Captain’s Log

by

Endeavoring to get the Christmas tree done, I opted to reach for one of my favorite holiday films: A Christmas Story. Affectionately known in my family as “Ralphy.”

I’m not sure if my mother tended to think about her parents a lot when we were decorating for Christmas, or if she was too busy with us little hooligans, but I tend to think about my parents as I put up the tree. Pretty much my entire life: we’ve watched Ralphy. It’s long been a tradition of sorts for me to catch it at least once during the Christmas marathon, often in bits and pieces. It never really seems like Christmas time without that.

For me, it’s got a double meaning of sorts. See, the film is so exactly a reflection of the world that my momma grew up in that hearing about that itself was kind of like a Christmas tradition itself. It was kind of her way of sharing a piece of her childhood with her own children. To even fathom how many references to her childhood there is in the film, we’d probably have to enumerate just how much ‘stuff’ is shown in Ralphy, lol.

Must of heard all the stories a thousand times over growing up, but I never really got tired of hearing her share that with us.

by

While my afternoon could probably be summed up by Star Wars; Squadrons, Willow was incredibly smart and took a sublimly comfortable nap.

I planned ahead what my cooking schedule would look like, so I wouldn’t have to worry much about defrosting time, prep, cooking, or resting times. Likewise the order to do things. Momma did teach me a thing or two in the kitchen 👍. Willow on the other hand stole the show for cuteness.

Growing up my my mother only made turkey once a year, and decided if she was working so hard: she was going to make a huge turkey. Whether it was four of us, or two of us, what that really meant was an average of 22 lbs of bird every thanksgiving. Every year, I’d usually make light of that, lol. Left to my own devices sometimes I don’t even make turkey for thanksgiving.

Since it’s just me, and three hungry dogs: I opted to get the smallest turkey breast I could find. Still too damned much food, lol. Combined with the side dishes, I’m pretty sure that I could have fed another three people.

One of the things my brother’s first marriage brought into our family traditions was green bean casserole. Something that yet survives, and fills bellies. When you’re choking down turkey for weeks, you learn to appreciate the sides, lol.

The family sized package of four cheese mashed potatoes was definitely a good plan. Kroger turkey gravy on the other hand is some of the most salty gravy I’ve ever tasted. Compared to my mother’s thanksgiving plans, my selection of food is rather modest and simple. She often made so much, you could probably have fed the neighborhood for a day instead of us for weeks.

Needless to say, my solution to the holiday resulted in a very full belly. Despite ample pre-dinner snackage, Willow tried to steal turkey twice. It’s probably a good thing I kept their share towards the edge, lol.

The hungry minions were very well fed with their share of turkey. Which is kind of special, because I rarely will make turkey. They really, really love turkey and chicken; and Willow is especially inclined to pilfer fish.

Plus I had bought a can of something yummy for their post dinner treat.

We are all full now. But they will forget this whenever I reach for the cake I baked last night….

The week in pictures

by

 Aside from the general busy level and workalcoholism, I think this largely sums things up.

Test of new socks: AWESOME. I’ve put off buying new socks for so long that it feels like clouds instead of boots. Also willow doesn’t understand why she doesn’t get a post-walk treat before I take my boots off, and after.

Pretty sure she demands pretzel sticks.

Misty wanting attention.

Willow wondering why Misty gets the crane service and the chair.

Sometimes: I am a dog chair.

Willow reminding me that her pretzel stick bribes are required for midnight snackage.

The kind of looks I get when getting dressed for work.

It’s amazing Willow didn’t dive on the plate faster than I could take the picture, lol.

Wasn’t sure if leftover brussels sprouts and alfredo sauce was a great idea. Combined with meatballs, it certainly is!

Willow wishes a poor meatball would roll off the table, on the floor, or just straight into her mouth.

Yes, Willow, I know you wants treats.

Sometimes you’ve just gotta splurge 🙂

Pretty sure the dogs are smarter than I am when it comes to how to spend an afternoon.

Best part of chili mac is definitely eating chili mac.

Comfort level: over 9000!

by

 When the weather reports shifted towards flash flood and river flood warnings, I was rather less concerned. Since the local terrain can handle quite a bit of water, and I’m not that close to the river.

Water simply collects by the fence, whether it runs off down the road or much more typically from our gutters down a slight slope towards the fence.

When it started to sound like someone up ended a lake, and dumped it overhead: I figured the slope out towards the fence would be pretty flooded this morning.

Willow was rather less enthused by this, as her favorite walking spot only has a couple meters of dry space between here and the fence.

Needless to say she took a shorter walk this morning than normal, lol.

This stands in stark contrast to plenty of places I’ve seen in Georgia where the angles of drainage feel more inverted. So I’ve long been happy that overflow collects down there instead offs my doorstep, lol

by

Not sure that my emergency action plan has changed much since I was a child, aside from the rise of LED bulbs and that my phone can speak an emergency alert for tornadoes. But I’d like to think warning times have improved over the last couple decades.

Officially hunkered down. All the things near shelter point. Etc. But based on the radar and the weather, I’m thinking if I was going to die by tornado tonight I’d already by dead. Just the same, I’d rather it be a shorter trip if I find myself grabbing dogs and taking cover.

And then there’s the part I find more mixed.

Decided while I was at it: fresh underwear. Not unusual as part of my getting ready for bed. But not a horrible precaution for tornadoes either.

But then I pictured hanging from a tree branch by the elastic, narrowly saved from being gone with the wind. Because my sense of humour is rather twisted and easily amused. For some reason: this made my mind flash to a scene in the old visual novel: Family Project. Soon after the middle aged woman,  Masumi is introduced into the story: she tries to commit suicide by leaping off the nearest bridge. The main character ends up saving her by her panties, and putting the elastic to the ultimate test, in what’s a spectacularly hilarious scene (if terribly embarrassing for the character). Personally, if I was in that predicament, I’d be keeping that pair for good luck, lol.

by

Whether I spend it on gaming, or programming, or anything else. I find it’s a fairly narrow window betweent hat point where the dogs start deciding it’s time for bed, and they decide me getting on the computer before bed isn’t a valid excuse for it being too early for bed.

Shortly after Misty’s nightly meds the dogs usually want to get ready for bed. When they decide if I’m not in bed yet there’s going to be treats to pay is rarely long after :/.

Actually Willow always kind of wants treats but she knows after bed her odds of success go waaay down.

On the flip side in that narrow window for getting things done, I’ve got speakers and some nice music on the Country Jukebox. But of course it’s long past the point of going to bed before the dogs get anymore antsy, lol.

by

Thinking over my experiment, I think I can principally call it a success. Over the past ~three weeks, I’ve managed to not go out of my cottin pickin’ mind and want to flip my NT partition out a window. 

As someone that’s principally had a FreeBSD or Debian setup on hand for the past fifteen years, I’m going to call that signs of progress on Microsoft’s part. Because while there are worts here and there using a X session: traditionally they piss me off less than Windows.

Since the experiment began I’ve made numerous changes, but mostly small ones.

The freaky SD card freezes Explorer thing hasn’t happened in ages, so I can probably thank updates for that. Likewise I find turning my keyboard off before power down seems to result in less having to repair the damned thing. Pretty stable for the most part.

IIS is definitely slow as dog poop compared to lighttpd, but given how easy it is to lock it down to a specific network, I’ll forgive that.

The thing I miss the most is how copy/paste works in X. The whole thing about ^C/^V versus the mouse selection and clicking the middle mouse button is really helpful when you’re copying between a terminal and a note editor. The select / right click thing with modern Windows terminal emulators and console things, not so much. But that was also something I disliked about using Android and a monitor anyway.

Since modern Linux tends to treat otherwise available memory like a ramdisk, and buffers the crap out of it for faster file I/O, I’ve made a small tweak to WSL2 setup:

PS > type ..wslconfig
[wsl2]
# default is 80%, or about 12.8 if you’ve got 16GB.
memory=8GB
# Default is 25%, or about 4GB if you’ve got 16GB
# It’s a VHDX file used as swap: not system virtual memory.
#swap=?

Effectively limiting WSL2 to half my system’s physical memory. Otherwise I’ll find myself with 300~400 MB free in task manager. Some of the projects I work on generate ~20 GB of files and general nut punches memory.

That my desktop sessions on W10 usually burn up to 3.5 ~ 6.5 GB according to Task Manager, this further increments my desire that my next machine offer at least 32 GB of RAM. Because 640 KB isn’t enough for anything anymore 🤣.

As most of my interests revolve around an xterm session, WSL works pretty damned good for me. Enough so that using Xfce4 and Thunar vs NT’s DWM and Explorer aren’t as large an impact as the change from Davmail + Thunderbird to ActiveSync and Windows Mail.

Much to my amusement if I do the old “Send to” -> “Mail recipient” trick, I get an error message that there is no program for that. Actually, I can’t remember what decade I last actually tried that. But I’m pretty sure that XP or ’98 was still sexy at the time.

I’ve been happy to see that Windows Terminal has come along nicely. When I tried it very early on, I found it annoying because I abuse bash’s classic line editing instead of using notepad like shortcuts. No frustrations or interference with a release version of Windows Terminal; in fact my only negative comment is the fancy pane split stuff isn’t the same as tmux or screen, hehe.

Spending more time on Windows 10 than normal, I find myself reminded that it’s been about a decade since I figured I should learn how to use PowerShell. While I mostly skipped having to care about batch files in command.com, I have had no such luck avoiding cmd.exe in my life. And PowerShell frequently reminds me how nicer it is–if only I’d have the time to learn it as well as I do bash and general Bourne Shell voodoo.

My little experiment of using Windows 10 Pro instead of Debian Buster was meant to answer the question “Can I” use NT as my main development and work platform. The question of “Should I” however is a different one. That I haven’t gone insane is a positive. That I’ve tried at all of course indicates that I may be a tad more insane than normal.

But hey, I spent many years using Android as a desktop replacement, so I’m obviously crazy to begin with ^_^.

by

 The Tech My Dad Banned From Our House

Interesting read. I suspect her dad must have been an interesting fellow.

For some reason I find myself remembering Ma mentioning my father counting out a roll of a hundred stamps as one of his quirks; I’ve always wondered how he must have gotten screwed over or otherwise ended up so pissed off once upon a time to go that far. Everyone has their quirks, pa’s notion of cutting vegetables to uniformed size at least made sense, but I’d have to have been positively mental at some event to ever do the stamps thing myself, lol.

As for my childhood I was probably fortunate. We pretty much had a computer and some form of game console my entire life, not that I will ever really fathom how our mother afforded the Tandy. I know Nanny and the local pawn shops was often involved in my brother’s drive for expensive things.

But for the most part tech considerations weren’t really imposed upon me. We had to deal with a rather tight income, but my widowed mother did her best to make her children happy. More effort than I think she should have, or more than we should have received, but those were her decisions. My brother and I certainly benefited from that side of our mother.

Should we say the tech side had both sides of that. If we could afford a PC game that I wanted, I’d probably get it eventually. If I wanted new hardware I’d probably be better off asking for a used car fund 🤣. Such was life.

Our first computer was technically my brother’s, but I was really the only one that used it very often. What really got my family interested was the Internet. WebTV was very limited but also a highly effective gateway drug to modern computing. For ma and me: it was a pragmatic thing to end up with a PC.  For my brother I imagine it was the ability to play video games and surf the Internet, but he had moved out during our WebTV era.

Someone at church that taught computer classes and such, gave us an old Pentium/32MB machine and even took the old Tandy 1000 off our hands. When it died: we ended up with our pastor’s old Packered Bell with a Pentium II/64MB. After that died, my brother naught a Dell simular to his Dimension, and ma paid him back until it was paid off. A snazzy 2 GHz Pentium 4 and probably 512 MB. Whatever, it finally had a hard drive big enough to actually install games and the best graphics card we had seen since the old Tandy!

It was these Pentium based machines where I actually had any competition for using the computer. Which was both a good and bad thing, but mostly a good thing. By that, I mean the only way we got broadband is eventually phone calls screwing around with her email was the last straw, because if my bitching and moaning wasn’t enough to drive that decision: our combined grumbles eventually did, lol.

by

This long, tiresome week, I’ve opted to conduct an experiment: working out of my Windows partition. Since shoving my Chromebook in a closet ages ago, I’ve usually booted Stark  from my Debian partition. Well, this week I tried a little insanity.

So what worked? Well the important stuff. Namely WSL2 and Docker for Windows now enable me to do the things my Debian partition offers that actually matter. Yay for that. Being a busy week, I kind of put that part of the system through five hundred laps of abuse without a problem.

A very large part of my time revolves around command line environments one way or another, so a lot of my client machine’s job is being a glorified X-Terminal on steroids. Most GUI software I rely on is cross-platform within the desktop family trees, pardoning proprietary bits. Most parts I really care about are terminal friendly; most GUI parts involve interaction with others or specific tasks.

In particular I found it pleasant to have a Evernote’s desktop client. The web client’s not my cup of tea, beyond some of the editing shortcuts it shares with the Android and iOS clients. While most of what I do on my Linux partition was direct and to the point thanks to WSL, Evernote was a big shift.

What didn’t work so hot?

In a very unsurprising shortfall was Bluetooth. Twice I had to totally start from scratch pairing my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. To be fair, W10 20H1 launched with problems that are supposedly resolved. To be honest I’ve always had trouble with NT and Bluetooth: going as far back as the XP era. By contrast in a decade of combing Bluetooth and Linux: the only issue I’ve had is changing batteries 🤣.

Another is the networking side. Seems like W10 is happy enough to use my static/dns setup for Wi-Fi at work, and DHCP for my Wi-Fi setup at home. It’ll even deal with the DNS suffix at home. But sometimes it thinks my home network has no Internet connectivity because it’s trying to use my work DNS servers with my home connection. I suppose, considering the era NT comes from: I should just be glad that W10 has a concept of different configurations for different wireless connections. But annoying.

Shifting from Davmail / Thunderbird to the various Microsoft things, I mostly have two comments. One: easier setup. Second: different quirks. On the flipside, Davmail has a spectacularly accurate manual. And Thunderbird probably has more bugs and quirks than it’s competition, lol. I could actually replicate my Linux setup on W10, but would rather not during the experiment.

Explorer is probably the gold standard of file managers. Compared to Thunar, it sure is. But I found it amusing how it was a sticking point. On occasion Explorer total death hangs until I eject my SD card. In the kill explorer from taskkill /f and then restart the damned thing just to get my panel back kind of hangs. Although, I’ve probably seen more crashes from X file managers than you can shake a stick at, it’s compensated by *nix having a far superior command line environment.

More minor were things like my internal web server. Easy enough to replicate my simple lighttpd setup in IIS, and to lock it to my connection at work. Most of my stuff is either static, Perl CGI, or bash based; so the only thing that’s not operational with trivial effort is a few CGI scripts done in bash.

And then there’s the part that should really scare me: I didn’t hate the experience. By comparison using Windows 7 and its predecessors generally lead to cursing and gnashing of teeth.

by

I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible.

Most people don’t go to such an extent to avoid the big tech companies, even for an experiment it is a bit super thorough. But makes a solid point.
“Critics of the big tech companies are often told, “If you don’t like the company, don’t use its products.” My takeaway from the experiment was that it’s not possible to do that. It’s not just the products and services branded with the big tech giant’s name. It’s that these companies control a thicket of more obscure products and services that are hard to untangle from tools we rely on for everything we do, from work to getting from point A to point B.”
Perhaps the question we really should be asking ourselves is whether or not these companies are a necessary evil.
Would such services exist, or be anywhere near as good without the help of such companies? Miss Hill points out the dominance of Google Maps and the interaction with things like Uber, and I think that’s kind of key. We had GPS navigation long before we had Google Maps and smart phones, but which would you rather use? Part of what made Google Maps what it is today is the insane investment: sending people and hardware off into the wild blue yonder to build a better dataset than simply importing maps and satellite photos could. Who the hell has that much money? Well, Google did. Some clown in their parents garage might be able to kick start the next Apple or Amazon, but they’re not going to be able to afford to run Google Streetview without monopolistic funding.
As things worked out, I’d say Amazon turned out to be a pretty great idea. But twenty six years ago: we’d probably forgive you for thinking Bezos was crazy instead of anticipating he would become several times richer than God, building one of the world’s most well known enterprises along the way.
See, we build our success upon the success of others—and our success is often in enabling others to succeed. The question is can we do that without the ginormous bankrolls and the infrastructure that entails.
I’d like to think we have yet to see the last great American tech company. But without a governmental strongarm, I don’t think we will ever see these empires displaced. Not until landmark paradigm shifts cause them to exit a market, or for profitability sake they choose to exit or destroy one. You’re not going to beat Google Maps unless they’re incompetent and you’re hyper lucky and clever at just the right time: or they choose to shutter the entire operation. That’s just how it works at scale.
Yes, I’m pretty sure that we should refer to them as monopolies. But are they ones we need, or are they ones we can ill afford? As someone who long resisted Google and Facebook, I find that a very intriguing question.