Posts | Mark A. Matienzo skip to content W3C SVG Main navigation Menu About Now Posts Notes Music Projects Publications Presentations Press Posts IAH Forecast - Disquiet Junto Project 0476 Publish date: February 15, 2021 Tags: music black tent by Mark A. Matienzo An experiment with recording a new single using VCV Rack and REAPER based on a compositional prompt. I ended up recording two tracks. Perfecting a favorite: oatmeal chocolate chip cookies Publish date: November 29, 2020 Tags: recipes food by Mark A. Matienzo I have a horrible sweet tooth, and I absolutely love oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. I tend to bake as a means to cope with stress, and of course, more often then that means making these cookies. After making many iterations, I’ve settled upon this recipe as the ultimate version to which all compare. (Read more …) In Memoriam and Appreciation of Rob Casson (1974-2020) Publish date: October 1, 2020 Tags: code4lib Personal by Mark A. Matienzo The world lost one of its brightest and most charming lights earlier this week, Rob Casson. Many of us knew Rob through the Code4Lib community and conferences and his work at Miami University Libraries. We miss his generosity, patience, sense of humor, and genuine kindness. Those of us who got the chance to socialize with him also remember his passion for music, and some of us were even lucky to see live shows in the evenings between conference sessions and other social activities. On Sunday, October 4 at 1:30 PM Pacific/4:30 PM Eastern, those of us who knew him through Code4Lib and the world of libraries are encouraged to gather to share our memories of him and to appreciate his life and work. Please join me and my co-organizers, Mike Giarlo and Declan Fleming on Zoom (registration required). Robert Casson (robcaSSon), 30 Jan 1974 - 29 Sep 2020. Photo: Declan Fleming. (Read more …) First SOTA activation Publish date: September 29, 2020 Tags: ham radio by Mark A. Matienzo About a month ago, I got my ham radio license, and soon after I got pretty curious about Summits on the Air (SOTA), an award scheme focused on safe and low impact portable operation from mountaintops. While I like to hike, I’m arguably a pretty casual hiker, and living in California provides a surprising number of options within 45 minutes driving time for SOTA newbies. (Read more …) Optimizing friction Publish date: August 10, 2020 Tags: indieweb music plan9 food by Mark A. Matienzo Over and in response to the last few months, I’ve been reflecting about intentionality, and how I spend my time creating things. I have tried to improve the indiewebbiness of my site, and understanding what it means to “scratch my own itch”. This resonates particularly lately because it’s leading me to mull over which parts should be hard and easy. Unsurprisingly, much of that is personal preference, and figuring out how I want to optimize from the perspective of user experience. Friction in UX can be a powerful tool, part of what I’m trying to find is where I want to retain friction as it helps me remain intentional. (Read more …) A Hugo shortcode for embedding Mirador Publish date: July 25, 2020 Tags: iiif hugo by Mark A. Matienzo I spent a little time over the last day or so trying to bodge together a shortcode for Hugo to embed an instance of Mirador. While it’s not quite as simple (or full-featured) as I’d like, it’s nonetheless a starting point. The shortcode generates a snippet of HTML that gets loaded into Hugo pages, but (unfortunately) most of the heavy lifting is done by a separate static page that gets included as an