Copasetic Flow

 I mentioned that I'd made a pull request for datasette and Windows path handling, and then forgot to talk about what my fix involved. Basically, Datasette as it stands feels that colons have no business in file paths. Windows on the other hand? C:\ Consequently my pull request revolved around changing datasette/utils/__init__.py by adding the following code : The code checks for a Windows style path specification. If it finds it, it gently moves the rest of the code around that first offending colon.

 I... I just don't even know where to start with this. A fellow parenting blogger recently pointed me at a blog by a dad. The dad's blog is well done, well written, well thought out, and, and... Feels so much like my polar opposite in so many ways. Just, just, wow! I think every parent's views are valid. If it works for them, and it works for their kids, then it works. OK.... Wow... So... The post in question opined nostalgic about kids exiting a very delicate stage of life when they turn five. And.... He and I don't talk the same way about kids. I think kids are pretty rugged little people. It does nothing for me to think that they're fragile, delicate, in-danger, or need anything from me. Not even infants. Yeah, I know infants need lots of things from me, boy do I know, but it hurts me to think of them as some epitome of neediness. It doesn't make me feel important, and to be fair, I don't think it made the author of the article I read feel important eithe...

 I read blogs! It's my preferred method of tooling around the internet. I read Simon Willison's blog to fill me in on the latest in LLM AIs. I read Thomas Witherspoon's blog to hear about a variety of ham radio QRP (low power < 5 Watts) operations and POTA (Parkds on the Air) activations. I reach W6CSN's blog to keep abreast of what's going on POTA-wise around me here in San Francisco. I also find things that I think are super-cool that have nothing to do with what I set out to learn. For example, reading Simon's blog two days ago, I wound up at this really nice post from Andrew Stephens about well, reading blogs . So, that was kinda meta, but here's the cool part. I'm a huge Edward Tufte fan. Reading sheep.horse on a cell phone, I didn't notice the big reveal right away, but as I toodled around the site, I found it! Holy smokes! There's a CSS package that formats web documents like an Edward Tufte book! Or handout. I just learned about h...

 Project TouCans has had a big couple of months! It received a certificate of commendation in the GQRP building contest, as well as fourth place in the QRP division at the California QRP party! Both of these things surprised me a bit. I've been inundated since junior high school with the 'QRP can't do much' schtick, and well? It just ain't true!  TouCans is strung up on a dipole stretching from our roof to a wood pole mounted on our back fence. (Mota, the 11 year-old, and I levered a construction clamp over the lip of the roof using a broom handle from the kitchen window. I did all the window leaning... It was an adventure.) I didn't even realize the QSO party was the weekend it was, and yet that little pineapple can based rig came in pretty close to third! KO6BTY and I were also tickled pink to receive Certificates of Commendation in the GQRP construction competition! We've done a lot of work on the rig bringing it to it's completely wireless state a fe...

 It's been a busy and fun week again! Most of my time was spenting finalizing what the elevation profile Datasette enrichment would look like. I finally found the last piece of the puzzle laying around in a pile of Jinja template use practice. One of the goals this week will be to release the elevation package. I made my first pull request for an open source project, datasette, in this case. (I make them at workr, but this is my first foray into the wider world.)  ChatGPT provided the final kick to get the elevation maps plotted really eaisly. Subsequently, I learned about the Pyplot package and how to add labels to charts. I got a start back towards writing about dadding. I spruced up some writing I had lying around about cleaning the kitchen with the gang. I found another older piece that I love while checking out old blog entries here: Meerktas and Ravens . Oh, and then this one about what unschooling with toddlers lools like. Goals Release the elevation package Relea...

 This is a story from back in February. I wanted to share a cool moment in time that Mota, Tawnse, and I had on Monday. Daize had gone off to attend College Algebra, and I was working from the house. I walked into the kitchen and it looked like a portion of the recent bomb cyclone had landed in there. I had 25 minutes to kill, so I called Motaand Tawnse. When they arrived, I was already taking the recycling bag out to the garage. I asked them to empty the dishwasher and they got to work. When I returned, I moved everything off the stove into one sink. I asked them to load the dishwasher back up. While they were doing that, I got to work on scrubbing pans. As I did, I looked around the kitchen. I noticed a few dishes they’d missed, pointed it out, and they plopped those in as well. I asked them to check the rest of the house for dishes. While they were checking, I finished the pans, and got to work on cleaning the stove top. When they returned, I asked the two of them to get all the...

 I made my first ever pull request on GitHub this morning! The gang and I still mostly develop code on Windows boxes. It has more to do with the machines we have available to us on any given day than anything else. (The just-sit-down-and-type machine in our house is also for playing video games, so... Windows.) This has led to issues when using our Datasette enabled QSO logger and mapping applications .  Datasette on Windows has an issue with finding the SpatiaLite DLL file. The gang and I worked through the issues and documented our really clunky, blunt force, fix . The fix, however, amounted to changing the source code of Datasette itself on a per installation basis. That meant that if I moved to a new Windows machine I had to find the fix and re-implement it. Even worse, that meant that if I wanted to try something that worked only in a newer version of Datasette, I also had to reimplement the fix. That... Was a Lot. So, I was totally psyched when I got a little bit of ti...