Stray Thoughts - April 2026
A smattering of stray thoughts I’ve had this month. This is brand new for April and will be the inaugural post for Stray Thoughts.
Denoise: LightRoom vs DxO PureRAW 5
A quick down-and-dirty comparison between LR and DxO denoise. There is a very clear winner here.
Currently reading: Go Computer Now! by Ben Zotto 📚
About halfway through, what a great book. Tons of history that I knew nothing about.
Morning Meditation
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can injure me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him.”
~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 2
Finished reading: Traversal by Maria Popova 📚
How do you get from Captain Cook’s 1769 voyage to document the transit of Venus to Mary Shelley’s parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and their books Vindication and An Enquiry Concerning the Nature of Political Justice; to Margaret Fuller in America; to frog legs; to Aaron Burr as a destitute boarder; to the world’s first chemical equation–“grape must = carbonic acid + alcohol”; to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror; to Jane Marcet; to Michael Faraday; Ralph Wedgwood, the inventor of the noctograph; to the catastrophic eruption of Mount Tambora and its devastating global weather effects; to a doctor who wrote the first vampire-themed book, then later took his own life after being unable to convince the public of his true authorship; to phrenology; to Walt Whitman and his lost true love; to Henry David Thoreau, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Frederick Douglass? Maria Popova, that’s how.
Pentel Arts Multi 8 Pencil
Hiro had this pencil in his last Hiro.report. Had to order it right away and get penciling.
It’s a fun pencil, and switching leads is easy. Rotate the clip to the color you want—the cutout in the clip shows which one is selected. Press the top button, and the lead drops down. Adjust it to the length you want, then start writing. To switch colors, hold the pencil upside down, let the lead fall back into place, and rotate the clip to your next color.
It’s surprisingly small for how much it holds. The tapered barrel makes it comfortable to hold, and it never feels awkward. It’s all plastic, so it has a slightly cheap feel, and you’ll probably want to be careful not to stress the clip too much. Still, it feels solid enough to last a long time with reasonable care.
Bright, fun colors in a very small pencil. This is definitely going to become a must-carry item with my journal.
Custom Oura Ring Data Board
Poking around, I found out that Oura ring has a robust API, so I wanted to see what Claude Code could do with it. It took an afternoon of fiddling, but it seems to be a robust custom data board with about 4 years of data, that updates itself 3 times a day to a SQLite database. It runs on my Mac Mini home server.
Kumari Gold Tea
Kumari Gold deserves its own post. This is a reserve tea from The Tea Spot in Boulder, CO.
Flashback to 2009
Browsing the internet archives, I stumbled upon my blog from 2009. The original cliff538 was built from scratch as an exam for an HTML/CSS class that I was taking.