The coldest winter I ever spent
My sister-in-law, Gail got us a 6 quart Fagor Lux Multicooker (model 670041880) for Christmas. It’s great. We’ve used the slow cooker, pressure cooker, and even the yogurt maker settings (the yogurt came out perfectly!). I’m cooking a fancy bean soup in it right now!
Here is a local copy of the manual! Fagor Lux Multicooker User Manual 2015
Lee Sonko, Master of Science!
I received a message from San Jose State University today:
I now have two extra letters after my name!
Lee Sonko, MS
More letters to follow after I pass the board exam!
Short form: Dreamhost showed me how to implement a method of decreasing spam at the domain level called SPF. They implemented another domain level method of reducing spam, DKIM, a few months after I showed them that they hadn’t set up their system properly.
Long Form:
Until recently, there was nothing stopping someone from sending email from lee.org illegitimately (called “spoofing” email). A lot of spammers used it to send junk email “from” lee.org. This bothered me because:
I talked to Dreamhost support and they showed me how to setup an SPF record for my domain. See here and here on how to do it yourself.
Dreamhost support also suggested I create the emails postmaster@ and abuse@ because “I have seen some cases even though they are very rare cases in which not having these emails set up can cause some problems with servers receiving email.” Ok, sure. So I set those addresses up.
I created an account at postmaster.google.com to periodically check if Gmail is getting any spam from my domain.
I read up on spam-proofing a domain and realized that Dreamhost hadn’t implemented DKIM. Actually, they set it up for my domain but it was left in test mode. Even in Dreamhost’s DKIM example the test flag was set (see “Example of a DKIM Record, they write: k=rsa; t=y; p=GIMfMA0G…). So I had several back and forths with Dreamhost tech support starting in February and yesterday I got an email, “Our devs finally got around to removing the test flag and now DKIM records are properly being served.” Hurray!
In conclusion, you might want to check the headers on your outgoing emails. Look for the “dkim” header. Previously, when my account was still in “test-mode”, headers looked like “dkim=pass (test mode)”. And now they look like “dkim=pass header.i=@lee.org” :-)
The art of Burning Man will take over an entire gallery at the Smithsonian Institution for 6 months in 2018! This is the first major national exhibition to focus on the event.
March 30, 2018 — September 16, 2018
Michael Garlington, Totem of Confessions, 2015, photo courtesy of the artist
Each year in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, a city of more than 70,000 people rises out of the dust for a single week. During that time, multi-story art installations and buildings are erected and many are burned to the ground. Dedicated to principles of radical self-expression, decommodification, communal participation and a reverence for the handmade, the thriving temporary metropolis known as Burning Man is a uniquely American hotbed of artistic ingenuity and one of the most influential events in contemporary art and culture.
No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man is the first major national exhibition to focus on the large-scale, participatory work from this annual event. The exhibition will take over the entire Renwick Gallery building, bringing alive the maker culture of Burning Man through artworks, immersive room-sized installations, jewelry, costumes and ephemera that will transport visitors to the gathering’s famed desert city and highlight the ingenuity and creative spirit of this cultural movement. Photographs and archival documents drawn from the Burning Man Archives at the Nevada Museum of Art will trace Burning Man’s growth and its bohemian, counterculture roots.
The exhibition will include works by David Best, Candy Chang, Marco Cochrane, Five Ton Crane, FoldHaus Collective, Michael Garlington and Natalia Bertotti, Hybycozo, Aaron Taylor Kuffner, Christopher Schardt, Leo Villareal, Richard Wilks and others. Several installations were featured at previous Burning Man events, while installations by David Best, Natalia Bertotti and Michael Garlington, and Five Ton Crane will be commissioned specifically for the Renwick’s presentation and will debut in the exhibition.
Nora Atkinson, the museum’s Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft, is organizing the exhibition in cooperation with Burning Man Project, the nonprofit organization responsible for facilitating and extending the culture that has issued from the Burning Man event into the wider world.
The Renwick Gallery and Burning Man share a dedication to exploring contemporary maker culture in the United States and the vital role that creativity plays in innovation, connection and community. They are both creative laboratories where innovators go to play and to push the boundaries of their art.
— Nora Atkinson, Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft
We visited our Christmas Tree, Fiona over Memorial Day weekend. Fiona will return to us in December courtesy of Patrick and Laura of Forever Green Christmas Tree. They worked hard to help make this, our very first camping trip, a lot of fun!
Megan, Abigail and I at King Park on a beautiful day!
On Friday I finished 960 hours of fieldwork for my master’s degree in occupational therapy! The last step is to pass the board exam. If all goes well, I’ll have more letters after my name in August!
The patent just expired on the MP3 file format (did you know that MP3 wasn’t an open format??). The people that built it, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits is letting it go.
This article says “the German research body that owns the rights to MP3, has decided to no longer renew its patents on the technology–effectively killing the format for good.” I don’t think the format is “dead” but the long tail has certainly already begun. How often do you listen to MP3’s vs streamed audio content these days?
The family is going camping at the end of May for the first time. We’re looking for something like a 10 man tent for the 3 of us. Not exactly glamping, but comfortable with our queen air mattress, crib, and clothes laid out.
Do you have one we could borrow or rent? Costco has one for $200 but we just don’t go camping that often, it’ll be sitting in our closet for years.
My very long time friend Travis has written his science fiction book series. Dive back into hard SF!
Tagline: Science fiction about antigravity, lunar colonization, open source software, genetically modified dogs, AI…and really really big guns.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tjic/powers-of-the-earth-sf-with-spaceships-dogs-and-bi