Toby's Log page 78

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Just finished baking desserts for Christmas, including all of the cleanup and prep for transport. Even though I was tired after baking, I just wanted to be completely done. I spent most of the day between these desserts (planning, buying food, baking, cleaning, etc.) and final Christmas gift purchasing and preparing. I made pecan tassies (every year) and a gingerbread loaf (first time). Merry Christmas.

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After a recent OS and Firefox update, I found myself with a window with 120+ empty tabs in place of several hundred non-empty tabs that I’ve built up over the years. I thought they were gone. Luckily, the Tab Groups plugin that I use (formerly built into the browser) automatically backs up the tabs when it is updated, which had happened 6 days before. I was able to recover 465 tabs. Yes, I have a tab problem. I find articles daily, and often don’t have the time to read through them right away, so I save them. I leave open pages I find in searching for solutions to problems I’m not yet ready to solve. I’m trying to read through or bookmark tabs over time, but I think I’m adding faster than subtracting. I must say, Firefox was super fast with 465 less tabs, and I would feel less scattered if I got them under control, so I will try to put more effort into reduction. I think a better bookmarking system would help a lot with that.

Keyboard troubles

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I have a keyboard (the music kind, Casio CTK-671). I like to play it sometimes. It has, for a long time now, been difficult to turn on. Many times, the light and screen will come on, but the screen will be messed up in some way and keys won’t produce sound. I can keep turning it off and on and sometimes it will eventually work, but sometimes not. It has gotten worse over time, and is now to the point where I can rarely get it going. After like a week of not being able to get it working, I was considering getting a new one. Today, I finally got it running. I’m really considering just leaving it on long term, in spite of the electricity it’ll use.

Akron Art Prize 2016

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I went to see the art at Akron Art Prize yesterday. Today was the last day, so I wanted to get in before then. I spent some time looking through the many art pieces. I actually read the little description and gave a good look at nearly every piece. There were lots of interesting pieces, but several that especially caught my eye, in no particular order, were:

The event is one of Cogneato’s clients. We built both their website and the voting system. The voting system, which started as a web based SMS + website setup and migrated to a web-based phone app (PhoneGap with an API server) provided a lot of interesting experience, some of which I haven’t really had in other projects. This year’s primary challenge was figuring out how to get the PhoneGap part working and deployed, as the guy who used to do that left the company. I took some notes on the deployment part.