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meet.hn/city/us-Fort Collins

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Open Source, Programming, DevOps

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Ditto, a short box from wet cat food worked really well to keep my cats off the laptop.

I have a USB keyboard and external monitors, so the laptop sits off to the side, and is warm, so they loved to sleep there. Particularly a problem since it also has a button that powers off the laptop. I made a keyboard cover, but even then it was problematic with them sleeping on it (thermal throttling).

Putting a box on the desk solved that, they prefer it, until a second cat wants to join the party, which is thankfully rare.

To expand on this a little bit:

I had a friend that wanted to scan the cover of his album to start selling copies of it online. This would have been in like 1995 maybe. I went out and bought a HP ScanJet and wrote a command-line program run the scanner and grab that image for him.

I started thinking about making a GUI companion to it. I kept thinking "I need to do this like xv does, I need to do that like xv does." I finally realized: What if I just added a scanning screen to Xv? But because of the license, I couldn't just release it as open source.

I contacted John Bradley, thinking it was probably a long shot that he'd answer. But he did, and he accepted my idea: I'd sell xv with scanning for $50, and send him half. Real nice guy, though the majority of our interaction was me just sending him periodic checks.

I had a domain, tummy.com, because it was a fun name for a fat guy, and when I registered the domain my provider (back in the early '90s) wouldn't let me register a .org unless I was a non profit org, so I went with .com. Because of this deal with John Bradley, I registered tummy.com as an LLC to start selling this software. Over around a decade, I sent John well into the 5 digits of licensing fees. Mostly it was one-offs, but there were a few organizations where it was handfulls of copies for their site.

I had done that software in the evenings while I did a contracting gig at the Telco (USWest). When that contract was up, I was tired of working for a giant company, so I wanted to start doing Linux sys admin consulting. So I started doing that under the tummy.com brand. Did that for around 20 years until around a dozen years ago.

RIP John Bradley.

>a control panel

That control panel was really great! Particularly for scanning, it was nice to be able to adjust some of the color curves slightly to correct the scanned image.

However, one thing I REALLY used that control panel for was greyscale images, you could adjust the curve so that things that were barely legible in the image suddenly popped way out. Almost like that trick of rubbing a pencil across a blank page to reveal what someone wrote on the page above it. Or smaller adjustments just to make a greyscale more uniform.

That was really one of xv's superpowers.

John Bradley, author of xv, has passed away

https://voxday.net/2026/03/25/rip-john-bradley/

RIP John Bradley - Vox Popoli

John Bradley, the longtime member of this community who was the founder, producer, and lead guitarist of Booster Patrol, died on March 20. He was 61. I couldn’t think of a better way to pay tribute to the man who was both a bandmate and a friend than to write a song for him in […]

Vox Popoli

A couple weeks ago I was working remote and didn't bring a power adapter, and I realized a couple hours in that my battery was getting kind of low. I clicked on the battery icon and got a list of what was using a lot of power: 1 was an hour long video chat using Google Meet, the other was Claude desktop (which I hadn't used at all that morning).

What in the world is an idle Claude Desktop doing that uses so much power?

Do you have a better recommendation?

I feel bad for OWASP. They're doing the lords work, but seem to have a shoestring budget.