virtualwolf – Page 7

Christmas 2017

29 December 2017virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

Christmas and Boxing Day this year were pretty great. My sister and her husband and kids were able to make it up from Nowra again, so we had the family Christmas at my parents’ place with everyone. My niece Arya, now three and a half, is GODDAMN ADORABLE. She’s totally happy to just go off and play by herself, and there wasn’t a single tantrum the whole time we were there either. Lily and Scarlett were happy to hang out with each too and got along very well.

It was interesting to see that Scarlett’s reading is definitely not at the same level as Lily’s was at the same age… Lily was eight when I posted this but she was absolutely tearing through pretty much everything, whereas Scarlett was struggling a little to read the jokes inside the Christmas crackers.

Beanie was terrific, he mostly just wandered around keeping an eye on what everyone was doing and didn’t bark once. Arya was a afraid of him to begin with, because he was so excited to see someone vaguely at his height that he kept jumping up on her and trying to lick her face! My sister’s dog at home isn’t one for jumping, so Arya wasn’t used to that. She got over it eventually, though, and was able to sit down and give him scritches.

I’ve been a bit stuck for what to get for Christmas and birthdays of late, so I’ve asked for mostly just books. This year’s haul:

So that should certainly keep me occupied for a while!

We went back over on Boxing Day for mum’s birthday, and went down to Collaroy Beach in the afternoon. It was completely overcast but the weather was otherwise glorious… temperature in the mid-20s and a lovely breeze. There were more photos, of course, and I gave the 135mm lens a good workout for once!

Photographical style

17 December 2017virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

I never really thought of myself as having a particular “style” to my photos, but I was looking back at my old photos — originally specifically from Christmas and then just more generally all of them — and I’ve realised in the last year or two I’ve very much moved towards a lighter “high-key” style where I bring the shadows up and even bump the exposure of the whole photo by ⅓ to ⅔ of a stop or even more, to get a nice light airy feel to them.

Have a look just at my Christmas albums to see what I mean.

It’s even more obvious when going back and looking at all my photos as a whole! My photos from our trip to Boston in 2012 are a good example, they’re all super-saturated and high-contrast, with really dark shadows. I still have all the original RAW files from that trip, but I don’t want to go back and start re-editing photos lest I go down the path of George Lucas and just totally ruin everything with my meddling. 😛

A holiday in Perth

24 September 201717 September 2018virtualwolfTravel / WordpressLeave a comment

We went to Perth for a week last week, and it was damned lovely! A friend of mine, Mat, who I’ve known for over fifteen years and originally met through the now-mostly-defunct Everything2, lives over there and was able to offer some advice on places to eat at and suburbs to stay in.

We arrived on Saturday and stayed in a house in Highgate, which is about a 10-15 minute walk from the city itself. Less than a block away is Hyde Park, which is lovely, and so green (Perth has had like a month or two straight of rain, versus the next-to-none that Sydney’s had).

There’s a bunch of street art all around the place as well, and lots of interesting buildings to take photos of (full album is here).

On Sunday we visited Fremantle, to check out the markets there and hopefully get a view of a sunset over the ocean (something we’ve never seen given both Kristina and I grew up on the east coasts of our respective countries). It was indeed getting very nice, but sadly the clouds moved in right as the sun was getting low to the horizon.

Fremantle is the main cargo port for Perth, so there were the giant cargo cranes there and also a massive submarine in dry-dock (have a look to the right of the second photo)!

Monday was spent first at the Western Australian Botanic Garden and then wandering Northbridge and the CBD itself.

The Garden is massive although there’s a lot of just regular bushland as well as flower beds.

Northbridge was neat, there’s a lot of laneways and little alleys, and most of them have art on the walls, often on a very large scale.

Those last two would have been probably four stories high!

We wandered through the CBD itself as well, had dinner at Durty Nelly’s Irish pub (highly recommended, the food was incredible), then continued wandering after night had fallen.

On Tuesday we visited Rottnest Island! We made the mistake of taking a bus tour, which was filled with loud, obnoxious, racist boomers, and we only stopped to actually get off the bus twice. Otherwise we were driving past all this wonderful terrain and the occasional quokka, and everyone was snapping shitty photos out of the bus windows.

Thankfully that only lasted an hour and a half, and we were able to go visit a colony of quokkas that were all of about ten minutes from the main buildings on the island, and OH MY GOD they are adorable! They have no natural predators on the island so they were pretty well unafraid of people and we were able get up super-close to them.

The water around the island is crystal clear.

Tuesday night, we had dinner in Northbridge at a Mexican restaurant called La Cholita, and holy crap if you’re in Perth you need to visit it. The food is amazing.

Afterwards we went for another wander around the area and snapped some photos.

Wednesday was spent briefly at the Araluen Botanic Park (briefly, because Kristina’s legs were massively hurting from crouching down and getting up constantly on Tuesday while we were visiting the quokkas and the Botanic Park was filled with lots of hills), and then a leisurely wander through East Perth.

The weather starting turning a bit crap on Thursday, so we visited Mat’s sister and her boyfriend on their rural property and just hung out there with their horse Archie and hilariously uncoordinated Maremma sheep dog Iorek, then went back and played some Diablo III.

I can’t believe how well-timed the trip was, we booked it back in July and the week before the trip was almost non-stop rain and it’s now back to raining again for the next week! There would have been so much we wouldn’t have been able to see if the weather had been awful.

A vehicular upgrade

29 August 201724 September 2017virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

We bought a brand-new car today! \o/ It’s an extremely handsome-looking Kia Cerato hatchback in dark metallic grey.

We’d been toying with the idea for a little bit, then Kristina came across some videos of crash tests comparing somewhat older (from ~2000-ish, which is exactly what our current Corolla is) cars impacting with newer ones. They’re nothing like the utter crumpling of the cars from the 1970s, but still somewhat alarming. She did a bunch of research and found that the current Kias are extremely well-regarded and reliable, and it turns out there’s basically nothing else in the same price range that offer as much power and features; the equivalent cars like the Corolla and Civic and such were all several thousand dollars more, with less power and fewer included features. The Cerato has a 7-year warranty as well, which seemed to be more than most other cars.

Speaking of power (112kW and 192Nm to be exact), we took one for a test drive on Sunday… I put my foot down and was accidentally doing 70km/h almost immediately! There’s a hell of a lot of room as well, it’s only marginally larger on the outside compared to our Corolla, but it’s so spacious inside. I’m excited about having a hatchback again too, there’s been a few situations where we were trying to put something into the boot and it just wouldn’t fit. Now we can go to town and put the back seats down and put EVERYTHING in it! *maniacal laughter*

We’re going to keep the old Corolla for a while just to go to and from the station in, because parking there means the car is permanently covered in dust thanks to all the construction going on, and when it rains everything turns to mud and the trucks going along the road just splash mud across everything.

A photographical upgrade

22 August 201723 August 2017virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

Last Wednesday, we upgraded from our trusty Canon EOS 7D to a brand-new Canon EOS 5D Mark IV! It’s a hell of an upgrade in terms of basically every single aspect… the 7D originally came out in 2009 and the 5D4 was only last year and is full-frame to boot, 18 megapixels versus 30, and the 5D4 also has the insanely awesome autofocus system from Canon’s flagship ~$8k-for-the-body-alone EOS 1DX.

I fairly obsessively tag my photos on Flickr so it’s easy to find things, and the final tally for photos taken with the 7D is 2641!

The very first photo taken was of this flower at my parents’ place, when I got our original 35mm f/2 lens for my birthday in 2010 (the camera and lens are not mine alone, both Kristina and I share it equally, but getting the lens for my birthday was a handy way to not have pay the entire cost of it ourselves :P).

It’s difficult to pull only a handful of favourite photos out of twenty-six hundred, but these would definitely be amongst them, in many cases more for the memory than any particular quality of the photograph…

Kristina being nibbled by a horse on our first wedding anniversary—

Meerkats warming themselves at Taronga Zoo—

Dan looking right at a well-placed “Look right” sign—

Kristina looking stunning with our ring-flash—

Lily writing her name—

The train tunnels at Wynyard—

Lily feeding the lorikeets—

A toothy grin—

Christmas excitement—

The first photo taken in our new house—

Kristina being extremely nudged by a calf at Featherdale—

My very first photo of Beanie when we got him—

Nanny at Christmas hugging one of Lily’s presents—

Beanie in the office—

One of the several actresses we got in at work one Halloween, who were done up as zombies and CREEPY AS FUCK—

Kristina cracking up at how ridiculous Beanie is—

Lily and Scarlett’s matching bears at Christmas—

Family photo—

The fantastically creepy decorations and lighting for the latest Halloween at work—

Playing around with coloured gels on our flashes with Adam and Stacey—

Beanie playing with his best friend Leo—

The extraordinarily epic storm aftermath we had—

A photo walk we did at work one lunch where we had some volunteers to do a pseudo-modelling shoot—

Leo and Beanie zooming down the hall—

Wandering around Barangaroo before going to the Maritime Museum—

We sold the 7D to friends, so it’s definitely going to continue on in a good home. It was an absolute workhorse, I didn’t think to check the shutter count before we sold it but it never once gave any sort of trouble whatsoever. Meanwhile, we’ve already started taking new memories with the 5D Mark IV and I’d say we ought to get at least 10 years out of it if not more.

Bandcamp is brilliant

13 August 2017virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

For those unaware, Bandcamp is essentially a more indie iTunes Music Store—they don’t have any of the huge music labels there—but with a twist… you can stream entire albums before buying them (as opposed to the 90-second previews you get in iTunes), and a significantly larger percentage of the money you pay to them goes directly to the artist (Bandcamp says around 75-80%).

I found out about it around the start of this year, and it has me discovering and buying way more new music than I had previously. From 2013 to 2016, I’d added 30 albums to iTunes from various sources… this year so far I’ve bought 34 on Bandcamp! They have an iOS app that lets you browse artists by tag (usually genre, like “black metal” for instance, but there’s things like “female-fronted metal” that spans different genres, and really whatever else users have tagged the artist with), so I’ll spend an hour here and there just going through listening to new artists and adding albums to my wishlist, then once or twice a month will go back and buy a few of them.

One of the best bits is that the artists themselves set the prices and you can pay more if you’d like, and some don’t even have a minimum price. The highest I’ve come across so far us US$9.99 (currently about AU$12.50), which is a good bit cheaper than the standard AU$16.99 price you see on iTunes, and a lot have been closer to US$5.

They’ve also done some fantastic things like donating all their proceeds for a day when Trump tried his so-called “Muslim ban” back in January, and more recently doing a similar thing with the proposed ban on transgender service members in the US military.

So basically, if you like music and supporting artists, stop buying music anywhere else and start buying it on Bandcamp!

Adventures with Docker

6 August 20177 December 2023virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

For a few years now, the new hotness in the software world has been Docker. It’s essentially a very-stripped-down virtual machine, where instead of each virtual machine needing to run an entire operating system as well as whatever application you’re running inside it, you have just your application and its direct dependencies and the underlying operating system handles everything else. This means you can package up your application along with whatever other crazy setup or specific versions of software is required, and as long as they have Docker installed, anyone in the world can run it on pretty much anything.

The process of converting something to run in Docker is called “Dockerising”, and I’d tried probably two or so years ago to Dockerise my website (which was at the time still in its Perl incarnation), but without success. Most of it was not properly understanding Docker but also Docker’s terminology not being hugely clear and information on Dockering Perl applications being a bit thin on the ground at the time.

My new job involves quite a lot of Docker so I figured I should probably have another crack at it, so I sat down in June and managed to get my website running in a Docker container! The two-or-so-years between when I tried it last and now definitely helped, as did having had a little bit of experience with it in the new job.

I think the terminology was one of the bits that I struggled with most, so maybe this explanation will help someone… you have a Docker image, that’s basically a blueprint for a piece of software and all its associated dependencies. From that image (blueprint), you start up one or more containers which are the actual running form of the image. If one container dies (the application inside crashes or whatever), you don’t care and just start up another one and it’s identical each time. To build your own image, you start with a Dockerfile that tells Docker exactly how to construct your application and all the different parts that are required to support it (see my Lessn Archive’s Dockerfile for an example). There really wasn’t any substitute for actually going in and doing it; by struggling and failing I eventually got there in the end.

Since my initial success with my website, I’ve gone on to put both my old site archive and my URL shortener in Docker containers as well! Next stop is Kristina’s website, but that’s still using Perl and Mojolicious and my initial attempts have not been successful. 😛

Internet history

16 July 201716 July 2023virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

On Twitter recently, Mark had downloaded the whole archive of his Twitter account’s history and had been poking through it and randomly retweeting amusing old tweets. I downloaded my own Twitter history and quickly realised that a lot of the old things I’d linked to weren’t accessible because I’d been using my own custom URL shortener (this was before the days of Twitter doing their own URL shortening) and it wasn’t running anymore. Fortunately I’d had the foresight to take a full copy of all of my data and databases from Dreamhost before I shut down my account, and one of those databases was the one that had been backing my URL shortener. A quick import to ~~PostgreSQL~~ Workers KV and a hacky ~~Node.js~~ Cloudflare Workers application later, it’s all up and running! I’m under no illusions that it’s almost ever going to be accessed by anyone except me, but it’s nice to have another part of my internet history working. I’ve been hosting my own website and images and whatnot (things like pictures I’ve posted on my blog née LiveJournal, or in threads on Ars Technica) in one form or another since about 2002, and the vast majority of those links and images still work!

Speaking of my website, about four years ago now I went and tried to collect all my old websites into a single archive so I could look back and see the progression. The majority of them I actually still had the original source code to, though my very first one or two have been totally lost. The earliest I still have is from March of 1998 when I was not quite fifteen years old! I started out with just HTML, then discovered CSS and Javascript rollover images, and then around 2001 I started using PHP. I had to go in and hack up some of the PHP-based sites in order to get them to work, and oh dear god 18-year-old me was a FUCKING AWFUL coder. One of the sites consisted of a bit over three thousand lines in a single file, with all sorts of duplication and terribleness, and every single one of the sites that was hooked into MySQL had SQL injection vulnerabilities. I’m very proud of just how much my code has improved over the years.

I went back this weekend and managed to recover another handful of sites, and also included exports of the Photoshop files where the original site source wasn’t available. I’ve packed them all up into a Docker container (I’ll write another post about my experiences with Docker at some point soon) and chucked them up on archive.virtualwolf.org for the entire Internet to marvel at how terrible they all were! There’s a little bit more background there, but it’s a lot of fun just looking back at what I did.

Better Raspberry Pi audio: the JustBoom DAC HAT

21 June 201720 February 2020virtualwolfRaspberry Pi and microcontrollers / WordpressLeave a comment

I decided that the sound output from the Pi’s built-in headphone jack wasn’t sufficient after all and so went searching for better options (a DAC—digital-to-analog converter).

The Raspberry Pi foundation created a specification called “HAT” (Hardware Attached on Top) a few years ago which specifies a standard way for devices to automatically identify and configure a device and drivers that’s attached to the Pi via its GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output) pins. There’s a number of DACs now that conform to this standard, and the one I settled on is the JustBoom DAC HAT. It’s a UK company but you can buy them locally from Logicware (with $5 overnight shipping no less).

The setup is incredibly simple: connect the plastic mounting plugs and attach the DAC to the Pi, then start it up and edit /boot/config.txt to comment out the default audio setting:

#dtparam=audio=on

Then add three new lines in:

dtparam=audio=off
dtoverlay=i2s-mmap
dtoverlay=justboom-dac

Then reboot. (If you’re running Raspbian Stretch or newer, the i2s-mmap line should not be added).

To say that I’m impressed would be an understatement! I didn’t realise just how crappy the audio from the Pi’s built-in headphone jack was until I’d hooked up the new DAC and blasted some music out. I’m not an audiophile and it’s hard to articulate, but I’d compare it most closely to listening to really low-quality MP3s on cheap earbuds versus high-quality MP3s on a proper set of headphones.

If you’re going to be hooking your Pi into a good stereo system, I can’t recommend JustBoom’s DAC HAT enough!

Raspberry Pi project: AirPlay receiver

16 June 201713 August 2017virtualwolfRaspberry Pi and microcontrollers / WordpressLeave a comment

I bought a Raspberry Pi almost exactly a year ago, intending on eventually replacing my Ninja Block and its sometimes-unreliable wireless sensors with hardwired ones (apart from the batteries needing occasional changing, there’s something that interferes with the signal on occasion and I just stop receiving updates from the sensor outside for several hours at a time, and then suddenly it starts working again). To do that, I need to physically run a cable from outside under the pergola to inside where the Raspberry Pi will live and I don’t really want to go drilling holes through the house willy-nilly. I want to eventually get the electrician in to do some recabling so I’m going to get him to do that as well, but until then the Pi was just sitting there collecting dust. I figured I should find something useful to do it with, but having a Linode meant that any sort of generic “Have a Linux box handy to run some sort of server on” itch was already well-scratched.

I did a bit of Googling, and discovered Shairport Sync! It lets you use the Raspberry Pi as an AirPlay receiver to stream music to from iTunes or iOS devices, a la an Apple TV or AirPort Express. We already have an Apple TV but it’s plugged into the HDMI port on the Xbox One which means that to simply stream audio to the stereo we have to have the Xbox One, TV, and Apple TV all turned on (the Apple TV is plugged into the Xbox’s HDMI input so we can say “Xbox, on” and the Xbox turns itself on as well as the TV and amplifier, then “Xbox, watch TV” and it goes to the Apple TV; it works very nicely but is a bit of overkill when all you want to do is listen to music in the lounge room).

Installing Shairport Sync was quite straightforward, I pretty much just followed the instructions in the readme there then connected a 3.5mm to RCA cable from the headphone jack on the Raspberry Pi to the RCA input on the stereo. It’s mentioned in the readme, but this issue contains details on how to use a newer audio driver for the Pi that significantly improves the audio output quality.

The only stumbling block I ran into was the audio output being extremely quiet. Configuring audio in Linux is still an awful mess, but after a whole lot of googling I discovered the “aslamixer” tool (thanks to this blog post), which gives a “graphical” interface for setting the sound volume, and it turned out the output volume was only at 40%! I cranked it up to 100% and while it’s still a bit quieter than what the Apple TV outputs, it doesn’t need a large bump on the volume dial to fix—there’s apparently no amplifier or anything on the Raspberry Pi, it’s straight line-level output. The quality isn’t quite as good as going via the Apple TV, but it gets the job done! I might eventually get a USB DAC or amplifier but this works fine for the time being.

On macOS it’s possible to set the system audio output to an AirPlay device, so you can be watching a video but outputting the audio to AirPlay, and the system keeps the video and audio properly in sync. It works extremely well, but the problem we found with having the Apple TV hooked up to the Xbox One’s HDMI input is that there’s a small amount of lag from the connection. When the audio and video are both coming from the Apple TV there’s no problem, but watching video on a laptop while outputting the sound to the Apple TV meant that the audio was just slightly out of sync from the video. Having the Raspberry Pi as the AirPlay receiver solves that problem too!

UPDATE: Two further additions to this post. Firstly, and most importantly, make sure you have a 5-volt, 2.5-amp power supply for the Raspberry Pi. I’ve been running it off a spare iPhone charger which is 5V but only 1A, and the Pi will randomly reboot under load because it can’t draw enough power from the power supply.

Secondly, the volume changes done with the “alsamixer” tool are not saved between reboots. Once you’ve set the volume to your preferred level, you need to run “sudo alsactl store” to persist it (this was actually mentioned in the blog post I linked to above, but I managed to miss it).