I run a lot of one-off jobs on EC2 machines. This usually looks like:

• Stand up a machine
• Mess around for a while trying things and writing code
• Run my command under screen

For short jobs this is fine, but when I run a long job there are two issues:

• If the machine costs a non-trivial amount and the job finishes in the middle of the night I'm not awake to shut it down.

• I could, and sometimes do, forget to turn the machine off.

Ideally I could tell the machine to shut itself off if no one was logging in and there weren't any active jobs.

I didn't see anything like this (though I didn't look very hard) so I wrote something (github):

$ prevent-shutdown long-running-command

Each year I put together a digital photo album with my favorite pictures from the year. Pictures for 2024 initially went very quickly: Nora (3y) and I did a lot of curation together, and the opportunity "do pictures and videos" was very motivating for her as she worked through her morning routine. After I got it all together, though, it got stuck at the pre-publication review stage.

I want the kids to look over the pictures and let me know if there're any they'd like me to exclude: I'm not perfect at predicting what they'll find embarrassing. While sometimes they're interested in looking over pictures, however, they have a lot of things they like doing.

A few months ago I was trying to figure out how to make bedtime go better with Nora (3y). She would go very slowly through the process, primarily by being silly. She'd run away playfully when it was time to brush her teeth, or close her mouth and hum, or lie on the ground and wiggle. She wanted to play, I wanted to get her to bed on time.

I decided to start offering her "silly time", which was 5-10min of playing together after she was fully ready for bed. If she wanted silly time she needed to move promptly through the routine, and being silly together was more fun than what she'd been doing.

This worked well, and we would play a range of games:

Over the past six months there's been a huge amount of discussion in the Davis Square Facebook group about a proposal to build a 25-story building in Davis Square: retail on the ground floor, 500 units of housing above, 100 of the units affordable. I wrote about this a few weeks ago, weighing the housing benefits against the impact to current businesses (while the Burren, Dragon Pizza, etc have invitations to return at their current rent, this would still be super disruptive to them if they even did return).

The impact to local businesses is not the only issue people raise, however, and I wanted to get a better overall understanding of how people view it. I went over the thousands of comments on the posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16) over the last six months, and categorized the objections I saw. Overall I found comments by 90 different people opposed to the proposal, and ignoring super short ones ("Stupid idea", "Oh no") I put them in 11 different categories. I counted some comments towards multiple categories: the goal was to understand how many people hold each objection. Here are the objections, sorted by the number of unique people raising each, and with some representative quotes:

While in a more remote area bike lights let you see where you're going, in a city there's usually enough light around for that. But you still need lights, so other people see you. [1] Unfortunately, lots of people end up biking without lights: it's easy to forget them, have them break, or end up out after dark when you intended to be home sooner. Batteries and LEDs have gotten so cheap, however, that you can get little be-seen lights for $1/each:

Lily has been trying to raise money for her class by busking, but it's cold enough that I don't want to play violin. I've been playing penny whistle, warm inside my pennywhistle mitten (thanks Julia!) but a lot of the fiddle tunes Lily plays are hard to play on a D whistle. A D whistle is good for a lot of keys (D, Amix, Em, G, ...) but Lily knows a lot of tunes in A and even some in E. Ages ago I had a tiny whistle in A, but I lost it at some point, which was probably for the best since it's absurdly high.