Commute Replacer™

Some podcast talk the last few weeks about people who actually miss their daily commute. Or, if they're not "missing" it exactly, they're having trouble replacing some of the small things that a commute enabled -- a liminal space, a hype-up between home and work, a decompression zone between work and home, a chance to catch up on podcasts (listenership seems to be down, apparently?), a chance to scream at the top of one's lungs for a while...

Obvious solution, for those with a basement or 2-story home... buy yourself an old sit-down arcade cabinet and retrofit it to resemble your preferred vehicle interior, then tuck the whole thing under the stairs, behind a door. Steering wheel, cupholder/console to the side, a dock for your phone somewhere in front, a pre-recorded video of your commute (or whatever!) on the screen.

Get your coffee and briefcase, walk over to the closet under the stairs, and climb in for 20 minutes. It's something less than an isolation-chamber, but does enough to divide work from home. (Maybe. I dunno.)

Disable wi-fi on a Raspberry Pi

note to self: you followed these instructions to permanently turn off wifi and bluetooth on newpie.local

[copying relevant text here too, just in case]

...If on Raspbian (usually), run:

systemctl disable wpa_supplicant
systemctl disable bluetooth
systemctl disable hciuart

Add to /boot/config.txt:

# Disable WiFi and Bluetooth
dtoverlay=pi3-disable-wifi
dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt

What I read in April 📚

Springfield Confidential: Jokes, Secrets, and Outright Lies from a Lifetime Writing for The Simpsons, Mike Reiss with a ghost writer. Pretty good Simpsons anecdotes, and some other good industry stuff. I mean, you already know whether you want to read this or not.

Quick Pi-hole tip

There are a couple of posts on the pi-hole forums about this "JavaScript is Disabled" thing. Your pi isn't really there; you just think it is because the page is cached in your browser. Your pi crashed hard. Restart it. That's all! (In my case!)

What I read in March 📚

I got sucked into making nonsense podcasts using nodeJS and eleventy, Breath of the Wild for another 20 hours or so, rearranging the house for 2 WFHers, and just generally freaking out. So what I read was mostly the labels on cans of beans and tomatoes.

But also about 3 percent of this A. Reynolds novel I still haven’t convinced myself to quit and the first (dull!) chapter of the latest N. Stephenson.

That’s what counts for progress around here.

Whole Foods/Amazon delivery excitement

I hadn't taken advantage of Amazon Prime's Whole Foods grocery-delivery perk. (When the prices are better at Publix, you are too expensive for me.) They sent me a $5 coupon yesterday, which I took as a sign that they don't feel their system is over-burdened. I really wanted some fresh veggies and a few other things, so I filled a cart with ~$100 worth of stuff.

When I went to check out, the "delivery windows" for the day (and the subsequent day, today), were filled. I couldn't move past the penultimate screen. There was a note suggesting that new "windows" are released periodically throughout the day, so I set a reminder to ding every half-hour. I reloaded the screen 4 or 5 times throughout the morning, and around lunchtime there was suddenly an opening from 2p-4p. I grabbed it and hit "Checkout."

A young woman delivered the goods on-time. Everything seemed fine, except I was missing one item -- a $4 case of seltzer. No big deal at all; I was so pleased with the process I was prepared to just let it slide without mentioning. An hour later I got an email from Amazon apologizing for the "incomplete delivery." They said they'd process a refund in "3 to 5 days." Okay, that's fine, I wasn't even going to mention it!

This morning (18 hours later?), I got an email regarding my refund of $100, and a detailed breakdown of every item, now marked as "returned by customer." Returned? Most of these items are in the freezer or the crisper; what return?

I'd crack a joke about keeping the $100, but who knows what this system will do next?