Jared Smith

It's fine. Everything's fine.


    280

    One tough part of having a side project that is actually operational and relied-upon is that I can’t always just try new things on a whim. Like, I need things to work and work reliably. Might need a side project from the side project.

    280

    Oh do I feel this so much.

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    280

    Weather

    Four-panel view of reflectivity, storm-relative velocity, base velocity, and correlation coefficient from the KPAH weather radar showing a tight tornadic circulation approaching the radar site.

    Look out, KPAH…

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    280

    Weather

    National Weather Service radar from Memphis depicting a quasi-linear convective system and several tornado-capable supercells ahead of the line.

    Really impressive line of discrete supercells on the Memphis radar.

    280

    Much happier with the Mac Studio after making the decision to move forward with a fresh setup. Didn’t realize just how many barnacles I had accumulated with the prior install – everything is just smoother and better.

    280

    Now that I had a few minutes to import my Mastodon follows, Micro.blog is really taking shape quite nicely as my primary Fediverse presence. Kudos to @manton for how he’s rapidly evolved his product to be a first-class Fediverse citizen.

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    Tech

    If it ain't broke...

    Shiba Inu in a red harness enjoying the fall, blissfully unaware of the crimes being committed in its name. Photo by Jaycee Xie on Unsplash.
    Shiba Inus deserve so much better than this slander. Photo by Jaycee Xie on Unsplash

    The DOGE Boys are apparently going to rewrite the software that runs Social Security in six months, according to Makena Kelly’s reporting at WIRED.

    “Move Fast and Break Things” is such a scourge upon the software …

    280

    Well, at least nobody sent a Liberian flag in the war plans group chat.

    280

    I hereby decree that 88x31 buttons on websites are back in style.

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    280

    At least the book I co-authored in the mid-2000s lives on in LibGen! 🙃

    I don’t really have an issue with this, but what I do have an issue with is Meta training its AI on it, of course.

    LibGen results for author Jared W. Smith, showing three results for “Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress.”
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    280

    I’ve got my eye on you, storms.

    White bearded male keyed in over a satellite and radar composite of the southeastern continental United States under the Carolina Weather Group branding, looking very inquisitively at a line of storms.
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    Tech

    Personal

    The Apple Studio Display, A Few Years Later

    A poor photo of the Apple Studio Display box.

    Personal nerd and poor financial decision milestones were achieved today: I got a VESA-mountable Apple Studio Display to pair with my M2 Pro Mac mini. This is my first-ever Apple desktop display of my own. It’s been just a few hours, and I haven’t had much time with it, but so far, so …

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    280

    Fire temperature RGB satellite product from GOES-West depicting hotspots in the Los Angeles metro where fires are burning.

    The Hollywood Hills fire is showing up on the Fire Temperature RGB product from GOES-West. Not good.

    280

    Went out on a limb and joined Team Trackball (Logitech MX Ergo) over on the weather computer, where there’s limited room for mousing anyway. Getting the hang of it, though drawing on the screen will take some getting used to. The precision mode is nice, though, and may help.

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    280

    Ksox 20250108 0327 CC 0.4.

    Just a casual 85 MPH wind gust earlier northeast of Los Angeles earlier this evening. Unfortunately, the worst fears around wildfire conditions are verifying here.

    280

    I’m “oh my god I can’t believe that amazing CSS property is so widely supported” years old.

    280

    iOS 18.2 seems to have nuked all of my iPhone-to-Mac notification settings. Ugh.

    280

    In the process of making Micro.blog the center of my slice of the fediverse by migrating my Mastodon account following and followers here. Pretty excited about this – ActivityPub gives us a standards-based opportunity to think differently and break old habits around how we interact online.

    280

    Folks, it’s The Holiday Season™.

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    280

    If I ever find myself back in academia, this is how I’m writing my papers. Only way I can truly feel like I’ve achieved the “in-school” mindset.

    A screenshot of Microsoft Word 97 running on Windows NT 4.0 within a virtual machine on my MacBook Pro. Clippy is swaying within his box in the bottom left corner, anxiously awaiting my next command.

    280

    I’ve not been paying much attention to Threads lately, and the growth-hacking notifications have definitely been picking up steam. If there’s one thing Meta knows, it’s how to sound desperate when you ignore one of its platforms.

    280

    Instead of sleeping at a reasonable hour, I’m considering consolidating my personal fediverse presence on micro.blog to get the benefits of using my domain. Will want to migrate my Mastodon following and the like. Probably worth investigating during my holiday time off. (NERD.)

    280

    Cracked open the chswxbot parser this weekend for the first time in a while. Starting to add some more metadata parsing for each product. This effort begins with the coastal flood products, hopefully making those automated alerts more useful.

    I also need to do some better character-limit wrangling …

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    280

    Milton and I don’t exactly see eye to eye.