Rubenerd

I’ve seen this quote attributed to Gururaj Ananda Yogi in a few places:

It’s so simple to be happy, but so difficult to be simple.

Most of my critiques about webcams lately have been in the context of video conference fatigue, where the evidence suggets that they’re a uniquely-draining experience. I stick with audio if I can, which has been a boon for my concentration, and for others on these calls who don’t need to see my flapping head, weird hat selection, and my looks of bemusement when someone suggests they can make their architecture simpler by using k8s.

Back in 2016 the big debate was around covering laptop cameras, given even the likes of The Zuck use PostIt Notes to cover theirs. Surely the rest of us should do it if someone who has such a blatant, comic-book villain attitude to privacy does, right?

Certain Apple bloggers suggested that if your machine is sufficiently compromised with malware to activate the webcam without your knowledge, you’ve got bigger problems. Therefore, covers are pointless. The former is true, which is why all effective security is achieved using a single layer. It’s like Shrek said, ogres are like onions… bagels.

Back on Earth, Apple themselves were even aware of this, given the original FireWire iSight camera had a brilliant mechanism which would expose the camera and power it on with one twist. It wasn’t necessary to protect the lens, the faux aperture blades were behind the protective glass. It was there to prevent inadvertent filming, regardless of whether you have malware or not.

As another example, I granted yet another new video conference call system access to my webcam this morning, which promptly began sharing it to everyone on an audio call! It was my little Targus sliding webcam cover that saved me, by blacking out the video and making it look as though it didn’t activate.

As I said back then, covering your webcam is no panacea, and also leaves open the question of what else your computer is recording about your activities. But it’s still entirely rational and reasonable to cover your webcam when you’re not using it.

Last Monday I wrote a post exploring the RSS Validator’s claim that RSS 2.0’s pubDate and Dublin Core’s dc:date elements were considered duplicates. I asserted that they overlapped, but had different semantic meaning and precision.

The feedback from both gentleman concerned this section:

Which leads us to the justification for removing dc:date, so as not to “confuse news aggregators”. As someone who maintains and builds aggregators, I don’t buy this. I wouldn’t think anything introduced with namespaces would take precedence over a mandatory element like pubDate.

Geoff (not the railfan Geoff from the last post!) chimed in:

I agree with your comments. Compatibility concerns between [feed formats] were always overblown (and lead to that delicious irony of Atom). It’s very easy to write a decision tree based on the presented version of RSS or Atom to weight which date to respect (pubDate in RSS 0.9x and 2.0, RDF like your Dublin Core example in RSS 1.0).

The “delicious irony of Atom” referred to an earlier conversation we had where a new incompatible format was introduced to address incompatibilities. I actually appreciate what Atom set out to do, but there’s a well-worn xkcd that shows the practical reality.

Hales of Haelstrom (feed here) cautioned that while “I could probably ignore the warning about duplicate date elements”, they can introduce an issue with determining and handling updates:

All of these choices [about updating an article when a feed changes] hinge on being able to identify that the new edited article as being “the same” or not as the old article. You need a unique ID attached to the article for this to work, otherwise it’s a guessing game.

I’ve omitted how I find the “date” in the first place, but it’s a similar list of “Look for thing 1, if that fails looks for thing 2, if that fails …”. In my case I fall back to using the “title” of the article before I use the “date”, but that’s not necessarily the best thing to do if you want to avoid duplicate articles (and so other feed readers/parsers probably won’t do this).

This ties in with my Perl post last month about moving to Perl’s XML::LibXML. I commented that I prefer using a general XML parser over specific packages for RSS, Atom, or OPML, but didn’t give more detail why. Aside from needing to only learn how one package works, it’s so that I can handle edge cases like what Hales describes. Turns out that even among packages in the same language, they handle updates, identifiers, dates, and other nomenclature subtly differently. I prefer pulling in data from whichever format is presented, and handling the dates and other data in the same data structure. I like to think Perl’s hashes and syntactic sugar are especially suited to this, but that’s for another post.

Or as Hales summarised, “welcome to RSS!” It’s funny how I find these sorts of things challenging but ultimately fun and rewarding, as opposed to getting the blessing of a specific API written by a large social network that wants to own the Internet and control our social graphs. Walled gardens are pretty, as long as you follow their [ever changing] rules and terms. The open web is messy.

What do you get when you put a Leyland bus frame onto a freight wagon chassis with only four wheels? You get a railbus that met British Rail’s Thatcheresque 1980s budget requirements, but one that was notoriously bumpy, loud, and uncomfortable. There isn’t much love for these trains for the souls who had to ride them everyday, but they’re a fascinating curiosity for railfans. Flippy doors!

I’d never heard of these trains before, despite growing up obsessed with British and European railways. Geoff Marshall did a great video exploring the last day of these trains operating in Wales.

Check out Geoff’s other videos too while you’re there; his series on London’s Lost Railways was beautiful.

The future doesn’t look great for free-to-air television stations, or TV as it’s referred to by people. Thesedays cool hipster 10x engineers would probably refer to it as t8n.

I remember reading an article a few years ago saying the median age of American TV viewers is increasing by one year annually; meaning there aren’t any new people tuning in. I’m not sure if we can extrapolate that further to countries like Australia and Singapore, but it wouldn’t surprise me. It takes a lot not to surprise me. Wait, that doesn’t make sense.

People are watching as many (if not more) shows and independent programming as before, but they’re on streaming services, social networks, or independent publishing platforms. It was BitTorrent and Gnutella prior to this, but we all pretend those didn’t happen. Uncovered old copies of TV Week stuffed into wall cavities as cheap insulation will as likely be met with a huh? than any form of nostalgia.

This has had several interesting side effects. News channels have begun publishing video clips on sites like YouTube, reaching new audiences with their unsubstantiated bollocks. TV stations have had to work hard to pander to their remaining viewership, lest their great-grandchildren tell them they can get far better stuff elsewhere. Is it showing through yet that I don’t think free-to-air t8n is any good?

(Was it ever good? Or was it just better than crushing boredom in a time before the Internet where we could surf mindlessly instead)?

The other that Clara and I noticed was a sharp increase in ads on sites like YouTube… for network TV. One of these stations in Australia have successfully transplanted their show promos from their moribund channels to the web, with the same faux gritty voice and intense music.

This is something. You. CAN’T. MISS.

It had the opposite effect, by reminding us of everything we don’t like about TV. I suppose I should be happy that they’re keeping the disgust alive and fresh, in case I’m ever tempted to plug in an aerial or subscribe to cable again.

I have a lot of multimedia CD-ROMs, and Clara and I have an expanding music collection of CDs, cassettes, vinyl, and MiniDiscs. There isn’t much we can do about the physical dimensions of most of these, but CD jewel cases have a lot of wasted space. Given they constitute the bulk of our physical media, we thought it was worth trying to consolidate them down.

CD binders were the first thing we tried. We cracked open the jewel cases, and put the front and back paper inserts into empty CD pouches in the folders. It’s already has saved us a ton of space in this tiny apartment. It’s also fun to take the binder over to the couch and leaf though them to choose what music to play for that evening.

Have I mentioned that streaming services suck, and you should buy music? But I digress.

There’s just one problem with the CD binder approach. The back inserts are wider than the front inserts, because they don’t need to accomodate the hinge for the CD jewel case. That means they need to be put into the pouches at a 90 degree angle, which makes reading the text difficult. They also only fit in the lower pockets and require you to overlap the CDs above them, otherwise they’d protrude from the binder and the zip won’t close.

I feel like there should be a better way, so I started looking for alternatives.

DiscSox are an interesting idea. The sleeves are taller than they are wide, so they can accommodate the back inserts. I’d prefer to have a folder though rather than loose pages though.

As far as I can tell, is a phrase with six words. I can’t see anyone who makes a folder that can accomodate both paper CD inserts. Surely Clara and I can’t be the first people to want something like this?

Anyone have ideas?

I was helping someone with metadata on her website, when we realised that you can use Schema metadata to define the occupation of a Person with, surprising though it may seem, hasOccupation. The Occupation type includes the following attribute:

occupationalCategory

A category describing the job, preferably using a term from a taxonomy such as BLS O∗NET-SOC, ISCO-08 or similar, with the property repeated for each applicable value.

ISCO is the International Standard Classification of Occupations, as published by the International Labour Organization. I wonder if their title was a compromise between the correct spelling of Labour, and the incorrect spelling of Organization?

ISCO-08 is the most recent iteration of the Index of Occupational Titles. Naturally I downloaded the PDF, like a gentleman, to see if and where they classify Technical Writers. On page 178:

2641 Authors and Related Writers

Authors and related writers plan, research and write books, scripts, storyboards, plays, essays, speeches, manuals, specifications and other non-journalistic articles (excluding material for newspapers, magazines and other periodicals) for publication or presentation.

Among the tasks listed:

b) conducting research to establish factual content and to obtain other necessary information;

d) analysing material, such as specifications, notes and drawings, and creating manuals, instructions for use, user guides and other documents to explain clearly and concisely the installation, operation and maintenance of software, electronic, mechanical and other equipment;

I’m in far more creative company than I deserve here:

Author, Book editor, Essayist, Indexer, Interactive media writer, Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Script writer, Speech writer, Technical communicator, Technical writer, Writer

I’m also a “systems designer (IT)” in their parlance, which sits under 2511 Systems Analysts on page 144. There are no poets in that classification, unfortunately.

From his Megaprojects episode on the Boston Big Dig:

Last November I thought aloud about my relationship with the Vim and nvi text editors. I said that I’d written millions of words in them, but that I felt like I hadn’t progressed beyond an intermediate user of either.

I hinted that I was trialling GNU Emacs as an alternative. I went absolutely all in, and thanks to the excellent MELPA repository I’ve now consolidated a ton of stuff into it, from RSS to IRC. Most valuable of all, Org Mode replaced nvALT, one of my last Mac-only holdout applications that I couldn’t run on FreeBSD. It was like stepping into the proverbial lolly store.

(Every so often I realise just how much of our industry is based around abbreviations and acronyms. That paragraph had no fewer than six).

But as the emacs joke goes about it being a great OS that’s missing a text editor, I somehow moved back to Vim for writing. Using another editor full time made me re-evaluate the harsh criticism I levelled at myself as a Vim user. Turns out I had better muscle memory, and understood the Vim way of doing things more than I expected; to the point where even using the Evil Mode in Emacs didn’t do it for me.

Just as everyone has their own way of learning, I’ve also since discovered Drew Neil’s Practical Vim, Modern Vim, and VimCasts. The built-in Vim tutorial is comprehensive, but I grok his explanations far more. I feel as though I’ve levelled up significantly since I wrote that last post. I might do a series about it at some point.

My post yesterday about the health benefits of decaf coffee reminded me of this new law I’ve been mulling.

Back in 2017 I proposed Rubenerd’s Law of Headlines, a play on Betteridge’s which states that the answer to a headline ending with a question mark is no. I proposed that if an article is titled with “Technology foo considered harmful”, there’s an unharmful, legitimate use for it.

I’m now shamelessly extending Newton’s Third Law of Motion, and Cunningham’s Law which states that the best way to get to the correct answer on the Internet isn’t to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer.

Any comment about substitute or mock food will result in equal and opposite obtuseness.

Examples include “I don’t understand the point of decaf coffee, non-alcoholic beer, fake meat”, etc. What they’re really saying is “I can’t relate to anyone’s circumstances beyond my own”. Or they can, but feign ignorance for Internet points.