ultracrepidarian: a person who criticizes, judges, or gives advice outside the area of his or her expertise.
So I’m working on a project at work where I want to rebuild my code whenever I save a source code file. Today I found the tool ‘entr’ and it’s a great thing to learn about. (I should totally send this to Julia Evans!)
All I needed to do is run
ls *.src | entr make
And that’s it. It’ll re-run make every time I save from the editor. Simple, helpful, open source.
Way back in 2012 (or was it 2011?) I exchanged a few emails with Leo Padron about starting his own watch company. At the time, he was restoring vintage watches and had the urge to start his own brand. He’d found my “Design and make your own watch” page and I wrote a blog post about him as well (lost due to Confluence’s shitty export code).
This month, he emailed me with an interesting update. He’s at Drop now and designed a field watch, the Felix.
The Felix is here on Drop; the image gallery above is from their site. Specs, also from their site:
That’s a decent MSRP, and very good to excellent IMHO at the $300 preorder price. I quite like the rounded shape for comfort, and at 39mm this should wear like a dream. It’s got enough design in it to not be boring or me-too as well. Good lume, well sized hands, and a delightful ring of color on the offset crown too.
On the minus side, I’ve never been a fan of the 13 to 24 numbering on a dial, though that’s a pretty small complaint.
Nice work Leo!
Three long reads – or at least bookmark:
Takeaways? Install pi-hole at home, use 1Blocker on iOS, uBlock Origin on your desktop, reconsider if you use Android at all, and always have a 6-digit PIN on your phone. It’s probably worse than you thought.
Check this out:
In July of 2018 I paid $244 to a company called Adrionics for a chunk of PVC stuffed with electronics, the PA-II:
It’s a sophisticated, lab-grade piece of hardware – twin laser-based light scattering particulate sensors, and it measures how much junk is in your air. In particular (a pun I am delighted with), the “PM2.5” size range most important to your health and lungs.
It’s rated for indoor or outdoor use. I put mine next to the garage door mainly due to the difficulty of running a power wire outside. Outside is better but you could benefit by having indoor and outdoor if you’re feeling fancy.
You can read about the PMS5003 sensor here, it’s pretty nifty. The PA-II uses twin sensors so you can plot and compare the two readings and thus get better data:
Science! You can connect directly to the sensor (it uses WiFi) and see the full details as well as temp, RH% and breakouts of counts per size range.
And even if you don’t own one, head over to https://purpleair.com/ and try their map – you can see see local and regional quality at a snap, as with the top image in this post. I can tell, for example, that we’re in fire season as the quality is usually much much better. And if your health is affected (asthma, seasonal allergies or the like) then a sensor makes even more sense. There are other ‘smart home’ air quality monitors with designer enclosures; I don’t recommend them. Do your own research but I found that PurpleAir was a guy who started making these for himself and then for others who asked.
Which, yeah, is a lot like Paul Scurfield in another post in this series. Or Dan Fock.
Each sensor automatically shares its data so you benefit others too – I like that. I’ve done a few experiments with cheap air quality sensors and have come to believe that you can’t get good data without spending a chunk of money, so while this is a non-trivial expense I consider them a good value and recommend buying one.
Or maybe check the map – if someone nearby has one already, then just bookmark the map and benefit from some citizen science.
How to repair a Seiko 7S26 Automatic wrist watch
— Read on www.clockmaker.com.au/diy_seiko_7s26/
Fantastic! Free version of the timezone watch school.
An random Sunday morning will find us at the Hillcrest farmers market. Been going for about 14 years now.
So a few months ago I bought macro and wide lenses from Moment for my iPhone X. They work great and I was hoping to get a few years from them but Apple changed the 11 and to everyone’s surprise added wide. It’s great! Here’s normal and wide at work.
Conveys place well.
And nothing to carry etc. anyone want some moment lenses?
Impressive. Both dark to the eye.
This is a very good post about the current mess here in California where PG&E shut off power for 800,000 people to cover its ass and avoid starting another fire. It sounds as if my local utility, SDG&E, actually got its shit together after starting a fire in 2007 and being forced to actually pay for it:
n 2007, San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) was blamed for wildfires in San Diego County; investigators found it hadn’t done proper vegetation management. It ultimately paid $2.4 billion to settle lawsuits related to those fires. It wanted to pass on remaining costs, some $379 million, to ratepayers in the form of higher rates, but the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) wouldn’t let it. The case was appealed all the way up to the California Supreme Court, which found against SDG&E. Earlier this month, the US Supreme Court announced that it would not take the case, leaving SDG&E to eat the costs. (This ruling is relevant to how PG&E’s liability will ultimately be divided up.)
Vox
Since 2007, the scare of those lawsuits has prompted SDG&E to spend $1.5 billion upgrading its fire detection and response capabilities. And in its recently announced wildfire mitigation plan, it proposes spending $3 million more on such measures as aggressive grid hardening and vegetation management, improved meteorology with more weather stations, more remote, high-definition cameras for fire-detection, a multi-level community outreach and education program, and a series of community resource centers where people can go when power is shut off to receive information and basic needs.
Vox
The other state trend driving this is housing prices – for years, ‘drive till you qualify‘ was received wisdom for years. The result, combined with the desire for a yard, was sprawl. Sprawl + climate change = burning homes.
Anyway, the Vox piece does an excellent job of laying out the utility and fire side of the story – have a read.
ultracrepidarian 