srand.info is my personal knowledge base: a collection of projects, technical notes, lessons learned, experiments, and occasional detours. My career and interests have crossed software, infrastructure, photography, automotive work, and independent media.
The categories will evolve, but the purpose is simple: document what I build, preserve what I learn, and share anything that might be useful or interesting to someone else.
Recently added
I started Markit with a tempting automation idea: take item photos and turn them into marketplace listings. That sounds straightforward until the object is old, unlabeled, damaged, unusual, collectible, or valuable. Then the risk moves from formatting a listing to making claims that may not be true. The boundary became clear very early. I want … Read more
The glamorous part of my Markit idea is the AI appraisal. Take photos of an object, identify what it might be, gather evidence, estimate value, and generate listing drafts for marketplaces. That is the part people notice. The less glamorous part is more important: getting the photos into the system without making the workflow miserable. … Read more
The longer SoCalNomad ran, the less the interesting work looked like feature development. It looked like operations. That is not a complaint. It is what happens when a project becomes real. Once people and crawlers can reach it, every change has a blast radius. Every cache has a memory. Every workflow has a schedule. Every … Read more
I could see newsletter subscriptions accumulating in the list manager as unconfirmed. That seemed normal at first. Double opt-in begins in an unconfirmed state and becomes active after the subscriber clicks a message. The confirmation message was never being sent. Two Endpoints Created Similar Records The signup path posted to Listmonk’s administrative subscriber endpoint. That … Read more
I understand why email open rate dominates campaign conversations. It appears near the top of the funnel and usually produces a large number. It is also one of the easiest campaign metrics to misunderstand. An “open” is typically an image request. The recipient’s mail client requests a tiny tracking image, and the analytics system records … Read more
I had already accepted that attribution was incomplete. That still left a practical problem: what language should appear next to a number in a report? I settled on four labels. They are not sophisticated, but they stop a dashboard from quietly upgrading evidence as it moves from an event log to a presentation. Measured Measured … Read more
The usual web-image advice tells me to compress harder. That is sensible when the image is decorative or when an oversized upload is slowing an otherwise lightweight page. It becomes less useful when original photography is part of the reason the page exists. Concert images are particularly good at exposing the cost of a generic … Read more
I received a suspicious email that looked, at first glance, like evidence of a compromised mail server. That sounds obvious, but it is easy to skip the boring investigation step when the message looks alarming. A spoofed display name, a familiar sender address, and an unexpected recipient can make the situation feel worse than the … Read more
Analytics dashboards make it easy for me to become overconfident. A chart shows visits. A campaign shows clicks. A tracked link shows engagement. It is tempting to keep walking the conclusion forward until the dashboard appears to prove revenue, appointments, leads, or sales. Sometimes it does. Often it does not. I wrote the Matomo measurement … Read more
A photograph is not always one file. It may begin as a camera RAW file, acquire an XMP sidecar, become a full-resolution TIFF or JPEG, and produce separate Web, social, press, and print exports. A normal folder makes those relationships understandable to a person. A DAM needs to preserve them without confusing a derivative for … Read more