Went to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem with a friend today to see an exhibit titled Making History: 200 Years of American Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. It was a really interesting hodgepodge of American art. Here are some of my favorites.
Hey, bagaag.com is back! I’ve just moved my fledgling site to WordPress. The old site was essentially just a test bed for a hobby programming project. It was a CMS written first in PHP and then in Python to manage a Hugo site hosted on IPFS. I got it working nicely and then promptly lost interest. As often happens with my hobby coding projects, the fun part was over. I decided if I want to actually focus on content, I should just use WordPress. It’s easy. I know it. Customization is fairly straightforward. And if I feel like geeking out, there really are no limits to what can be done.
My daughter is Lucy Dacus’s number one fan, and she loves the Toy Story movies. So when I saw this photo of Lucy on tour, I had to fix it for her.
I took these during a crazy day trip to Manhattan with my daughter. We woke at 6am, drove 4 hours to get there, walked around for about 8 hours, then drove home.
Excalidraw is a simple but highly capable wireframe editor and drawing tool. It runs entirely in the browser and saves data to browser storage – no cloud service required. You can also save and load drawings to and from a local file. The software is free and open source. A reasonably priced paid version adds some optional niceties like access controls and cloud storage.
My favorite stage of a programming project is the initial creative act, figuring out what a piece of software should do, how it should look, and how it should be written. I often refactor wildly during this phase. For example, I completely scrapped the initial Python-based front end I had created for this project in favor of Tiny File Manager, a full featured file management UI in a single PHP file. It was fun getting to know that code and build a plugin system for it so I could add screens and navigation items without mucking too much with the source. But, having used it a bit, now I’m thinking a tree-based IDE-style UI will work better. Every good CMS has a content tree. So I’m going to mock up something for that in HTML/CSS/JS and see what works. This is why I code for fun on my own time: you can’t do this when you’re getting paid. Maybe something great will come of it, maybe not. Either way, I had a lot of fun along the way and learned some things, too. This is is what I refer to as code painting.
This topic reminds of a great poem by Frank O’Hara: Why I Am Not a Painter.
Instead of fireworks, Rockport, Massachusetts hosts a massive bonfire on Back Beach. As the blaze grows to staggering proportions, fire hoses douse it to maintain some semblance of control. This year, the fire became a monster raging against the fire hose. It looked like this for several minutes – pretty surreal.
Thank you to Florian Dahlitz for getting me over the hump on configuring a Python app in a container as a non-root user. My python app container now creates files in the volume mapped to my local drive as my local user rather than as root.
Great post calling out the growing apathy around government corruption.
I was cruising around this lovely personal website – another pixel artist – and was curious what tool she uses to create her art. It’s https://www.piskelapp.com/ – a fun and free web-based alternative to Aseprite that can save files in browser storage.