i woke up ahead of my alarm clock set at 9am. after using the bathroom and taking a quick shower, i went in the basement to bring up 2 bikes for freddy and catalina. i was ready to leave but waited for freddy to finish his shower so i could tell him about the bikes. while waiting, i saw my 2nd uncle walking to market basket, with a newly arrived chinese astrophysicist in tow. i guess he was showing him where the supermarket was, but a 45 minute walk is a long way for cheap groceries. when freddy finally came out of the bathroom, i gave him two sets of lights (front and back), the key for one lock, the combination for the other lock. i also brought him around back to show him how to open the backyard door.

i woke up early because my mother and sister were going to make a morning costco and supermarket run to beat the rush. but when i arrived in belmont my sister was nowhere to be found until my mother called her and discovered she was still sleeping. i had time to help my father assemble a 4ft wire shelving unit he brought home. we replaced that one with the smaller 3ft shelving that was already in the kitchen. my sister finally showed up; we didn't leave until 10:40am, my father stayed home with hailey.

on the way to waltham i was playing pokemon go from the backseat. of course i got a motion sickness headache from staring at the phone, but it was worth it, because i made a lot of progress. i finally reached level 20, and ended up capturing 34 pokemons (though none of them were new). i saw an ultra ball for the the very first time, not sure if it's a new feature, or something i unlocked when i reached level 20. because i haven't been visiting a lot of pokestops, i depleted my balls to a little more than a dozen. i ended up passing on a lot of pokemons simply because i didn't want to waste my limited supply of balls to catch them.

the waltham costco was crowded but it wasn't too crazy. aisles would occasionally get congested with shopping cart traffic, but everyone seemed to be in a cooperative spirit. even waiting in line seemed to go by pretty fast. we ended up buying a 21 lbs. fresh butterball turkey (99¢/lbs.) so didn't need to visit the waltham market basket, which would've been even crazier in terms of crowds. on monday we'll visit the malden super 88 in the afternoon to pick up some asian ingredients.

my sister threw a bose soundlink mini bluetooth speaker in the shopping cart. we thought she was getting it for us, but actually she wanted it for herself. the cafe has needed a source of music for quite some time, ever since the receiver died. my parents have been looking to get one of these bose speakers, but they were waiting for it to go on sale. we bought it today with $15 off ($140), but there's a reason why it's so cheap: it's actually the 1st generation, which has a 7-hours battery instead of 10-hours, and recharges via a proprietary adapter, instead of using the standard microUSB. otherwise, functionality-wise, it's the same as the 2nd generation (which sells for $180 online).

my father spent much of the afternoon playing around with the speakers. the sound quality it produces is pretty amazing. loud, rich, and a deep bass you can feel in your chest, all that for a little speaker you can fit on your hand. paired up with the xiaomi music app for android, he was discovering an unlimited genre of songs he never knew existed, including chinese audio books and instrumental versions of taiwanese music.

later while my mother and sister went out to do more shopping (tjmaxx), my father tried some tea he had, including the tea sunmeng's parents give us, and some sichuan "bamboo needle" tea from mt.emei (a gift from the new astrophysicist). he liked the bamboo tea the best, with unusually shaped tea leaves that periodically sink and fall.

for dinner my sister made lamb spaghetti. i had just a plate but i could've ate more. when i returned to cambridge, there was a very faint mist/fog that coated my motorcycle windshield, making it hard to see. at a traffic stop, i quickly wiped the shield with my gloved hand. fortunately by the time i actually got home, the mist was gone.

freddy was home, said he'd been back since 7pm. he and catalina went biking today, but didn't leave until 2pm. destination? framingham, because it has a special medical history significance (framingham heart study?). but framingham? it takes half an hour to drive there by car. on a bicycle? 23.5 miles, it'd take 2 hours and 15 minutes to bike there. and since we're so close to winter, it gets dark by around 4:30pm. so it didn't come as a surprise that they only made it as far as waltham, following the charles river. catalina couldn't go any farther and they decided to ride back.

i put the cover over my motorcycle because it was going to rain overnight, and put the two bicycles away in the basement. my sister stopped by briefly to drop off my glass ramekins. i was sort of dreading coming home because of how noisy it was last night, but steve and paul were quiet as mouse this evening, not sure what changed.

i fixed the problem i was having on my pi00 when logging in from ssh and retriggering the autostart script that calls omxplayer to play an rtsp stream. it involved putting the omxplayer command inside of an if-statement that checks to the status of tty:

because omxplayer is called from the command-line, it has a tty of /dev/tty1. but when i log in from ssh, the tty is /dev/pts/0. i read that i had to log in as terminal instead of the GUI (so i changed the startup setting in raspi-config) to make it work, but later i discovered that it wasn't necessary, perfectly fine to still boot into the GUI, since the autostart script still runs as /dev/tty1, so as long as i'm checking the tty and don't run the script all other times, i'm fine.

i also set up the juiceSSH app on my phone to use SSH key authentication instead of password. i also downloaded an SSH client for the iphone (serverauditor) and set up SSH key authentication as well.