roma★
$LAYYYTER
Andulka
Xuebing Du
occasionally subtle
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
tannertan36
we're not kids anymore.
Product Placement
Discoholic 🪩
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NASA
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
YOU ARE THE REASON
⁂
Kaledo Art
pixel skylines
Claire Keane
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Not today Justin
seen from Singapore
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@gander2112
Oops, caught again - VTA
Oops, caught again – VTA
Quickie. This morning on the VTA light rail train, the fare enforcement officer got on the train, and checked fares. The guy across the row from me had been nailed before. I think he is a security guard, and he uses an eco pass, but it is his girlfriend’s. The enforcement office scans it and it shows her name.
Oops.
The enforcement officer makes him get off and buy a ticket. One afternoon, the…
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Douchebags - Transit Freeriders
Douchebags - Transit freeloaders, taking advantage of the honor system
One of the perks of my job is that I get an Ecopass, and thus free fare for riding the Lightrail. It is super convenient, and I get a little exercise in the walk to and from the train station. All good.
When I first began riding, I was wondering if they ever verify that riders have paid the fare or had used a Clippercard for the ride, as for the first 5 weeks, I saw not even one fare enforcement…
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Dumb things I do
Dumb things I do
I am sure I am not unique, that I am not the only one who does stupid things.
Sunday, I did a 6.4 mile hike/walk. I had a small blister on my right small toe. As usual, I “popped” it, and went on with life.
Then Monday, I felt like doing another hike/walk. Bad idea. Small blister became agonizing, and a huge portion of the skin on the bottom of that pinkie toe peeled off.
Now, I am in agony.…
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Waking up in a Libertarian US
Waking up in a Libertarian US
A dream sequence of waking up in a Libertarian USA
Joe Conservative wakes up in the morning and goes to the bathroom. He flushes his toilet and brushes his teeth, mindful that each flush & brush costs him about 43 cents to his privatized water provider. His wacky, liberal neighbor keeps badgering the company to disclose how clean and safe their water is, but no one ever finds out. Just to be…
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Fun and games - Cloudflare and SSH
Fun and games - Cloudflare and SSH. Some sleuthing was needed to get to a good state
<p>As I mentioned in a recent post, one of my sites, a WordPress site to help a friend sell their house, got hammered with xml-rpc requests. It didn't get hacked, but it did bring apache to a painful halt, and filled the memory.</p>
<p>To prevent that, I setup <a href=”http://www.cloudflare.com”>Cloudflare</a> in front of it, to act as a CDN and a way to prevent it from being attacked. Thus,…
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A fun afternoon (attacked website)
Dealing with an attack on a website is no picnic, but I won
Thursday, December 15 was a day like any other until the afternoon. Then I got the notice from the Jetpack plugin for one of my WordPress sites that it was down, and couldn’t be reached.
This happens occasionally, so I wasn’t too upset. Pointing my browser to the site Home2Baja gave a Database connection error. Simple enough to fix.
So I fired up PuTTY, and logged in. I attempted to restart…
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Book review: All the Birds in the Sky
Book review: All the Birds in the Sky, a cracking good read from Charlie Jane Anders, highly recommended
In the aftermath of the 2016 elections, the lead up to November 8th, I had been reading a lot of political history of the latter half of the 20th century. After The Donald won, I needed a change.
While I have often found modern SciFi a bit hard to get into, I steeled myself and asked a High School friend, Chuck Serface for a couple of recommendations. First up was “All the Birds in the Sky” by Ch…
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Good things are coming my way!
Good things are coming my way!
Well, I have something VERY Important to say. Apparently, I have some money coming my way, as I have recently received an urgent communiqué from none other than the FED chairwoman, Janet Yellen, herself.
Yessir, the good times are soon to be here in Casa Geoff. As you can see, from the email I have quoted below that it is a Major Award.
From Mrs. Janet L Yellen
Federal Reserve Bank New York.
33…
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That Tone Thing
That Tone Thing - lessons from 30+ years of guitar playing
The other day, as the train was lumbering towards my terminal station, a great Mr. Big song came on. From their Raw like Sushi Vol. 2 album, the song was Road to Ruin with the Paul Gilbert guitar solo appended at the end. I turned up the volume, and basked in the glory that is Paul Gilbert and reminisced about that elusive thing that all guitarists chase: “Tone”. It wasn’t a particularly great…
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Email Clients - Redux
A perennial issue - Email clients on OS-X, revisiting yet again
Again, I find myself at a crossroads. Being a Mac person, and relying heavily on Google’s email products (I have 5 different email identities, all hosted on Google’s Gmail or G-suite apps), I must have a mail client that works well with the Google way. Alas, the built in Apple mail client is okay, but on alternating releases they really foul up the way it works with the Google imap/smtp world.…
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About a month ago, I posted about how I was finally cutting the cord, and moving all my serious pictures out of the Apple Photos application. It was just too constricting, and while their “Pro” app for photographers, Aperture was great, they have abandoned it.
I began seriously using Adobe Bridge which was free (as in beer) and worked pretty well as a lightweight photo manager. But it’s major flaw was that the importer really didn’t handle RAW files gracefully (the version I had, CS6, wouldn’t preview the .CR2 files from my camera, so I couldn’t do any pre-sorting. Lame.)
SO, it is back to Lightroom, a more feature rich Adobe product, that integrates well with Photoshop, and offers many capabilities. A bit overkill for a hobbyist like me, but its importing tool is incredible.
Now, I am going through my images, re-organizing them, and selectively editing them. If you follow me on Facebook, look at my photo albums for some of the results.
One thing I was turned on to are a set of filters from Topaz Labs, plugins for Photoshop, that give you some insanely cool effects for your pictures. I have to thank an old friend Inge Fernau, for this addiction. I will write about them in future posts, but to summarize them, they are plugins for photoshop with presets (and other manual controls) that give a huge variety of really incredible effects.
Here is a gallery of images that I have processed.
Photography About a month ago, I posted about how I was finally cutting the cord, and moving all my serious pictures out of the Apple Photos application.
Train kept a Rolling
Train kept a Rolling
Having rejoined the working world, I am now lucky enough to be working for a company that it makes total sense to take the VTA Lightrail in to the office. I live about 1.1 miles from the Cottle station, a 20 minute walk from home. Then 50 minutes to get to Tasman station, and a 5 minute walk to the office.
Since driving the 18 miles takes between 40 minutes and an hour, and the train gives me a…
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Photography - Library Organization
Photography – Library Organization
Having written about my struggles as an undisciplined photographer, first outgrowing iPhoto, finding a safe harbor with Apple’s “pro” application, Aperture until they orphaned it, and then casting around for a solution.
I tried Adobe Lightroom, and it was reasonable, but being geared for professionals, it was a bit overkill.
A friend recommended another Adobe product, “Bridge”, as a good,…
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NCIS at 13
NCIS at 13, it is headed up the ramp to jump the shark. Shame.
A week or so ago, the magic icon on Netflix appeared, “New Episodes” for NCIS. Cool. Season 12 left with a cliff hangar of Agent Gibbs being shot by a child member of “The Calling” and I needed closure. So, we tucked into some binge watching of the latest season of NCIS, re-watching the final episode of season 12 to get in the groove. What a disappointment. It was a pretty weak closure of the…
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What I learnt from Forza Motorsports 6
What I learnt from playing Forza Motorsports 6 on my Xbox One
Pretty much the saving grace of the XBoxOne is Forza (ok, the latest Doom is pretty cool too) is Forza Motorsports Racing. I splurged for my birthday, and bought the 6th version of this, and I was not disappointed. I began playing back on my old Xbox360, with Forza 2, and was hooked. The cars, the tracks, the physics were what made the game. Each major release upping the ante, making it more…
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Photo Chaos - Taming the Beast
Photo Chaos - Taming the Beast - years of abuse, and neglect are coming to roost in my photos
As a long time photography hobbyist, I am in an unenviable position. My collection of images is, how should I put this, a chaotic mess. If I was a professional, I would have long ago adopted a workflow, with a definite process for handling images, sorting, grading, and culling that would have some consistency across the decades. Alas, I am a duffer, and just keep adding without any rhyme or…
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Hated Things: Whole Foods Market
Hated Things: Whole Foods Market
As we were running out of the probiotic that we use for our greyhound (Jarodophilus brand) I needed to procure some more. When we lived in Arizona, there were several purveyors that I could go to that had it on the shelf.
Not so since we moved to California. The only market that seems to have it consistently is Whole Foods.
Groan. I cringe every time I have to venture a foot into that place.…
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