§ An antsy week with stints of wanting to re-arrange my house and take a vacation. On Saturday I was this close to joining a rock climbing gym. I think it’s a kind of low-grade cabin fever. Later in the week, I stopped by my favorite trail deep in the local nature reserve. No signs of life yet, only frozen mud and creaky tree branches. After spending so much time cooped up inside, I appreciate the enormity of the park more than ever.
§ I put together a little project on a spare Raspberry Pi that displays photos of the earth using NASA’s API. New photos aren’t added as often as I would like—it updates every few hours, at most. Still, it is incredible to have an always-on “live” view of the globe right here on my desk.
§ Picture this: it’s Thursday night and a new exhibit gallery is opening early the next morning. At the last minute one of the technicians realizes that a critical microcontroller needs to be reprogrammed. But oh no! They don’t have an FTDI bridge with them. It’s at this moment that I suddenly remember I have a Flipper Zero in my backpack that I’ve been carrying around, basically unused, for years. I’ve never felt geekier.
Apologies to all of the Canadians out there.
§ The Bezzle, Corey Doctorow’s sequel to Red Team Blues is out. The audiobook sample he released last month didn’t exactly hook me. The protagonist, Marty Hench, has an overconfident, self-righteous, cynical worldview that I find off putting. Still, I backed the Kickstarter a while back so I have the MP3 files waiting for me right here in my inbox. I’ll give it another try soon.
§ I started watching The Deuce, David Simon and George Pelecanos’ lesser-known follow-up show after The Wire. Is it as good as The Wire? Probably not, but it feels similarly ambitious.
Simon and Pelecanos clearly have a knack for writing believable cities, cities that continue moving after the cameras stop, cities that are alive. My mind keeps going back to Synecdoche, New York. It is almost as if Simon and Pelecanos spend years toiling up front, crafting characters and meticulously developing atmosphere, before finally casting some sort of ancient spell that sets everything in motion so now they can then just leisurely stroll down the street and document at will, free from the need to direct. As if there is some impossibly large sound stage hidden in the desert outskirts of LA and if you can manage to find your way inside you’ll find D’Angelo Barksdale sitting right there on his orange couch.
