| Wednesday, September 30, 2026 |
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Super Hot Sauce
by brian @ 15:32:38 - [perma-link]Last week I started 4 Jars fermenting, and just made 5 more. The first four were Ghost with Nectarine, Peach or Plum, and Carolina Reaper and Plum. Today’s are reaper and peach, three ghost and nectarine, and a burning bush hab and nectarine.
i have two not quite ripe mangos to make one more jar, with the conveniently not quite ripe peppers now turning red on the plants.
Each jar has 6 peppers, 3 or 4 fruits, onion, garlic, and 3-5% salt brine.
I will have a lot of hot sauce this year!
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| Monday, September 28, 2026 |
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Claudtermittent fasting
by brian @ 17:57:44 - [perma-link]I was feeling hungry this evening, so I went to the kitchen to get a bite. There I discovered why I was so hungry. I had not eaten my breakfast. The pancake was still in the rice cooker.
One of the reasons I like to cook breakfast in a rice cooker is that i can set it up, go for a walk (or in this case some coding with Claude) and it will be ready to eat when I get back. No rush because the rice cooker will keep it warm for a while. I whip the egg whites separately and fold them in so it fluffs up big like Japanese Fluffy Pancakes. So good.
This time I forgot to come back. I got hyper focused on my project until my stomach was growling louder than I could ignore, eight hours later. I’m so glad there was a pancake waiting for me in the kitchen!
Eight hours was a bit much. It is more of a Japanese Dense Pancake.
Still tastes fine, and I’m not hungry anymore.
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| Thursday, September 24, 2026 |
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Astro Upload Tool
by brian @ 23:58:33 - [perma-link]I'm sharing some of my astrophotography captures with https://crowdsky.univie.ac.at/
It is photos of a supernova that blew up (relatively) in late July. The web uploader was failing a lot for me. It is slow to get from here to Vienna, I guess. My laptop would timeout on one image, and it would fail a whole job after an hour. Or I would forget to come back to click "Finish" and it would time out my session.
So today I asked Claude for help. It figured out how the site works, and wrote a utility that uploads with retries. It can also, apparently, complete old jobs that failed. And it just plods along in a tmux session, slowly uploading.
It has about 2700 images over 15 different sessions to go. It should finish by morning. Then the chart along the bottom should be more full, all at the one dot.
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| Monday, September 21, 2026 |
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WLED on the Dance Floor
by brian @ 12:34:03 - [perma-link]My dance floor has its next evolution. I replaced the Teensy 3.6 controller with two ESP32s running WLED, one in each panel. Now the floor can be controlled over WiFi, with lots of standard-ish protocols.
The blinks in this video are a visualization of the token stream from the LLM I run at home. Yes, my dance floor shows me what my AI agent is thinking.
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| Monday, June 1, 2026 |
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Hydration and Fertilization
by brian @ 13:03:25 - [perma-link]I added another pump to my indoor ghost pepper nano-farm. Putting fertilizer through the clear water tubes started forming algae. Yuck!
Now i have MasterBlend mixed up in a black 3 gallon bucket feeding the ghosts only, once per week. The water gives a good dousing every 4 days. They will run on the same day once every month. They shouldn’t overflow with the big under tanks.
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| Friday, May 15, 2026 |
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Early Peppers
by brian @ 10:02:59 - [perma-link]I have about 60 hot pepper starts in 6” pots now. 3 of them started growing peppers. I’m letting them go because i want to see what they are. Two look like jalapeño, and the other looks like … a Jamaican Mushishito? I thought the seeds came out of a Carolina Reaper or Trinidad Moruga Scorpion. It was red and wrinkly, and dried up beyond actual recognition, but i thought it had the big folds like those superhots.
I had 10 varieties on a balcony, so it was all a big cross-pollination party.
I’ll take these off when i move the plants outside. After it freezes again next weekend. Wtf, climate?
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| Wednesday, January 14, 2026 |
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Future Ghost Peppers?
by brian @ 22:11:18 - [perma-link]One of my indoor ghost peppers is flowering again! I started these last year, from my 2024 Ghost’s seeds. One of the outdoor ones grew 3 big peppers. The indoor ones have been kind of stunted.
A couple of them have flowered before, but never set fruit. I put a small heater in the room to keep the temperature warmer than I want the rest of the house. The one plant perked up and started flowering again. We’ll see what happens!
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| Tuesday, January 13, 2026 |
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3I/Atlas on a Seestar S50
by brian @ 13:00:52 - [perma-link]The faint diagonal streak near the middle of the image is the 3I/Atlas comet. My Seestar S50 live-stacked 6-7 (heh) hours of 10s subs, starting in the late evening on Jan 12.
It was partly cloudy when I started. I was only expecting to get the scope out and polar align on the new MSM wedge (which is pretty nice!). Around 10pm or so, the sky opened up.
On a whim, I tried looking for the comet. I set up the Seestar to track a star that was near it, according to SkySafari, and started capturing with the Astro filter. After a few minutes, a fuzzy blob became visible, slowly stretching out between two stars!
I let the capture run all night. Eventually the comet went behind some trees and the captures stopped succeeding. It ended up being over 2000 images. I deleted a few from the beginning and end that had branches poking into the corners. There was not enough space left on the Seestar drive to run the stack again, so I'll have to stack it on my computer.
Once I saw the streak growing, I aimed my Dwarf3 and Dwarf mini at it, too. While I was finding the right spot in the app, I saw a "3I/Atlas" label pop up, so I clicked on it. The Dwarves started tracking the comet!
Unfortunately, the Dwarf mini capture was cut short when a house suddenly jumped into frame. The Dwarf3 didn't have darks for higher gain, so I shot it with lower gain, and got a very faint image.
If I get another clear night soon, I'll try this again!
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| Tuesday, January 6, 2026 |
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Lode Runner Spice Rack
by brian @ 18:09:10 - [perma-link]I saw this at IKEA (in the kid shelves section) and thought it would be perfect as a spice rack. It wasn’t quite perfect, because the individual shelves weren’t quite tall enough for most of the jars. Spreading the shelves out made a lot of room. The ladders are great, but it should have come with at least 4; there’s no way to climb from the second to third level. I’ll have to 3d print a ladder!
I like it. Now I can see all 12 of my dried pepper flakes, and they aren’t occupying a quarter of the countertop!
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| Saturday, May 31, 2025 |
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Dishdrawer repaired again
by brian @ 20:00:30 - [perma-link]I replaced the drain hose that i broke while trying to figure out a problem with the top drawer. Turns out the control box in the upper right of the door has a broken bracket and gets loose. That breaks the selector buttons and eventually the “door open” detection sensor. I repaired it with tape before. Now trying blocks of foam to keep it in place.
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