PSA for folks in the Bay Area: The University of California Botanical Garden has re-opened for limited, outdoor-only visits. Seems like a nice (and reasonably) safe place to go during the pandemic. It's July, so not much is in bloom, but it's still beautiful.

So, my etcd post was cross-posted to Hacker News and Reddit and probably more places. For the good of my own sanity, I'm not going to try to read through the comment threads on those other sites; generally, I try to avoid Hacker News anyway¹. Just some brief, off-the-cuff follow-ups:

• Yes, I recognize that the post from the other day was, uh, inflammatory. I did not write it as a persuasive thinkpiece targeted at the critical 18-25 demo or whatever. It's just some notes while I was in the process of rewriting some software from the etcd v2 API …

Once upon a time in 2013, there was a tool called etcd which was a really lightweight database written around the Raft consensus algorithm. This tool was originally written in 2013 for a bullshit unsuccessful project called CoreOS Container Linux that was EOL'd several years ago, but that doesn't really matter — etcd was greater than its original use-case. Etcd provided a convenient and simple set of primitives (set a key, get a key, set-only-if-unchanged, watch-for-changes) with a drop-dead simple HTTP API on top of them. I have built a number of tools using etcd as a lightweight consensus store behind …

It's been about ten years since I've regularly used that most quintessential of post-1984 computer peripherals, the mouse. The last mouse I had was pretty exclusively used for a gaming PC in college and was a Logitech MX518¹; since then I've used a variety of input devices. It's been a while since I did any brief reviews of technology on this ostensibly-technology blog, so what the hey, let's do it! In brief, we're going to talk about:

• Logitech TrackMan Wheel Optical
• Apple Magic Trackpad and Apple Magic Trackpad 2
• Logitech M570
• Kensington ExpertMouse
• Elecom DEFT PRO
• Elecom DEFT HUGE …

As every company I've ever bought a product from has been reminding me all morning, today is my birthday. 32 revolutions around the sun. Still ticking.

Obviously it's been a pretty busy year; most of that is in my post from last month. According to the accelerometer on my wrist, I've walked 2,904,398 steps in the last year¹ but I'm mostly still in the same place as I was. Probably by the time I hit 33 revolutions around the sun, it'll be a very different story. Still got that baby on the way (another ~6 weeks to …

For the past few years, I've been using a one-port 2016 MacBook¹ as my personal laptop that I carry with me whenever I am traveling or need to work outside the house. It's been a mixed bag – the size was pretty much perfect and very similar to a thin version of my old 12" PowerBook G4, but the CPU performance was absolutely awful and the battery only lasted about two hours. Also, I was finally bitten by the infamous Butterfly Keyboard Issue and was getting double-entries from my spacebar.

In March, when Apple released the new MacBook Air with …