Category: Link Dump Page 1 of 2

This Post Is a Meta Post About the Post I’m Too Tired To Work On Which Is a Post About Being Burned Out

On August 22, 2022

In Apple, Link Dump, This Sucks, Vegan, Work Horrible Work

I started writing this overly wordy post about how burned out I’ve been feeling lately. This is not news to anyone since I’d wager most people who didn’t have their work lives wildly disrupted during the pandemic are equally fried and as ready for the scrap heap as I am.

I had a few free hours this weekend and tried to just concentrate on writing that smaller thing that seemed less intense than the much, much longer thing I’m also puttering away on. I was completely wrong about that. The end result was an intense wave of brain fog and fatigue that knocked me entirely out of commission at 10 PM on a Friday night. This is not at all normal for me.

After I concluded that absolutely nothing worth sharing with any one was going to be accomplished that night, I just poked around on the interwebz for a length of time likely equalivalent to what I’d spend writing something that wasn’t a link dump with a lengthy explanation.

As a side note, I’m giving Ulysses a trial run as an editor for things longer than 1000 words. I have not yet decided whether it is for me yet but it does give me some separation from a web browser which is a nice break if nothing else. I recently acquired one of the M1 Pro Max (it just flows off the tongue like a song) MacBook Pro’s and decided that I should stop doing everything in the damned browser if I was going have a machine that substantial. I still have very mixed feelings about Apple but this generation of machines is pretty damned good at least until the new version of the OS comes out and makes me regret my earlier words. The weird part is that I actually enjoy this keyboard which is significant because I often go to ridiculous lengths to avoid ever typing on the keyboards built into laptops. So, yeah, real tools like a goddamned grown up. Totally weird, right?

Unfortunately, this wasn’t prompted entirely by a fervent need to complicate my workflow. Draft is performing strangely for me over the past few weeks and the ‘Oh boy’ moment was watching my cursor, unmanned by me, mow backwards over something I’d just finished up and losing 650 words or so. Nope, haven’t reported as a bug or anything yet but until I have some free time that actually feels free I’m going to stick to editors that save text locally. There are too many unstable layers to that stack although I’m guessing Chrome is the guilty party. I’ll come back to that extraordinarily handy tool when I’m less terrified of it potentially eating a bunch of words while I watch in horror.

Things I saw recently:

This hardware-centric examination of a 1996 photo of animators working on Final Fantasy 7 is one of the those things that I started reading out of general interest in all things FFVII but ended up being far most interesting. The idea that an SGI machine had the capacity for 8 GB of RAM in the 1990s when hard drives were generally measured in megabytes is mind blowing. SGI and IRIX were always fascinating to me but, mostly because I work with excruciatingly boring commodity hardware even on the server side of the house, I’ve never had to opportunity to do much with that family of machines other than stare slack jawed at it. I made the mistake of looking at ‘vintage’ SGI hardware (specifically the Onyx line mentioned in the article) and I am now reassured with complete certainty that I will never own any piece of hardware from Silicon Graphics.

Holy shit! A Next Level Burger opened in Denver! I will soon venture out on another leg of my ultimate quest to become the most overweight and unhealthy vegan ever. I’m not happy about the potential impact this will have on our local heroes Meta Burger but I suppose this was somewhat inevitable.

I would have never guessed that DMCA takedowns were an escalating issue on Reddit. Maybe it’s because my use is largely limited to geeky/work/funny areas. If you follow the link, the actual number is startling.

Unsurprisingly, dictionaries are too risky for Florida schools now. I wish I had adequate words to describe the sounds that came out of my mouth when I originally read this. It’s also saddening that I now have a Google Alert set up for book banning in the United States. That’s really where we are folks. Maybe the uncertified veterans being welcomed into classrooms as teachers will just start shooting books deemed offensive?

What To Expect When You’re Expecting Nothing

By goneaway

On August 18, 2022

In Link Dump, Linux, Work Horrible Work

So, yup, it most definitely has been a year or slightly more since I’ve paid much attention to this place. Typically the near daily notifications that some plugins were updated are the only real reminder that this site, or more properly domain, has been spitting on the floor and making the Midwestern tourists uncomfortable for coming up on 20 years. That is terrifying and I almost wish that I’d kept copies of the earlier versions of this site so I could be sure when it first lurched into motion. The earliest versions were Movable Type and before that some random and awful Perl I cooked up.

That was a completely different time for weblogs. This was the “before times” when readers of web pages hadn’t yet had all of the attention span beaten out of them and slideshows would have been novel but not the content that truly drove eyeballs. I was never immune to any of this so I dropped off posting here in much the same way that most of the people who read this site regularly back then would have stopped reading what I posted. It does not really matter but the habit of writing something about the things rattling around in my brain also hit the ejector seat button during that time. Social media has never held much attraction so I basically exiled myself from the web for a very long time other than work related stuff. In retrospect, it would be better to remain offline since most of what I loved is long dead and over. Pardon me while I take brief respite in yelling at a cloud.

Possibly more interesting things:

1. For reasons that I cannot pinpoint, I’ve started using Notion for work. This is not usage mandated by my employer since the hated Monday.com is their tool of choice. I started looking at applications that let me create to do lists without requiring me to learn some TLA Esperanto and keep a list of the shit that I actually did on a day to day basis. The most common question that my managers ask me is what the hell do I do all day. This is a fair question since my work style involves bouncing from thing to thing all damned day and sometimes ignoring major project work to grab some of the low hanging serotonin yielding fruit of quick piece work to feel like I’m actually getting things other than reading terrible documentation and smashing my face into the keyboard done. I ignore most of the features of Notion other than these two (and have banished the Gratitudes from the diary section like the lingual STD that they are) and have cruised along with a free account for the past month or so. If I had to use all of the features, I would absolutely hate this software but being able to pick and choose the useful parts while pretending the parts I don’t need/find noxious don’t exist is pretty damned useful. I’m also a big fan of being able to flip between the desktop client on my work computer and the web interface on my own machines if I suddenly remember something when I’m goofing off after work. It’s awfully handy to copy and paste the contents of the day in question directly into Slack when the inevitable request for details comes in. I like that it doesn’t seem like work to use it and that I’m able to avoid becoming one of those workflow obsessed goobers whose accounts of building tiny and lifeless worlds in Notion. Reading accounts by these insane people actually made me avoid considering this tool for a long while.

2. In the spirit of bringing back the culture of BOFH workplace vengeance, I’m composing a list of things that will cause one of your account passwords to suddenly expire and possibly require a very long and very complex password for its reset. The gold standard for this is always the Excel format spreadsheet required for some ridiculous thing or another and, in the process, wasting a bunch of irreplaceable minutes futzing around in an application that I have absolutely no use for. In the interest of equitable exchange, you will waste your time changing passwords and possibly repeat on a bi-weekly basis if you are particularly insistent. I haven’t yet formulated proper punishments for being pushy about fantasy sports via work communication channels but that is most definitely a work in active and malicious progress.

3. If you’re a linux person and, for this particular link an Arch user, then it might be time to consider something other than the default kernel. Those default kernel builds are great for making sure that almost any machine can boot but they tend to be more than a little flabby. Here’s a guide on switching kernels on Arch. At this point, I have a hard time using a desktop linux system that isn’t using the Zen/Liquorix kernel. I get disappointed when I have an extremely powerful processor and the desktop feels about as responsive as it did when I was running a PIII 233 desktop with a spinning disk.

4. The mayor of Venice does not fuck around with tourists being idiots. This made me happy.

The Lane You Inevitably Find Yourself In

By goneaway

On January 23, 2021

In Art Art Cut A Fart, Baseball, Life During The Plague Years, Link Dump, Microsoft

Now that we have someone relatively sane occupying the White House and along with that change comes the hope that we’ll eventually get the Covid-19 (and all of its new and super fun mutant variations) under control, I’m going to try to gravitate towards more sane things myself. The way for me to get there, at least in the short term, is to read about things that aren’t political. That said, Wonkette lives forever in my perpetually open tabs. I just need a breather.

1. This article about Russian Avant-Garde painters that may or not have even existed is one of the more fascinating things I’ve read this week. The idea of creating fictional painters to sell the style of work popular with American collectors is one that makes me want to do more digging since the commerce of art isn’t something I often think about. I do love the whiff of simulacra exuding from the complicated mess.

2. Heartbreakingly especially given how many Hall of Famers have passed recently, Hank Aaron has passed away. Aaron was legendary on so many levels and is yet another crushing loss to delineate this span of time from any kind of feeling of normalcy or continuity.

3. Microsoft were just granted a patent for some creepy dead people AI chatbot idea that I’m not quite ready for. Did no one see Devs? Jesus.

4. AZ man (trying to compete with Florida?) pulls a gun on a customer for wearing a mask which just about epitomizes the state of things in the US right now. Take off your protective wear and risk your life for my bullshit politics or I will shoot you.

I Need A Day Off To Properly Recover from 4 Days Off

By goneaway

On November 30, 2020

In Apple, Cool As Fuck, I Wish I Didn't Know About This, Link Dump, Robot System For Robots

I logged very little time at a keyboard this weekend, hell this past week excepting work, and spent most of the time off either driving around on errands or figuring out the logistics of getting to some place on some day by a certain time. I feel like I spend a lot of my life trying to stack tasks up to get small pockets of time to do things I like. Ultimately this is nearly always a losing strategy since I end up too exhausted to really use those time slots fruitfully. Thus, some links:

1. I am not a scientist but I do enjoy reading about bug sex on the internet when long and interesting stories about the aforementioned topic become available. I can especially and completely away from the topic of the article relate to the author’s compound dread and fascination with spiders. I don’t like them either when we come face to face while they descend on a web but I am fascinated by them.

2. text.fish is an invaluable bit of web hackery that allows you to bypass the javascript hackery that hides new stories behind an overlay about how expensive it is to publish words on the internet after you’ve published them on dead trees already. I may start actually linking to stories published by a certain monochrome lady again if this continues to work since the text is the only thing I’m really interested in. Good stuff that I hope isn’t immediately detected and blocked by more disgusting JS.

3. I was going to link yet another article about Parler and the weird-ass continuing outcry about election fraud from the fringiest crazy people and then I realized I may have already posted something about that story or maybe it was quoting large chunks of something I’d already read a week ago. Call it exhaustion or a hangover of sorts from the first couple of weeks of post-election misdirection and chaos mongering by the right but I’m about out of interest and/or enthusiasm for anything related to crazy people and the 2020 election.

4. Growl is ceasing development which is kind of a bummer because it was a great case of how to deal with Apple not being equipped to handle a necessary interface element and devs stepping in to handle the shortcoming. As seems always is the case with Apple, they took some of their good ideas, pasted some shit and failure on top, and made it just barely good enough for interest to decline in something better.

Some Stuffs From the Webs

By goneaway

On November 13, 2020

In Life During The Plague Years, Link Dump, Oh God, Politics

Still getting acclimated to the ebb and flow of my new gig and mostly working through lunches at the moment so time hasn’t been on my side for wasting scads of time doom scrolling lately. Here’s what ended up on Pinboard:

1. The Donald J Trump Presidential Library site is brilliantly done. I’d seen mention of it in a few places but (incorrectly) assumed that it would be disappointing. It is not. Maybe I’ve just grown so tired of seeing that man’s name in print and the expected bluster, xenophobia, and obsession with how he is seen by the world that I just tuned it out earlier. It is worth a visit if only because it’s better designed than most non-parodies associated with real libraries and museums. Top notch stuff all the way around folks!:

History has judged the former President to be criminally negligent in the death of thousands of American citizens, morally bankrupt in treatment of immigrants, and vastly amoral in race relations in empowering white nationalism.

With our Criminal Records Room, you can do the research on how YOU would prosecute Trump’s crimes against humanity!

2. In an unfortunately similar vein is My Little Crony. It visualizes all of gross business connections between Tory politicians and various companies getting government contracts during the pandemic. It’s ~~good~~ ~~comforting~~ less humiliating as an American to know that we’re not alone in our beleaguerment by the corruption of our elected officials. Not that this was ever necessarily a question or anything.

3. I’m glad that Google is doing something with the still fresh leftovers from its failed forays into VR that doesn’t involve them slowly bit-rotting in an unmaintained state while a group of adherents try to keep the content afloat. We could all use a walk somewhere far away right now. The only issue is that you can’t walk there and stay permanently. That sounds nice right about now.

4. I also learned today that following a half bag of Zapp’s Voodoo chips with an unintentional gulp of coffee is a grave error that can only be undone with vigorous toothbrushing and an optional minty mouthwash chaser. It’s the umami version of the ol’ toothpaste and orange juice disaster and I would not wish it on anyone else.

5. This article over at Slate gives me much more hope after the sheer number of editorials I’ve read over the past few weeks that have basically said that Biden’s appointments are going to nearly impossible to get past the Senate. I strongly believe that Mitch McConnell should be sealed into a capsule and fired at high velocity to the Moon since he doesn’t seem interested in doing much for either his state or the country. Any public servant that single-mindedly focused on gaining and consolidating political power needs to be retired in the interplanetary sense. Poof! Goodbye! Don’t worry about samples! No one wants you to come back.

So Much Shazbot

By goneaway

On October 31, 2020

In Apple, Cool As Fuck, Life During The Plague Years, Link Dump, The Dollar Dances On Our Asses, Work Horrible Work

I’m trying to stick with my pledge to not make excuses for my absences because why would I? This typically means, and will in this case, a link dump but I should also mention some of the things going on away from the keyboard since that’s where my focus is most of the time lately.

I’m starting a new job in just over a week. I managed to scrape up a week off between the two which fills me with joy and dread simultaneously. Colorado is back up to Safer At Home Level 3 which means there won’t be a whole lot of anything going on in the city and my house has rapidly degenerated into a state approximate to a 1990s punk house while my wife has been in the hospital over the past three weeks. That’s one of the weirdest parts about being largely confined to home; you’re stuck in the middle of it, realize in full what a godawful mess it is becoming, and cannot summon any enthusiasm for doing anything about it. That’s where I am right now.

Speaking of hospitals and my wife, her projected release date coincides with my first day at the new job. It’s hard to say in just words how relieved I am that she’s getting ready to come home after the sheer number of ‘so scared that I spend the day trying to not break down’ scares that we’ve had over the past couple weeks. I have no clear idea yet what the fiscal impact is going to be but I’m fairly certain that a 3 week hospital stay will not be inexpensive even with relatively good, for a stagnant startup, insurance coverage. I’m trying not to even think about that now but it looms eternally in the background along with all of the other worries that come with ~~stupid~~ adult life.

Here are some sights I saw:

1. You may or may not care about skate shoes. I happen to care a bunch but mainly because I’m always trying to find vegan skate shoes that don’t look like a hacky sack wrapped around my foot. The Savier story is pretty goddamned interesting. I read this story during lunch and ended up falling down an incredible rabbit hole chasing down a bunch of shoes and people who make shoes mentioned in the story.

2. Although this examination of Apple’s newfound commitment to lessening e-waste versus what you’re actually going to buy which incidentally comes in even more packaging is factually correct it is also a frustrating read for me. I have a cheap/old iPhone from Sprint-Mobile that is about ready to go back to the mothership because I have actual use for it. I’m also replacing my OnePlus 7 Pro 5G with a Pixel 5. It’s shipped and should be here shortly. Uh oh! I’m switching phones with different charging standards!! I have several warp chargers for my soon-to-be-ex OnePlus. Will I throw these chargers away? No, because they’re still useful as chargers for other USB-C devices. They may not charge what I’ve plugged it into up to 80% in a scant few minutes but in the wide world of Covid-19 I’m not away from home or even my desk very often. I can wait the extra 20 minutes in most cases. The point here being that because all of my phones excepting my cheapo iPhone all use a standard charging cable that magically just works (that phrase seems oddly familiar – perhaps from another lifetime?) with most of the devices that need charging. I need to charge my Kindle? Easy, just unplug the USB-C cable and plug the microUSB cable into the brick. The multiple wireless charging stands that I used with my Pixel 3 XL — they still fucking work with the new phone two versions later.

3. I really enjoyed reading one man’s 35 year history with Amiga machines as constant in his life. The stories about his nascent experiences with computers and the warm nostalgia that surround those memories was really heartening for me.

4. I also enjoyed this criticism of the odd design decisions Zoom made when implementing end to end encryption because it was a easily digestible and entertaining explanation even to someone who is really not all that interested in the specifics of encryption. The furry stuff creeped me the fuck out but I guess nobody rides for free?

Today I Turned Off My Sprinklers and Opened These Tabs

By goneaway

On October 20, 2020

In Cool As Fuck, Link Dump, Microsoft, Oh God, Politics

Here are the things that drifted dreamily across my sleeping browser while I was working on something longer and more substantial to post here. Pinboard keeps all of that stuff from disappearing and is worth every penny that I pay for that service.

1. Gizmodo threw down a sarcasm laced guide on how to avoid showing your coworkers your junk on Zoom that is hilarious but should not need to exist. The catalyst was a reporter for the New Yorker jerking off during a Zoom call which even if you think your camera is off is the very worst idea that you’ve ever had. Vice has the more explicit version of this story and I really hope that ‘Zoom dick’ doesn’t become a term that we remember fondly from those dark days in 2020.

2. Not even Microsoft wants you to use the new Edge browser apparently because if you try to download it with a sane browser then you end up being redirected to the local copy on your computer that you’ve thus far never opened on purpose. I don’t have a Windows machine handy to test this out right now but I will later tonight just to take my trip on the hilarity-go-round along with everyone who is actually trying to download this ill conceived aberration. No browser that is remarkable only for being less terrible than the old version of Edge should be this difficult to obtain.

3. I would agree that the press that Trump sees so blatantly biased against him is actually giving him the idiot questions because he’s a hostile idiot and seemingly can’t handle a question necessitating an answer longer than a single sentence. I’m assuming he’s also wired as fuck on Adderall and his stem cell and steroid cocktail. Stimulants, fragile arrogance, and generally having the least experience dealing with the details of daily life of any president in history lays some great groundwork for his eventual Darwin award. Well, probably not unless he’s confronted by a particular scary ramp but I’m hoping the rubber/glue ratio reverses itself and he can be the lucky recipient of some of that ‘locking up’ he enjoys yelling about.

4. Chaos Ink is good hypnotic fun in your browser. I tinkered around with it for 15+ minutes which is more than I can see for most web things that serve a definite purpose these days.

Kicking Some Things Down The Road Because It’s Saturday

By goneaway

On October 18, 2020

In Apple, Link Dump, Linux, The Dollar Dances On Our Asses, This Sucks

Some quick things since my son is with me this weekend and there are some very important shows to watch and video games to be played:

1. Mozilla is completely fucked. No one, including the barely plural employees who remain, can decide what the fuck Firefox is actually about. I’ve been mostly absent from this concern but a bunch of folks who I respect have vocally advocated for FF for years. This is the proverbial chickens coming home to roost. Given the performance of the browser over the last half decade, this hasn’t been a question or issue for me for a very long time.

2. Hey! Guess what? Apple even hates its own hardware now. How long do you need to get everything completely wrong before smart people start jumping ship. Apple is lucky since they’ve been actively opposing your rights as a user for long enough that the Ouroboros manuever isn’t altogether surprising.

3. You can actually buy the Google Coral board now. Well, you can pre-order it.

4. An article about gaming on FreeBSD seems absurd enough for a weekend link dump. You can play games on FreeBSD but most of them are ancient. Linux is doing slightly better on this front in case you were wondering.

The Things That Made It Past The Collection Of Calamities I Call My Life

By goneaway

On October 14, 2020

In Apple, I Wish I Didn't Know About This, Life During The Plague Years, Link Dump, Oh God, Politics, Work Horrible Work

It’s been an inordinately busy week. I’ve been spending my days slogging through work, interviewing with another company (shhh), and visiting my wife in a cardio thoracic ICU nearly every night. My wife is recovering from two small strokes that she suffered either during or after surgery. The main effect is aphasia which means she struggles with verbally expressing thoughts. This is painful because my girl is a talker and is brilliant at relating something that happened in a story and I hate to watch her struggle. That said, the doctors have said that the recovery process from this can take a very long time and she’s improved dramatically from yesterday. It’s difficult but it doesn’t feel like the end of the world, just a change. I’m okay with things changing and generally uncomfortable with catastrophe. I know she is having a terrible time being stuck in her head and I need to be better about filling the silences. I have a feeling we’re both going to have to adapt on a level that neither of us is accustomed to. I’m just happy she’s awake right now.

These are some things I noticed today:

1. To begin with, most Apple hardware has an unpatchable vulnerability stemming from the T2 chip and the outlook is not looking great in terms of mitigating this issue. I’m sure there is some amount of karmic retribution here but I’ll settle for vague analogy about putting all of your eggs in a single basket. I’m typing this on a vulnerable machine in the spirit of living dangerously.

2. Tangentially related to Apple, this brilliant person adapted an iSight into an acceptably modern camera by packing the pretty shell with a Raspberry Pi and doing some 3D printing to piece it all together. The responsible mad scientist also created a GitHub repo for all of the necessary components in case you want to play along at home.

3. My son’s school was scheduled, rather optimistically, to resume in person learning next week. We just received notification from the district that they’re now pushing that date out until late November. I really and fervently hope that when our idiot in chief runs out of steroids and dies that we, as a country, start to take this a little more seriously and listening more carefully to scientists when they try to warn us about killing ourselves. I am completely in support of calling everything off until we have a safe and effective vaccine. I have enjoyed hearing about attempts Trump’s fundamentalist supporters have made to square up their fervent belief that their draft dodging, adulterous fuck boy is somehow the torch bearer of Christianity while having his morbidly obese life saved by a treatment utilizing stem cells. At some point does your brain just throttle itself and eventually turn off?

4. My ballot arrived in the mail today. I look at voting like an act of exorcism. I’ll fill it out tomorrow and drop that shit off. Make sure you do the same even if you disagree with my politics completely. You owe it to yourself and everyone else in the ragged remains of a country to participate in this so-called democracy.

Some Tabs That I Can Now Close Permanently

By goneaway

On October 12, 2020

In Cool As Fuck, Link Dump, The Dollar Dances On Our Asses

Some things I ran into while stumbling around the interwebs:

1. Uhmmm should be an mandatory installation for all companies who’ve decided to replace all of the pointless meetings we used to endure in person with virtual meetings where we’re expected to sit attentively while nothing really happens. I’ve been in a few working sessions that would have benefitted tremendously from being reminded that we didn’t need to be in a meeting in order to communicate during that work. A little elevator music to remind you that no one is saying anything or really paying attention to the meeting you’re stuck in? Sound fucking great.

2. TypeLit is a service that gives you practice typing while you literally (or should that be ‘literar-ily’) retype over classic novels. My typing speed wasn’t as quick as it might have otherwise been because I was reading the text while I was typing. For me, it’s most valuable as a hybrid experience that places actually reading the book somewhere in the mix.

3. Buy For Life is a great idea for cataloging products that are durable and not intended to use for a year or two and discard. The contents aren’t extensive yet but the inspiration behind this site are worthy of attention. I own a few of the things they feature but I think this is mostly because I tend to spend too much money on things and despise cheap crap for the most part. I’ll definitely check back here a few months from now to see what they’ve added. More useful things and less disposable garbage is something I can endorse.

4. If you play guitar, then check out Guitar Dashboard. I know nothing about music although I’ve played guitar for nearly thirty years and I picked up on some music theory concepts while fooling around with this tool.