Category: Other Archive

Re: GoToSocial

Admin is a lot simpler with GTS than the last time I tried Mastodon. It can be a single binary or a single container, and just uses SQLite instead of running a full DB in a separate container. I’m running it on a 1GB Linode and haven’t had to add storage or RAM.

Basically the only sysadmin stuff I’ve done aside from setup and this fix since I set up the test instance a year and a half(?) ago has been installing updates, which has just been incrementing the version number in docker-compose.

Interoperability is a lot better now, and it seems to interact fine with varieties of Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, Bookwyrm, Pixelfed, Snac, WordPress, etc. Varying degrees of trouble with Postmarks, Bridgy Fed and Lemmy.

Some of the more noticeable features that haven’t been built yet:

  • auto-delete
  • post editing (though it does pick up incoming edits)
  • filter support isn’t finished, and only works in hide-it-completely mode.
  • hide boosts (or maybe it was added in the latest release, I’ll have to check)
  • link previews
  • search posts (except your own)

I’ve also had intermittent issues with attachments not making it across despite being within the size limit, but only on this server, not on the test one. I suspect it’s related to the proxy settings I just fixed!

TODO: Update the existing GTS review

Helix Comics

comment left at Comics Worth Reading’s post, The Helix Titles That Live On; Time Breakers Crowdfunding

Interesting: I think Sheva’s War and The Dome: Ground Zero were the only ones I picked up at the time. I might even still have Sheva’s War in a box somewhere, though I don’t remember anything at all about The Dome.

I read Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse as a TPB, but I’m not sure what imprint it was by that time. Transmet, of course, I discovered after it moved to Vertigo.

Of the rest, only Cyberella rings a bell, but when I read about the Time Breakers collection, I immediately thought 2 things: “Why didn’t I notice this when it was new?” And “I have to buy it now!”

In retrospect, it’s weird to me that I skipped most of the Helix line. But I think I was still mostly reading superhero comics at the time.

FINALLY managed to punch a hole in the firewall…

FINALLY managed to punch a hole in the #firewall that allowed the #docker image to make DNS calls outward so I can actually federate this instance!

(really wanted to punch docker)

Problem was I had to restart the docker service after updating the firewall rules.

#awall #AlpineLinux

Comment by @ikke@ipv6.social:

if you combine awall and docker, make sure you set the awall_dedicated_chains variable to true. This will make sure awall does not interfere with the rules that docker adds. See https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/awall#control-variables

#

My response:

Thank you! I suspect you’ve just saved me a future headache the next time something restarts!

Multi-level pagination in 11ty?

All the documentation I’ve found on Eleventy pagination has to do with a single level, and I’ve got that working pretty well.

  • Take a collection (ex. of tags) and create one page each
  • Take a collection of posts and put 10 on each page and so on.

What I’d like to do now is combine them: loop over all the tags, and then paginate each tag’s collection so if I use some tags a lot, they don’t end up with 50 posts on the same page. Basically the way WordPress generates paginated views for each tag.

Something like this: (simplified, I know filters need to be in there)

pagination:
data: collections
size: 1
alias: tag
pagination:
data: tag
size: 10
alias: tagpost

Though that didn’t seem to work.

Is there some way to do multi-level pagination, or would I need to take some other approach for the outer loop?

On StackOverflow

Having an open mind doesn’t mean believing both sides equally or disbelieving them both equally.

Comment on this guest post at This is True: What’s Good for the Goose

Having an open mind doesn’t mean believing both sides equally or disbelieving them both equally. It means looking at evidence and actually *thinking* about what is being said, what is being done, and what else is happening.

If one “side” promotes unfounded accusations (i.e. conspiracy theories) and the other “side” calls them on it, those aren’t equivalent.

If one “side” marches when an election doesn’t go their way and the other “side” violently threatens or attacks the legislature to overturn an election that doesn’t go their way, those aren’t equivalent.

If one “side” complains about propaganda in an election they lost, and the other “side” insists without evidence (unless you count the claims that have been repeatedly laughed out of court) that the votes in an election they lost were somehow faked, those aren’t equivalent.

Sure, don’t trust reflexively – but don’t dismiss reflexively either. Automatically rejecting “both sides” isn’t critical thinking, it’s just another way of reassuring yourself that you’re right.

Flickr Commons and Facial Recognition

Comments on @angeldan’s Flickr post reacting to the NYTimes article on Flickr Commons photos being used to train facial recognition software and the initial reaction of how dare they use our photos for this?

FWIW, it was Yahoo that did this, and they no longer own Flickr.

Also, if they only used photos that were licensed for creative commons or commercial use…well, that’s what those licenses are for, right? Pre-emptively giving others permission to use the work under specific terms without them having to ask?

…

A. The thing is, you have to make an effort to choose a Creative Commons license for your photos. And the licenses are short, and go out of their way to explain what they do. It’s not the default, and it’s not 40 pages of legalese that you’re required to click through just to use the service. Now, if Yahoo used photos that *weren’t* licensed to allow reuse, then that’s another story.

More concerning, IMO, is whether the *subjects* of the photos would have agreed to this use. Not an issue with identifying trees, birds, cars, etc. – the original Flickr Commons collection wasn’t specific to people – but definitely an issue with the face recognition projects, and that’s where things like the Illinois biometrics law come in.

B. Yeah, the uses that the tech has been put to are in many cases creepy, unethical, and dangerous. That’s always a problem with tech. We often don’t anticipate the ways people will abuse it, and that’s something that we need to do more of. That’s a *huge* discussion in the tech world right now, and one that needs to be examined more closely, from as many angles as possible.

But is this *Flickr’s* breach of trust?
1. It was Flickr’s former parent company that made the original collection, using images that users had specifically assigned creative commons licenses.
2. It was a team at the University of Washington that narrowed it down to the images of faces, created the MegaFace dataset, and encouraged groups building facial recognition technology to use it for training and testing.
3. It’s still other companies that have been actually using the tech.

Review: Star Wars: The Last Jedi

I learned long ago that “things happened that I didn’t like” and “it was badly made” are two different complaints about a movie. And while a lot of stuff happened that I didn’t like, it was interesting and creative in a way that Star Wars hasn’t been able to be in decades. We knew where the prequels were heading, we knew where Rogue One was heading, and The Force Awakens followed essentially the same plot beats as A New Hope.

It’s dark, yes – but not really much darker than Revenge of the Sith, another film that features the slow, inexorable snuffing out of hope by a powerful galactic-sized force, leaving only a handful of heroes at the end. But with RotS, we knew things would get better (eventually). This time, we get a triumphant return at the end, and a hint at a better future in the epilogue.

The Last Jedi made it possible for Star Wars to be surprising again, and unless Episode IX goes out of its way to reject it (or even if it does), I suspect it’ll be received better in the long run than it has been in the moment.

Review: Mpow BH044 Bluetooth Receiver

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008AGQMQC/

I’ve been using this in my car to listen to music and podcasts from my phone for the past year. Sound quality is virtually identical to what I got plugging into the headphone jack (when I had one), plus now I have physical buttons for pause, play, forward and back, which is *really* nice for driving!

Occasionally the connection doesn’t quite work right and I get very crunchy audio, but when that happens I’m able to just turn off the phone’s bluetooth and turn it back on, and when they re-pair the sound is back to normal.

The one thing that bothers me about it is that the battery warning sound (bleeping once a minute) doesn’t start until there’s only about 10 minutes’ worth of battery left, which always seems to happen 5 minutes into a 30-minute drive.

Demonizing Rent’s Benny vs. Lionizing Hamilton’s Alexander

My comment on GeekDad’s Demonizing Rent’s Benny vs. Lionizing Hamilton’s Alexander.

Great analysis! I recently picked up the Rent soundtrack again after letting it sit for a while and found that my perspective has changed over the years.

I was thinking about Benny vs. Aaron Burr the other day: Benny’s the designated villain because he’s on the other side of the conflict from the rest of the main cast. Personal flaws aside, he’s not evil, he just has different priorities. But the show clearly presents him as the bad guy.

Hamilton literally has Aaron Burr *call himself* the villain, but the show does so much to humanize him that it’s hard to read him that way. (At least as far as the cast album goes.) Antagonist, yes. Opponent, absolutely. But he’s presented much more sympathetically than Benny, even though he actually kills the hero.

Angsty Superheroes

Comments on Mary Sue: Daredevil v Batman v Superman: Getting Angst Right in the Superhero Genre

I’d like to think that the general popularity of Daredevil amongst comic book/superhero fans should make it clear that fans who aren’t thrilled about the dark tone of Man of Steel (and the implied dark tone of Batman v. Superman) aren’t all just afraid of having grown-up superhero stories, but that grimness and darkness fit some characters better than others. (YMMV as to which characters they fit.)

But then the complementary tones of Flash and Arrow don’t seem to get that across either, and they actually make meta-references about it in the shows.

I’m *hoping* that once DC’s cinematic universe branches out, they’ll break things up tonally as well (like they’re doing with the DC & Vertigo TV shows), but it’s hard to be confident when they’re presenting the launchpad movie as doubling down on the angst.

Disqus

Challenger

Comment on I Remember Where I was When the Challenger Blew Up

I was in elementary school, outside, so it must have been during recess, when a classmate said something like, “Did you hear what happened? The space shuttle blew up!” I don’t remember how he found out, or when I first watched the video, but I remember that moment.

Strangely, I can’t remember how I *found out* about Columbia, even though I blogged about my reaction to the news. #

Answer: Is it crazy to commute between Orange County and Los Angeles every day?

It depends on how flexible your hours are, how early you can get up (or how late you’re willing to stay out), how long you can stand “driving” through stop-and-go traffic, and whether the train is an option.

I commuted the slightly shorter distance from Tustin to the LAX area for about 4 months before I moved closer to my job, and it was incredibly draining.

Typically, I spent 10-20 minutes getting to the 91, and then anywhere from one to two hours trudging along at ridiculously slow speeds for the rest of the drive. The drive home was typically about 20 minutes longer than the drive to work.

On good days, if I made it to Norwalk early enough to find parking, I could take the Metro Green Line the rest of the way, bypassing the worst of the traffic and letting me read on the train. There was a stop a short bus ride away from my office. It still took an hour and a half each way, but at least I could relax during most of it.

Once I actually made it to work in only 45 minutes. It was a holiday. And the drive home was just as bad as usual.

I did try taking the train the whole way a couple of times, by taking Metrolink up to Norwalk. But because the Metro and Metrolink systems only connect in downtown LA, I had to take a local bus from Norwalk’s Metrolink station to Norwalk’s Metro station, and every transfer adds more time and more things that can go wrong in the process…especially because I had to put in extra effort to make it back to Norwalk that evening in time for the last Metrolink train, with two buses and a train on the way. It ended up being almost as stressful and taking even longer.

Going to Santa Monica, the Metrolink/Metro route might work out better, because you can probably transfer straight from one train to another at Union Station. Also, this was about three years ago, so the schedules might allow for more flexibility these days.

Another thing to consider: Metrolink is considerably more expensive than Metro, though if you’re using it daily, a pass will be a much better deal.

On Quora

No Coincidences

Comment on PAD’s Coincidence in Fiction

I love the take on Les Miserables. I’ve been re-reading the book, and the coincidences are just astonishing.

Things like Cosette starting to give up on Marius and catching a glimpse of a soldier, who just happens to be Marius’ cousin. The Thenardiers’ younger sons are taken in by a former servant of Marius’ grandfather, then get lost and picked up by Gavroche.

My favorite is probably the point at which one of Thenardier’s associates decides to mug some random guy who turns out to be Jean Valjean, on the street outside Marius’ friend’s house, while Gavroche is watching from the bushes.

There actually is a part in the novel where Eponine is manipulating various groups of people. The question is, should that be worked into Valjean’s sister’s spy network? Or is she an opposing force? Hmm…

Note: same ground mostly covered in Padded and No Such Thing as Coincidence

Delicious Retreat

Comment on A Delicious Retreat: Early Sharing Pioneer Announces Feature Downgrade

I get the impression that they tried to be Pinterest and then realized that they couldn’t keep up, and figured it would be better to focus on their strenghts than be a third-rate Pinterest clone.

The fact that they added Facebook integration at the same time as announcing the cancellation of stacks suggests that they’re aiming to be a repository for link sharing on other social services. Searching your Twitter stream or Facebook timeline (or Google+ page, or Tumblr, etc) for a particular link you posted three months ago is a pain. Searching for it on Delicious is…well, at least possible, though it’s better if you take the time to tag your links once in a while.

That of course goes away if FB or Twitter realize that people might want to look at their old stuff and improve their own search…except for people who use more than one social service. Or *have* used more than one social service over time. Aggregating those shares in one place could be useful, and might even turn out to be a niche worth filling.

Disqus

Mitochondrial Eve

Comment in response to The 10 Most Successful Failures in Geekdom

Apologies in advance for the nitpicking, but this is one of those things that Just Bugs Me(tm), and it seems to come up every time the BSG finale is mentioned.

The “Mitochondrial Eve” concept doesn’t mean everyone else died out. It’s finding a common ancestor based on the fact that we only inherit mitochondria from our mothers.

Start with two families. One has all girls, or a mix of girls and boys. The other has all boys. The mother who has girls? Her grandchildren will inherit her mitochondria. The mother who has all boys? Her mitochondrial line will disappear, even if she has more grandchildren than the first.

One character being Mitochondrial Eve doesn’t mean every other family died out. It just means that over time, each other line had at least one generation of all boys.

What am I Reading? (With Robot 6)

I read the first issue of Elric: The Balance Lost this week. When I first heard that BOOM! was going to be launching an Elric series, I was somewhat interested, but not certain I’d pick it up. It wasn’t written by Michael Moorcock himself, and besides I hadn’t enjoyed his most recent Elric novel nearly as much as his earlier works. But then I read the preview they released for Free Comic Book Day, and I was hooked.

The story spans at least four worlds in Moorcock’s multiverse, and four incarnations of the Eternal Champion: Elric, last ruler of a dead empire, who wields the black sword Stormbringer and absorbs the souls of those he kills so that he can live; Hawkmoon, champion of a distant future Earth who defeated the conquering empire of Granbretan; Corum, last of a dead race who fought to protect the humans who inherited his world; and Eric Beck, a game developer living in a world not unlike our own. The first issue establishes all four characters and the worlds they come from, so that new readers unfamiliar with Moorcock’s work will understand the basics, and shows each world threatened by the tipping balance. Elric finds himself in a world overrun by chaos, while Eric Beck’s more familiar world is beginning to shift too far toward order. By the end of the issue, Eric finds himself drawn into the adventure. It’s one of the most effective first issues I’ve read in a while, managing to mix exposition and action and end on a hook that makes me feel like the next issue will jump straight into the story.

The Unwritten continues to hold the spot as my favorite ongoing series. The latest issue is essentially a caper, with Tom, Lizzie and Savoy trying to infiltrate the auction of author Wilson Taylor’s estate. It’s got all the twists and turns in terms of allegiances, who has the upper hand, and who *thinks* they have the upper hand, that you’d expect, and in the end it manages to both answer some questions about Tom Taylor’s origins and call into question some of what we thought we knew, all while setting things up for the next phase of the story. I’ve always been a sucker for stories about stories, which I’m sure is why Sandman resonated so well with me when I finally started reading it, but The Unwritten tackles the concept from an entirely different angle, focusing on the way stories — whether history, fiction, propaganda, or the stories we tell ourselves to justify our actions — shape the world.

Of course, as a DC reader and a Flash fan, it would be virtually impossible to avoid Flashpoint. I’m reading the main series and six of the tie-in miniseries. Of those, the ones I’m enjoying the most are Frankenstein and the Creatures of the Unknown, Kid Flash Lost, and Citizen Cold. The first issue of Frankenstein is crazy World-War II action featuring the Frankenstein monster and lawyer-friendly versions of Dracula, the Wolfman, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and features Frankenstein personally killing Adolf Hitler with a sword. It’s hard to go wrong with that. Citizen Cold feels like a return to the glory days of the Geoff Johns/Scott Kolins run on The Flash, only with everything shifted around to make Captain Cold the protagonist. It’s interesting to see how little has changed in Central/Keystone City when the rest of the world is vastly different. Kid Flash Lost feels more like a continuation of The Flash Vol.3 than Flashpoint does, except better. It’s faster paced, despite the fact that the main character has lost his speed for the duration. It manages to justify some of the odd choices from “The Road to Flashpoint” that just came out of nowhere. Most importantly, Sterling Gates really understands Bart Allen’s personality in a way that I never really saw in Geoff Johns’ Teen Titans or Flash runs (though there were glimpses of him in Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds).

As for Flashpoint itself, it continues to remind me a lot of Geoff Johns’ first Flash story, Wonderland. The first two issues didn’t really grab me, but things are picking up with the third as it moves beyond exposition and into rising action. Maybe it’s just me, but in a five-issue miniseries, shouldn’t you be done with setup in the first issue, not half-way through the third?

Other comics I’ve read recently: Farscape is moving toward the conclusion of its year-long story about the invasion of the Uncharted Territories. It still feels a bit too much like New Jedi Order, with the arrival of an unbeatable enemy and the wholesale demolition of large chunks the universe that had been built up by four years of the TV series, but it’s continuing to hold my interest. And Tiny Titans #41, the All-Flash issue, was a welcome counterpart to the grimness of Flashpoint: Legion of Doom and Grodd of War.

Guest post at Robot 6

DC only seems to have room for three main Flashes at a time

DC only seems to have room for three main Flashes at a time: Past, present and future. Sometimes that shakes out as Jay, Barry and Wally, sometimes as Jay, Wally and Bart, and most recently as Jay, Barry and Bart. They’ve got four major Flash characters to work from, and they want Barry in the “present” role…and now that they have a chance to rewrite history, they can get rid of the “extra” character.

That suggests two likely possibilities:
1. They erase Barry Allen’s grandson and reset his nephew to being Kid Flash.
2. They erase Barry Allen’s nephew and keep his grandson as Kid Flash.

We’ve basically gotten ONE Flash story that’s *just a Flash story* out of each run since 2005

I feel like I’m Charlie Brown, DC is Lucy, and the promise of a Flash series that actually gets off the ground and *goes* somewhere is the football.

We’ve basically gotten ONE Flash story that’s *just a Flash story* out of each run since 2005. Everything else has either been setup, wrap-up, or a side story for an outside event.

That two-parter with Bart vs. Mota. Tom Peyer’s “Fast Money.” Maybe Geoff Johns’ “The Dastardly Death of the Rogues.”

Long-form writing only works if you follow through on it. I love reading novels, but I’d much rather read 20 short stories than 10 first chapters and 10 last chapters.