September 10,

back to the office (more often) and other autumn stuff

Next week, we go from two days a week in the office to three days. The old way was that half the employees came in on Mon/Wed and the other half on Tue/Thu. (I was in the Tue/Thu group.) The new plan is for everyone to come in Tue/Wed/Thu, with Monday and Friday being work from home days for everyone.

I’m not looking forward to it. I think I get a lot more work done from home, and I’m a lot more comfortable. In the office, even with only half the folks there, it can get pretty noisy, since almost all of our meetings are on Teams now. I generally need to keep my AirPods in with some music playing to drown out everyone else’s Teams calls and concentrate on my own work. And I’m not a big fan of driving 20 minutes each way just to sit in a cubicle for eight hours. I’ve probably made these complaints on this blog already at some point, but it always makes me feel a little better to vent about it.

I’m also a little worried about my own stamina. I’ve been finding that my in-office days are kinda exhausting, sometimes. Maybe I have some kind of medical problem, or maybe I’m just getting too old for this stuff. I don’t know. I guess we’ll see if I can manage three days in a row or not.

NFL

On a different subject, today is the first Sunday of the NFL season. So that’s cool. The Giants are on the Sunday night game and the Jets are on Monday night, so there are no local afternoon games. I’m pretty sure I’ll turn on whatever games are on, and just let them play in the background today. It’s a rainy day and I don’t have much else to do.

I spent a little time this morning trying to figure out what NFL-related content I can watch on my streaming services this season. I can still watch NFL Matchup on ESPN+, it seems. And NFL Primetime too. Apparently, Inside the NFL has moved from Paramount+ to the CW, which is a bit weird. I guess I can watch that on my TiVo then, if I can figure out when it airs. And I guess I can watch PFT Live on Peacock, if I need more football news.

I’ve been getting into sports enough recently that I’ve been flirting with the idea of signing up for cable again, or one of the cable-like streaming services that includes ESPN. But any of those would cost me way too much money, and the prices are going up on some of them soon too. So I’m trying to stick with just what I have now. That means I can’t watch stuff like the US Open men’s final today, which is only on ESPN, but I guess I can live with that.

Goodreads widget follow-up

And just a few minutes after my last post, I’ve figured it out: The Goodreads widget wasn’t working, because I had Privacy Badger enabled in my browser. Well, that answers a lot of questions.

And now that I can see what the Jetpack Goodreads widget does, I see that it is likely just a wrapper around the HTML/JS widget that I could have added directly in a code block. I’m going to leave it on the page for now, but I might drop it later.

Sigh. Well, back to that whole iced coffee idea. And lunch. Yeah, lunch sounds good.

WordPress widgets — On This Day and Goodreads

After updating to WordPress 4.6.1 recently, I also updated all my plugins, and decided to spend some time messing around with the site a bit.

First, I found that updating the On This Day plugin broke something; it started showing a PHP error. After looking at the code a bit, I figured out that just changing something in the widget config would fix the problem. If I was more ambitious, I would actually go ahead and see if I could fix the error in the PHP code, and maybe even see if I could get the original author to merge it in. But I don’t have the energy for that right now. We’re in the middle of a late summer heat wave, and I’m not up for PHP debugging right now. Maybe next week.

After messing with that a bit, I noticed that Jetpack had added a Goodreads widget recently. I like the idea of showing what I’m currently reading in the sidebar, so I added and configured it, but couldn’t get it to display anything. This is possibly because I have my Goodreads profile set to private. (Or at least partially private.)

I’d previously messed around with adding a Goodreads widget, using a general-purpose RSS widget, but (for some reason) had never added it to my live site. Looking back at that, I see that there’s a key associated with the RSS feed URL, so that’s probably the issue with the Jetpack widget; it doesn’t have the key (or anyplace to enter it in the widget config). And looking at the RSS widget that I’d experimented with previously, I see that I’d have to expose the key on my site to use that one. So I guess I should leave my “currently reading” list off this site, since I’m not sure what else somebody could do with that key.

Goodreads also has a customizable HTML/JavaScript widget that I could use, and which probably works with private profiles (without exposing the key), but I’m not sure I want to add that right now, since I don’t want to go down the road of starting to add miscellaneous JavaScript widgets all over my home page. (Been there; done that.) So if you want to know what I’m reading, you’ll have to add me as a friend on Goodreads, I guess.

After some spelunking into the Goodreads account settings, I’m a bit confused about all this though. I’m not entirely sure which stuff in Goodreads is public and which is private, and I’m pretty sure the “currently reading” list isn’t private. So I really think this is a rabbit hole I shouldn’t have gone down at all.

The weather app on my phone says it’s 86 degrees out, and feels like 96, so I should really stop messing around on the computer and go get an iced coffee or something.

Fun with the Raspberry Pi

I ordered a Raspberry Pi kit earlier this week, and it showed up in the mail yesterday. I ordered this kit from Amazon. It’s a nicely-packaged kit, with the Pi, a case, a power supply, a wifi dongle, an SD card, and a few other things.

The SD card comes with the standard NOOBS image on it already. My intention was to wipe that out and install Volumio, but I thought I’d give the standard setup a try, just to see how it worked. To do that, I had to hook the Pi up to a USB keyboard and mouse, and an HDMI monitor. My normal computer monitor doesn’t have HDMI, so I had to use my TV instead. That was a little awkward, since I don’t have a good surface for the mouse close enough to the TV, but I managed. The standard setup is quite easy, and doesn’t require an internet connection. Basically, it just allows you to set a few parameters, then it installs Raspbian Linux onto the SD card. From there, you can use the command line or start a GUI shell. I messed around with that for a while, then unhooked everything, so I could get Volumio installed.

To do that, I had to download the Volumio install image, and write it to the MicroSD card. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to do that, since I don’t have a MicroSD slot on my PC, but I managed to find a MicroSD to SD adapter in my pile of random memory cards, and used that to get the MicroSD card into my PC. From there, I followed the simple instructions on Volumio’s site, cross-referencing this useful blog post. You can set up Volumio without hooking up a monitor or keyboard. You just need to plug the Pi into a wired Ethernet connection to get the initial setup done. So I did that, and got it set up through the browser interface at volumio.local. I set up my wifi card, then unplugged the Ethernet cable, rebooted, and all was well. To test it, I copied a Paul McCartney album to a USB thumb drive and plugged it in. I also plugged headphones into the audio out jack. Volumio had no trouble seeing the USB drive, and the audio played through the headphones, no problem. The audio quality coming out of the standard output jack isn’t great though. (I also plugged it in to my receiver, to try that out, and it sounds OK there, but still not great.)

So I ordered a DAC with RCA output jacks from HiFiBerry this morning. And a new case from them too, since the one from CanaKit isn’t going to work with the DAC on top of the Pi. I’m hopeful that this will give me acceptable sound quality. Between the kit from CanaKit, and the stuff from HiFiBerry, I’ve now spent more than $100 on this project, so I’m going to feel a little stupid if it doesn’t sound at least as good as a $100 CD player.

The next part of the project is going to be figuring out how I want to get my music collection hooked up to the Pi. The USB thumb drive I used for testing was formatted as FAT, so I’m glad to see that I don’t have to use an EXT4 formatted drive, or jump through any hoops to get the Pi to recognize a FAT drive. I had bookmarked a good writeup on dealing with different file systems on the Pi, but I don’t think I’ll need to worry about it. So I should be able to use either a USB thumb drive, or a USB hard drive for my music. The thumb drive would be easier, since I won’t have to worry about power. I have a 32GB thumb drive that I’m not using, but that’s not quite big enough for everything. A 64GB drive would only cost about $20 and would be big enough to fit my main MP3 collection. I also have several USB hard drives gathering dust in my apartment, including a small 120GB drive that would probably be perfect for this. I’m not sure if the Pi would provide enough power for it though, so that could be an issue. So I guess the next part of this project, while I’m waiting for the DAC to get here, will be to experiment with hard drives and thumb drives.

keyboard macros

I’ve been using WinKey to manage system-wide keyboard macros on my Windows XP machines for awhile now. WinKey is a nice little program that simply allows you to launch programs by pressing a key combo involving the Windows key. I use Win-X to launch Firefox, for instance. I’ve had this running on all my home and work computers for the last several years, so I’ve really got these macros hard-wired into my brain at this point.

Unfortunately, WinKey doesn’t work on Vista (at least *I* can’t get it working), and is no longer being developed or supported by Copernic, the company that (at one point) wound up with the rights to it. (They didn’t develop it originally, but I don’t remember who did.)

I recently came across a program called AutoHotKey, which is a fairly powerful scripting environment for Windows keystroke macros and general automation. It *does* indeed work on Vista, and is being actively developed. And it’s open source! You do need to read at least a little bit of the documentation to get it to do what you want, but it’s not hard to figure out. For instance, this command:
#x::Run C:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxfirefox.exe
maps Win-x to launch Firefox.
And you can send keystrokes to the active window quite easily, so, for instance, this little script:
#+T::
FormatTime, CurrentDateTime,, MM/dd/yyyy h:mm tt
SendInput %CurrentDateTime%
return
pastes the current date and time into whatever app you’re currently using when you press Win-Shift-T.
You can just put all your little macros together in one text file, and put a shortcut to it in your StartUp group, and off you go. Neat!

I’ve been thinking about keyboard macros on the Mac, too. David Pogue did a column on PC and Mac macro programs a couple of weeks ago. There are a few interesting options on the Mac, but I haven’t had time to try any of them out yet.

Lord of the Rings

Went to see a Lord of the Rings presentation at Lincoln Center last night. Very cool, even if I didn’t get home until 2am! You can find a bunch of write-ups on it at TheOneRing.net. The Cave Troll rules! I can’t help being a bit geeky about this. It really looks like the LotR movies aren’t going to suck! Of course, now I’m going to have to re-read all the books, too. Where am I going to find time for that?