iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 17h

They weren't wrong. Truck is now working but half my face is sunburned and I am driving to Devil's Tower.

Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 17h

Fixing the head unit in my truck. Firmware instructions are like, look just trust us, it's going to work but it's going to get real 'Close Encounters' there for a bit.

Firmware upgrade instructions including "Automatically the update will start on the decoder, you will notice the screen will start to turn blurry and bright for 15-30 seconds. It will get back to normal when finished"

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 26/09/2026

Updated my ebook library with the classic mayflower covers of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books (the "good covers" as we call them)

Classic 60s/70s style fantasy book covers showing daring deeds of swords and sorcery. Semi naked barbarians fighting monsters, wiry thieves scrambling from giant snakes, etc. etc.

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 24/09/2026

I will teach the post-fall children the art of graffito, the passing of knowledge, ideas, and wisdom through words on walls. A final draft which I will paint across the empty husk of a burned villa, the former home to an elected official who took industry money to allow the looting of public goods:

Burning a Gutenberg has always been easier than creating one, yet the technocrats called their destruction necessary disruption for growth. We saw it for what it was: vandalism at scale.

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 24/09/2026

We gather round a fire & burn the only remaining fuel sources we have left: unread bunker stockpiles of The Fountainhead. I speak to the children gathered around so they may learn and understand the fall, this pyre to civilization casting a soft glow on their faces.

Even more well adapted for the techno-huckster role were those in whom the ethical organs had simply failed to manifest. Unlike a missing lung or kidney, the lack of this organ did not harm the afflicted individual, it harmed everyone else once that individual gained power, money, and a complete lack of external regulation.

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 24/09/2026

another graffiti draft, this to be painted on the glass doors of the lifeless, monolithic server racks standing like terracotta warriors in the vast and echoing data center that serves as a tomb for a desiccated corpse clad in a venture capitalist branded patagonia vest & strung up with cat 6 cables

The American Hucksters who ushered in the decline were individuals whose moral bodies had undergone a procedure common to those in finance and technology suffering from a vestigial compunction: the complete surgical removal of all principles.

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 24/09/2026

graffiti i'm drafting now so I'm ready to spray paint it on the walls of a decaying luxury bunker as I step over a gucci clad skeleton and loot the last can of fruit cocktail left on planet earth

“The cornerstone belief of the last techno-oligarchs was that they would be good guys as soon as they finished pillaging. Gambling addicts rolling the dice on societal destruction, they kept at it believing that just one more roll would solve everything and redeem them in the eyes of the world.”

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 18/09/2026

beets.io now generating proper biographical dates for composers as well as the composition year for specific tracks. may tackle jazz eras after this...

a file listing showing listings such as "Handel, George Frideric (1685–1759)" with a track titled "01 (1717 Handel) Water Music, Suite no. 1 i"

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 17/09/2026

More than half the time I'm using the SD card slot on my macbook for micro sd cards so I *finally* gave in and ordered a flush fitting micro sd adapter. Honestly for a high micro SD card user it's great, wish I'd done it sooner. Always in the macbook, don't have to pull an adapter out of my tech kit

micro sd card with a flush fitting adapter next to a macbook and an mp3 player

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 15/09/2026

You know it, reviewer for that epic thrash album "HARPS OF THE ANCIENT TEMPLES"

A review reading simpy: This is some heavy shit

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 15/09/2026

30% done w/my classical music reorg. Very pleased with how my beets config (w some little python helpers) is managing the library so far Period (Ancient/Medieval/Baroque/etc) -> Composer -> Work -> Track with composer & COMPOSITION DATE (the best) Next 2do: add composer years to their folder names

A listing of classical music composers and works with "1880 Borodin In the Steppes of Central Asia" highlighted

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 15/09/2026

(most mens influencer podcaster voice possible) I'M OUT HERE VAX MAXXING. VAXXXXING. MAX VAXXXXXXXING (getting my seasonal boosters for influenza and covid which are now available, go get 'em)

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 13/09/2026

Making meal prep for my son's lunches and giving them names like "Spiced Mush Beef with Noodles" or "Sustaining Chicken and Roast Veg on Rice" and realizing that they could all be straight from Breath of the Wild. So basically: curious to see if my son gets a stamina buff from any of these.

cooking scene from the video game breath of the wild with a large cooking pot on a fire and characters making food.

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 11/09/2026

so excited by how well my beets path code works on all this. i *really* like knowing the musical period and composition dates at a glance. I also like being able to easily set the periods on unusual compilations like the Kronos Quartet Lachrymæ Antiquæ album.

various classical music albums shown in a computer file listing, with meta data including composers and dates in the filenames.

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 11/09/2026

Have wanted my music filing to work automatically like this since I first converted my CDs. SUCH a relief.

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 11/09/2026

Tweaked my beets.io config to sort, path, and title my classical music albums the way I've always wanted to. Still a shallow enough hierarchy to be navigable but includes a ton of composer oriented information (composer parent folders) along with track composition dates.

A set of folders with classical music period names (Medieval, Baroque, Romantic, etc.) and subfolders for composer (Erik Satie), album, and tracks with the track composition date).

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 10/09/2026

Looked at the stuff on the table just now and realized I am just actively rejecting so much of the modern “technology as subscription services” stack that I have regressed to the early 2000s and it feels... good.t

table strewn with objects including a paper street map, a hand held radio, a couple mp3 players and some 80s looking headphones, some photographic slides.

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 09/09/2026

me removing the networking hardware from our smart tvs

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 08/09/2026

planning out this week's family dinners and found this note which is the sum total of my chicken rice bowl recipe lol (i believe I mean "combine in approximately equal measures" but who knows)

a close up photo of two asian sauces: garlic chili sauce and oyster sauce

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 07/09/2026

Q How did you fix that thermal throttling issue? A "Active Cooling"

a desk fan pointed at a laptop supported by a stack of books

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 06/09/2026

for family game time tonight we started "The Roottrees Are Dead" (we just finish The Incident at Galley House a little bit ago, loved it). Very fun to play as a group since we all remember different details.

an illustration from a video game showing newspaper with a photo of three women and the headline "the roottrees are dead"

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 05/09/2026

It's 2026 and if you went back in time & told me I'd expend effort to revert my music & podcast system back to 2006 methods I wouldn't have believed you (but I also had higher hopes for the tech industry) beets.io + swinsian for music, simple podcast manager, sed, rsync, iconv doing the xfer work.

a retro looking black music player about the size of an old ipod, clicky wheel and buttons on front.

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 04/09/2026

all the scissors in my house have different names, some purely utilitarian (trauma scissors) some point of origin based (tokyo hands scissors). Trying to explain to my kids why I call these the DEAD AGAIN SCISSORS

a set of chromed metal scissors balanced on my hand

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 04/09/2026

Ok, I did the dialect quiz and despite having lived in Seattle and overseas for decades it correctly tagged me as a Wisconsin boy, but I bet 90% of that was the question "do you call it a water fountain or bubbler?" mydialect.us/quiz-standar...

US map with heat map on top of it centered on wisconsin

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 04/09/2026

I checked twice and still managed to adjust the links on the wrong side the first time. Good news is I am now very fast at swapping links in and out.

a watch with a link band being adjusted with a removable pin on the table.

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 04/09/2026

I totally endorse using nato phonetics. Useful for radio, calls, & even things like being a LEGAL OBSERVER in high stress situations where comms matter. I make these wallet friendly plastic cards that I give away all the time to help learn! Made my kids learn by reading out license plates and signs.

a plastic card with the NATO phonetic alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie, etc.) on it.

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 02/09/2026

left this morning on my bike and it was still summer in #Seattle ... rode back in the afternoon and it was the winter gray :/

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 02/09/2026

slowly filing in some gaps in my ripped CD music library with FLACs via bandcamp

screenshot of two album purchases: "soul journey" by gillian welch and "things we lost in the fire" by low.

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 02/09/2026

got podcasts syncing via a duct-tape script to my old DAP

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 01/09/2026

one side effect of the rise of streaming music is the atrophying and in many cases total extinction of the tooling around managing and syncing music to external players. gave up looking & wrote a sync and processing script that syncs tracks, playlists, and reformats them for different players.

code in a terminal showing output from a script that is syncing music tracks

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 31/08/2026

before and after. bought a $9 capacitor, new gaskets, switch, and the pump is back in business. saved about $300 but more importantly feel handy-satisfied.

sump pump switch housing filled with rusty water

sump pump switch housing with new capacitor, switch, and gaskets

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 30/08/2026

Adding some podcasts to this music player so I can have them sync over to my music player. Missed this highly practical view of a podcast feed.

a music player showing a simple rss feed view (just a list of titles) of a podcast

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 30/08/2026

wrote a little transfer program to take playlist exports from Swinsian (local music file player for macos) and modify/transfer them for/to my daughter's music player (shanling q2)

computer showing code, a music player app, and a tiny digital audio player resting against the screen

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 29/08/2026

thought I'd crack open my exterior drainage pump to see if there was any water intrusion into the switch housing what do you think, maybe some dampness in there

sump pump switch housing open to reveal a red rusty pool of water with circuits floating in it

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 29/08/2026

Only lost one blueberry on the ride down one of Seattles particularly steep hills (one berry is the minimum tithe for Seattle’s crows so this was fine)

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 28/08/2026

This whole "renaming everything 'America'" thing is some sort of Pontypool linguistic collapse scenario isn't it.

three characters from the movie pontypool, a swaggering guy in a black cowboy hat, a woman looking worried, and a man behind a big radio mic

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 26/08/2026

12142 tracks. 34 days, 22 hours, 23 minutes, 28 seconds worth of music in my newly organized library. What I love about this is not "how MUCH it is" but "how FINITE it is." Music streaming is an overwhelming sea. I love that I just have my tracks and they are mine and they are limited in number.

a screenshot of a music player app with album covers and track lists. david bowie is peeking out at us from the screenshot.

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 26/08/2026

made a custom-genre tree file & now beets.io MAGICALLY auto-sorts my music into these top level genres. Genres are then used by my custom beets path config to make a top-level folder structure. This is super useful for my music players which need good folder trees. v pleased. (still adding tracks)

a list of music genres displayed in a music player including:
alternative
ambient
avant-garde
classical
comedy
americana
easy listening
electronic
metal
hip hop
holiday
international
jazz & blues
kids music
r&b
rock & pop
reggae
soundtrack
singer-songwriter

a set of folders matching the genres in the previous image.

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 25/08/2026

Anyone engaged in any sort of geopolitical policy making should be required to have played go.

A quote from the book "Go! More Than a Game": Go is a game of big moves and little moves. One problem we will examine here is what may look big now can, in the final analysis, be small, and vice versa. The ability to see what is and what is not territory and potential territory is to see the truth on the board.

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 25/08/2026

studying for some tests and annie lennox is growling out "WOULD I LIE TO YOU HONEY" in my headphones and it's a major time machine right back to freshman year college

the cover for the eurythmics 1981 album "Be Yourself Tonight" with a bleach blonde looking annie lennox vamping and side eyeing someone on the cover.

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 24/08/2026

travel and edc use of fairly small single purpose, unconnected devices is liberating. not where I thought the future would be going back in 2006 but it feels like basic survival to reject the oppressive connection of a phone.

small mirrorless camera (fuji xe4), small ereader (xteink x3), small audio player (shanling q2), headphones

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 23/08/2026

figuring usb-c cable specs is bad enough but have you seen memory card indicators? "read write spead," "speed class," AND "additional speed class"? Like some sort of tiny deranged RPG character sheet. don't even bother LOOKING at a TF card's markings.

a compact flash card with ambiguous symbols some of which relate to speed and performance

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 22/08/2026

Finally upgrading some fav albums from MP3s to FLACs

checkout page for a music download service showing two albums from the band Low

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Ethan J. A. Schoonover @ethanschoonover.com · 20/08/2026

The 24 week tech literacy class I taught for incoming 6th graders had 5 (FIVE!) weeks of spreadsheets because I consider them SO foundational & effective at teaching both sheet skills but ALSO computational thinking & intro to code. We built a ton of spreadsheet games! SPREADSHEETS RUN THINGS FOLKS.

Tech literacy curriculum for 6th graders. Each week had a specific subject:
Google Classroom Intro
Chrome Basic Use
Gmail Use, Groups
Google Docs, Printing
Typing & Slides
Presentations, Image Creation
Google Drive & Organization
Docs Review & G Drive
Google Account Mgmt
Spreadsheets Intro
Spreadsheets 2
Spreadsheets 3
Spreadsheets 4
Spreadsheets 5
Command Line Intro & SSH
CLI 2 & Capture the Flag
CLI & Interactive Fiction/MUDs
CLI Structures & Files (FSH)
CLI Pipelines
CLI Review & Quiz
Web Page via CLI
Web Page Development 2
Web Page Links & Images
Final Presentations

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