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My Little Tarot Library

My Little Tarot Library

Remember back in 2023 when I launched Gallery 69, a FLAG in Enderis Park? Well, the neighborhood can now welcome another Free Library… of another kind!

My Little Tarot Library

I don’t know Mandy but she’s got an account for her mylittletarotlibrary that you can check out, and if you’re local you can swing by 74th street between Hadley and Locust and get your own tarot reading!

My Little Tarot Library

I know almost nothing about tarot readings or cards but I’ve learned a few things about them from Dana and a couple friends who do readings.

My Little Tarot Library

Dana told me you are not supposed to buy your own tarot deck, as it should be gifted to you. Did she just make that up so I buy her a deck? I don’t know! I do know that Stacey Williams-Ng made a nice looking deck!

My Little Tarot Library

It looks like Mandy offers readings but I did a terrible job with the photo of her card so contact her via Instagram for info!

My Little Tarot Library

When you visit the library you’ll see a stack of cards in envelopes or just wrapped in paper. Take one and there will be a reading written on the paper wrapped around the card.

This is the card I got when I was riding past on my bike one day and discovered the library. I told Dana about the library but felt she needed to go get her own card.

My Little Tarot Library

So here’s the card Dana got. Wild, right? Although honestly if we keep going back each week Dana could have a full deck within a year! (Kidding!)

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An Automated Announcement System

AAAS Robot

AAAS Robot

An Automated Announcement System (or “AAAS”) is an idea for a system that can make scheduled announcements during an event when you are too busy to do it yourself.

This is an idea I was working on back around 2017 or so when I was one of the producers for Maker Faire Milwaukee. Each year the venue would have a PA system, and our venue manager would show us how to use it. It was typically a mic with an on/off switch attached to the front panel of a PA system ready to go. Pick up mic, turn it on, talk, turn it off. Simple, right?

The issue is that we always ran with a skeleton crew of just a few people, and we were always dealing with putting out fires or dealing with something important and would always forget to make announcements!

The other issue is that when you go live on a mic with 5,000 people listening you might not deliver your words smoothly… especially if you don’t have a script to read from… and who has time to write a script when things are one fire all around you?

So that’s where the idea of An Automated Announcement System came from.

The original idea was that I would create a schedule of announcements and then prerecord them all to audio files, then once we had a folder full of audio files we’d load them onto a Raspberry Pi with cron jobs to run a script to play the audio at the appropriate times.

The Raspberry Pi would have the audio output connected to the audio input of the PA system so it could just run in the background without any user intervention, and do the announcements for you.

Maybe the audio files would all have timestamps as names and one script would just run continually checking for a match of the current time and then play the file. That might be easier than scheduling a whole bunch of cron jobs. Heck there’s probably some super-simple unixy-system way to do it that. (If not maybe I should write one!?)

Anyway, that was my idea for An Automated Announcement System which never happened because I never had time to work on it and then in 2020 there was a global pandemic and Maker Faire was put on hold. Sigh.

Feel free to run with this idea if you like it!

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Anytype – An Everything App?

I moved from Evernote to Bear for my synced notebook needs back in 2020. Bear’s great support for Markdown was one of the reasons. At the time I said of Bear “It’s not perfect” and no, it’s not… so I started to question my use of it because honestly you should check your tools every now and then to see if they need replacing. Since I am using desktop Linux a bit more now I wanted to see about using Obsidian again, but using their sync solution is twice the cost of Bear’s, and self hosted syncing or using some other method involves yet another piece of software.

So when I found Anytype it looked pretty interesting! It’s local-first and peer-to-peer and all of the clients you use sync and data is encrypted on your own devices and only you have the key. Ah, speaking of the key… it’s not a password, it’s a “12 word mnemonic ‘Recovery’ phrase” which you better store somewhere… I’ve been using Anytype for a week and just today I launched it and it asked for the phrase, which I did not expect and had to copy/paste from where I store it. Anyway…

In my workflow I see Anytype taking the place of Notion. I’ve been using Notion for a few years now mainly for task management. Before that I used Monday.com and before that Asana. They all have their pros and cons… I use a free account because I don’t collaborate in a team, it’s just for me and my small hobby business.

And part of moving from Notion to “something else” is a goal to do more self hosting and rely less on companies (especially US-based companies) to have my data.

While I am liking Anytype, it is a powerful and complex beast. It has many capabilities, but it’s not super intuitive, and it can take some reading and experimenting to get how it works. It’s a little like a database, and since “everything is an object” it’s sort of like an object database? But it does have relations… It sort of reminds me of UserLand Frontier which had an object database, but also a scripting engine… I don’t think there’s a scripting engine available in Anytype though.

There are all sorts of “spaces” you can use to get started… think of these as empty / example databases. I’ve tried a few but ended up using them as examples and just built my own. But what about notes?

While I do plan to use Anytype as a simple database / datastore and for tasks (though it lacks notifications at this point) I don’t think it will replace my use of Bear for a synced digital notebook. Anytype has this whole “block” concept like Notion and you can’t easily just paste in a big chunk of Markdown text. It’s also a lot more work to fire up Anytype and add a new note, as there’s a bit of friction involved where Bear has none for me. The way Anytype handles Markdown is also… weird to me.

So for now I’ll probably stick to Bear for notes, and honestly I think I just need to reorganize some of the ways I use Bear to make notes a bit easier to work with and find. Also, I guess you cannot change the font size in Anytype which is a bit annoying. Still, I am finding it useful for some things… but not everything.

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blogNag – A Blog Post Reminder

I recently released blogNag which is a Python script I run once per day via a cron job to notify me how long it has been (in days or hours) since I last wrote a post on this blog. This forces me to think “Hmm, I should write another post…”, thus promoting a cycle of continuous blogging.

I remember back around 2000 so some bloggers had this idea to “bug” each other if they didn’t post for a while. This is the modern day version of that, since most of the 2000 bloggers have stopped long ago. ;p

It uses feedparser and I remember having some issues getting that installed in the past so I set up a virtualenv for Python. I had these two links for notes: venv — Creation of virtual environments and How to Set Up a Virtual Environment in Python – And Why It’s Useful

My short version for setting up a venv since I will probably forget by the time I need to do it again…

mkdir blogNag
python3 -m venv ./blogNag
cd blogNag
./bin/pip3 install feedparser
# now we can run
./bin/python3 ./blogNag.py

Look, I’m not great at Python but It Works For Me.

Also, this is on Codeberg because I don’t plan on putting any of my personal work on GitHub in the future if I can avoid it. (Microsoft acquired GitHub and I prefer not to support them if possible. Others can make their own choices in the matter, and I won’t judge!)

You’ll probably want to change the code to look for your own feed and do your own notification thing… Again, it works for me, YMMV and all that. Enjoy!

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High Capacity CPAP Water Tank

Hack to add on an auxillary water tank for a CPAP machine

I ended up making a High Capacity CPAP Water Tank (Or an “Auxiliary Tank”) because the manufacturer doesn’t make one. This post will show what I’ve done and talk about how it works a bit.

I use a CPAP and got a new one in 2024, and while it works much better, there is still one issue with it… If I set the humidity too high it runs out of water in less than six hours, which is how long I usually sleep. For a while I was filling a second tank and then swapping in the middle of the night when I awoke from the dryness. It works, but it’s not ideal…

So I wondered if the manufacturer had a larger capacity tank… they do not, but in the process I found someone who had come up with solutions, and I’m a maker so I had a go at it.

RonKMiller used a collapsible water bottle with some hose fittings…

Hack to add on an auxillary water tank for a CPAP machine

Now, if you’re wondering why there are two tubes, it’s because the bottom one is for water and the upper one is for air. Since the CPAP machine uses pressure you need to have the air flow into both containers otherwise it tries to come to pressure and blows the water in the built-in tank into the secondary tank.

jdm5 took a different approach, and used a large container with a sealable top…

Hack to add on an auxillary water tank for a CPAP machine

Both of these posts were valuable in figuring out what I was going to do. My build is similar to the one from jdm5 though I chose different connectors. Here are the things I used:

Hack to add on an auxillary water tank for a CPAP machine

In total this project cost about $75 USD, but I can subtract the $30 for the Air10 HumidAir Water Chamber because my HRA covers that so it’s not out of pocket for me. In addition I only used one piece of the 40 Piece Food Storage Container Set. If you already have a container or can buy just one that can be a huge savings.

Hack to add on an auxillary water tank for a CPAP machine

For the Rubber O-Rings I had these on-hand for other projects but you can probably just buy what you need from a local hardware store. The PVC tubing is much cheaper than Silicone, so if you do choose Silicone that price will go up… probably triple or more. And again, you can choose different hose connectors but the ones I chose work for me.

Hack to add on an auxillary water tank for a CPAP machine

The piece of wood is under the tank to raise it up to the proper level so the lower hose entry points are the same height on the auxillary tank as they are on the CPAP’s reservoir. This is so water will level out between the tanks.

Hack to add on an auxillary water tank for a CPAP machine

Due to space constraints on my nightstand I need to put my container behind my CPAP machine, not next to it. I just made the hoses longer. I may consider switching to silicone tubing in the future, as it’s much more flexible than the PVC tubing I have now.

Hack to add on an auxillary water tank for a CPAP machine

So to use this I just pop the top off the external tank, fill it with water to the “fill line” (where I’ve added a piece of black gaff tape) and then lift the tank higher than the other tank, slightly tilting it so water can flow into the CPAP’s tank. Once the level on the CPAP’s tank hits the fill line I put down the external tank. If need be I can then top it off, but I usually don’t need to as it will be plenty of water to last the night.

This system isn’t perfect, but it’s a huge improvement over what I used to do. This is the best system I could come up with for the lowest dollar amount, and after four months of using this I am fairly pleased with the results.

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