(I have read a lot of books this year.)

There is a lot inside American Oligarchs that has been mentioned in other places before, but this is a nice compendium documenting the pervasive lies and corruption that exist at every level within the Trump and Kushner companies, organizations, and families (which are all one and the same, really) and a lot irony. Sweet, sweet irony.

The story of the Trump family proves that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. DJT’s grandfather, Frederick, left Germany at an early age and avoiding the mandatory service (!!) with the Bavarian army (this would later cause him to lose his citizenship). He settled down in the Pacific Northwest and owned a number of hotels and restaurants during the Klondike Gold Rush, some of which were allegedly involved of illicit activities of various sorts. He died in 1918 due to complications with the Spanish flu.

The story of the Kushners is interesting and tragic. Jared Kushner’s grandparents and extended family were rounded up by Nazis during World War II. Some members were murdered, and others sent to concentration camps where they eventually made a daring escape. After the war, Jared’s grandparents were displaced people without a home. Few countries wanted to take Jewish refugees, especially those lacking proper documentation.

In more recent times, both families have displayed fairly dubious business skills, while projecting an air of confidence (but come across as desperate for acceptance and recognition). Cross them the wrong way and they will hold grudges for life.

Despite this, they have somehow always managed to fail upward. Sadly, this now has some pretty drastic consequences for our democracy.

If you didn’t want to eat the rich before this book, you’ll feel like you’re ready for a five-course meal of cooked oligarch once you’ve finished. We have some serious issues to fix and we should start by locking all of these fine folks up.

I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads.

I recently built a side project recently that automatically downloads GOES-17 imagery every 10 minutes and then compiles it into a video.

The result is pretty darn awesome! Here is 3 weeks of GOES-17 imagery sourced from NOAA / CIRA / RAMMB. The video begins the night of August 15th, 2020 as lightning storms rolled through Northern California and runs until the afternoon of September 10th, 2020.

Almost immediately, you begin to see smoke plumes from fires created due to lightning strikes.

Note: The blue and yellow blocks that you see periodically flash on screen are the result of corrupted image data downlinked from GOES-17. I’m not sure exactly what causes this, but these errors are present within the original images files hosted on NOAA’s CDN.

(Be sure to bump up the video quality — YouTube’s default compression really ruins the image)

View from our backyard at 9am. Taken straight out of the camera, white balanced to sunlight. It looks like a photo taken on Mars. 💔

It seems like every year, late in the summer or early in the fall, the air in the Bay Area fills with thick smoke from raging infernos happening around northern California. The air is hazardous to breath, preventing you from taking kids to the park, walking your dog or even opening your windows.

Last year, we made the wise decision to purchase an air purifier, which admittedly, looks like a giant iPod shuffle.

As fires continue to burn around these parts, we’ve started to rely on air quality data from PurpleAir, which monitors air quality data from a series of IoT sensors that people can purchase for their homes or businesses.

You can view a map featuring realtime data collected from their sensors. Here in the Bay Area, the sensors are quite ubiquitous and can give a more realistic pictures of air quality near your home.

For example, here is the current air quality around the Bay Area from PurpleAir while I write this post.

For comparison, here is the current air quality map for Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), which we used to reference when trying to determine local air quality.

The fidelity you get from PurpleAir is pretty amazing.

Knowing this, I decided to write a Node app that periodically queries PurpleAir for air quality data from a sensor located a few blocks from our house. It continuously runs on a Raspberry Pi setup in our entertainment center and sends me a text message to close our windows when the AQI crosses above 100.

I’ve made the source code available on Github. Check it out!

Comet NEOWISE, captured from our backyard in Oakland. See you again in 6,800 years!

In the early 2000’s, one of my favorite punk bands was Tsunami Bomb. I followed them up and down the West Coast, going to a ton of shows and meeting a lot of cool people in the process. They went on hiatus in 2005. In 2009, the had a reunion show up here in the Bay Area, so I went and took a number of photos.

(Interestingly, they reformed again in 2015 with a slightly different lineup… and I sadly haven’t gone to see them live yet).

Anyway, they recently had an Instagram post celebrating their anniversary and posted one of my photos. Nice!

It was a pretty awesome show. A few more photos…

The premise: a baseball fan fondly recalls his childhood memories of obsessively opening and collecting packs of baseball cards.

While watching an A’s game one afternoon at the Coliseum (which he rightly describes as a “post-apocalyptic crater ringed with hot dog stands”), he wonders what the players featured on the cards he collected as a kid were doing with their lives after their baseball careers had ended.

After purchasing a pack of cards on eBay from 1986, (the first year the author remembers having baseball cards), he sets off on a road trip across America to find and hopefully meet the 14 players featured in this 30-year-old card pack.

High jinks, hilarity and even important life lessons ensue.

This was just a great read and I highly recommend it for any baseball fan. Check it out on Goodreads.

I recently wrote a simple hook for React to automatically detect a device’s dark mode preference (as well as any changes to it) and style your web app accordingly, using something like ThemeProvider from styled-components.

It was developed as part of a side project I was hacking around on using my personal React Starter Kit, which is my own React project for quickly getting prototypes and side projects up and running.

I’ve released this as a standard GitHub repo instead of an NPM module due to the simplicity of this hook, especially in light of one-line packages breaking the Internet. To use it, just copy it into your project where needed.

I’ve released this under an MIT license. Feel free to use as-is, fork, copy, tear apart, profit, and share as you wish.

You can check out the code on Github.

Pandemic problems.

Fun fact: I like washing dishes.

In light of current events, I’ve found myself doing it much more than usual. However, I’ve never really been able to explain why I’ve enjoyed it so much but I’ve felt there is something relaxing and even meditative about it.

It turns out, I’m not alone in this line of thinking and it’s been mentioned by Thích Nhất Hạnh as a way to cultivate mindfulness.

Adam Hanley randomized two groups of college kids and had half read Thich Nhat Hanh’s instructions for mindful dish-washing while the others read simple, mechanical instructions.

After the students washed the dishes, members of the group that had read mindfulness teachings reported having a better experience, a joyful experience, and had lost track of time.

Hanley’s study was published in 2014. Some notes from the abstract are below:

This study sought to investigate whether washing dishes could be used as an informal contemplative practice, promoting the state of mindfulness along with attendant emotional and attentional phenomena. We hypothesized that, relative to a control condition, participants receiving mindful dishwashing instruction would evidence greater state mindfulness, attentional awareness, and positive affect, as well as reduce negative affect and lead to overestimations of time spent dishwashing. A sample of 51 college students engaged in either a mindful or control dishwashing practice before completing measures of mindfulness, affect, and experiential recall. Mindful dishwashers evidenced greater state mindfulness, increases in elements of positive affect (i.e., inspiration), decreases in elements of negative affect (i.e., nervousness), and overestimations of dishwashing time.