Rubenerd

I love hitting the Wikipedia random article link and seeing what comes up. Today we got the Circus Building which is:

… an exhibit building at Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont. It houses a collection of circus posters, Gustav A. Dentzel Carousel animals, and elaborately carved miniature circuses, including those by Roy Arnold and Edgar Kirk.

The accompanying photo by John Phelan may be my new work desktop background for this month. The colours almost perfectly match my blog colour scheme too, which hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Manton Reece microblogged this phenomena last October:

I’ve fallen behind on support email again, and getting more spam isn’t helping. So tired of those “I see you wrote about Topic X, can you link to my blog post too?” emails. (Except for other people’s blog posts and conversations on Micro.blog, not even my own posts.)

This spam is a new scourge, and you know they’ll respond with “did you get a chance to review my last email?”.

My favourites are ones that inform you that Netscape Navigator or Limewire that you wrote about in that nostalgia post are… wait for it… retired and no longer maintained! But did you know you can use their tool instead?

Blogs I stumble across today are almost always abandoned. Occasionally they’ll make a reference to moving on in their last post, but the vast majority will just end abruptly with their last train of thought. I can’t help but think what happened to them; I hope they’re doing okay.

Blogs have existed online for a sufficient enough time that it’s feasible for them to have been abandoned for a decade or more. It’s interesting seeing the stratification from abandoned Blogger sites, then WordPress, and that brief blip of Octopress. The topics are time capsules into what people were thinking about, and their themes and layouts are a product of their time.

I spent at least an hour yesterday reading through Travel Thru Time, written by a Malaysian about attractions and places to eat in Kuala Lumpur and the wider Klang Valley. I moved to and lived there not long before the blog started, so it was such a nostalgic joy seeing all those familiar places exactly as they were in late 2009. The writer even used the same Blix theme that I did at the time!

(Many of their earlier posts were around Putrajaya as well, which we spent a lot of time in because my sister had a friend who lived in the area. Their specific post about Alamanda sent me right to that Starbucks where so many of my early blog posts were written).

I’ve lamented the decline of blogging here for a few years now, more in terms of an industry trend. Writers are being pulled to incomprehensible Twitter threads, Medium, and Facebook to share their extended thoughts, and blog platforms are pushing people away by branding the exercise as a business activity. But on a personal level I understand people come and go; their lives take on different priorities, or they believe—erroneously!—they’re not interesting enough. It’s still a shame when they let us glimpse their creative energy and potential, only to have it vanish.

I may or may not have immediately downloaded the site on account of being a digital hoarder archivist. I usually exploit the fact WordPress exports a sitemap.xml which I can parse and feed into fetch to download, which is more precise and reduced the spam that blunt site mirroring tools generate. Blogger ones are a bit trickier, but I’ve got a function in my Perl Swiss Army Knife to parse and download content.

I have a WordPress install running in my homelab that just consists of these imported blogs. Copyright means I probably can’t share it—I think?—but I’d say well over half the sites I archived have vanished from the public web. Submitting to the Wayback Machine is about the only other hope I have of preserving these thoughts in a public capacity. I feel a responsibility to keep these thoughts, ideas, and snapshots of life alive.

There’s no metaphor here, no commentary about the state of the word, no analogies or comparisons. This really is just about my big toe, and the ensuing pain that ensued! As opposed to ensuing pain that didn’t ensue? I already read ensue as ensuite, which should be spelled as on suite. Or on sweet.

I slammed my aforementioned left big toe into the side of a table leg during our current house move. I yelped and commented on my lack of spacial and situational awareness, then proceeded to put weight on it to finish this aspect of packing. The little guy swelled up and turned red, then a shade of purple.

Turns out I’d impacted the nail into the side of the toe. Gruseome details aside, the resulting infection was painful and unpleasent; as if the former didn’t already indicate the latter. It reminded me of my busted ankle at a smaller scale; like the skin around the toe was too small and tight for the stuff inside. Wait, I said I was leaving the details aside.

Some stinging Dettol foot baths and awkward propping up of my leg later, and he’s on the mend. Which is good, I’m rather attached to him. He comes with me on walks, and is a source of great stability in my life. Don’t we all crave that?

It shoes just how one small, seemingly inconsequential action can have such a dramatic impact on your life. Shoes in that sentence was a typo for shows, but it’s too delightful to fix.

I’ve flown in the face of the idea that you should never meet you heroes. Every developer, podcaster, and musician I’ve talked with and met has been great!

Bean Dad was the first to not be. I posted about an exchange of ours last year in which he described Millennials and Gen Z as insincere, and went off on a few of us who described the unique struggles facing young people in the 2020s; especially those younger than both of us.

I initially felt disillusioned and a touch sad when he slagged me off, but eventually attributed it to Twitter being a bad platform to discuss ideas, which it is, and some misunderstandings.

Then I saw it happen again and, once more, my instinct was to defend him. I had listened to enough of his body of work that I thought I knew him, and that things I wouldn’t excuse from other people were fine coming from him (this is almost certainly how some of his co-hosts will discuss him after the fallout from this has settled). That cognitive dissonance should have rung alarm bells, but I was desperate to preserve this image I had in my head.

The Bean Dad thing was strike three, and unfortunately for the rest of his fans, it was far more public. This time he was Internet Villain #1 for 2021, and everyone was uncovering and talking about things people like me had been subjected to before. Other musicians I follow and trust shared their own disturbing encounters. The most telling moment for me was not being surprised when I read who Bean Dad was. I suppose, deep down, I’d already come to terms with it.

If there’s one good thing from this whole saga, it’s that it gave people confidence to talk openly without fear.

The hostnames on my machines were always Star Trek ships, then they were anime characters. Now this has happened on Clara’s and my new homelab server, and weirdly I have no problem remembering what each one was for.

holo$ sudo jls
==> JID  IP Address  Hostname              Path
==>   1  10.8.8.81   gura.holo.lan         /var/jail/gura  
==>   2  10.8.8.82   ina.holo.lan          /var/jail/ina
==>   3  10.8.8.83   kiara.holo.lan        /var/jail/kiara
==>   5  10.8.8.84   cali.holo.lan         /var/jail/cali
==>   9  10.8.8.88   ameliaWATSON.holo.lan /var/jail/ameliaWATSON
    
holo$ ssh gura
==> Heh heh hyuh hyuh! A!     
    
holo$ ssh ina
==> Ina Ina Inaaaa~    
    
holo$ ssh kiara
==> Kikkeriki!    
    
holo$ ssh cali
==> ... guh?     
    
holo$ ssh ame
==> Amelia, a-WAT-SON!

Art was by Ina herself!

From The Economist last Saturday:

Brexit cuts Britain’s long-term growth potential, reduces its influence in Brussels and Washington, and strains the bonds of the United Kingdom. [..] “Which is the more likely, I’m asking myself: that we lose Scotland, or that we rejoin before we’ve lost Scotland?” says Michael Heseltine, a former Tory deputy prime minister, who thinks Brexit is a disaster.

The SS Martin Mullen was a Canadian freighter that started plying the North American Great Lakes from the turn of the century. This photo was taken in 1906 by the Detroit Publishing Company, and I haven’t been able to stop looking at it. The smokestack lets you know you’re dealing with a steamer, but somehow the scene looks oddly modern.

I’ve mentioned on previous Music Mondays that I’ve gone back to maintaining a music collection, in lieu of using streaming services. It’s been such a rewarding exercise, and the tea ceremony of maintaining and using a proper Hi-Fi system has been a lot of fun! Streaming services made music disposable, but doing this made it tangible and real again.

Clara and I have all the music we want between LPs, cassettes, CDs, Minidiscs, and a large file server. We jump to sites like YouTube if we want to preview music, then we buy it from Bandcamp, ZDigital, or Apple iTunes… while dodging the latter’s incessant ads for their own streaming platform.

Drive space is cheap, and you get so many benefits:

• Artists you care about make orders of magnitude more when you buy their album compared to streaming. This is especially critical during Covid times where concerts are difficult.

• Nobody can revoke your music if you buy it DRM-free. You licenced the right to listen to it by getting it on physical media or as a file, and that’s the end of the transaction.

• You have the final say on metadata. A specific streaming service had so many mistakes in album text, or had missing translations, or the wrong cover art. Maintaining a collection lets your type 1 personality shine!

• Potentially higher quality. Streaming services are pretty good now, and I don’t have equipment good enough to tell the difference between most high-bitrate AAC files and ALAC/FLAC. I also play pre-recorded, type 1 cassettes and LPs! But well-sampled albums like Esther Golton’s Aurora Borealis absolutely sparkle with that extra headroom.

I’ll be doing some more reviews of music software and tools for organising in the coming months.

You know the drill for me now; whenever I see a cool new new PC laptop I head to the technical specs page to see how pedestrian the screen is. Today’s is the premium Portégé X30L-G:

1920×1080, 165 ppi

The 13-inch MacBook Pro has 2560×1600 with 227 ppi, almost 30% higher. And has for a decade.

I know I sound like an old record now, but why don’t PC companies care about their screens? Why do they include gimmics like touch but not something that would actually make their computers more usable, especially for photographers or sysadmins that need lots of tiled windows?

All I can think of is the graphics are underpowered, or they think their customers don’t care. They must be right, given how the tech press never mentions this elephant in the room. Once you use 2x HiDPI, 1.5 scaling is nasty.

Please, PC laptop makers, give Apple some meaningful competition! Dynabook were once Toshiba’s legendary laptop line; if anyone could do it, it’d be them.