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NASA Wallpaper Changer

I like switching up my wallpaper every once in a while. Each device I use has a different wallpaper, and I normally just get it in my head that it’s time for a change.

I decided to go a little further than before when I discovered the NASA APOD Gnome Extension. This downloads NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, and sets it as your wallpaper. It’s a neat utility. There are several others which allow you to use different sources, or which pull from Wikimedia commons, and I’ll likely play around with those. What I like about this APOD extension is that it also gives the description that accompanies the picture.

NASA APOD Wallpaper Changer icon window.

I think changing up a wallpaper can give a fresh look, and a different feel to each day. I’m not sure how much I’ll like it in the long run, and sadly none of the extensions I’ve found are able to require 4K wallpapers, but it’s a fun adjustment to how my computer runs that I’m looking forward to.

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Backpack Search

A while ago, one of the water bottle sleeves in my backpack started to tear. In addition, the nature of my traveling life began to change. I was taking weekend trips to San Francisco, and the occasional long-term trip back to Minnesota (such as I am on now.) Now that I’m armed with a little bit of birthday money, particularly a gift card to REI, I’m on the hunt for a new backpack.

This is actually a tough situation. I’m hesitant to go window shopping right now, and this is the first time I’ve needed to be intentional about purchasing a backpack. Throughout college and the first couple years in my job, having a standard “school” backpack with several large pockets, a laptop compartment, and some smaller organizational areas has been nice. But there’s more to be done now. In particular, I’m less enthused by how many external zippers there are on my current backpack, or how the interior space is split up in a way that is sub-optimal for what I need. There’s a lot to figure out, since this is a world that I’m not very familiar with. But it’s fun to take the time and explore. It’s not a rush purchase, so I can be intentional about it.

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Two Good Board Games

This is just to record two old games that my family very much enjoys. Both are a wonderful mix of strategy and the luck inherent to board and card games. The rules are reasonably basic, and the boards can be beautiful.

They are Cribbage and Backgammon. Cribbage is mainly a card game where you play to 121 points, but traditionally you play on a board with holes and pegs to track said points. It can be played with 2, 3, or 4 players (with two variations in the 3-player version) and is a wonderful game to teach someone starting at a young age. It teaches quick decision making, basic addition, and is just a casual, fun game to play at any point.

Backgammon requires a more involved board consisting of chips or tokens (15 per player) and two rows of 12 “slots” for them. Typically these slots are represented as triangles of alternating colors. This game uses dice as well, and is a great strategy game where you typically have many more moves than other board games focused on dice.

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Celebrating The Fourth

I’ve been thinking about the Fourth of July. During the past couple of years, I’ve become less confident that there’s any agreement what precisely it is meant to celebrate. In theory it’s a celebration of our self-proclaimed anniversary of independence from British rule. Excellent. Yet it more closely resembles a general celebration of whatever America means to each particular celebrant.

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The Gold Standard for Math Typesetting on the Internet

Through a wonderful little game called TeXnique, I became aware of the online typesetting system KaTeX. Unlike MathJax, which is immensely finicky, slow, and has limited support for proper LaTeX, the KaTeX system supports scaling of rendered images, automatically detects the text color of my site and adapts as necessary, and has a fuller implementation of LaTeX commands.

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