pig-monkey.com - general

Bent Steel

2026-08-04T00:00:00-07:00

The Harambe Arm Bar is an EZ curl bar for bands. It allows for a more ergonomic wrist position when performing a variety of arm exercises. I use it primarily for curls (standard or drag or reverse, wide or narrow grip) and triceps extensions (overhead French press or skull crushers), for which it is especially beneficial. I acquired the Arm Bar last December, and since then have only used the straight bar for those exercises occasionally enough to confirm the superiority of the Arm Bar.

I have tried the Arm Bar for overhead presses and bent-over rows. I can take it or leave it for both of these movements. It works fine, but doesn’t feel any better than using the straight bar. For those exercises I will just use whichever bar is more convenient given the sequence of exercises I am performing.

Sometimes I will use the Arm Bar for a narrow chest press. It allows for a much narrower grip than the straight bar, but I generally just do my chest press with a standard shoulder-width grip, and rarely feel a desire to go narrower, so the Arm Bar’s benefit here is irrelevant.

I find the Arm Bar to be more valuable than the Harambe Handles. I expected my conclusion to be the opposite. The Handles unlock new exercises, where the Arm Bar doesn’t allow one to do anything that can’t already be done with the straight bar. It just improves the ergonomics for a small selection of already available exercises. But those few exercises that it improves are core, and so I spend more time using the Arm Bar than the Handles.

Neither are necessary additions to the straight bar. I’m happy to have both, and continue to use both. But if I was only going to have one adjunct to the straight bar, I’d select the Arm Bar over the Handles.

It's Not a Costume

2026-07-31T00:00:00-07:00

I was out of town between mid-June and mid-July, pedaling the hinterland. My last soirée was attending Elektra at the opera, over a month ago. Yesterday, to mark my return to the beau monde, I went to the Kontravoid show. I learned of Kontravoid last year through his collaboration with Chelsey Crowley (my favorite Crowley) from Nuovo Testamento, of whom I am a fan. Also on the ticket last night was Normal Bias, whose music frequently gets recommended to me, but whose tunes I have never really gotten into.

Kontravoid was excellent, and I enjoyed Normal Bias more than I thought I would, but my primary reason for going last night was to see the first opener: Pink Stiletto. I first met her at one of the shows last Halloween weekend, wherein she complemented my jacket and asked what I was dressing up as. To which I replied: “It’s not a costume. I look this good every night.”

Kaweco AL Sport

2026-07-26T00:00:00-07:00

I have previously maligned the performance of Kaweco pens. Despite this I am still a fan of the design of the Kaweco Sport, particularly in matte black aluminum. So when a Kaweco AL Sport in black appeared on eBay for especially cheap last May, I bought it.

The pen was described as lightly used. The pictures of the eBay listing led me to believe that the body was in great condition, but I was unsure about the nib. Given how cheap the pen was selling for, I assumed that the nib would be damaged. The Sport’s nib units in are readily available and easy to replace, so I decided I would preemptively order a new nib before the pen even shipped.

Most critiques of Kaweco pens on The Internets are related to the poor quality control of their nibs. Sometimes you get one that writes great, other times not so much. I avoided this problem by ordering my replacement nib from The Nibsmith, who offers a tune and smooth service for free with the purchase of any nib. I ordered a gold plated Medium nib and a black Fine nib. The pen itself was cheap enough that even after purchasing it and these two replacement nibs, I still paid less than the normal list price of the pen.

I also bought a gold clip, because I believe pens should have clips.

As it turns out, my two preemptive replacement nib purchases were unnecessary. The pen arrived looking like new, with all original packaging. As far as I could tell it was new. One of my two replacement nibs was backordered, delaying the shipment of them both, so I wrote with the Medium nib that came with the pen for about a month. It was perfectly fine. Less scratchy than the Fine nib in my Kaweco Classic Sport Piston Filler – which may just be attributable to the greater width – though not quite as pleasant as the gold nibs on either of my Pilot pens.

Writing with the Medium nib reinforced that I do prefer a Fine nib. I like a finer line, and the Medium requires more frequent ink refills. I was glad to have ordered the Fine black nib. I put that one in as soon as I received it and have been writing with it ever since. The Nibsmith tuned it to be silky smooth, and it is now a favorite. The Pilot Vanishing Point remains my favorite pen, but the Kaweco AL Sport now writes equally well, and it has dethroned the Pilot Elite as my favorite compact pocket pen. The need to thread and unthread the cap does still vaguely annoy me, but I love the aesthetics of the Kaweco and the texture of the matte black aluminum.

I did order the mini converter for the Kaweco, but as expected it is comically small. I haven’t used it once. Instead I refill standard international cartridges with a needle and syringe. I do the same thing with Pilot cartridges in my two Pilot pens.

The one issue I had with the Kaweco is the add-on clip. When installed, it slipped off so easily as to be useless. The same clip works great on the resin body of my Kaweco Classic Sport Piston Filler. I think the aluminum body does not provide enough friction for the clip. To address this, I cut a thin strip of double-sided tape and placed it around the cap at the position where I wanted the clip. The tape is thin enough that I was able to finagle the band of the clip over it. The clip hasn’t moved since, and I can now confidently clip the pen to anything I want.

I expect that my other Nibsmith-tuned nib will eventually find its way into a Kaweco Brass Sport, if one of those ever shows up on eBay for a low price.

Tour Hydration

2026-07-24T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve gone through many iterations of my water carrying strategy for touring. This is the current state of things. It will probably continue to evolve.

On every bicycle tour I pack my Sawyer Squeeze filter and accouterments. Thus a resupply may be natural (a creek, a lake, a trickle from a rock face, etc) or man-made (a cafe, a konbini, a water fountain at a park, etc).

I prefer to use an insulated, plastic bike bottle as my primary drinking vessel. I opt for the Camelbak Podium Chill 24oz with Mud Cap. A bike bottle is easy to drink from, both on and off the bike. Having something squeezable means I can also use it to periodically blast a little dirt off the bike. Something with a valve cover to keep the cooties off is key. Plastic insulated bottles are pretty poor at insulation when compared to double-wall metal bottles. This bottle won’t keep cold water cold, but it will keep it cool for a bit, which is valuable on a hot day. I’m willing to sacrifice some of the internal volume for the poor insulation. Camelbak’s Podium bottles have high-flow valves and (the post-2019 versions) are easy to disassemble for deep cleaning, so I tend to default to them whenever I need a plastic bike bottle (insulated or not).

I will always carry a bladder, as this is an efficient way to add more volume. And if I’m going to carry a bladder, I might as well pack one with a hose, even if the plan is just to use the bladder to refill the bottle. For the past couple years my preference here has been the HydraPak Seeker 2L with HydraFusion Tube. I typically use a frame bag, and this bladder will live in there, but if I am travelling framebag-less I can put the bladder in a fork bag or front pannier. The hose is secured somewhere in the cockpit using the Camelbak/Fidlock magnetic tube clip. The bladder usually wears the Plug-N-Play 42mm Cap, which allows the hose to easily attach and detach. My filter kit includes the 28mm Filter Adapter, allowing the Sawyer Squeeze to output directly into the bladder.

Given my druthers, every evening of a bike tour involves a tea session. A tea session means a dozen or so steepings in a titanium gaiwan. Heating water for each steeping is a waste of fuel. Instead I will heat all the water at once, and store it in an insulated vessel to be decanted into the gaiwan when needed. Since water temperature is important here, I want a bottle with good insulation. For this I carry the Hydro Flask Lightweight 24oz (which remains my EDC when not on tour). Generally I carry this bottle empty, stuffed into a pannier rather than keeping it full and accessible while riding.

Before starting the day’s pedaling in the morning, I fill the Camelbak bottle and the bladder. If I am confident that resupply points will be plentiful, I’ll keep the weight down by only putting 1 liter in the bladder. If I am unsure of the resupply opportunities, or I expect the day to be very hot, I’ll put 2 liters in the bladder. Thus I usually start the day carrying 1.7 to 2.7 liters. If I need extra capacity I can also fill the Hydro Flask bottle. If I need still more capacity, the dirty bag in my filter kit is a 2L 28mm Vecto. Thus my total carrying capacity is 5.4 liters.

I can always stop by a store and buy a bottle or two of water if I need to bump that capacity up more. But if I know I’m going to have a 24-hour (or more) stretch without a water source, my preference is to pack a second Seeker 2L bladder. I prefer two smaller bladders over one larger bladder both for the redundancy – if one bladder is punctured, I still have a second – and for the greater flexibility in how the water weight is distributed around the vehicle.

Link Log 2026-07-19

2026-07-19T00:00:00-07:00

Promiscuous Art

2026-06-06T00:00:00-07:00

I went to the symphony last night to check out our new music director. I knew the main event was La Mer (no, not that one) but did not otherwise look at the program when buying my ticket. Upon arrival I learned that there would also be Wagner. Specifically the prelude and Liebestod from Tristan. This gives me opportunity to deploy one my (many) favorite Huysmans quotes from Against Nature, translated by Robert Baldick.

Then again, secular music is a promiscuous art in that you cannot enjoy it at home, by yourself, as you can a book; to savour it he would have had to join the mob of inveterate theatre-goers that fills the Cirque d’Hiver, where under a broiling sun and in a stifling atmosphere you can see a hulking brute of a man waving his arms about and massacring disconnected snatches of Wagner to the huge delight of an ignorant crowd.

He had never had the courage to plunge into this mob-bath to listen to Berlioz, even though he admired some fragments of his work for their passionate ardour and fiery spirit; and he was well aware that there was not a single scene, not even a single phrase, in any of the mighty Wagner’s operas that could be divorced from its context with impunity.

Slices cut off and served up at a concert lost all sense and meaning, for like chapters in a book that are complementary to one another and combine to reach the same goal, the same conclusion, Wagner’s melodies were used to define the characters of his dramatis personae, to represent their thoughts, to express their visible or secret motives, and their ingenious and persistent repetitions could only be understood by an audience that followed the subject from the start and watched the characters gradually taking shape and developing in a setting from which they could not be removed without dying like branches cut from a tree.

Des Esseintes was therefore convinced that of the mob of melomaniacs who went into ecstasies every Sunday on the benches of the Cirque d’Hiver, barely twenty could tell what the orchestra was murdering, even when the attendants were kind enough to stop chattering and give it a chance of being heard.

Considering also that the intelligent patriotism of the French made it impossible for any theatre in the country to put on a Wagner opera, there was nothing left for the keen amateur who was ignorant of the arcana of music and could not or would not travel to Bayreuth but to stay at home, and this was the reasonable course Des Esseintes had adopted.

The whole book is like this. Des Esseintes is such an asshole. I love it.

Anyway, I agree with his sentiment vis-a-vis disconnected snatches of Wagner, at least when it comes to Tristan. The whole point of the chord is that you have to sit through four and a half hours of tension before it is finally resolved. Playing the prelude and Liebestod back-to-back, as a single piece, defeats the purpose. It loses the emotional weight, and degrades to just being a nice piece of music. There’s no höchste lust there.

Despite all that they played everything well, it was a great concert, and I think I like this Elim Chan.

As We All Must

2026-05-31T00:00:00-07:00

I don’t use wood pencils very often. Yet somehow I have ended up with five pencil sharpeners: Nakajima Jukyudo Co. 531S, KUM Automatic Long Point AS 2M, KUM Meisterwerk, Möbius + Ruppert Wedge Single-Hole, Möbius + Ruppert #610 Castor.

I regret nothing.

…a pencil sharpener – that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticon-deroga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.

Nabokov, Pnin

Link Log 2026-05-30

2026-05-30T00:00:00-07:00

Alex & Lee

The Trailer Gap

The Playboy Fiction Index

Rogue One: The Andor Cut

The banality of the video podcast

Diva

2026-05-29T00:00:00-07:00

Last night I went to a screening of the recent 4K remaster of Diva. It looked gorgeous. I hadn’t seen Diva for a few years, but was reminded that this may be one of my favorite films. Every scene is dripping with stylish neo-noir coolness. This movie is probably one of the reasons I started going to the opera. Beineix shoots Paris like Mann shoots Chicago and L.A..

Diva, of course, is also part of the unofficial Nagra Film Trilogy. If you like beautifully designed, portable, high-fidelity audio equipment, you want to watch The Conversation, Diva, and Blow Out.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

And just when you may have thought that this movie couldn’t be any more up-my-alley, I noticed during this viewing that in the press conference scene one of the reporters is taking notes on what appears to be a Rhodia N°13 graph pad with an (unknown to me) fountain pen. I appreciate fine stationery in film.

Très chic.

Cold, Cold Nights Under Chrome and Glass

2026-05-28T00:00:00-07:00

Last week I went to see The Black Queen. This was my first time seeing them perform since 2016, when they were touring Fever Daydream. I had no idea that Danny Lohner had joined the band for this tour until he walked out on stage. At the end of the set I yelled at him to release the Tapeworm tapes, you coward.

So if that ever happens, you’re welcome.

Holy Water opened that night. I’d never heard him before, but he was great. He reminds me of VNV Nation. I went home and bought his album, which I did not like as much. He’s much better live. He also seems like a swell guy.

This week I went to the Male Tears show. I had never heard of them before. They’re alright, I guess. Not really my jam. I went because the opener was Sleek Teeth, who very much is my jam.

I first heard them last Halloween at Substance Fest. They became my favorite new-to-me band, and my third favorite of the festival overall (after Sacred Skin and Pixel Grip). Their EP is only five tracks, but all of them are bangers. When I listen to it I just loop it to make it seem longer – seven months of that, and I haven’t gotten sick of it yet. I like to listen to Operating when I’m operating operationally.

They played some new tunes, so I look forward to a full album and more shows. But I will also accept more shows of the same music. Repeatedly.

Concerning Harambe Handles

2026-05-27T00:00:00-07:00

I bought a pair of Harambe Handles back in January. In the subsequent five months my use of them has been more limited than I expected.

I regularly use them for split squats. This requires that I stack the Travel Plate on top of the CyberPlate in order to get tension in the lower part of the movement. I perform these like ATG Split Squats, though because my front foot is elevated on the stacked plates, the exercise is fairly different from what I’d consider a “normal” ATG Split Squat. (I try to do normal ATG Split Squats, without any weights or bands, every other day or so. I consider this part of my prana-bindu training, rather than strength training.)

I also use the handles regularly for the standing lateral fly. It used to be that deadlifts where the first exercise on my pull days, but I try to do a set or two of these first now. Between my stretching and this I am able to warm up a bit better before hitting the deadlift, which is the heaviest exercise I do.

Occasionally I will use handles for a rear delt fly, though this is less frequent. Sometimes I use them for a floor press, but I prefer a bar over handles here.

So the handles give me two regular exercises, and two less frequent. I’ve tried other movements with handles, but nothing has stuck. The handles are as well made and pretty to look at as the rest of the Harambe system, and I’m happy to have them, but they’re not a must-have accessory.

Link Log 2026-05-10

2026-05-10T00:00:00-07:00

Default mode network

Japanese Woodblock Print Search

I don’t want a screenshot of your Claude conversation

Cultural Topography: A New Research Tool for Intelligence Analysis

Apocalypse Early Warning System

Glory Box (Brass Against, 2025)

Zebra Magnetics

2026-05-09T00:00:00-07:00

As mentioned previously, two years ago I bought a ZebraLight H600c Mk IV headlamp. When I was ordering the light, The Internet also suggested that I buy magnets for it. Reader, I did.

From K&J Magnetics I bought the D82-N52. This is a 1/2” x 1/8” N52 neodymium disc magnet. It can be slid inside the spring of the tail cap. It does not interfere with the function of the cap. The flat top 18650 still fits, and the cap still screws on all the way.

I also bought the BX842. This is a 1 1/2” x 1/4” x 1/8” N42 neodymium block magnet. It can be attached to the pocket clip, and then secured with heat-shrink tubing.

I installed these magnets as soon as I got the light. I haven’t regretted it. The only minor annoyance is that when I ride to the beach and set my helmet down in the sand, the pocket clip magnet collects all the iron in the sand. I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.

While the H600c is primarily a headlamp, I do occasionally carry it in my pocket, and I’ve yet to be annoyed by the magnets. If it was a dedicated pocket light, perhaps I’d feel differently.

Restic Continuum

2026-05-08T00:00:00-07:00

As I was migrating my online backups to Restic, I was concurrently building a system that would allow me to use Restic to complete full-disk backups to external USB drives, thus replacing my use of cryptshot and rsnapshot. I give you Resnap.

For me, the main appeal of rsnapshot has always been that the resulting backups are just directories full of files. When it comes time to restore, no special tooling is required for access. Just copy the files over using rsync or cp or whatever tickles your fancy. If you can read the disk, you can recover data. Most competing systems create backups in a way that you also need the backup tool for recovery. This introduces fragility into the setup. My experience has been that most people do not think or care about this, but I have spent many years thinking about how not to lose data. I have certain requirements for backup systems. “Robustness” is a big one.

Restic does fall into the second category of tool. If you have a copy of a Restic repository but the Restic project has imploded and you do not have or cannot execute the tool, you’re in for a bad time. But the reason Restic has been on my radar since the project first stated a decade ago (it takes me a while to adopt new backup software – also I recall it took them a while to implement compression) is that it is compiled to a single, statically linked Go binary. This means you can easily store the tool itself alongside (not within) your backups. You’re not going to do that with a sprawling Python project like Borg, which is why I continued to use rsnapshot for my local full-disk backups even after I adopted Borg for online backups.

But with Restic you can just cp the binary to the backup drive. And that’s what I do. Resnap also provides resnap-restore, a simple wrapper script that makes it easy to perform the restic restore ... operation during full-disk recovery. This too is stored on the backup drive alongside the binary.

What this means is that you can use Resnap to create a full-disk backup to an external drive and then bury that drive in your backyard for 25 years (properly sealed). After you dig it up, as long as you have the passphrase, can read the drive’s filesystem (ext4 for me), and can execute a binary compiled for whatever architecture you were using 25 years ago (x86-64 for me) – both highly likely given the commonality of those systems – you are going to have no problem restoring that data (subject to the physics of spinning rust). An unlikely scenario perhaps, but that’s sort of the data backup baseline we plan for here at pig-monkey.com.

I would have to relinquish my Street Samurai credentials if I didn't occasionally wear tabi booties.

2026-05-07T00:00:00-07:00

Bedrock Cairns and Luna Tabu 2.0. Paired with the mirrorshades, I am led to understand that this is what The Youth refer to as a “fit”.

As a wise woman once said, “You can’t let the little pricks generation-gap you.”

Restic Adoption

2026-05-06T00:00:00-07:00

After mulling it over for many cycles, I finally decided to migrate my online backups to Restic. As is my wont, I have published my solution as Restash so that members of the Pig Monkey Data Backups Fan Club can be like me.

The restash script will look pretty familiar to anyone who has been using my old Borg wrapper script. It is mostly the same basic structure, with Borg logic replaced with Restic logic, and two other significant differences.

Previously I ran the Borg wrapper hourly via a systemd timer, and used backitup to run the verification checks (and compacting) less frequently. Now the script has subcommands, and I use different systemd units to call the different functions on different schedules – backups more frequently, verification and pruning less frequently.

Previously I achieved redundancy by using Borg to backup hourly to my rsync.net account, while Tarsnap ran daily backups of a smaller subset of the same data. Now I’m using Restic to backup hourly to my rsync.net account, and also using Restic to backup the same data daily to a Backblaze B2 bucket. I’ve been an rsync.net customer since 2014 and I think highly of their service, but the B2 bucket is cheap insurance that helps me sleep better.

In the example config you will see that the SFTP_HOST is simply restic. That refers to an entry in my ~/.ssh/config, which looks something like this:

Host restic
    Hostname abc123.rsync.net
    User abc123
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/passphraseless-key
    IdentitiesOnly yes
    BatchMode yes
    ServerAliveInterval 60
    ServerAliveCountMax 3

The only other significant change from the old Borg wrapper script is that I broke out some of the config options, backup targets, and excludes to separate files to make it easier for you, my adoring public, to reuse the tool.

As hinted at in the README, I still use nmtrust to only execute backups on trusted networks. Don’t be a data litterer.