Finished reading: Prequel by Rachel Maddow 📚

All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.

The above quote is not from this book, but it’s what I kept thinking the whole time I was reading it. I learned a lot of history I was unaware of and obviously Maddow was pointing out the similarities to today’s political landscape

Took Thursday and Friday off last week, went to 4 baseball games, enjoyed watching the Padres play the Nationals and Orioles. Dylan Cease tossed a no-hitter to start my long weekend and the Padres took 3 out of 4. If I am lucky the Padres will be back in October to play the O’s in the World Series!

On CNN

A second longtime adviser said the only way Biden would even consider stepping aside — a move that is still very much an open question — is if he was presented serious data showing that he would not only likely lose his reelection bid, but also endanger down-ballot candidates in House, Senate and competitive local races across the country.

Ego.

Its been a few years since I have been backpacking so I’m going car camping soon to make sure all my gear is still functional and safe. I can tell i am out of practice because I can’t manage to fit everything in my pack like I could have before.

The worst part about going to Japan is having to leave. It will always be my favorite country and I look forward to the next time.

Even though I am not afraid of heights, my little brain was telling me to walk softly.

I’m not sure how else to say this but a spa/hot tub/bath filled with herbs and tea is amazing. I am so relaxed now.

Beach!

Can’t wait to get inside!

Beautiful park near my hotel in Tokyo.

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 can’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.

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.

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;
      };
    };
  };

Here are the books I finished reading in 2023.

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 📚

Halfway through the series, still enjoying it.

Finished reading: A Trail Through Time by Jodi Taylor 📚

Finished reading: A Second Chance by Jodi Taylor 📚

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.

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.

Finished reading: A Symphony of Echoes by Jodi Taylor 📚

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 📚

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