Blags

So I’m attempting to set up my music collection with airsonic and beets. So far airsonic works great… for the music which happens to be in a /artist/album/track folder structure and is properly tagged. So the most common solutions for getting your music organized this way are MusicBrainz Picard and beets. Picard is a non-starter for me because my music is on a headless server with only web interfaces and shell connections exposed.

So Valorant’s big Twitch takeover during the lockdown is old news now… I got into the beta pretty early. Sadly I didn’t have a lot of free time to actually play right after I got in. I did get 3 full matches in during my first week with a key. I realize for most gamers that isn’t a lot, but the first to 12 format is still a pretty big time commitment for me right now.

Within corporations there are attempts at innovation that move processes within the plane below. The hope is that every change will increase speed to market without affecting risk. However, in reality, for a process of adequate maturity, almost all changes will move along the line pictured below. Typically a negative symptom of this is a loop of process changes that repeats infinitely and goes something like this: Firm is at point A - medium risk and medium speed to market Firm finds a reason to consider this speed to market to be too slow (perhaps smaller more risk tolerant competitors are observed) Firm moves to point B via an “innovative new process”.

I have two books to return to the library today: Farsighted by Steven Johnson and Japanese Culture by Roger J. Davies. Until very recently I almost never read non-fiction books. I think school kind of ruined that experience for me and I’m only just now recovering. Farsighted The first of the two books, Farsighted - How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most, was a very entertaining read. It’s the kind of self help book that contains only a few small action items.

I really want to start making more stuff. To that end I’ve started writing down any ideas I have for things I need as they appear. I’ve posted whiteboards around the house to record stray thoughts and I keep my notebook close when I’m out in the world. One idea that I got was to create a key caddy, kind of like the ones that people keep next to their door if they have multiple key rings.

With much help from my friend Uriah I’ve been able to set up Pi-Hole and PiVPN for my phone. This will let me block Reddit and Hacker News. The combination of those two sites has latched onto the addiction centers of my brain to a physically harmful level. I’ve been losing sleep looking at memes… as ridiculous as that sounds. So what all did I do? First we gathered materials. Uriah provided me with a Pi Zero and a usb ethernet adapter.

From time to time I like to clear out some of my open tabs on my phone. I do a little write up of each one. You can see the last two iterations of this series here and here. This one is going to be a little different. I have a bunch of long-lived tabs open for a small number of categories. Iyashikei 癒し系 means healing or therapy in Japanese (source: Jisho.

From time to time I like to clear out some of my open tabs on my phone. I do a little write up of each one. You can see the previous iterations of this series here and here. And I just noticed that my last post in this series is missing a 0 in it’s path. sigh… Anyway, here are some of the longest running pages in my mobile browser right now!

I wrote a new blog post that outlines a number of techniques for decompiling and debugging AEM source code. You can [find it on my company’s engineering blog]https://web.archive.org/web/20230609044544/https://engineering.icf.com/decompiling-and-debugging-aem/)! Update 2025-04-08: It looks like the old ICF Engineering blog finally fell off the face of the internet. I’ve linked to the web archive version for now. I may repost the content here at some point in the future. I also noticed at least one website that has wholesale stolen the content word for word with no attribution, which is super frustrating.

I wrote a new blog post that outlines an a binch of little things AEM customizers can do to make their AEM instances shine. You can find it on my company’s engineering blog!