Pelicans in Flight
Good morning from Carolina Beach, NC. The pelicans are out early looking for breakfast. #birds.
Paddleboard Photo
Jordan Lake, located near Raleigh in central North Carolina, is a reliable place to see bald eagles and has been for years. It’s a pretty nice place for paddle boarding, fishing and boating. There are 1,000+ campsites around the lake.
Crucial Track for May 20, 2025
"You Never Even Called Me By My Name (The Perfect Country and Western Song)" by David Allan Coe
What’s a remix or cover you like more than the original? "You Never Even Called Me By My Name by David Allen Coe" is one of my all-time favorites. While I have it on pretty good authority that Coe is a bit of a rough character, his rendition of Steve Goodman's original is classic. I was lucky enough to hear Hootie and the Blowfish perform this live at a free convert my hometown sponsored. Darius Ruck explained that being from the south, the band like to play the song for souther audiences.
Another Knife's Edge
This is one of many stretches of the Appalachian Trail known as The Knife’s Edge. It’s in eastern Pennsylvania, a day south of the Lehigh Gap. For about a mile, you have to put your hiking poles away and maintain three points of contact to traverse it. #hiking
The Appalachian Trail Near Allentown, PA
I remember this day for one spectacular disappointment - we’d planned to visit a privately owned shelter near the trail that had an actual flush toilet instead of a privy, but we couldn’t find it for some reason. I was so sad. We stopped at this primeval looking spot to eat lunch.
Crucial Track for May 19, 2025
"Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" by Bob Dylan
What’s a song that grew on you over time? **Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts by Bob Dylan" - It pains me to think this song is 50-years-old now. I was 10 when it was released and to me, it's always been one of the songs of "The New Dylan" which I roughly define as anything not from the 1960s. The music and lyrics to the tune are just a master class in how to win the Nobel Prize. Along with Hurricane, I think this is some of his best work of the 1970s.
Bald Pate Mountain
Southern Maine has some of the best hiking in the US. Bald Pate Mountain is fun on a dry day, but if it is raining, take the day off. This is the south side. The northern side is just a steep granite sliding board with the occasional bush to grab. The view from the top is magnificent. #hiking #AppalachianTrail
Moravian Church
The cupola atop the Moravian Church in Old Salem Village (which later combined with another nearby community to form the modern city of Winston-Salem, NC).
The Colorado River
If you descend to the floor of the Grand Canton, this is what awaits you. Wonder Woman sent me this photo on the day she completed the Rim to Rim challenge. She also remembers it as the day I watched two TV shows without her, something I will never live down, I guess.
Huumingbird at rest
This is the only photo I have ever taken of a hummingbird while perched. #birds
Rim to Rim
A couple of years back, Wonder Woman made a weekend trip to Arizona to cross this off her bucket list - running the Grand Canyon from rim to rim, which she did the day after taking this photo.
Guilt Free Dital Media Pipline Automation
After a nearly twenty year break from using peer-to-peer
technology (torrents) to download movies and TV shows, I have decided
that it's more ethically pure in 2025 to once again fly the skull and
crossbones than it is to put money in the hands of the fascist
billionaires who monopolize the entertainment industry. To be clear, I'm
not advocating doing this to software from independent developers. It's
the collaborating big tech companies that don't deserve your money any
more.
Don't do this without a VPN. Just to show you how easy it is for your ISP or anyone who has your router's IP address to see what you download, you can use I Know What You Download
With minimal effort, using mostly free or freemium software. you can cobble together a secure, integrated system capable of importing my watchlist from Trakt into a an app that will search torrent web sites for the media that you want, download it and add it to a Plex media server.
The tools needed for creating this system are:
- Trakt - an online database of movies and television shows (Freemium)
- Nord VPN - a privacy protecting virtual private network to shield my Internet traffic from my ISP and others. Other VPNs using the OpenVPN or Wireguard standard with P2P capabilities can also be used. (paid)
- Prowlarr - an app that facilitates public and private torrent sites and adds them to other apps from the same developer to search for media (FOSS)
- Radarr - imports my movie watchlist from Trakt, searched the Internet for movies in English, that are at least 1080p and that do not exceed 10GB . It adds those movies to my BitTorrent client. It renames them using the Plex naming standard and adds them to the folder where my media library is located. (FOSS)
- Sonarr- imports my television watchlist from Trakt, searched the Internet for shows in English, that are at least 1080p and that do not exceed 10GB . It adds those movies to my BitTorrent client. It renames them using the Plex naming standard and adds them to the folder where my media library is located. (FOSS)
- Deluge - a BitTorrent download client with built in VPN integration and a highly configurable interface (FOSS)
- Plex - a media server that lets you watch movies and TV shows stored on your computers hard drive on your television through your Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Firestick or other streaming mechanisms
Jeff Bezos owns Amazon Prime Video, The Washington Post , and a hobby space exploration company among many other things. When the de facto head of Saudi Arabia's government ordered the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Bezos protested loudly and had a PR photo taken at the man's grave. Yesterday, Bezos proudly announced a new business partnership with the same government that committed the murder.
Apple has been in active collaboration with MAGA since the CEO, Tom Cook, donated $1 million to the president's inauguration. The company was just found to have committed perjury and ignoring a court order to end abusive business practices that unfairly rob developers of revenue and inflate the price of software and services.
A New Generation
Having lived in the same house for 30 years now, I’ve watched generations of tree rats make their home in my backyard. Every year, a new crop of babies starts the process of getting to know us through the bribery process. I’ve probably distributed a ton of peanuts to them since 1995.
South Carolina Low Country
A spring afternoon in a kayak on a waterway like this is not a bad place to be. In the South Carolina Low Country, you can find places like this all over.
Pilot Mountain
If you ever heard Andy and Barney talking about Mount Pilot on the Andy Griffith Show, that was a reference to the real place, Pilot Mountain, NC, which is about 20 minutes away from Mount Airy, Griffith’s real hometown and the basis for the fictional Mayberry from the show.
No Need to Worry, I Think
I've just taken the longest break from writing in well over a year. It wasn't a planned break. We've been traveling quite a bit over the past month. Preparing for and recovering from the trips takes time, not to mention actually being away from home. I've also been consumed with a couple of interesting projects that can be real time sucks. It's been nice to give myself a break. No one creates pressure for me the pressure I put on myself. The minute a hobby starts to feel like work, it's time to reevaluate.
I operate well when I'm consistent. I'm capable of long, long streaks in all kinds of circumstances. I went nearly two years of getting 10K steps a day, which required me to go for long walks in the midst of a couple of hurricanes. So, yeah, I'm not always the brightest when it comes to these arbitrary goals. Consistency in writing caused me to literally lose sleep on the days when I put off posting until late in the day. Tapping out blog posts on road trips with Wonder Woman doesn't make me the best traveling companion either. I decided to evaluate my dopamine addiction, the one that's fed every time I hit the "publish" button on my blog. Writing is stil a priority, but I'm giving myself some space for other things.
One of the projects I'm working on is the consolidation of a lifetime of photographs. I started using a digital camera in 1995 when I worked for Westinghouse as a technical writer. It was a hefty model made by Kodak that used a small disk to record images. I think it cost about $5K at the time. The company paid for it, but I would occasionally use it to take personal photos. I've been using an iPhone since 2009, which is when the production of digital photography really accelerated. I'm sorting my pictures by the year and month they were taken. When possible, I add geotags to any images that don't have one. Using face recognition software, I'm tagging all the photos of my friends and family. In as many cases as I can, I'm also tagging the photos by subject.
I'm removing all the residue from work, which means random images of IP addresses, error messages, blinking lights from switches, routers, and wireless access points and the like. I'm also moving the thousands of memes I've collected to a separate library to that all my anti-Republican vitriol doesn't get mixed up with the images of my grandkids when i set my computers to play slide shows.
My second project is the self-hosted server I've been working on. I've repurposed old hard drives and other pieces of hardware to create versions of my music, photos, books and video collections from the Internet and on my home network on various devices. Every day I try new ways to avoid using the resources of the big tech companies, a big goal of mine this year.
The only other issue I'm facing is a wacky disturbance in my sleep schedule. It's been months since I got eight continuous hours of shut-eye. I've gotten into a pattern of getting up around 2:00 AM every day to work on my projects and then napping throughout the rest of the day. It's not a productive pattern, but I'm having a hard time breaking it.
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Crucial Track for May 14, 2025
"Jesus Christ" by Woody Guthrie
What’s a lyric that resonates deeply with you and why? I'm far from religious, but I pay attention to the effect that religion plays on society. Although the utter hypocrisy of the Christian right-wingers seems like a fairly recent development, it really isn't. Woody Guthrie was singing about the dividing line between God and mammon 85 years ago. This song was written in New York City Of a rich man, preacher, and slave If Jesus was to preach what He preached in Galilee, They would lay poor Jesus in His grave.
Crossing the Hudson
This is the lowest point on the Appalachian Trail. It’s in New York, where the trail crosses the Hudson River. Manhattan is only 18 miles away. You can see the skyline from the top of the nearby mountain. #hiking #AppalachianTrail
