Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
Kid mused about the possibility of a youtube channel that only showed coffee. So I told him about the original webcam that monitored a break room coffee pot for years. And of course from there we ended up on the joke RFC for Hypertext Coffee Pot Control Protocol, which also introduced the error code 418 I’m a teapot (whose response body MAY be short and stout).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot
TIL how to string a guitar.
Fridge lightbulb went out. Placed a pickup order at Target for a replacement. Added a few other things we don’t need immediately but could use soonish, figuring why waste an extra trip later. Got a notice at 9:30 that the order was ready, figured I’d wait until morning to pick it up.
I just looked at my email. They filled everything in the order…except the lightbulb.
Kids these days. When I was his age, we NEVER had Friend Drama over who was hosting the remote video chat!
“What do you want for a second dinner? You’ve already had two lunches!”
“You’ve become a hobbit! No, wait, you’re too tall for that.”
In “Final Crisis,” Darkseid’s death on Earth drags the planet down into a singularity, stretching time so that months pass on Earth while only a few minutes pass for the Green Lanterns arriving in our solar system.
Which fits right in with how it feels like ages since March 2020 and yet it also feels like we’re still stuck there.
I’m not big on zombies, but I really like Mira Grant’s (Seanan Maguire’s) Newsflesh series. That said, there’s one story I don’t ever want to read again. The one set in a post-Rising elementary school, showing all the anti-zombie precautions the school takes…and then how they all fail horribly in an extended metaphor for school mass shootings.
This picture of individual barriers around each student’s desk…
Laminated hands and car desks: How schools are welcoming kids back
Reading up on #IPFS and thinking about the old joke about how real hackers don’t do backups, they just upload everything to public FTP and let the rest of the world mirror it.
(an internet outage a couple of weeks ago got me thinking about async schemes like that and SSB)
Interesting article on going beyond nature conservation and actively helping species adapt to introduced predators, changing climate, diseases, etc.
I’d read about the chestnut tree projects a couple of years ago, but the others are new to me.
How Far Should Humans Go to Help Species Adapt?
An Australian project to help threatened marsupials avoid predatory cats is one of a host of ‘assisted evolution’ efforts.
Apparently Doc Brown was using the correct pronunciation of gigawatt with a soft J
https://www.nist.gov/pml/weights-and-measures/metric-si-prefixes
How on earth did we end up with gigabytes using a hard g?
(oh no, it’s related to the GIF debate, isn’t it?)
Re-linking to this blog post from a couple of years back for, oh, no specific reason…
Free Software and Failed Ideals
Once upon a time, the idea that “only the code mattered” was sold as a way to be inclusive. No one would be shut out if their code was good. But building software is more than code. It’s design. Planning. Discussion. It’s figuring out use cases, misuse cases, and failure modes. It’s interacting with people.
Hmm, it’s one of the posts I’ve already imported to my gemlog too…
I’m normally not nervous about going to the dentist, but I’ve got my second pandemic-era visit coming up today. You can’t wear a mask while someone’s working on your teeth.
On the plus side, looking at the covid case rates over time makes me feel better, as LA county is back down to roughly the same rate it was at during my last visit in September (itself postponed from July, which was clearly a good decision).
If you’re not familiar with Gemini, it’s sort of a stripped-down web or souped-up Gopher, very bare-bones and text-oriented. Perfect for blogging.
A bit more in this post, including links to info about Gemini and related software. (You do need a different browser to access Gemini links – I’ve been using Lagrange on the desktop & Ariane on Android .)
Still a bit rough around the edges, but my Gemini conversion for my Les Misérables commentary is up! The blog is now available both on the web and via Gemini.
It features commentary from two full read-throughs (in different translations) plus reviews of movie, stage, radio and comic adaptations.
Gemini: Re-Reading Les Misérables
Web: Re-Reading Les Misérables
Message from school district, which has been slowly opening up on-campus classes by grade and with precautions, mentioned an upcoming orientation for high school freshmen…because they haven’t been to on-campus high school yet. At all.
Oddly specific error: somehow my blog lost the post IDs for all the comments going back to 2002.
The comments were still there. Just not attached to anything.
I was trying to consolidate some posts earlier this week, and ran some optimizations too, so I think one of those broke it.
Fortunately I have a weekly backup of the db. I just restored a copy of the old comments table & updated the live one with the old values. Glad I know SQL. This would have been a major pain for someone who didn’t.
Incidentally…the status page is just lagging behind
Kid checks Down Detector for Roblox, sees a giant spike in down reports. Goes to status page. “Wait, it’s all operational?”
Me (mumbling): “always has been”
Remote work vs network outage.
Spent 1.5 hours on the phone with tech support troubleshooting everything that could be done inside the apartment. Everything inside is fine. The soonest they can send a tech out is tomorrow morning.
So glad the kid’s back on campus today, even though he refused to get out of the car for something like 20 minutes.
And at least I have the phone hotspot, even if the cell signal is flaky on this side of the building.
But I’m getting a clear reminder of the difference between applications designed to run locally with an internet connection and applications designed to run over the internet. Gmail is a lot easier to use on my phone than on my desktop right now.
(later)
Internet access is fixed!