Notes

Robb Knight has a page listing people's descriptions of their default app choices, and he just did an update for this year. I thought it sounded fun, so here are some of mine as of the end of 2025:

• Adblocker: uBlockOrigin
• Browser: Firefox; FFUpdater to keep vanilla Firefox for Android updated without the Play Store
• Calendar: Fossify Calendar, DAVx⁵, macOS Calendar.app
• Chat: Signal
• Cloud File Storage: Mega
• Contacts: GrapheneOS Contacts app
• E-Books: Readest
• File Sharing: LocalSend, OpenMTP, Syncthing
• Local Backups: FreeFileSync
• Mail Client: Mailspring on desktop, Thunderbird on mobile
• Maps: Organic Maps
• Music: Auxio, Lollypop, Music.app
• Notes: Obsidian and Markdown-Oxide/Neovim
• Password Management: Bitwarden
• Podcasts: AntennaPod
• RSS: NetNewsWire, Capy Reader
• To-Do: Same as notes for writing the lists; taskfinder for tracking/organizing
• Two-Factor Authentication: Aegis
• Weather: Breezy Weather
• Word Processing, Presentations, and Spreadsheets: LibreOffice

My local library has a TTRPG group (currently playing Pathfinder 2e). I sat in on a campaign today, the group was very welcoming, and I'm excited about it. I've wanted to get into D&D/TTRPGs for a while, but didn't have a group to do it with. While I hear Pathfinder is a bit more involved than some, I was able to get a copy of the rulebook to take home, and I'm invited to give it a go with making my own character and joining the party next weekend. It's especially nice because the library is right at the end of my street!

I enjoyed how it felt like manually stepping through a computer simulation — the whole time I was thinking of Ben Eater's videos about building a 6502 computer on a breadboard, in which he uses a pushbutton for a clock pulse at some points to manually step through things.

Lately I've been looking for 1) more things to do off the internet and 2) ways to make friends in my area. I made a lot of good friends in grad school, but now most of them have moved; the scarcity of academic jobs means a lot of moving around T-T. I've never been great at putting myself out there, so most of my friendships have developed from being in proximity to a lot of people, which doesn't work the same way out of school. This group seems lovely though, and I'm glad I pushed myself to give it a try.

Tracy Durnell's recent post resonates with what I've been doing lately to make my computer usage more pleasant.

I've been in the habit of compulsively checking notifications (Mastodon, RSS, YouTube subscriptions, etc.), and I figured out that staying away from that, and using my computer for local things is much nicer. A few specific local things I've been enjoying:

• I've wanted to learn the live-coding tool Tidal Cycles for a while now, and I'm finally doing that. Here's a Tidal Cycles performance by Lil Data, and here's one by Moxus (super glitchy and noisy!). This tool is nice because I can code and have my coding be immediately musical.

• I've started knitting, and my goal is that once I'm comfortable with some basic stitches, I can use code to generate patterns. I was inspired to do this by Sophia's project using p5.js to generate knit beanie patterns. This is a nice way to feel connected to my programming/computer interests without actually needing to be online or even use a computer for the full project.

Jo has been using the code I use to get post locations for my /now page statuslog section to add locations to her notes. I realized it would be nice to add it to the script I use to generate note templates as well!

While most of my blog posts are written from home and not associated with a place, I have a number of notes from trips with my partner that aren't just in Rochester.

I like the “vibe” of connecting things on my site to a physical place, so this should be nice to add.

My partner and I took a walk at Powder Mill Park in upstate NY to look at the mushrooms and fish hatchery. While we were there, I came across the transmitter for a United States Geological Survey (USGS) stream gaging station—you can go to the link and see the data from this station.

I've been interested in cataloging the stations I see since I saw Sarah from Signals Everywhere's video on the transmitters for these stations. I previously found one at Ellison Park and got some pictures of both the transmitter and what I believe is the sensor. According to Sarah, the stations uplink the data in the UHF band (~401 MHz) to the GOES weather satellites, which relay the data back down for processing by the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS). My photos from today are below:

I've long thought it would be cool to connect the data from these to some sort of musical result, but I haven't figured out a satisfying way to do that—a way to both make the data meaningfully present in the music and make interesting music, rather than something blandly demonstrative of the data.

I went with my partner to the Natural Stone Bridge & Caves park in the Adirondacks for their birthday. They love rocks and geology, and really wanted to go here.

From what they told me, this park was originally gifted to a family as thanks for their efforts in the American Revolutionary War, and after a long time as a sawmill, later members of the family converted it to a park.

Some photos from a walk through Highland Park today:

I'm tracking airplanes by listening to their ADS-B transponders over the airwaves! I have dump1090 running on a Raspberry Pi, sending the aircraft data over my local network, and an RTL-SDR receiver (silver dongle in the Pi in the second photo) picking up the signal.

I've started some notes on ADS-B transponders as well as on using an RTL-SDR receiver more generally in the new digital garden section of my site. I've started putting project notes from my Obsidian notebook on my site — I like the idea of thinking through things in public.

If you want to track planes yourself, you can also use ADS-B Exchange — it takes in data from a bunch of volunteers doing similar stuff to what I'm doing here.

Benji made some IndieWeb stickers that look like a metal band logo, and he sent me one — thanks! He also included some other fun stickers, shown below. The metal one and the goose with a floppy are what I put on my laptop so far, and as the note says, the goose/floppy is from alistairshepherd.uk.

My partner and I went to the Rochester Museum and Science Center's planetarium for the “Stars with Carl” event this past weekend. The “Carl” in question is a 1968 Carl Zeiss Mark VI star projector — a fully analog unit that if I remember right, weighs over 2 tons.

The presenter showed us how the skies change with season and latitude, and demonstrated “star hopping” between different stars and constellations. I took some pictures of Carl at the end — a very cool machine: