Captain’s Log

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Insults to injuries:

When you’re about to use your desktop to login, load a slow ass webpage, to go edit something the app doesn’t offer, and you’re next thought is “Wait, my iPad’s browser is still faster than this thing.”

My desktop mostly remains because it does one thing very well: play Direct3D games. Because while its era of Core i5 is getting quite long in the toofers: it still can throw three pounds of GTX at problems my other machines can’t.

Actually, based on the few games that really stress the shit out of my desktop: I’m inclined to think the old Core i5-3570K is the real bottleneck. That is to say when games like Final Fantasy XV or Resident Evil 7 get a spike o lagocity, it coincides with the processor load looking like a tomahawk cruise missile hit in the family jewels.

That said: the machine has held up very well. Beyond those two titles: it hasn’t really blushed in the face of melting as far as 1080p gaming goes.

Expected decommissioning date has long since come and gone versus how long I had designed Centauri to service my computing needs. It’s mostly been economics, and the lack of need to retire it that the machine has endured. Which is why the last overhaul was migrating from the very first SSD that I ever bought to a considerable larger one.

The obvious catch to the age is, for tasks like web browser page load times, my iPad basically smokes my desktop :/. But the fruity thing can’t drive my GTX 780, nor will it ever natively run the games that dominate my desktop’s reason for existence.

Last time that I researched options for the longer term: it pretty much boiled down to two issues. The older Core i7 models that fit my motherboard aren’t easy to come by for a good price unless they’re second hand. Versus new: may as well buy a modern Core i5, but then it is in for a penny, in for a pound of ram. Needless to say, I don’t invision Centauri’s next significant hardware refit to be for quite a while.

Given how well Centauri has aged, and the odds that its GTX will need to retire by the time Centauri does, I rather wonder if whatever comes next in hardware will just be a laptop with a Thunderbolt eGPU dock or whatever nVidia equipped laptops look like by then. For now, I’m just happy the machine hasn’t died in a puff of smoke despite all the years of hard work, hehe. It remains one of the best computers that I’ve ever owned.

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First world problems: temptations.

Part one of the first season of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime is available for a really good price, right now. Which is to say about 50% off the original pricing, or about what it should actually cost, lol. And that puts it in the same price range of season two of Is This a Zombie?, one of my favourite series.

Both will eventually join my Blu-ray collection if I have anything to say about the next ten years, and the latter is one of the leading ideas of what Christmas time is going to look like.

Thus the trade off problem: that the latter will continue to be available at the usual price versus the former won’t float up to “Ugh, that sucks” pricing, before I finally can pull the trigger. And this is part of why budgets are depressing things o/. Actually, thinking about the definition of ugh pricing jacks makes me remember: better off getting one of my favourite series off eBay. Because through “Regular” channels like Amazon has too many digits to it, and as years go by even the original publisher isn’t a good source. SMH.

On a positive side, my very strong aversion to dust collectors and nick knacks means decorating my home didn’t involve a decade of debt, so much as stuff that’s been in my family since before I was born, lol. This does of course, not prevent me from having to dust stuff once in a while. Yeah, let’s not think about that.

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Things that I consider potential risks, now that I again have a tablet capable of HDMI output:

  • Monitor, and Xbox controller = gaming
  • Monitor, keyboard, and mouse = relaxing.
Typically, my Tab S3 and its predecessors had a high probability of being my device of choice even when sitting at my desk. The main thing that gets me to power on Centauri and use it, is the laziness wires to plug in if I want to share the monitor.
Sadly, Scarlett’s one real failing versus Goldie was the loss of external monitor support. Samsung’s first iteration of USB-C, while welcomed, did not come with DP or MHL alt modes. Which is how Celes, the Chromebook entered the collection of devices I deal with.
Nerine the iPad on the other hand, has external monitor support via DP alt mode, and my USB hub quite the few ports. The risk that I’ll eventually buy yet another Bluetooth mouse, also seems to be incrementing.
What shows no real sign of changing however, is how much I dislike the Mac editing shortcuts. Having had PCs for nearly thirty years, the way you combine arrow keys with modifier keys, while cursing the lack of vi and emacs editing strokes in joe random UI widget, is kind of deeply ingrained by now. Macs, of course do it differently. When you start dicking with the order of modifiers, and which do what, my muscle memory requires a “Are ya really sure?” level of buffering. It will probably be quite a while before that can be eliminted.
On the upside however, I still type at a decently high speed provided that I’m not editing what I insert. Being able to type as fast as I can think, is not a problem. Having to correct for my inability to spell shit is the actual problem. Sigh, that one actually has no real solution. Unless maybe you can make my keyboard provide an electric shock for every genuinely misspelled word, lol. Wait, don’t do that…I’d die.
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Pretty consistently, I’ve never cared much for dragging windows around and stacking them across my desktop workspace. Anywhere, or anytime.

When we made the transition from a ROM/floppy system to a modern hard drive and window based system, monitors in my family were universally too small to care, not to mention Windows 98 wasn’t exactly a sexy multitasking anything at that point.

The thing that’s basically stuck with me is how I tend to favor a central application of focus, and rapid switching to another; like having an xterm and API docs side by side. It’s only been the era of the 20-something inch screen that I’ve really found much use for having my workspace split into two or more applications. It’s kinda rare that I do a one window split with two, or a quartet approach even on a big screen.

Once we get down to much less than 20” diagonal, the value largely disappears from many desktop apps. Rather you end up with something more like 1.5 apps or 1.2 apps on a laptop sized screen. Which usually results in me just maximizing what I’m doing, and using alt+tab to switch actives.

It’s probably little wonder that I prefer the style of window management found on Android tablets and iPads to drawing and stacking crap. Or that when I ask my PCs to do much more than provide a convieniet Xfce session, you’ll usually find me running something like Xmonad—that manages application windows for me.

Because I’ve got better damned things to do with my computers than dragging windows around all day.

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25 Old-World Italian Cookie Recipes Your Grandmother Made

I’ve probably had too many of these, at one point or another in my life. Also a nice find off Flipboard, because some of my mother’s baking recipes were lost or trashed during my last move. Among them the Italian sparkle cookies.

Maybe a decade ago, ma came across the recipe in a magazine or a website and it became yearly tradition to make a batch for the holidays. It was as close to a cookie one of the old Italian relatives used to make when she was younger, as she could find; I think it was one of my grandmother’s sisters that made them.

The difference is, our relative made them as huge cookies. My mother, made as many freaking dozen cookies as she could™. I think the recipe called for something like 6 dozen cookies, and she usually made a couple dozen more, demanding so when six eggs were involved in the process. We usually had plenty for Christmas,plenty to give others, and a few frozen to help tide us over until next holiday season.

While I stand by my grumbling about having to make so many extra cookies, it was fun helping my mother bake the sparkle cookies 👍. I’ve often thought, that I might take a shot at it if I ever found a similar recipe, someday.

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Safari in iOS 13 was sending browsing data to Chinese tech giant Tencent
http://flip.it/_rQW_A

I find it a little amusing in a way. Having had internet access since about 1996, I’ve long since gave up on considering my browsing habits to be private—it’s my browsing contents that I want kept private.

Between how browsers work and how much control we yield to the other end of a socket, I think it fool hearty to assume you can remain private about the basics. If you have ever visited a web site in recent times, it’s a fairly safe bet that someone, somewhere can collate a unique identifier for you across several websites. Yielding things like your IP and resources (you know, the /blah/blah part of urls you visit) are integral to how user agents (browsers) and servers work. Cookies have been a fact of browsing virtually forever. You don’t have enough control over how any of this shit works, to be able to enforce strict privacy from being tracked.

Anonymity is the difference between sending the Gestapo to 742 Evergreen Terrace and f24088cc-4914-43ab-9810-07cdc069ebac visited five websites about donuts, and then logged into Yahoo mail; let’s ask Yahoo about them.

What we do however have some control over is the secrecy of our session content. Transport Layer Security, ala HTTPS, provides for some measure of privacy where it matters in our browsing. Nothing is going to stop donuts dot com from using an obvious /glazed resource for finding out about glazed donuts, but telling that you typed “HJS” into the search box and it popped up a super secret bulk ordering form, and your transaction details, is a different story. The security measures make it harder for someone to be dropping eaves if the other side is trustworthy; not being tracked is just hopeless at this point.

I have more hope in solutions that are technical and procedural in nature. Because if you can’t trust donuts dot com with where to bill and ship donuts then you probably shouldn’t be ordering donuts from them. If donuts dot com isn’t allowed to do business in your country without being obligated to offer up your payment data to the request of law enforcement, or pushing it to government donut databases, that’s a social problem and therefore political.

For better or worse there’s only so much that can be done on a technical front without changes to how the World Wide Web functions, and that shit just isn’t going to change for the sake of personal privacy.

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Random factoid, but I find it surprisingly easy to read an analog clock.

I remember learning how the analog clock face works somewhere around kindergarten or so. But the caveat was my brother couldn’t read analog, and even as a child I had a measure of love for precision.  When you consider my brother is a decade my senior that might be a little sad. But that’s how it was.

Growing up at a point in time where the heights of coolness was probably a Casio Databank and alarm clocks that could wake you up with radio, that situation pretty much ensured that digital clocks dominated in my family because they were idiot proof. Also who didn’t want a portable calculator back then? 🤪

Thus most of my need for dealing with clock faces has been in giving directions, whenever my head’s translation table between port/starboard -> left/right isn’t sufficient. Despite how dusty the part of my brain where this is recorded must be, it’s still a functioning piece of grey matter.

I’d also like to think by now, my older brother can read an analog clock worth a fart…. since it was about twenty five years ago that I learned how.

What’s wrong with me versus what’s wrong with me

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What’s wrong with me versus what’s wrong with me:

It’s not moving my grandmother’s commercial sewing machine and squeezing it into a tiny storage room on my patio that bothers me. Fair enough if that shouldn’t be stored on my patio.

It’s finding a garbage bag full of Disney VHS tapes, that the machine kept snagging on, that really bothers me. Because why the fuck do I still have that!?

Between my mother’s passing and the last time I moved, things were pretty much sorted into four groups: thrash, keep, brother’s attic, and defer. I’m pretty sure it’s time some defers become trashed. On the flip side, I’m pretty sure that I found a cache of DVDs that I know I have but haven’t been able to find since I moved in, lol.

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When the local definition of the weather is “Hot as hell”, and the feeling of baking in the sun’s rays both feel good and off home, I can’t help but blame it on growing up in Florida.

Coming from a place like southern Florida kinda leaves you with a permanently damaged sense of temperature, lol

The downside to talking about books

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Ahh, nuts. The downside to talking about books is when you find yourself torn about what to read.

I don’t really re-read books very often. My long term memory tends to be better than most, despite my short term memory being more like reading a password, swivelling my chair, and having already forgotten it, lol. The things that stick in my memory tend to stick very long in my memory. When I re-read a book it tends to be because I’m starting to find specific details harder to remember.

Two good ideas for re-reading come to mind. Well, technically three but that’s a horse of a different color.

One is Speaker for the Dead and Ender’s Game. I first came across Ender’s game about a decade ago, and rather enjoyed that how it portrayed its children’s way of problem solving reflected my own childhood and peers. What really stuck with me about Ender’s childhood though was the side story of his siblings. The books were written at a point where for most people, the concept of usenet and BBS’s would have been foreign. Yet their activities as Locke and Demosthenes fortel of a world like my own where things like Facebook, blogs, and comments on news sites had become part of our real life. Plus there’s the fact that the ending screw, was pretty spectacular; Ender’s fate is far from returning home to a ticker tape parade.

The real draw for me however was Speaker. It’s dialog heavy with its drama and mystery as we’re integrated into Novinha’s family and the community on Lusitania. How Ender has coped with being forced into genocide and the excellent characters, rather than cardboard we’re presented with are a pleasure. But what’s really stuck with me is the piggies truly are an alien species different from our own, one which makes a strong contrast along side the Buggers and humanity. While most critters populating science fiction are enough like us, the Pequenios are very much “Xeno“– aliens, strangers. And I really liked that. The series’ concept of utlaenning, fraemling, ramen, and varelse is particularly fitting to that tale, pretty much: those close to us, those familiar to us, and what the heck are you?

Second on my temptation is S.A. Hunt’s The Outlaw King trilogy. Can’t recall if I first came across it by the recommendation of folks on Google Plus, or through a Humble book bundle I bought. But I remember it as good stuff. The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree helped splice me into it: interesting characters, a nice setting (I like watching westerns), and a fantasy world that makes you wonder how it came into being. I think by the time I finished Law of the Wolf, my response to Ten Thousand Devils was “Shuddup and take my money!”. I had come expecting pulp fiction and found enough depth that it left me wishing for more.

Third is Dune, but I know rather than revisit that old friend, I should pick up where I left off at in Messiah some years back. I think I’ve read Dune at least twice in the past twenty years, maybe even three times. It remains one of my favourite books. Also among the few that I have both a physical copy and an electronic copy.

For a long time, Dune was a curious film. One night when I was a kid, I watched maybe half of it with my mother. It’s probably a poor selection for a late night movie when you consider the cut was about three hours long, and you probably need to watch the film twice to understand it. But I enjoyed it.

Quite a few years later, my mother lent me her copy of the book, and when I saw how many appendices full of information about the world there were: I knew that I was going to enjoy the book. And then I realized the film cut out at least half of the content, in fact you’re probably getting just the most vital ~30% of it when you watch the ’84 film. That’s when I came to understand what the word abridgement meant.