A Selection of Complex CSS Selectors

While working on this site redesign I've had the opportunity to learn a bit about modern CSS. (The last time I redesigned the site was, I think, in 2011.) (Holy cow, 14 years ago? Crazy.) Yes, flexbox and grid are amazing and finally make CSS usable for decent, …

Sunset over Canyonlands National Park, viewed from BLM's Needles Overlook in Utah.

Birds in Moab and Arches & Canyonlands National Parks

My partner Thu and I recently spent about a week in Moab, Utah and the national and state parks that surround it. This is a (probably incomplete) list of birds we identified during the trip.

Brief Review: Tamron 28-300mm F/3.5-6.3 Di VC PZD

It's terrible. Don't buy it.

My (Only) Two Complaints about the Canon 10x42 L IS WP Binoculars

I have previously written a glowing review of Canon's 10x42 L IS WP binoculars. And I stand by it! After using them heavily for a while now, though, I have two minor complaints. Stabilization LED Color When image stabilization is on, a green LED lights up on top …

Automating Ghost Routes & Redirects Deployment

Ghost clearly documents how to automate theme deployment with GitHub Actions, but deploying routes & redirects automatically is not as straightforward. This lack of straightforwardness is quite unfortunate in my view, particularly because custom routes are coupled to your theme; and redirects are somewhat coupled to routes since they both …

Dust Caps for Oxygen/Acetylene Hoses

I had a need for some plastic caps for oxygen & acetylene hoses in my workshop, to prevent dust from entering fittings on my oxyacetylene torch setup when it's not in use. This is a perfect application for 3D printing! The following model, printed in TPU, fits snugly …

Solar Water Preheater Goals & Design Considerations

Friends on Mastodon will know that I'm working on sort of a thermal battery for our house. Let me explain…

A migration to Ghost from Jekyll

I just want somewhere I can quickly & easily share things. So, I'm testing out what a new iteration of dzombak.com may look like, running a self-hosted instance of the Ghost CMS.

Some new DNS-related tools

I've recently written some DNS-related tools you might find useful.

Everything I know about the YK-1000H NTP Server

Back in October I bought a GPS-based YK-1000H NTP server from an international seller on eBay[1]. I finally got around to hooking it up. Since I can find effectively no documentation online, this blog post documents everything I've learned (which is not much). Networking The unit does …

Cloning Raspberry Pi SD cards

Occasionally I need to set up a new Raspberry Pi that's extremely similar to an existing Pi, typically for a monitoring application like collecting UPS statistics. The hard way to do this is to set up the new Pi from scratch and install and configure your application. The …

Faking the fan rotor lock signal in a Tripp Lite SU1000RTXLCD2U UPS

For Reasons[1], I needed[2] to connect my refrigerator to a double-conversion UPS so it receives good, clean power regardless of what’s coming from the wall outlet. In my case, this power could be from the local electric utility or from an onsite natural gas generator. I found …

Letter of Recommendation: Quality Binoculars

Over the past year I have tested a bunch of different binoculars; in this post I share recommendations for *good* binoculars at three different price points.