09/29/2025 to 10/05/2025, Blog, command line, references, prompts, tools, Marching Band, BOA, MacBook, curl://, Leet

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09/29/2025 to 10/05/2025

It has been a busy week with work, and playing Kingdom ❤️🗝️ on my PS2 emulator😁 For a second year in a row, Andrew left on Friday for Bands of America Iowa Regional Championship, Northwest High School Stadium, Waukee, IA. They held the competition on Saturday. Just like last year, it was too windy so they were not able to use their props. There were 29 marching bands and unfortunately, they didn’t make it out of prelims, 26th out of 29 and 12th in Class 2A. Andrew told us that he doesn’t care for Iowa 💨. It was nice to see Rosemount, MN win the final and all three caption awards, there were only 4 Minnesota marching bands out of 29 total. Hopefully we go someplace else next year.

On Saturday, I updated my MacBook to Sonoma 14.8.1. I’m not going to upgrade to Sequoia because my 2019 MacBook has an Intel processor and could possibly run hotter with Sequoia, and Apple will still support Sonoma for at least another year.

Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia)

Awhile back, I had an issue come up with updates to my rss.xml feed not being picked up by FeedBin RSS reader but was by Feedly. After a bit of research, I concluded it had something to do with one fetching GET and the other fetching HEAD. The command line tool I used to investigate this issue was curl://.


curl -I URL → Sends a HEAD request
curl -i URL → Sends a GET request

Before


~> curl -I https://www.ikeating.com/rss.xml
HTTP/2 204 “this URL has no body”

Now


~> curl -I https://www.ikeating.com/rss.xml
HTTP/2 200 
server: nginx
date: Mon, 06 Oct 2025 14:44:55 GMT
content-type: application/xml
content-length: 6195
etag: "e9e8fe1e31b1832222e24b05b94d5bfa90e36754"
content-disposition: inline
x-backend: phl-web-04
x-trace-id: ti_f6bcac1a652d5fa6426324ab4b7bcc59
x-backend-ip: 10.202.2.214
x-frontend: phl-frontend-01

Clean prompt to just see HTTP status code of a HEAD request


curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{http_code}\n" -I https://www.ikeating.com/rss.xml

The issue seems to have resolved itself and I’m assuming it had something to do with Fastmail server. 🤷‍♂️

A note on video and image editing and conversion. I’ve mentioned using ffmpeg for video before and I am now exploring whether or not I should switch my image format from jpeg to webP format using ffmpeg to convert.

Example prompt for converting jpeg to webp


ffmpeg -i input.png -q:v 50 output.webp

Example prompt for compression of video


ffmpeg -i input.mov -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 23 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a aac -b:a 128k output.mp4

🔗 Links

I found the following link to some arial imaging of Itasca County. The resolution is amazing!

A while back, I stumbled across the term “Leet” or 1337. I happened to notice a "FREE KEVIN" sticker while reading the Wikipedia which prompted me to read the Wikipedia entry for Kevin Mitnick. I noticed that he was involved with knowbe4 which is familiar to me through work.

End of blog. Thank you for reading!