Radio nerd aside: this Twitter thread is bananas.

TL;DR: lots of the Russian military is communicating in the clear and SDRs around the world are listening and recording it all.

“Teach us to be loving not only in great and exceptional moments, but above all in the ordinary moments of life.

Lord, give us your Holy Spirit. “

— Intercession of Lauds, Ash Wednesday

Currently reading: Fundamental Theology (Sacra Doctrina) by Guy Mansini 📚

This came up in class this weekend and I’ll be using it in parallel with the required texts, though mostly for my own edification. The author’s at St. Meinrad to boot!

I have an unabashed love of RSS feeds and track about 40 right now. I used newsboat, which is a terminal client that works pretty well. If you like mutt, you'll like newsboat. It runs on my main workstation, though, so I found myself gravitating back to Feedly so that I could catch up on things when I wasn't sitting in my office. Somewhere along the way, I saw a reference to a self-hosted aggregator, and since my phone is tethered to the home network all the time anyway via wireguard, I figured I'd give it a shot. I looked at a few and finally landed on FreshRSS - mainly because I found a docker image for it and can run it on the NAS alongside HomeAssistant. Ten minutes later, I'm up and running. So far, so good. I like it! 

I'm more or less caught up with schoolwork. Grades are starting to come back to us, which is nice too. One final set of readings and an essay (Theodicy: Aquinas v. Anselm) is due before the next class but I'm ahead of schedule. Next week, I'm on deck to teach OCIA and will be doing Marriage and Morality (read: contraception, IVF, &c).

I also managed to step (along with my wife) into coordinating our parish's Synod-on-the-Synod activities, which should be interesting. The runway seems short - we need to have our summaries back to the diocese by the end of April - so the keys will be delegating as much as we can to individual ministries and school, hosting as many listening sessions as we can before the diocesean deadline, and ensuring bilingual access every step of the way.

Meanwhile, the temperatures are slowly climbing. The sun is out more and the days are getting longer, but we're still in that 60s-one-day-20s-the-next part of the year.  Spenser nailed it:

Therein the changes infinite beholde,
Which to her creatures euery minute chaunce;
Now, boyling hot: streight, friezing deadly cold:
Now, faire sun-shine, that makes all skip and daunce:
Streight, bitter storms and balefull countenance,
That makes them all to shiuer and to shake:
Rayne, hayle, and snowe do pay them sad penance,
And dreadfull thunder-claps (that make them quake)
With flames & flashing lights that thousand changes make.

Currently reading: Idylls of the King (Penguin Classics) by Alfred Tennyson 📚

Not sure what I was expecting out of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, but given its famous opening line, I guess the plot went the only way it could. This book (and the last) happens from me looking at our bookshelf and saying, huh - I didn't know we had this. I'm still not entirely sure where we got some of these. I think after this, I'll look for something on the lighter side. 

“Be glad then that you are overwhelmed, and do not be saddened because he has overcome you. A thirsty man is happy when he is drinking, and he is not depressed because he cannot exhaust the spring. So let this spring satisfy your thirst, and not your thirst the spring…Be thankful then for what you have received and do not be saddened at all that such an abundance still remains.”

— St. Ephrem the Syrian, deacon

This was in the Office of Readings for Sunday - the whole piece, excerpted from a commentary on the Diatessaron, is worth reading and comes at a particularly good time for me (simultaneously thirsty and a little overwhelmed).

“When I notice something wrong in my brother that cannot be corrected - either because it is inevitable or because it comes from some weakness of his in body or character - why do I not bear it patiently and offer my willing sympathy? As scripture says, their children will be carried on their shoulders and comforted on their laps. Could it be because there is a lack in me, a lack of that which bears all things and is patient enough to take up the burden, a lack of the will to love?”

— Blessed Isaac of Stella, Abbot

Still working through the Tolstoy collection. So far The Cossacks is my favorite, followed closely by Family Happiness and The Death of Ivan Ilych. I finished The Devil last night and am still chewing on it. Two endings are included, both terrible, and I’m not sure which is the less terrible.

Draft of one paper (Liturgy!) is done. Will sleep on it, review/edit it tomorrow, and submit Monday-ish. Most of this week's reading for the online class (Creed!) is also done; one more article to get through plus a couple of YT lectures. On deck: readings and essays for the upcoming class (Fundamentals!) at the end of the month. #wharrgarbl

Current state: I have to write a paper for a class that just ended, start the reading assignments for a course beginning in a few weeks, and keep up with the ongoing readings/reflections for an online class that commenced this week.  My head so full. 

“And suddenly he was overcome by such a strange feeling of causeless joy and of love for everything that from an old habit of his childhood he began crossing himself and thanking someone.”

— Tolstoy, The Cossacks

Facebook, said the director of diocesan media, is where the people still are.

So after this latest formation weekend, I installed FB Purity, gritted my teeth, and logged back in after a nine year hiatus. Not much seems to have changed and the plug-in seems to clear away nearly all of the most annoying UI stuff.

I intend to use it like Twitter - follow a few things I’m interested in (church stuff, duh) and mostly lurk/listen.

A little more nerd stuff - I've fallen down the Home Assistant rabbit-hole. Not really interested in the automation aspects as much as having One Place to See Everything. I've been eyeballing it for a while but figured it would have to wait until Raspberry Pis were available again at reasonable prices. Then I saw that there was a Docker image available! Our NAS will run Docker, so fifteen minutes later I had it up and running. A couple of days later I've got what few IoT things we have all discovered and dashboarded. In the process, I wanted to re-install OpenVPN but decided to give Wireguard a try. After a bit of flailing - I had ignored the 'you should reboot' installation message and wasn't actually using the updated kernel - it's up and running beautifully. It's fast, easy to add new clients, and I can set it for on-demand activation whenever I'm off the local wifi network.

Currently reading: Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy 📚

Found it on one of our bookshelves and we have no idea how it wound up there.

Spent most of Sunday and Monday installing a new ceiling fan. Difficulty level: 16' ceiling. This required two (2) runs to Home Depot to rent a 14' step-ladder and truck to haul it and an extended facetime call with a master electrician friend of mine for some Q&A. Managed it all without serious injury or breaking anything, so I'll call it a win.

In all of the bouncing of the room circuit, the Raspberry Pi bit the dust, or at least its sdcard did. Found a larger card and reflashed it so we’re back in the adblocking business. Oh and amidst all this, one of the garage doors went all haywire and a guy had to come out and basically re-set a bunch of things. So we start the (short) week with everything more or less working again. The sun’s out and the weekend’s snow and ice are, again, melting quickly.

We finished up season 4 of Fargo and season 6 of The Expanse, so we decided to give Peaky Blinders a try. One episode in and we're sufficiently intrigued. I do have to say that we got a good laugh by Netflix's content warning when it started: "Language, Nudity, Gore, Smoking."

We breathlessly intoned "...and smoking!" to each other as things got underway.

I wrote a dumb little shell script to watch the USCCB’s website for any updates to their ongoing overhaul of the Liturgy of the Hours. If anything changes, the script DMs me on our family’s Slack channel. Why Slack? The price is right and the younger ones without phones can participate. It’s been great fun for general silliness, sharing pictures, and general announcements like we’re starting Boba Fett in 10 minutes.

I’ve also come to appreciate Slack’s webhook feature, which makes it a cinch to post data to a channel. Among other things, I’ve got a script that uses rtl_433 to monitor my wireless grill thermometer and send temperature updates so I can keep an eye on things when I have to be elsewhere.

In any event, this is what I came up with after liberally borrowing from similar things I found online:

#!/bin/bash

URL="https://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/liturgy-of-the-hours/liturgy-of-the-hours-second-edition"

mv new.html old.html 2> /dev/null
lynx --dump -nolist $URL > new.html
DIFF_OUTPUT="$(diff --changed-group-format='-%<+%>' --unchanged-group-format='' new.html old.html)"
if [ "0" -ne "${#DIFF_OUTPUT}" ]; then

    message="LOTH Website has been updated: https://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/liturgy-of-the-hours/liturgy-of-the-hours-second-edition^M"$DIFF_OUTPUT

    curl -X POST -H 'Content-type: application/json' \
            --data "$(jq -n --arg var "$message" '.text = $var')" \
            https://hooks.slack.com/services/getyourownwebhookapi/urlinfoandputithere
fi

Why lynx? For a page that doesn’t change very often, the USCCB’s CMS uses enough javascript that changes and I was getting false alarms. Lynx will dump out the content and leave all the cruft behind. The ‘nolist’ option suppresses the URL list which is normally appended to the output.

I wanted to see the actual changes in the message, so I found a concise bit of formatting for diff’s output

Another tip of the hat to ‘jq’ which, once again, makes dealing with JSON a snap. This runs as a daily cron job. Now I’ll be all in the loop whenever something happens. In the spirit of sharing, take this and go nuts if it’s useful to you.

Someone on Metafilter just referred to NFTs as “Dunning Krugerands” and I don’t think I’ll read anything better this whole day.

Today’s Wordle needs to be kicked to the curb. There needs to be an indicator of some kind, if you know what I mean.

The retreat for this weekend was canceled. The priest set to lead it came down with Covid, as did several of the staff at the retreat house. There’s a fair bit of noise around here at the moment about another snowpocalypse this weekend, so perhaps it’s just as well. The retreat center is isolated and beautiful, but probably not the best place to be if the roads start getting tricky.

I may look ahead and try to do something in the late summer or early fall. In the meanwhile, prayers for a speedy recovery to all, for the peace, strength, and patience of caregivers, and an end to this pandemic.

A sunny 40 degrees today and I took a few minutes to uproot an apple tree which finally gave up the ghost. Then I did a bit of pruning on another and ended up dressing the pears and sour cherries too. The garlic seems to have come through the recent snowiness, which is nice. I’d like to add 1 or 2 more pears to go with the Keiffer and Bartlett - probably Bosc and/or Anjou.

Trying to put a few thoughts together on cycles and liturgy.

Having started a new liturgical year with Advent, we find ourselves now on the far side of Christmas, Epiphany, and the Baptism of the Lord. In short, the First Week of Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time, as a season, is broken into two parts by Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. This first part, occurring as it does after the birth and manifestation of The Lord, can be seen to correspond in a way to His life and ministry on earth.

The second part of Ordinary Time, then, begins after the Ascension. Having accomplished everything necessary for our salvation, the Lord departs and the Spirit accompanies the Church through time as it draws ever nearer to the End of Time - the feast of Christ, King of the Universe, which precedes Advent, and so the cycle continues. There’s nothing particularly ordinary about Ordinary Time, except that it feels like a chance to draw a breath or two after the Christmas season. This year we’ve got a fairly long ramp-up to Lent, too. But we’ll have the memorials of the saints, the feria, and everything else besides. Snow notwithstanding, the regular work and school schedules have started and our college kids have returned to campuses to get ready for the next semester.

The cycles of seasons, weeks, and hours show the sanctification of time itself - that strange and wonderful place where the transcendent and immanent meet. The God beyond all categories and definition and the source of all being deigned to become one of us. Still more, He invites us into the ongoing communication of Love that is His very nature - the Father to the Son, and the Son to the Father, the Spirit proceeding from both. We’re part of this conversation in our worship, our liturgy. What’s happening in signs and symbols here on earth is going on in reality in heaven. What’s here is real; what’s there is a more real sort of real. Super-real.

There’s a lot bouncing around in my head at the moment on this, almost certainly because of all the preparatory reading we’ve been assigned for our next class on Liturgy. I’ve managed to finish it well in advance and have started the book on which we’ll be writing papers - The Spirit of the Liturgy by Cardinal Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. It’ll probably go with me on this weekend’s retreat, but I’m also tempted to go with nothing except a bible and breviary. If memory serves, the retreat house has a decent little library so I’m sure I can find something if I need to. Maybe I’ll drag Talley’s Origins of the Liturgical Year for super-nerding on calendar stuff.

In other news, I made some orange marmalade this past weekend and it turned out beautifully. There seems to be something nearly magical about eating orange marmalade when it’s 25 degrees outside - as if we’ve somehow captured the tropics in a jar to eat on our toast. We got to babysit the new grandbaby, too, so it was a fabulous weekend all around. The snow has all melted and things have gotten back to their normal mid-South green and brown. It’s still plenty cold but at least the sun is out.

Currently reading: The Spirit of the Liturgy by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger 📚

A heavy snowfall was nice, but nicer still is listening to it all melt at once.