I’m now running a job that will, once it gets through the backlog, delete all of my tweets which are ten days or older, and remove likes from older tweets.
Aside from waves hands at everything, my year started and ended with a familiar issue: email bounces.
The first was the bounces from the self-run mailhosts of Firefox contributors that had gone down or had mistakenly classified mail from Bugzilla as spam.
The end of the year was bounces at industrial scale from a Gmail outage that affected every organization sending mail, including my new job at Bandcamp.
In app notifications can be the Devil’s work, but oh my Sweet XML Jesus, sending email is still a thing.
Books read
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, Janelle Shane
An Unkindness of Ghosts, Rivers Solomon
Gender Queer, Maia Kobabe
The Language of Power, Rosemary Kiersten
The Telescopic Tourist’s Guide to the Moon, Andrew May
Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the Afronet to Black Lives Matter, Charlton McIlwain
The Empire of Gold, S.A. Chakraborty
The Relentless Moon, Mary Robinette Kowal
Pet, Akwaeke Emezi
Annabel Scheme and the Adventure of the New Golden Gate, Robin Sloan
The City in the Middle of the Night, Charlie Jane Anders
I wanted a simple desk calendar. Like the ones you’d get from the buisnesses you traded with over the previous year.
I had an eInk display which would work with a Raspberry Pi. Generating the calendar page as HTML and sending a screenshot to the eInk display was appealing to me, so after finding useful note on using CSS grid to display a calendar, I extended on it to make a calendar generator.
The generated HTML is intended for display on an eInk display, via a screen capture by running a browser on the command line, or a screenshot service.
Browsers have HTML and CSS engines we can use to lay out the calendar for us.
Start with three-line layout using CSS Grid where you wrap a list in a container with display: grid set on it, and format the list as a seven column display.
Instead of frameworks, the JavaScript uses native date functions to figure out the current date (as determined by the system running the browser,) the start, end, and previous/next month’s overlapping dates. The calendar markup is generated using JavaScript template strings.
then you can check if DoW is a Sunday, and fill in the days from the previous month which fall in the first week accordingly. And yes, if you use a calendar that starts weeks on Monday, you may want to make a fix and submit a patch to the project on GitHub.
Adding a custom background, different typography, or even date-sensitive styling is a straightforward extension of the project. Other things to try would be to fetch personal or household calendar items and merge the data in with the calendar grid.
This project accepts the optional query string parameter month which can take on the value previous and next to display the calendar for the previous and next months.
The current date is highlighted when the calendar is displayed.
Using with eInk Display
If you have an eInk display is attached to a Pi or other device and the necessary drivers and libraries are installed, you can fetch a screenshot with the current calendar using Firefox:
And a bash script can run the process daily once you set up crontab entries for it. You’ll want to run the script at startup and at least once a day.
cd $HOME bash
firefox --headless --screenshot --window-size=600,448 "https://7-calendar-cafe.glitch.me/"
./calendar.py
Since the idea behind eInk is to only update when you need to, using a whole Raspberry Pi (even a Pi Zero W) feels like one’s over specified the hardware for the project.
I’m not sure if a Pi Zero W can run Firefox, if you’re using one to drive the eInk display, you might want to use a screenshotting service in the workflow.
However, that Pimoroni display has buttons you can program, and using them will be the next version of this project.
Show off your mods with the hashtag #SevenCalendarCafe on Twitter and the Fediverse.
The project’s title is a nod to both the Pimoroni Inky Impression and The Cocteau Twins.
Because of the periocity of their orbits and their great distances from our Sun the close conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn are not once-in-lifetime, but once-in-centuries events. Since these happen roughly 800 years apart’, they were considered to be linked to the end of ages and empires.
Since this summer, when Saturn and Jupiter started rising in the night sky after sunset, I’ve watched them close their apparent distance: they are still millions of miles apart.
This past Monday was the closest point of the conjunction, and I’ve been out with my telescopes and marveling that I can see both of these giant worlds in the eyepiece this week.
Sunday night I attached my camera to the back of my big telescope and took photos while the two worlds, which are low in the sky at dusk, were still visible. This is a single frame, and I am shooting horizontally through the evening sky which puts a lot of dust and air between my telescope and space, so it’s blurry.
To see the conjunction look towards the West at dusk during Christmas week. A pair of binoculars will be enough to resolve both planets as separate disks, with the point-like dots of the Galilean moons and Titan if you’re in a dark enough sky.
