Geek Stuff category archive
Misty Water-Colored Memories 0
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 . . . .
Routine Maintenance 0
I recently had all the water cutoffs in my residence replaced because none of them cut off the water any more. But hey! they were all over 30 years old, and stuff wears out. (I had the primary cutoff replaced about a year ago with a nice ball valve for the same reason.)
This applies to blogs and bloggers, also. I just removed “Margaret and Helen” from my blogroll because there’s not been a new post there for over six months (which, by the way, is a darned shame–it was fun to read).
Bloggers, maintain your blogrolls and remove defunct blogs. I can’t count how many times I’ve clicked on a link in a blogroll only to get a 404 or to find that the latest post was in aught-something or other.
Grumble, grumble, grumble.
Meta: Down at the Farm 0
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.
Happy Birthday to Me 0
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.
Geeking Out 0
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.
Facebook Frolics 0
The EFF weighs in the inimical implications on Facebook’s decision to wall off its garden from legitimate academic research. A snippet:
Revealing the secrets behind this surveillance-based ecosystem to public scrutiny is the first step in reclaiming our public discourse.
The Zuckerborg is the fast lane of the disinformation superhighway.
Geeking Out 0
Listening to a Sherlock Holmes OTR radio show from the Old Time Radio Theater with the QMMP media player on Ubuntu MATE with the Fluxbox window manager. Shaded in a tabbed window are Thunderbird, Firefox, and Konqueror. To the right are Xclock and GKrellM. The wallpaper is from my collection.
About That Algorithm 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, Nir Eyal explains why persons stay buried in their phones, even as they step off the curb in front of passing cars, or, indeed, drive one of said passing cars. He identities four factors designed into “social” media and messaging applications to keep you “engaged.”
Here’s the summary (emphasis added):
- People have become attached to their devices because devices facilitate social connection and because they’re engineered to capture attention.
- Products that lead to habit formation often involve four steps: a trigger, an action, variable rewards, and investment.
- Understanding how people interact with their devices can lead to better iterations of technological products in the future.
Follow the link for a detailed discussion of how “social” media sucks you in.
Don’t Believe the Hype 0
Artificial intelligence is indeed artificial, but it’s not intelligent.
I Just Finished Updating My Windows 8 Virtual Machine 0
Windows is a kludge.
Geeking Out 0
Debian Buster/Sid with the Plasma desktop on a Thinkpenguin laptop. The wallpaper is from my collection.
The Disinformation Superhighway,
It’s All about the Algorithm Dept.
0
David Neiwert explains. A snippet:
Follow the link for the full story.
Geeking Out 0
VirtualBox virtual machine of POP!OS with the default Gnome desktop (I loath Gnome with the fire of a thousand suns–Gnome spells “simplify” as “d-u-m-b-d-o-w-n”) on Mageia v. 8 under the Fluxbox window manager. The wallpaper is from my collection.
It’s All about the Algorithm 0
At Above the Law, Mark Herrmann reflects on how often persons misunderstand the possiblities of technological advances, starting with examples from the early days of automobiles. Then he moves to today. An excerpt:
But we didn’t realize that algorithms run by artificial intelligence would cause many of us to hear only our own thoughts reverberating constantly in the echo chambers of our computers.
I commend the entire article to your attention.
No Place To Hide, the Clock is TikToking Dept. 0
Bruce Schneier reports that TikTok has changed its terms of service to include a provision that it may now collect biometric data.
One more time, “social” media isn’t.