Trevor

I learned–perhaps finally understood–how apache and let's encrypt work. I had a long-standing issue with certificate renewals and I hope that the auto-renewals will work now that I have solved how apache works on my server.

Turns out that when you hack shit together, it tends to be… hacky. I hope that my knowledge will continue to grow and the lessons (re)learned today will be easily recalled if I find myself with a broken install for my various websites on my server here.

I have links to share and I need to make time to share them with you, whoever you are. I hope that they are at the very least insightful.

Everyone who's worked in support can relate to the headline alone on this article. I've also seen this a lot on the other side of support, with the service provider blaming the hardware and the hardware support blaming the service provider. And if it's the same organization, it's the same thing, only with different departments.

There's a meteor shower tonight and although this article is a bit old, it's always going to be relevant. Light pollution is a big detriment to nature and ourselves. I love electric lights, do they all need to be on all the time though?

I've had conversations before about liking the art and disliking the artist and most of the time I am quite capable of separating the two. This article specifically relates to the author of “Master and Commander”. I wonder if every famous person is (not so) secretly a terrible person and if this is a by-product of our obsession with fame.

And finally this post from the Oatmeal is epic. If you read nothing else, read this last one.

This is a quick post to let you know that I'm still here. I have a lot of links to share and I need to share them to get them out of my backlog. Expect a bit of a dump in the coming days.

In the article we learn that plants can sense the vibrations of falling rain and awaken to germinate.

This is awesome. The experiment placed several yields of rice seeds in 3cm of water and exposed some of the yields to simulated rain. With measuring equipment they discovered that the vibrations caused by the falling water could be detectable by human ears as the sound of rain.

I'm constantly amazed by nature and am working to incorporate this finding into my seedling station to see if I can get better yield with some sort of automated watering system that mimics rainfall.

Some people in a city were tired of the pot holes not being filled by the city administration. Every city has them, and every city administration seems to delay in repairing them if ever.

I have the thought that if they built the roads better the first time, pot holes would not be an issue. Though that's likely to put the road crew out of work after a few years and that's a sticky proposition.

Back to the story, they decided to paint the pot holes with spray paint and other people took notice. Social Media posts were made and more attention surrounded it. City Administration had to take action and repair the road. They took action because they could. They wanted to highlight that even if you're feeling small and insignificant you can do something to make a real difference in the world. Read the article, you'll find a nice surprise.

I have to restore entries from a backup that is not entirely reliable in the date/time that the entries were posted. The good news is that I have a backup.

I have posts in the pipeline, I need to make time to polish and publish them. Stay tuned to this channel.

It's been two months since my last update. I've been busy. I guess. Or lazy. Hard to say.

I do know that I'm struglling again with motivation. I don't seem to be able to move like I used to. I'm a bit stuck behind the screen. I tend to lose myself in Youtube (mostly Shorts) or doomscrolling Reddit. I am aware of these habits and I have a bit more power to disengage with them and for this I am grateful. Else I'll lose myself.

My best friend told me recently he's lost desire to do anything but watch Youtube. I hear him loud and clear. I've been able to remove myself from social media¹, but I haven't been able to kick the Reddit habit. There's a lot of utility in Reddit and Youtube, and they are designed to keep you on that site. Much like AI chat is designed to keep you engaged and on that site. Our shorter attention spans are klilling us slowly and we don;t even notice it.

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1. I recognize that Reddit is often referred to as social media, though I don't agree with that, it's more of an unstructured message board. Now that I wrote that, social media is a collection of unstructured message boards… fuck.

I had an inkling that this might be the case. I often think about how much we were able to do with limitations in thechnology. We don't (usually) program write software in machine code anymore and I wonder how much faster apps would be if we did. Of course there are drawbacks. Hardware architecture changes very fast and coding in high level languages affords us portability with our code, much like what the language Java promised us in the 90's.

It turns out that if you let it, some sites will download over 512MB of content due to how the advertising platform works. The site in question seems to think that using RSS will resolve this issue (it will) instead of fixing the web page to be more efficient (which the author of the original article pointed out). I first saw this post on Shubham Bose's website via HackerNews that depicts the 49MB website. The comments on HackerNews are good insight and Shubham points out that Windows 95 consumed less space than the post from NYT. As with the post about PC Gamer, NYT's page bloat is mostly due to ads. I hate ads and will block ad networks on my personal network. Browsing the web on another network is a real treat. I have maintained to myself when I see a pop-up asking me to disable my ad blocker taht I would not use one, if I could trust as servers. In the not too recent past I came to distrust second party ad platforms because Doubleclick was hijacked and malware was installed via banner ads. Lovely. Since then I've been wary.

There is discussion about ad blocking equating piracy and there is real merit to that argument. For my part, I usually do what I do when I'm hit with a paywall, I bounce from the site. I have a hope that some data nerd somewhere sees that I left as soon as I was asked to disable my ad blocker and brings that to someone who can make a decision about how ads are being served. I recognize that not all publishers can afford to have a department that manages their ad content and the tech skills required to keep that functional. I understand that decentralization is easier to work with, letting a dedicated external team handle the ads. That's another post for another time though. I pine for an Internet that feels more personal and less driven by capitalism.

Here is an article posted on the Seeker. I beleive that there are three camps regarding AI and AI Use.

1. The first is that AI is cool and the greatest thing ever. I find that these people have the talent to create on their own, but for some reason find this better.
2. The second is that AI is terrible and should be called out as such on sight. I find that these people cannot see any benefits to using AI and that it's terrible for everything. People, the planet, resources, etc.
3. The third group has really bad FOMO. They love, hate, or are indifferent to AI but are so afraid if being left behind (posisbly again) that they latch on to the technology.

I see a need to be familair and loathe to use it. I see the merits for AI and I also see that people shut off their brain when they use it. I am requently reminded some variation of this image back in the 90's:

Shamelessly stolen from here

And as I type this out, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht on the latest Diggnation video podcast are espousing Apple for not jumping on the AI bandwagon early enough (rather, at all). :(

Kottke gets linked here again because of this wonderful site. Go read the article, I'll wait.

What I had not previously considered is that the mega corporations can build in a lack of competetion by buying all the competetion. The Buy it for Life crowd loves these old brands with good reason. I expect that the trick will be to find any of these items before 2000. The best place might be thrift stores. I have my backpack made by the shoe company Simple that I'm sure is at least from 1996. It needed repair, and I fixed it punk rock style. It gets regular use and is the first bag I grab when my satchel does not have enough capacity.

I'll poke around and see if I can find a how to find vintage gear site. I'll update this post if I do.