Corey Snipes

A new phone protector arrives in the mail today, which means I can finally activate my GrapheneOS device for everyday carry. I will keep the iPhone around the house for working with family screentime and media rental stuff, at least for now. Probably this moves to an iPad on the shelf eventually. I'm using a Pixel 8a from eBay, $150 (with a minor crack on the glass). Setup required a bunch of steps, but I just walked through them as…

I use Publii for website content management. This week, inspired by the flurry of activity around the new human.json protocol, I decided to add it to my website. Here’s the process I followed. I'm currently editing the human.json file by hand, which you'll need to do as well. Stepping through... Make list somewhere convenient. Start with a couple of websites that you know and trust. Don't forget to include the leading 'https://'. At the time of writing, this is required…

Normal Cleveland things. This is an advertisement is for Cleveland-area attorney Tim Misney, whose original advertising campaign featured Tim looking sternly at the camera with a raised eyebrow saying. "Misney Makes Them Pay". It is so well known the he now has a whole series of billboards that don't say anything about law or attorneys. Some have holiday messages, some are in the style of Andy Warhol, some implore kids to study and stay in school. Misney is part of…

Many people (like me) who grew up with the farenheit temperature scale have trouble thinking about celsius temperatures, and either resort to looking it up as needed or just throw up their hands. Knowing the conversion equation isn't helpful. These are the mental anchors I use, to help me relate to the celsius scale. Superhuman above this 40c Extreme high end for outdoor activity (104 f) 30c Feels hot (86 f) 20c Feels comfy (68 f) 10c Sweater weather (50…

Six years ago we adopted my mother's old GE dryer temporarily when she moved to independent living. Not long after, the motor gave out so we had a small shop repair guy out for a look. Surprisingly, he was still able to get a new replacement motor (not cheap, but available) and belt. After telling us that a new dryer would be cheaper, and giving us a few raised eyebrows, we convinced him to repair it so he took it…

I had a go at figuring out the sewing machine this afternoon, and made some re-usable gift bags out of scrap material. They're incredibly simple, just basic seams along the sides and bottom, and a bit folded over at the top for the yarn cinch. We used bags made by my grandmother every Christmas when I was a kid. I'm not sure where they ended up. Probably a casualty of my parents' house cleanout. I wish I had them now,…

I spent some quality time with the Craftsman table saw today, making these wood blocks for Susan. They'll eventually be sanded and painted as stands for jewelry and small art pieces in her studio. Because I have no tools to deal with 4" wood directly, I made rough cuts with a circular saw to get them to the right general size, then used the table saw to make straighter and more properly aligned cuts. The faces aren't perfectly straight, but…

I picked this up at the thrift shop this summer. I was eyeing it for a while, but what pushed me over the edge was my daughter's observation. "You should get it." It's such a delight. The intentionality involved in using it, the mechanical-ness, the maintainability, fact that it still works as well as it did in 1971. I just love it. There's more information on this model here. Fortunately, there's a small but robust community of typewriter enthusiasts like…