It's 9:45am on a cloudless Wednesday morning here in summertime California.

My light meter reads 14 lux pointed directly at the sky — about as much as the middle of the night (with local light pollution), or about 1/1000 as much as a normal morning. They tell me that the skies are this apocalyptic shade of red due to the smoke from the 16 major wildfires currently burning in California¹. Local news has plenty to say on the cause if you want to read up. Damn if it isn't disconcerting to live through, though.

What world did I …

Hello hypothetical readers; sorry for my absence, but I've spent the last weeks pretty well busy – as I foreshadowed in May, I have a son now!

It's been quite an adjustment. Isaac was born on August 7, 2020 after a very long¹ labor, but he's happy and healthy now. I got 3 weeks off of work, which I spent with my wife doing intensive child care. Let me tell you, I have a whole new respect for single parents. Caring for an infant with just the two of us (since none of our families or friends can visit or …

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 …