I am going to Japan next week and will be posting most of my pictures on https://zachstravels.com so that I don’t flood my normal site with posts. I will still post a few here, but that site will be the home for my travel pictures from now on.

I can never sleep when I need to and am always tired when I canโ€™t. What punishment!

I was talking to a coworker the other day and mentioned the digital camera I had that used 3.5 inch floppy disks. He thought I was joking. I was not.

sony digital camera with floppy disk drive

Took my boys to the game store to play the prerelease of the new Star Wars TGC. They had lots of fun and everyone was so nice to them.

I track the books I read on my blog and have loose goals of how many books I want to read a year, but I have been rereading the Stormlight Archive books this year in preparation for the release of book 5. Questioning if I should count them or not.

NixOS Grafana Tailscale Auth

It took me a while to figure out how to configure an auth proxy on Grafana in a NixOS config, turns out it was really easy. I was doing everything right except wrapping auth.proxy in quotes.

services.grafana = {
      ...
      "auth.proxy" = {
        enabled = true;
        header_name = "Tailscale-User-Login";
        header_property = "username";
        auto_sign_up = true;
        sync_ttl = 60;
        whitelist = "127.0.0.1";
        headers = "Email:Tailscale-User-Login Name:Tailscale-User-Name";
        enable_login_token = true;
      };
    };
  };

Year in books for 2023

Here are the books I finished reading in 2023.

No Time Like The Past A Trail Through Time A Second Chance A Symphony of Echoes Just One Damned Thing After Another The Internet Con The Sunlit Man Klara and the Sun Yumi and the Nightmare Painter The Frugal Wizardโ€™s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England Astrophysics for People in a Hurry Waking Up to What You Do On the Origin of Time Chip War Ordinary Wonder Sapiens The Lost Metal Clear and Present Danger Tress of the Emerald Sea The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen

Had a goal to read 24 books this year, going to fall four short as I have not read anything cover-to-cover since the beginning of the month. Hard to read for fun when I am trying to write a non-fiction book at the same time.

Finished reading: No Time Like The Past by Jodi Taylor ๐Ÿ“š

Halfway through the series, still enjoying it.

Finished reading: A Trail Through Time by Jodi Taylor ๐Ÿ“š

Finished reading: A Second Chance by Jodi Taylor ๐Ÿ“š

Book #3 was action packed, I was surprised to find how much of the book was left when I thought it was nearly done (an ebook problem), but the story was great and the ending was worth it. Really pulling out all the stops in the time travel genre.

Linux Finerprint Reader and Lid State

I recently setup fprintd on my laptop so that I could use the fingerprint reader for login and unlocking 1Password. It worked well until I plugged my laptop into the dock and closed the lid. It was unfortunately still prompting me for a fingerprint, even when I did not have access to the reader.

After a search I found an article about how someone disabled the usb device on lid close so that it would stop this from happening. I only needed to find the correct device to disable. It was not listed in lsusb as a fingerprint reader, but the Archwiki had the information I needed. After that I just needed to find where it was in the device tree.

$ grep 06cb /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/idVendor
/sys/bus/usb/devices/3-3/idVendor:06cb

After adding the the following NixOS config everything worked just how it should.

services.acpid = {
    enable = true;
   lidEventCommands = ''
    grep -q close /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state
if [ $? = 0 ]; then
    echo 0 > /sys/bus/usb/devices/3-3/authorized
fi

grep -q open /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state
if [ $? = 0 ]; then
    echo 1 > /sys/bus/usb/devices/3-3/authorized
fi

exit 0
    '';
  };

My daughter’s soccer season ended today, the team came in first place in their division. My youngest season end tomorrow and a win guarantee the same. I had to fill in for his coach for a lot of the season so I was coaching both groups and am extremely proud of everyone.

My daughter and I at our last soccer game of the season.

Finished reading: A Symphony of Echoes by Jodi Taylor ๐Ÿ“š

The Chronicles of St Mary’s Book 2

This one was not as fun as book one but that maybe because I was more aware of where it was going. This suspense and mystery of the first added to the fun. I still enjoyed it and look forward to reading the rest of the series.

Finished reading: Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor ๐Ÿ“š

A friend recommended this series as something light and fun to read. First book delivered on that promise. Several more to go.

Finished reading: The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow ๐Ÿ“š

The topic was interesting, but I assumed the “fix” would be more grassroots than it was. I also did not really find the suggested solutions to be feasible or realistic. It’s a bummer because the internet really is broken but this book didn’t help solve it to my mind.

Finished reading: The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson ๐Ÿ“š

Great way to end the Kickstarter set. The whole Cosmere is great, but the world of Roshar and Way of Kings will always be my favorite. Reading a story about the struggles of one of these heros was wonderful.

Oh, no! YouTube TV has multiview for news now. Fox, MSNBC, CNN, and BBC News. This is not going to be good for the news junkie in me.

Finished reading: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro ๐Ÿ“š

Iโ€™m not sure how I feel about this book. Interesting story, but I feel like so many things were left unanswered. Iโ€™m not sure yet if that was the intention or not. It will definitely be on my mind a bit longer and may require a reread again one day.

Finished reading: Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson

I really enjoyed this story and for the second time in the Secret Projects again the narrative form as told by everyone’s favorite Cosmere character.

๐Ÿ“š

Finished reading: The Frugal Wizardโ€™s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson ๐Ÿ“š

This was a fun story, I would love to read more of this world.

Finished reading: Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson ๐Ÿ“š

Short and Fun. Tyson has a great way of educating people on the topic which is always interesting.

Finished reading: Waking Up to What You Do by Diane Eshin Rizzetto ๐Ÿ“š

So when we witness some of the atrocities in the world that we have of late, it seems to me that what we are witnessing, in part, is what happens when an individualโ€™s fear, hopelessness, powerlessness, and so forth, get recognition within a larger group. The individualโ€™s reactions to those experiences are generalized and legitimized, at least within the group, and any hope of self-inquiry is lost.

If its not clear by my posts, I have not done a single technical thing after work hours as of late. I get done working, do soccer stuff for the kids if the day requires it, and then I read a book. Not sure how long this will keep up, but I do feel better this way.

Finished reading: On the Origin of Time by Thomas Hertog ๐Ÿ“š

This was light on actual science and heavy on storytelling but still had some interesting ideas and thing to think about.