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Pretty Good Hat

I volunteered to do some copyediting of the web page for my kid’s school, and naturally the best way to do that was to spend a couple of hours learning how to use {rvest} and writing a short script to scrape the site into a set of Quarto files. I’m right on track to get started with the copyediting in early 2025, give or take.

Lowkey one of the best devices I’ve ever owned, my 10-year old Synology just keeps working, and Synology continues to keep it up to date and supported. It’s really impressive.

A screenshot showing information for a Synology device. It shows the model number of DS213j.

My little Shiny app to visualize my last.fm data continues to tick along. This graphic shows the top artists of my year not in my top all-time played list. My favorite new album of 2024 is at the top of this list: Nick Cave’s WILD GOD is a tremendous, moving record.

If you’re still scrobbling, you can see your own data at deardestiny.shinyapps.io/tuner.

A graphic list of my ‘new top artists’ in 2024. The background is bright yellow, and the list starts with Nick Cave’s new album WILD GOD. Also on the list are TV on the Radio, Jackie West, The Cure and feeble little horse. The list includes small thumbnails of each album cover.

December 22; the longest night of the year is behind us. I have a warm coffee, I’ve worked out and made myself breakfast, and I’m finished with work for a long rest.

I started playing Balatro and, alas, it’s such a good game! I don’t care much either way about poker, and Balatro adds a fun, challenging layer of modifiers and risk that makes it awfully hard to to put down.

A Balatro screenshot. I have drawn a straight flush (diamonds) from several face-down cards.

I didn’t know that Lucinda Williams had a couple of rollicking cover albums, of The Beatles and Tom Petty. Man, I’m a cryer for Wildflowers.

Lucinda Williams poses like Tom Petty on his album cover for Full Moon Fever. She stands with a guitar over her shoulder, leaning forward like daring you to listen. Maybe a little smug? The photo of her is is monochrome and is shaded pink, yellow and green from top to bottom.

I’ve been hosting my little set of domains with Pair.com for nearly ten years (!), through a handful of small price increases; eight bucks a month to put my random junk online has always been fine. Now Pair is increasing my shared hosting plan to $14, nearly doubling it! Hmm.

Apple, I’m practically begging you to implement a multi-select editor in the viewer for activity data. When the Peloton app on my watch goes haywire and decides that I’m exercising from midnight to 3am – reader, I was not exercising – it would be nice to be able to selectively delete all those records instead of nuking the entire day.

A edit dialog on my iphone showing many rows of one-minute activity records

A screenshot from the Apple activity app, showing constant activity from about midnight to three am. I was not awake. This data is bogus.

I’m starting on some of my end of year data projects. First up, a bit of output from the summary visuals I’m building of my workout data! I know, I know, polar plots are bad data representations, but I really like the clock-like image for this depiction of workout times.

A radial bar plot, in a half circle design. It shows the number of times I worked out at different times of day throughout the year. I am heavily a morning workout person, with many 4am and 5am sessions.