Updates for July 2026

Here's what I've been up to during the month of July:

• We took a trip to San Diego at the start of the month to see some friends and visit the zoo down there.

• I installed a front basket on my main commuter bike and have been enjoying it, for the most part.

• We've moved furniture around in our bedrooms for the first time since settling into them.

• I've been researching and trying out sewing bags.

I started reading Busy Doing Nothing for the second time but haven't finished it yet. I did read a bunch of eclectic articles:

• Moving Car-Free as a Parent

  Driving is the default for the 95% of North Americans. This is just reality -- it is what most North American communities are built for, and depressingly it translates to a highly asocial and lonely experience for new parents [...]

  It's nice to see people try a different path through parenthood. I was pretty cautious biking with my daughter and didn't start in a trailer until she hit one year.

• The US Constitution Is For Simple Folk Still Burdened By The Belief That Words Have Meaning

  Real originalism means asking what the Founders would have wanted if they had lived long enough to become furious about anchor babies.

  This is the best summary I've seen for the state of America's higher courts.

• How Flock Cameras Wrongly Tracked Me for Days Over 'Stolen' Plates and Sent Police After Me

  Back in the Kohl’s lot, I was standing there with my hands up, still getting over the shock of throwing the Range Rover in reverse and seeing four cop cars materialize on the backup camera, lights blazing.

  I'm all for more enforcement of traffic laws (I see people breaking them every day), but the tech cannot be this capable and flawed.

• Accepted proposal: range over all command-line flags

  But *debug is false both when the flag was omitted and when the user explicitly set it to false. The parsed value alone cannot distinguish those cases.

  This is an interesting case where most of the command line flags libraries I've used (except the venerable getopt) fall short. To me, Go consistently accretes good ideas in its standard libray on a very minimal and frankly odd base layer.

• Server Migration

  I refused, and asked if I could speak to the engineers, which he in turn refused because, "They make hundreds of thousands of dollars. They don't get paid to take support calls. I get paid dollars an hour to do that." Then I was told it could take 24-48 hours to resolve.

  I also hosted with Media Temple initially (because it's what all the cool kids were doign) but dumped them when they were acquired by GoDaddy.

• Mr. Penumbra is up all night

  In the years since, the Kindle has matured and curdled ... the web has become an even more brutal arena ... and only one realm has remained truly, reliably apart. Only one realm has remained reliable, period. That’s the realm of the physical, of course.

  I love the home-scale production that Robin's getting out of his risograph machine and booklet maker, I just wish they weren't so crushingly expensive.

• Printing tiny photos for paper journals

  And the photos are stickers! So far I haven't printed something from this and not wanted the photo to be a sticker: wouldn't I want to stick it onto a postcard or in a notebook? The quality's totally fine but won't replace a desktop printer or a film photo.

  We bought a similar printer thinking we could use it to send updates to friends and families of our daughter, but it's not the most convenient tool. This seems like a good use of it that I might try for my bullet journals, though.

When July started we took a four-day trip to San Diego to see some friends. There was an obligatory visit to the San Diego Zoo for a day, then to Coronado on North Island as the town prepared for the Fourth of July, and then some relaxing hangout days. While we were there, we tried more vegan restaurants: Plant Power, Mr. Charlie's, Tacotarian, and Ben & Ester's. We capped off the trip with an evening at Kate Sessions Neighborhood Park near Pacific Beach.

Later in the month, I rearranged furniture in the bedrooms; it feels nice to have more open space in the main bedroom. My daughter loves her new wardrobe and moving her crib to the non-window side of the room lets us push it right up against the wall. I still haven't finished putting together all of the IKEA items, like the caster drawers. And we'll be upgrading our bed to a king size along with a refresh of our nightstands as soon as we can decide on them.

I bought some devices this month, like an Xteink X4 that's now running CrossInk. It's great to avoid all of the distractions of a phone, but I wish it could open books I'm borrowing from the library. I'd also like to set it up to dual-boot into Microslate so I can try typing on it with a Clicks Power Keyboard. For my birthday, my wife bought me (her) a Nintendo Switch 2 so we swapped out the old Switch in our living room. They really thought through the migration experience and almost all of our old Switch games carried over to the new device, along with our settings, saves, and screenshots. We've been enjoying Splatoon Raiders, Star Fox, and Mario Kart World. On the Steam Deck, I started a new Baldur's Gate 3 character and tried out Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which wasn't for me (I'm not a fan of quick-time reflex games).

My commutes lately have been delightful with a new front rack installed on my Kona Rove. It's much more convenient than a cavernous pannier for the amount of stuff I carry.

And finally, I've been exploring "MYOG" (Make Your Own Gear) for sewing bags and other sports/technical items. I bought a ZPP Kit from Ripstop by the Roll and sewed it up in a single evening, despite having to rip the first seam I sewed out a few times. We have a really nice sewing store near us that I've been able to stock up on supplies at. My next projects are a pouch for my wife's Freewrite Traveler and the LearnMYOG Everyday Fanny Pack.