Playa Vista is one of the more walkable neighborhoods on the Westside — a tight grid of parks, wetland edges, and open space that’s easy to miss from the freeway but genuinely good on foot. This tour covers about 3.2 miles and works equally well as a morning dog walk or a first look at the neighborhood. If you’re here for the Bluff Creek Trail, the route connects directly to the Lincoln Boulevard trailhead at Stop 4.
The Bluff Creek Trail is a mostly flat, partially paved path that traverses the bluff just below LMU, on the border between Westchester and Playa Vista. It works best as a 4-mile loop — a couple miles on the trail, then a couple miles walking back through Playa Vista past Oberreider park. Accessible from three points: the end of Dunbarton Avenue, across from the Annenberg PetSpace on Bluff Creek Drive, and near the fountain on Lincoln Boulevard. Views include snow-covered mountains on one side, the ocean on the other, and at one spot the Hollywood Sign. The lower trail through the wetlands is closed to foot traffic year-round.
The Wisdom Tree sits on the slope of Mount Lee in the Hollywood Hills, just below the ridgeline near Cahuenga Peak — one of my favorite spots in Los Angeles. The climb up into those hills is the highlight of this hike. The Lake Hollywood loop was a bit of a let-down: a fence runs between the trail and the reservoir the entire way, keeping you at arm’s length from the water for the whole circuit.
A four-peak hike in Angeles National Forest — Mount San Gabriel, Mount Disappointment, Mount Lowe, and Mount Markham via the historic Mt Lowe Motorway. Super challenging, with some serious steep sections. One of the more demanding days you can put together in the San Gabriels without leaving the road system entirely.
I did this trail on New Year’s Eve day with Rhys. It’s a moderately difficult out-and-back that ends at a very hot (120°) pool and stream. A great hike to take with a dog in January — but the lack of cover would make it too hot most other times of year. The hot spring at the end is really cool, and to get far into it you need to do some scrambling through hot water, which is not at all good for a dog, so we stopped there.
I roam these mountains
Alive, alone, in love with life.
Strange to some, yes
I don’t try to explain
I can’t explain
The feelings I have here
In this land of no men
Of mountain ranges and rivers.
My mind empty, my heart free.— Li Po, Heron Dance translation.
chill-dogs is a curated product site that helps dog owners find cooling and calming gear — from summer heat relief to anxiety-friendly comfort products.
In late January and early February 2026, my dad and I drove my 2008 Toyota Tacoma from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. The trip took 9 days. The odometer read 3,753 miles at the end; the day-by-day mapped dataset sums to 3,572 miles. I started this as a journal project, but as soon as I imported the GPX tracks it became a data project: route structure, speed regimes, and elevation signatures that are hard to capture in prose alone.
The Obsidian CLI is here and it’s genuinely exciting for anyone doing open project management. Being able to script vault operations, trigger note creation, and automate workflows from the command line — without touching the GUI — opens up a whole new world of integration possibilities.
The landscape of AI coding assistants is evolving rapidly, and two recent developments from Steve Yegge are particularly interesting: Beads and Gas Town. These innovations address one of the fundamental challenges facing coding agents today: maintaining context and memory across sessions.
What I’m listening to on Spotify. Play history collected automatically 5× per day. Browse by artist or by week, or explore the musical genres taxonomy.
A simple and cost-effective approach to deploying Hugo projects to AWS CloudFront.
I have and still do use services like AWS Amplify and Netlify to automate my CI/CD pipeline for many of my projects, triggered by a GitHub check-in and running in GitHub Actions. However, for a recent photography project that involved deploying a large number of files, storing everything in GitHub wasn’t feasible. I needed a solution that was simple, affordable, and delivered high performance. That’s when I decided to use AWS CloudFront with an S3 bucket, integrated with an SSL certificate generated through CloudFront.
Every musical genre in my recent tracks. This page was generated with the Spotify API , please read our full disclosure on our use of this data.
A long anticipated release has come to the hugo static site generator that will be a real game changer. This is part of release v0.126.0. The new feature, called Content Adaptors allows you to generate static pages in your public directory at build time from a remote resource, such as an api.
Check out the new Ingredients Taxonomy pages
As part of the recipe template configuration being developed for The Ryder Theme for Hugo websites, a new taxonomy is created for ingredients. Ingredients are not the same as recipeIngredients; they are defined as an array in the front matter. I didn’t want a taxonomy page generated for every single recipe ingredient, so I created a separate variable. The recipeIngredients are used to display the ingredients on the page and for the recipe schema, ensuring the pages are properly displayed as recipe rich results in Google and other search engines.
This notebook has a flexible and strong spine and extra smooth paper that feels great for extended long hand writing sessions.
Buy Midori Notebook on Amazon.com
I found this partial to create a tag cloud on Mert Bakir’s personal website and I have been adapting the code to suit my needs for this project, for now I’m just leaving it under this project page until I can decide what to do with it.
