and Kindle apps, and other stuff (e.g. Kiwix, for offline Wikipedia) work great. Battery life is great, with maybe 8% knocked off after six hours of playing downloaded music. The back seems tough enough, although I will grab a screen protector. It's one of those things where there was no reason it should not be fine, but it's nice that it *was* fine, especially in a circumstance where fine is wonderful. Doubtless any number of e-paper Android tablets would probably be a good outdoors rectangle, but the Boox is definitely a good outdoors rectangle.

I'm pretty proud of our stupid Halloween candy box. We'd repurposed old Valentine's Day crafts for the little spookies stuck to it.

He's as smart as he is coordinated.

I mean if it works, that's great. And if pictures work, even better. If it does work: I got really mad at Wordpress because it's seemingly impossible to pull in Pixelfed posts cleanly. And even if it could, it's a giant, heavy, terrible nightmare which constantly dissuaded me from ever writing anything there. So this is a custom CMS from Juniper MonCorp. I'll call it Chimp Engine. Sorry the formatting on any local posts older than this one is all funky. I'd just wanted to get the migration from WordPress over with.

Oh boy, it's been a while since I posted here. I'm pretty much just posting stuff at Pixelfed. I also made a website called Pika's Path, which is a sort of location-based blogging engine thingy. You can find my profile here.