Geek Stuff category archive

Mageia v. 8 with the Fluxbox window manager. The wallpaper is from my collection.

A Rutgers professor searches for the origin of the legend of the Jersey Devil. A nugget:

Gillespie, a professor of American Studies at Rutgers University and a leading New Jersey folklorist, is not actually trying to track down the beast itself. He’s been researching the origin stories, gathering context so present and future generations of New Jerseyans can fully understand the Garden State’s greatest legend. This Halloween season, he wants to make one thing crystal clear.

“The Jersey Devil is evil,” he said. “He’s known for slitting the throats of babies in their cribs. This is not a cartoon — it’s a monster.”

Follow the link. It’s a fascinating tale.

Listening to The Bishop’s Secret by Fergus Hume using QMMP on Ubuntu MATE under the Plasma Desktop. The wallpaper is from my collection.

Aside:

The Bishop’s Secret is a darn good listen. As a mystery, it is so-so. As a comedy of manners, it is superb.

I have seen numerous references to schools and colleges monitoring of student behavior during these times of remote teaching via Zoom and similar applications.

Like Google and Facebook, they watch what students are doing on their computers to make sure they are behaving the way the educational institution thinks they should behave or, indeed, have the unmitigated gall to take a bathroom break or get a Coke (Above the Law has some particularly egregious examples from bar exams).

At Psychology Today Blogs, Phil Reed takes a look at the larger issue machine learning and includes some strong thoughts on micromanaged digital monitoring. Here’s a bit:

In fact, the new digital approaches to learning retain all of the old aversiveness of classrooms from the 1930s but now coupled with a rather unpleasant odour of Orwell’s 1984. The fact that digital environments lend themselves so easily to this type of Big Brother-esque monitoring and control does not mean that they should be used in that way. Controlling learning, like governing, by aversive outcomes does not work. The fact that it is used so often may say something about the psychology of those setting up such systems, but it does not say much for their reading of the science of learning.

Updating a VirtualBox virtual machine of Linux Mint MATE using the command line (the command line is always faster, if you know the commands) on Mageia v. 8 under the Fluxbox window manager. The Mint wallpaper is from Mint. The Mageia wallpaper is from my collection.

I do likes me my pretty pictures.

Mageia v. 8 with Fluxbox. GKrellM and Xclock are to the right. Thunderbird and Firefox are shaded in a tabbed window. The wallpaper is from my collecction.

And, no, you can’t shade or tab applications if you use Windows.

Read more »

Mageia v. 8 with the Fluxbox window manager. The wallpaper is from my collection.

I’m watching an episode of Midsomer Murders in which a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk plays a crucial role. (The housing was not floppy, but the disk inside it was.)

Remember 3 1/2 inch floppy disks?

I threw all of mine out about five years ago, including a 16 disk installation set for OS/2 Warp, which I used to run a PCBoard BBS for my employer of the time.

Those were the days . . . .

A little while ago, I installed a plugin to make this site more mobile-friendly, and it crashed the site.

When I tried to load the site, everything loaded except the posts. If I clicked to go to behind the curtain to the admin area, a message popped up from WordPress telling me that the site had suffered a fatal error and directing me to the WordPress help files. It was “down at the farm” for about half an hour.

After 16 years, I would rather not lose this blog.

After puzzling for a few moments, I went to the backend of the website, which was accessible via my hosting provider, and opened phpMyAdmin and tried routine database maintenance (check, repair, optimize), to no avail.

In a flash of quite accidental what turned out to be brilliance, I opened the file manager in cpanel, navigated to the appropriate directory, and deleted the directory containing the files of said plugin.

And I’m back.

(Wiping sweat from brow) That was a close one!

And I’ll not try that plugin again, as it clearly is a malignant kludge, but I will thank it for giving me a chance to learn something.

The COVID-19 screensaver from the Xscreensaver suite on Debian Buster/Sid.

This blog celebrates its 16th birthday today.

Who woulda thunk?

I started it because someone in one of my training classes (I was training technicians in how to use and maintain my employer’s software at the time) told me I could self-host my website using Linux. As I had a spare computer lying around, thanks to a coworker, I installed Slackware v. 10.x quite by accident (whatever Linux I tried to install first didn’t work) and, after four months, got Apache working and brought the site online with the help of noip.com.

The blog, frankly, was an afterthought. I did it because I could, not because I had a burning desire to blog.

I haven’t self-hosted for more than a decade, the other parts of my old website are long out of date and have been removed from the site, but the blog lives on.

Every time I think of abandoning this–I guess you could all it–avocation, something comes along to re-ignite my outrage at our society of stupid.

Looking at a map of southwest England, where I spent my Junior Year Abroad at the University of Exeter, using Marble on Mageia v. 8 under the Fluxbox window manager.