Omnium Mini Max at the Denny Farrell Greenway Bridge
I love this bike.
I love this pedestrian bridge. I travel across it often and its just a great peaceful place to look down at passing cars, people, and trains. If you ever see me and this bike, yell out and say hi! I might have stickers on me!
Graffiti artist VAYNE in Atlanta
VAYNE in his hometown of Atlanta.
A follow-up video to that insanely large VAYNE piece in Atlanta, GA. This video follows VAYNE as he travels around Atlanta painting new pieces. A great way to explore the city! :)
An AI journey to create a glass hotdog
I made some glass hotdogs.
A glass hotdog
First off, hotdog is one word. I need to remember that because every time I type the word, I 2nd guess myself about whether it should be “hot dog” (as in, a dog that is hot?) or “hotdog” (as in, the thing you eat).
Secondly, have you ever seen a glass hotdog? I haven’t. I’ve seen glass window decorations with a drawn hotdog over them, but I’m talking about a full-on glass object shaped like a transparent hotdog. I needed one recently and so I asked AI to make one. I won’t give away where these are from, but I was thinking that it’s possible I’ve been the only person in the world to ever as a computer for this type of abomination.
An early glass hotdog that wasn’t quite glass or hotdog.
None of these are perfect, and some of them are downright weird, but the path to understanding how a machine thinks of both a hotdog and glass object is truly the transformative journey. I felt like I learned a new type of language syntax or something.
Enjoy this collection of glass and glass-like objects shaped like hotdogs.
Silver Moon Bakery & Cafe in a fight to stay open on the UWS
Silver Moon Bakery & Cafe is in a legal dispute about their UWS location.
If you’ve been in the vicinity of 105th St and Broadway, you may have smelled the sweet and fresh aroma of the bakery lovingly known as Silver Moon Bakery & Cafe. The bakery is a destination for fresh bread and pastries and has been serving the community at that location since 2015.
Recent reporting at The New York Times however has mentioned a dispute with the landlord which accuses Silver Moon of not vacating the space after their lease was up and owing rent to the tune of over $194,000. The bakery’s monthly rent is reported to be over $33,000.
For now, Silver Moon Bakery & Cafe is still open and operating (I took these photos yesterday) but disputes like this could potentially shutter the business at any moment. One particularly interesting tidbit from the NYT article is that it seems like the business partner of Silver Moon Bakery & Cafe, Georgia Stamoulis, may actually be related to or part owner of the landlord company (Broadside) that is suing Silver Moon Bakery & Cafe! Very odd!
How to loosen a stuck ball joint on an articulating arm
Quick tip for stuck articulating arms with metal ball joints.
I use an articulating arm like this Smallrig one to mount some random accessories to my laptop station when I’m out in the field at work. But lately both of the ball joints have gotten a bit “sticky” due to the ocean breeze and water occasionally coming into contact with the joints. Short of buying a new arm which isn’t that expensive, I wanted to see if lock lube or metal lubricant would work to loosen the ball joint without losing the ability to later have the ball joint lock precisely in place.
Well, good news. The lock lube works! I picked up a small spray bottle of lock lube metal lubricant and sprayed the tiniest amount into the metal ball joints of my articulating arm and it instantly loosened it up when unlocked. It was like new! And more importantly, when I lock the articulating arm, the lube does not make the ball joint slip at all.
Namecheap domain forwarding with TLS/SSL and HTTPS support, via Cloudflare
How to forward your domain with a secure certificate for free.
Apologies for the super long title, but I just wanted to do a quick write-up for anybody that might be in the same situation as I was just a few days ago trying to wrap my brain around why basic domain forwarding via Namecheap wasn’t working correctly.
I use Namecheap as a domain registrar and don’t really use it for anything else like hosting services. When I have an idea for something, I generally buy the domain and forward it here if I haven’t exactly flushed out the idea yet. I know I don’t need to forward it anywhere, but I like doing it. But lately Namecheap has been having some forwarding issues because their basic forwarding service does not include a security certificate, which means forwarding to an HTTPS domain (as is common now) creates a huge lag and hang-up in the forwarding process.
I solved this by using Cloudflare’s free DNS service which includes a free SSL/TLS certificate.
Essentially, I removed Namecheap’s DNS servers entirely from the equation since their free service was not using a secure certificate and moved domain forwarding and email forwarding over to Cloudflare, all at no additional cost. I had no idea this was even a thing.
No transfer of domain registrar needed to take place. You just tell Cloudflare to assume handling of the DNS records and Cloudflare basically does the rest. After you add a domain, you get pretty in-depth analytics about your domain being forwarded. The same applies to emails and catch-all email accounts to with that domain.
Cloudflare’s options are quite extensive, but if you’re like me and just need a domain forwarding service WITH a SSL/TLS certificate at no charge, this is a perfect solution.
The world of Portland graffiti
The good guys and bad guys of the Portland graffiti world.
Graffiti artist GIMER has been in the news lately because after many years of dodging the authorities, he’s been caught and arrested. The Portland police say he was caught after new evidence emerged from a video interview he did with CHAOSTOWN last year in which GIMER, whose real name is James S. Fischel, was shown giving a tour of his stash house. There are some rumors that the CHAOSTOWN creators were responsible for giving information over to authorities, but obviously none of that is verified by anybody for now.
But since the police themselves referenced the video shown above, it’s safe to say that CHAOSTOWN isn’t gonna land any new interviews with graffiti artists for a while.
Video of an early demo version of The Sims
Watch this very early demo of The Sims from 1998.
The Sims is being celebrated at Metafilter today and they’ve unearthed this video from 1998 showing an early demo version of the game. I spent countless hours playing the original The Sims when it came out. I had bootlegged the game on IRC channels (yes, I am that old) in many parts over an internet connection that probably wasn’t any faster than 56kbps. It was such a fun game of design and torture, with seemingly endless possibilities of life trajectories at the click of the mouse.
The first version of The Sims, released in 2000, was surprisingly not that different from this 1998 demo version. Pretty cool to see it in such an early development phase.