Month: February 2026
-
Thirty-six
Read more…: Thirty-sixLast year was quite a year. Less than two weeks after my thirty-fifth birthday, I was in the hospital for five days from a blood clot in my kidney. That kicked off a year of focusing on my health. First, I had many specialist appointments for six months. I’m all good on the blood clot…
-
Weekend in the Catskills
Read more…: Weekend in the CatskillsAmanda, Charlie, and I spent last weekend in the Catskills, exploring the Phoenicia and West Kill areas. (Or, depending on how you look at it, the Esopus and West Kill watersheds.) I took along my camera and tried to capture some of the beauty of that region in the winter. Woodland Valley Rd bridge over…
-
Escarole White Bean Soup
Read more…: Escarole White Bean SoupThis week’s bean dish was a white bean soup with escarole and ham. I was going to make a vegetable soup with yellow eye beans, but when I was in the grocery store, I spotted escarole, which I don’t see in many stores around here, so I bought a head of it and resolved to…
-
Blizzard
Read more…: BlizzardI was curious why Fern last month wasn’t a blizzard and the one this week was. Apparently, the wind! From the National Weather Service: Blizzards are dangerous winter storms that are a combination of blowing snow and wind resulting in very low visibilities. While heavy snowfalls and severe cold often accompany blizzards, they are not…
-
FediBoost Plugin
Read more…: FediBoost PluginBrandon Kraft built a WordPress plugin that solves a core frustration in the fediverse: Sites have their own identities, but most of us already have separate identities in the fediverse, too. FediBoost automatically boosts posts from your site’s identity from your own identity in the fediverse. Kraft wrote about it here: It does what it…
-
On using AI in blogging
Read more…: On using AI in bloggingRight now, I don’t use AI to compose my blog posts. I sometimes use AI in the pre-writing ideation stage and later in the editing/review stage, but not the composing/“putting pen to paper” stage. Six months ago I might have made “not using AI in personal blogging” a principled stance, but my thinking has evolved…
-
Red Beans and Rice
Read more…: Red Beans and RiceAs we are coming up to Mardi Gras/Fat Tuesday, this week’s bean dish was Red Beans and Rice. This Tuesday is looking a little busy for us, so we opted to make it this weekend and invited some friends over for dinner. It was Valentine’s Day, so Amanda and Charlie set the mood with hand-painted…
-
made with love
Read more…: made with loveAmanda and her friend Megan have been working on a project to support the local immigrant community impacted by ICE. Hi friends. We’re excited to share a little something we’ve been working on for the past few weeks — after bedtime, during swim class, and on the couch while our families watch Cars (Charlie) or…
-
LaTeX to Gutenberg conversion
Read more…: LaTeX to Gutenberg conversionDo any mathematicians read my blog? Perhaps one or two of my former math professors or classmates? At work, I forked an old package that converts .tex files to WordPress-compatible HTML and updated it to generate modern Gutenberg markup for the WordPress block editor. I’d love help testing it out and identifying the rough edges.…
-
Action Scheduler clean up
Read more…: Action Scheduler clean upAction Scheduler is a library for triggering a WordPress hook to run at some time in the future. It is used in a lot of large plugins to handle background processing of large job queues. It is an extremely useful tool. Unfortunately, it is also easy for bugs to make the queue or logs explode…
-
Big Apple Brook Trout
Read more…: Big Apple Brook TroutTrout Unlimited is doing a citizen science project in our area: Environmental DNA sampling to locate hidden brook trout populations in the NYC suburbs: Fairfield, Westchester, Putnam, and Long Island. Their plan is to cover 400 miles of streams, starting with locations where there was historic Brook Trout presence, but no recent state sampling. Then…
-
The blog post I think about monthly
Read more…: The blog post I think about monthlyI’ve thought about this post from I Quant NY at least once a month for the past decade. I finally found the link again over the weekend. Here it is: Such a simple data analysis, essentially sorting a column in a spreadsheet, revealed a problem with how parking near bike lanes and hydrants are marked.…
-
Back cover photo in 2026 issue of Tenkara Angler
Read more…: Back cover photo in 2026 issue of Tenkara AnglerThe 2026 print issue of Tenkara Angler went live today: One of my photos from the fly swap post is on the back cover. Exciting! If you are into tenkara, the print issue is full of good stuff. Worth checking out.
-
Creamy Rio Zape Bean Dip
Read more…: Creamy Rio Zape Bean DipThis week’s bean dish is an appetizer for the Super Bowl party we are going to this afternoon. I doubled the recipe on this Rio Zape bean dip from Rancho Gordo: I’ve made a couple different recipes with Rio Zape beans, and they are the tastiest bean varietal I’ve tried so far. Velvety texture and…
-
Three Amaro Nonino cocktail recommendations
Read more…: Three Amaro Nonino cocktail recommendationsI love amaro, and Amaro Nonino is a good gateway amaro if you haven’t yet explored the category. Here are three excellent cocktails in which to enjoy Nonino. All of these are in books on my shelf, but alas, you can’t link to books, so I linked to online sources. Fallback This is a wonderful…
-
Using AI for email triage
Read more…: Using AI for email triageFor the first time in a decade, I switched email apps. I’ve been a longtime Airmail user, but I moved to Spark for both macOS and iOS. The AI features are what pushed me over the edge. The ability to prompt things like these have been incredibly helpful for keeping my inbox tidy: It is…
-
Uniqlo Crossbody Bag
Read more…: Uniqlo Crossbody BagWhen I’m out on photo walks, I like to have both a wide lens and a zoom lens with me, but I don’t want to carry my big gear bag. I couple weeks ago I picked up a Crossbody Bag at Uniqlo for $25, intending to use it on park outings and woods walks with…
-
Automatically fixing links with the Wayback Machine
Read more…: Automatically fixing links with the Wayback MachineBroken links on the web are inevitable, but losing valuable context doesn’t have to be. I’ve been working on a plugin at work, in conjunction with the Internet Archive, to help combat link rot on WordPress sites. I consider this a “set it and forget it” plugin. One it is running, you don’t need to…
-
Hudson Ice Floes
Read more…: Hudson Ice FloesAfter picking Charlie up from school yesterday, we went on a drive to photograph the ice floes on the Hudson River. One of my favorite things when we lived on the Yonkers Waterfront was seeing the ice floes in the middle of winter. We haven’t had much ice the last couple years, so I was…
-
How NYC handles snow
Read more…: How NYC handles snowIt is common knowledge that NYC puts blades on garbage trucks to plow snow: One thing I didn’t consider is that switching to electric garbage trucks impacted their effectiveness as snow plows. My friend Trevor, who designs and installs efficient energy systems in buildings in NYC, told me a few other things this weekend about…