Steven Brokaw
A good, old-fashioned blog. Topically, it's all over the place. There are no ads, no trackers. There are precious few pictures. I tried to make the text nice, but most of my effort goes into the articles.
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Keep it Simple
I went back to eleventy. Wordpress is just not fun. I can’t explain it technically–I just don’t enjoy using it.
Looking at my eleventy configuration, I couldn’t figure out my own setup. I was happy that I got tailwind configured with pruned and minimized css. But I’m not a daily node or JavaScript programmer, and coming back to that after months of neglect was too much. So I ripped it all out. I took inspiration from bettermotherf*****website.com and made my own very simple stylesheet.
Writing my own stylesheet seems foolish in this day and age. I have to run to MDN for just about everything. But the benefit is that I have under 50 lines of straightforward CSS.
I don’t have the same level of features. I would like to resize the text based on screen size. But since the site is mostly text, it’s still usable as is. Also, I would like to have a light and dark mode. Maybe I will add media queries, but maybe not.
Will this be more sustainable than my tailwind installation? I think so, but I’ll have to wait and see. I keep my styles fairly straightforward. I select semantic HTML tags and stay away from classes.
Reading CSS is pretty easy. My problem is I don’t know the style names or syntax, so writing is slow. But since the site design is pretty simple, the stylesheet can also be simple, and I think that will make it sustainable.
I want to give a final shoutout to eleventy on this front. It really is a dead-simple site generator, if you want it to be. Being in node, you can set up all kinds of fancy workflows. But for someone like me, it also serves as a very simple template system.
3/26/2023, 9:29:00 AM
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A living, thriving testament to good urbanism
Rick Cole:
Mueller feels like the alternate reality of how our nation should have been building—with an emphasis on reality. Mueller tangibly demonstrates that New Urbanism is neither a nostalgic niche nor a utopian impossibility. New Urbanism is the application of timeless ways of building to the technology, demography and reality of how we could live today. If anyone doubts the viability and the value of building walkable urbanism, let them spend time in Mueller.
There are problems with Mueller. The west edge is full of big-box chain retail and acres of parking. But there is a good core that is a positive example of housing and buildings that are impossible elsewhere in Austin because our 80s-era land development code mandates low-density, suburban-style housing.
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Edgerouter Custom DNS
Info in this article can be found in EdgeRouter - DNS Forwarding Setup and Options
I have Google Fiber for Internet. $70/month for symmetric gigabit is a good deal. Speeds are consistent and service is reliable. But I don’t want to give Google the data of my DNS lookups, especially since it is so easily related to my personal information, now that they are my ISP. Here’s how I configured my EdgeRouter-X to avoid Google’s name servers.
I use the EdgeRouter as a forwarding DNS service. All clients query the EdgeRouter first. The EdgeRouter either replies from cache, or forwards the request on. Forward the request where? By default it forwards it on to the DNS server provided by the ISP. I like the forwarding setup, but I just want to forward to a different DNS server.
Your configuration may be different. Here’s my configuration that sets this up. This configures the dhcp server to tell the clients to send all DNS queries to the EdgeRouter.
set service dhcp-server shared-network-name LAN subnet 192.168.1.0/24 dns-server 192.168.1.1One way to set a custom name server is to change the name server which is handed out to your DHCP clients. For example:
set service dhcp-server shared-network-name LAN subnet 192.168.1.0/24 dns-server 1.1.1.1I went a different route. I set the system name servers, then configured the DNS forwarder to forward using the system name servers, not the name servers obtained from the ISP.
set system name-server 1.1.1.1 set system name-server 1.0.0.1 set system name-server '2606:4700:4700::1111' set system name-server '2606:4700:4700::1001' set service dns forwarding systemConfirm your settings. Here’s my output, with the Google nameservers not configured for forwarding.
admin@ubnt$ show dns forwarding nameservers ----------------------------------------------- Nameservers configured for DNS forwarding ----------------------------------------------- 1.1.1.1 available via 'optionally configured' 1.0.0.1 available via 'optionally configured' 2606:4700:4700::1111 available via 'optionally configured' 2606:4700:4700::1001 available via 'optionally configured' ----------------------------------------------- Nameservers NOT configured for DNS forwarding ----------------------------------------------- 8.8.8.8 available via 'dhcp eth0' 8.8.4.4 available via 'dhcp eth0'1/29/2022, 8:30:00 AM
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Film: Decasia
The title Decasia is a play on decay and Fantasia. The allusion to the Disney film indicates a more straightforward narrative than you’ll find. The movie is made of deteriorated film clips from silent era films and newsclips. Filmmaker Bill Morrison edits them together and holds them in place with a detuned score. Nitrate film deteriorates in fascinating ways, and the juxtaposition of these scenes invites comparisons beyond the content of the original scenes. The decay itself is another layer of comparison: The text of the scenes, the decay of the world represented in those scenes, and the decay of the medium itself. People seem to decay in the most disturbing way. Sometimes a ghost, or a wraith. Was that a klan rally, or did I invent that? Decasia invites you to bring your own imagery to fill in the gaps.
In his introduction to the film, Bill Morrison remarked that the Sundance premiere is touted as groundbreaking. His remembrance is that tickets to the film were easy to come by at the festival, and most people walk out before the 67 minute running time. Still, it found its small and dedicated following, and 20 years on continues to find more.
1/27/2022, 10:00:00 PM
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I made a few updates to the site. There are now three different types of content: links, articles, and thoughts. A “thought” is just a short, random idea like you might put in a Tweet. A link is a link to an article on some other site, possibly (but not necessarily) with a comment. And a article is a large-ish post. Bigger than a thought. Eventually I hope to wire this up to twitter in a way that makes sense, but I’m going to put that aside for now.
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Austin FC near deal for Norway defender Ruben Gabrielsen - sources
This is not the slam-dunk signing that many were hoping for, but it may be the best the team can get. Thousands of nervous Austin FC fans want to know: is Gabrielsen good enough?
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The Sparrow
I don’t know if speculative anthropology is a genre, but if it were, The Sparrow would be an exemplary piece. It gets categorized as science fiction, but the science is the least of its concerns. Yes, there are spaceships and aliens. But the spaceships are dealt with just enough to assure us that the trip is possible. It’s far, but not too far. It makes the plot timelines work, but doesn’t get into details of, say, rocket propulsion. Upon arrival at an alien planet, our explorers are lucky to be perfectly adapted to the plant, in mass, in atmosphere, and even in food sources.
The main concern of the story is the encounter with an alien society and how that might conflict with our ideas of meaning and faith. Our crew discovers an advanced society who evolved customs and norms under a vastly different ecosystem. The alien’s actions and attitudes towards each other are troubling. Actions that seem cartoonishly evil to us are the accepted tradeoff for a smoothly running society. If you believe–as the main character does–that God is leading you to this place, only to find yourself on the losing side of in this sometimes brutal society, you’re going to have second thoughts about the possibility of a loving God and his (or her) involvement in the world.
This book is not here to answer your questions, it is here to raise questions didn’t think to ask. Don’t look for an affirmation of your own sense of justice, or vengeance. At the end, our main character is having a crisis of faith, and the book tries to put us in that same frame of mind.
11/7/2021, 9:06:00 AM
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I saw the Velvet Underground last night. I’m not usually a big fan of documentaries, but this one was fantastic. Todd Haynes covered not just the music but the adjacent New York art scene, including the experimental film scene. It plays on AppleTV+, but if you can see it in a theater, you should. Austin Film Society is playing for a couple more weeks.
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Tonight’s AFS movie was Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon. A too-old Gary Cooper is cast as a love interest to Audrey Hepburn. I thought the casting was no more objectionable than Humphrey Bogart’s role opposite Hepburn in Sabrina. And it turns out, Bogart is a couple of years older than Cooper.
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Earlier I talking about how much effort of a quick post is. At least, compared to something like Twitter, or even Wordpress, it is difficult. Then I remember github has a built-in editor. This might be the perfect compromise.
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I like the new blog system. One drawback of it is that these short posts need to be committed in git and pushed. All posts follow that work flow, but for the short posts it feels cumbersome. I love that workflow for longer posts which I want to review and proofread. But it’s a hinderance for these shorter posts.
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Nanowrimo starts in almost a month, on November 1. Now is the perfect time to start thinking about a project, and make a commitment.
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Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations was written as a serial for weekly publication. I’ve been wanting to do more reading, so I decided to read one chapter of Great Expectations a day. At that rate it should take about two months to finish. I’ve been doing it for a week, and it’s been doable. It takes between 15 and 30 minutes to get through a chapter. I remember this book being a slog in high school, but it’s a fantastic read.
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I changed my site again. I know people do this to avoid writing: they change their site and then write about the new, “better” system. I’ve been down the same path. I’m hoping the new site is better, but I’m not going to go on about it.
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Happy MLK Day, 2021
Martin Luther King, in Letter from Brimingham Jail.
…I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I’ve posted this before, but it still feels relevent.
Here’s a reading list, and here’s an article that questions the notion of a reading list.
I like to give to local causes, so I give to the Austin Justice Coalition.
1/17/2021, 6:00:00 PM
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Edgerouter X
In the fall of 2020 I got Google Fiber. For about $5 more than I was already paying to my local cable company, I got 5x the speed. I remain skeptical of Google as a company, and I hate trusting them with my privacy, but so far Google Fiber is a good deal. Even better, though, is the discovery of the Ubiquiti Edgerouter X.
Gigabit Ethernet made it necessary to upgrade my home router. So instead of a consumer-grade plastic box of all-in-one router/switch/access point, I went for a small-business solution of the Edgerouter X. It is purely a wired router, with gigabit internet and a four-port switch built in. I added wireless network by pairing it with a Unifi access point. The access point draws power from the Ethernet cable connected to the router. The router and access point together require one power outlet, just like an all-in-one router.
The Edgerouter X has a web-based configuration assistant that will properly set up the router for 90% of the home users. Some additional customization is available in the web admin, but really the best way to customize this router is by connecting with SSH and using the command line interface.
Having a separate access point and router is a bit like having separate stereo components, or a separate computer and monitor. The freedom to mix and match makes it easier to match your exact requirements, and it gives me an incremental upgrade path. I can upgrade them separately.
I am somewhat late to the Edgerouter X party. It’s been out for a few years, and the newer access points don’t support the power over ethernet (PoE) that the Edgerouter X provides. But for $140 for the pair, it a steal, and will probably power my house for another year or so, until the next upgrade appears.
1/8/2021, 6:00:00 PM
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Is Austin the Next Silicon Valley?
By “next Silicon Valley, ” I mean a runaway housing affordability disaster that prices out all the diversity and creativity that we value about Austin.
Michael Agresta at Texas Monthly is opimistic that Austin won’t repeat the same housing mistakes as San Francisco.
If there’s one reason to be confident that Austin will not turn into the next Bay Area, it’s this: Austinites of all political types, from libertarian to social-justice-minded, have been warning each other for years that we don’t want to turn into the next San Francisco… there’s no chance we are sleepwalking through a reenactment of the past few decades of California history. For better or worse, what gets built here will be something brand-new.
I wish I could be as optimistic. That assumes that Austinites recognize and agree on what the mistakes of the Bay Area were. We may not sleep walk though it, but we seem to be courting disaster with our eyes wide open.
1/3/2021, 6:00:00 PM
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Happy New Year 2021
“Good riddance” seems to be a common sentiment towards 2020, but I can’t complain too much. I have my health. I have food and place to live. Nobody in my family got sick. Not everybody can say this. It did my best to stay healthy, but there are those who did the same and got sick regardless. Such is the nature of a virus.
I’m not big on resolutions, but the new year is a natural time to stop and think about the year past and future. I developed some good habbits in the last year that I’m happy about: cooking, exercise. I need to build on that to turn it into tangible health gains, like weight loss.
Another goal is to write more, to post more here. I wrote sporadically in the last year. About 12 posts, or once a month. I hope to increase the frequency.
“Find a niche and stay focused” is common advice for blogging. It’s advice I’m going to ignore. I don’t expect a large readership. I don’t plan to make money. I’m free to write what I want. The only unifying theme is what I’m interested in. Maybe technology, or programming, or photography, or books, or movies, or transportation, or urban design. Maybe cats. Of course, cats.
It’s all about small gains and incremental improvement. Nothing earth-shattering, just some improvements on past habits
1/1/2021, 6:00:00 PM
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TxDOT's Plans on Interstate 35
Texas Department of Transportation Open House. Don’t forget to submit a comment.(Update: TXDOT took down their site, so I removed the links).
Towers.net, Widening I-35 to 20 Lanes in Downtown Austin is the Anti-Project Connect:
More people than ever recognize you can’t build your way out of traffic, but the Texas Department of Transportation is planning to try just the same, and Austin will suffer for the next several decades if such a failure of imagination moves forward.
Reconnect Austin is a grassroots campaign to bury I-35 through Downtown Austin and reclaim this vital corridor as public space and developable land. Our vision is to create a new, humanized boulevard, reconnecting East Austin to Downtown, mitigating air and water pollution, and providing an economic boost in the form of new, centrally located housing and businesses.
Other cities to learn from:
Houston went all-in on the mega freeway expansion with the Katy Freeeway. The expansion made congestion worse.
Arch Daily writes 6 Cities That Have Transformed Their Highways Into Urban Parks.
World Atlas on The Story of the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco:
The replacement of the Embarcadero Freeway is considered a large success in the world of urban planning. The waterfront park has become extremely popular and has also received a significant level of private investment. The Embarcadero Boulevard which replaced Embarcadero Freeway carries almost half of the original freeway volume with the remaining traffic finding alternative routes or switching to other modes of transport. The changes also allowed more pedestrians to use the boulevard.
Pew Charitable Trust: More Cities Are Banishing Highways Underground — And Building Parks on Top
11/28/2020, 6:00:00 PM
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The Long, Strange Trip to Austin’s Transit Victory
In November 2020, Austin passed Proposition A, authorizing a $7.5 Billion transit expansion which includes rail. There have been various interpretations of why this succeeded. I’m not a transit or political expert, but I am an Austin resident who has been paying attention to transit issues since the initial, fateful 2000 loss. Here are my impressions of the various campaigns, and how we ended up passing the 2020 plan.
The 2000 Referendum
The 2000 loss was a true heart-breaker. It lost by less than 1%, fewer than 2000 votes. A couple of things that were in play that election:
The whole CapMetro area was voting on the plan, which added a lot of suburban voters. Central Austin really needed to perform to overcome those votes.
The anti-rail campaign had more traction in the central Austin electorate. Max Nofziger was still a respectable voice in local politics, and respected as an environmentalist. Climate change from automobile emissions felt less urgent then, and he led the charge against the plan, largely being a mouthpiece for South Congress merchants (i.e., Guerros) that rail would be bad for business.
Some potential advocates felt they could vote against this and get a monorail passed in a couple of years. It did feel like the plan was rushed to the polls, and there wasn’t the sense that all modes had been thoroughly considered.
With such thin margins, any of the above could have made a difference.
Red Line 2004 Passes
In Trains, Buses, People, Christof Spieler writes (something to the effect) that if nobody opposes your transit plan, it probably isn’t a very good plan. Pretty much nobody opposed the 2004 plan, which is why it passed.
The line runs on existing rail, so the capital cost seemed pretty cheap. It seemed like a good way to dip our toe in the water of light rail. In hindsight, it was the wrong idea. The line is slowly gaining ridership, but it isn’t the sort of smash success that makes people clamor for more. It will likely become a valuable element of the system after it connects to the orange, blue, and gold lines of project connect.
I often read that the 2020 election was Austin’s third try at rail, which ignores the 2004 election entirely. I think there is a sense in that this doesn’t count. It’s a commuter train, and doesn’t serve residents trying get around within the city. It also wasn’t a hard sell. Nobody was really asked to give up anything. The agency already owned the existing track. Even so, it’s relevant as a something that informs the typical Austinite’s perception of rail.
The 2014 Referendum
The 2014 referendum lost by a wide margin. Even transit advocates opposed the plan. Instead of addressing the densest areas, it was a speculative plan that tried to anticipate future growth by building in a corridor that was sparsely populated. The University of Texas played a part in ruining the line, as they wanted to encourage development along their eastern edge, since the western edge (where the 2000 and 2020 plans go) is already built out with some of the most historic buildings on campus. The western edge is also densest with residences, retail, and academic buildings. The 2014 plan ignored all that density.
Austin already had a rail line that had low ridership (the Red Line from 2004, opened in 2010), and the outsized operating budget of the line was a drain on the whole system. Transit supporters felt that the proposed line would perform poorly, drag the whole system down with it, and doom any additional rail investments for a long time. The secondary effect of this is that the plan was left without an army of community activists who would do the legwork it takes to push a citywide referendum over the finish line.
The 2014 failure is a best understood as a failure of leadership. It wasn’t messaging. It wasn’t pro-road sentiment. It wasn’t even anti-tax sentiment. I doubt a more transit-supportive electorate would have saved it. It was that the initial process ran amuck and ended up with a plan that served very few.
2020 Success
If the 2014 failure was a failure of leadership, I think it is fair to credit the city’s and Capital Metro’s leadership in the 2020 succes. The outreach was clearly superior. I had several feedback opportunities. CapMetro did the traditional forums at the community rec center, but they also did lots of virtual sessions (accelerated by COVID by the end). They seemed geared to take and incorporate feedback, rather than just present results.
At the beginning of the process, CapMetro seemed to be showing a worrying attraction to Autonomous Personal Rapid Transit, and other novel, unproven gadgets. I don’t know the story, but I like to think they were just doing due diligence. Maybe they knew these systems were unlikely to pan out, but they had to walk stakeholders through the decision process that leads to a system that can move tens of thousands of people in a space-constrained corridor. During the campaign rail opponents were full of promises of imminent technology we should just wait for. That sort of talk was much less resonant this time, and promises of non-existent autonomous vehicles, HyperLoop, monorail, and goldolas were not taken seriously. Maybe we got lucky, but the final plan was so solid that I suspect Cap Metro knew what they were doing all along.
The community engagement undoubtedly lead to a more equitable plan. As good as the 2000 plan was, it served very privileged parts of town and the distant suburbs. The only thing offered to the historically underserved east Austin was the promise that a central spine could improve the whole system. The 2020 plan incorporates east Austin into the core of the system with the blue line, rapid buses, and eventually a green line commuter rail.
The team apparently had the political space to pursue the best plan. My impression of 2014 is that Mayor Leffingwell didn’t do much to protect the transit team from political pressures. He might have even thought he could harness those special interests to his advantage, without considering the damage they would do to good transit fundamentals. This time, the team seemed to address the project as a transit project, not as a development incentive. They haven’t shied away from proposing construction in a crowded, busy corridor. Construction on Guadalupe will be painful enough that plenty of Austin mayors have shied away from proposing building a rail line along that corridor. The Project Team felt empowered to suggest the best transit route.
In the end, pretty much any organization with political weight in Austin got behind the plan: business groups, multiple Democratic party groups, social justice groups. The anti-rail groups was reduced to car dealerships, the one-off local businesses (Guerro’s and Esther’s Follies), and the ever-present road-warrior crowd.
Austin had 20 years to reflect on the real costs of inaction. There is no option that improves automobile traffic within the city. Things are pretty densely built around narrow rights of way. There is no space to widen roads.
I’ve read about the demographic changes that drove much of the change. I don’t have much to add to that. I’m sure it’s true. I don’t know how it balances against, say, the equity elements of the plan. Or against the slow, methodical consensus building that resulted from community outreach. Or the scope and reach of the entire plan. But all of these are really part of the same thing. The plan is large, comprehensive, and equitable because of diligent public outreach and reacting to that feedback.
They all worked together, which enabled a $7.5 billion plan, funded by a tax increase, to be passed by a wide margin during a pandemic. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it.
11/22/2020, 6:00:00 PM