Random
Retrocomputing and retro tech
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Bibliomania
I am a bibliophile. That is, not only do I love reading, I love books and all things associated with them. I can and do spend hours in used book stores and libraries; finding good ones is often a major goal when I visit a new city or country.
My all-time favorites in the US are Powell’s in Portland and Strand Books in New York. My favorite independents in the Bay Area include Bird & Beckett in Glen Park, Moe’s in Berkeley, Borderlands in the Mission, and City Lights in North Beach.
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You can read my occasional book reviews on Amazon
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And of course like all pretentious people I harvest quotes from my reading
Hobby projects
My coding projects ranging from partially useful (E-Z BART) to super useless. Knock yourself out. A few of interest:
- Bird of the Day mimics the page-a-day tear-off “Bird of the Day” calendar we have at home. We like to reveal the bird a little at a time to see who can guess its name first.
PogoVision, a photo-scrolling screensaver/app for Roku meant to imitate AppleTV’s screensaver mode. Discontinued because the free Roku app PhotoView for Google Photos does this as well as acting as a pretty decent album viewer.- Alexa BART app. “Alexa, ask BART when is the next train to downtown Berkeley.” … “Alexa, ask BART what train will get me to 16th and Mission by 7 pm.”
- Latex2ebook, a toolchain for the Unix-savvy to produce both beautiful PDF and functional AZW (Amazon Kindle format) from the same LaTeX sources.
- E-Z BART, which I made when BART revamped their mobile website and made it much more awkward to use