stuff

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.

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 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.

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.

I forget exactly how I came to learn of this site and I was inspired. eWaste is a growing concern and the current AI fuckery is driving up the cost of components. Arguably, we need more servers/services and are throwing out older generation tech because it's too slow or won't run the latest and greatest operating system, apps, or games. Worse yet, some people throw out old tech because it's no longer "useful". I see a lot of waste in perfectly servicable equipment in corners of office spaces doing nothing at all. What if we borrowed from this venture and put not only older laptops, but other devices like old Android TV boxes (as long as they have wired ethernet) to use as personal web servers, mail servers or other small low-resource services.

The only set backs I see is electricity costs and "waste" heat, as a bunch of older equipment might draw more power than a single better equipped server. Still, we can solar power these low draw devices, or hack a standard power supply to power a few laptops and use the generated heat to warm places with the right ducting. It may not be as efficient, but it will keep "perfectly usable" equipment out of landfills. Perhaps non-working hardware can be donated to hacker spaces so that the individual components can be used to manufacture something else. Or maybe… a small business harvesting connectors and components can be built that can help other pieces of equipment from going to disuse.

I stumbled across a blog article a while ago that I wanted to share with my work about Fuck Off Contact pages. While I liked the low-res look and feel of the post, I did not realize that the entire site is amazing.

It's got that retro charm for people who grew up with ANSI terminals and low-res web experiences, (think 16 colour 640x480 pixels on a CRT). I saved up for a card that was capable of 256 colours to get a better web experience. ANYWAY, the site loads fast, looks great and really shows what you can do with a little know how. I'd love to emulate that for my personal site. I'm still learning though and have a focus/time issue that I'm still working through.

This is the web I want to get back to and I'm not the only one. I'll have some other links to share about that soon, I want to finish reading them myself first.

I saw this image before. The one associated with this post. My inner-child squealed, I was nostalgic for the tech of the time. I wanted to run a BBS back in the 90's, I could only dream to have one with this many nodes. Another thought that I had was about a modern version might be 4-5 lines each per single pentium-powered node with a POSIX multitasking OS or a modern eWaste PC running a Telnet powered BBS. With Discord doing it's fuckery, I have the thought I'd archive and discontinue "my" server and put up a IRC server. I wonder how hard it would be to convert my groups to follow suit. Somethign to consider.

There's a Youtube video that discusses the purpose of this website here. Well, not really as I started this last year and only watched the video today. Actually,

Here's the embed:

Turns out there's a geocities clone called neocities. This is great, fantastic even. I would rather go here than Reddit, (though I really digg that digg.com is back! Seriously, check this shit out. Make a website, get off the platforms! Reach out to me and I'll help you get set up. I love this kind of technology and this is what started my love of networking. All the cool things.

Once again, I regret not saving previous versions of my websites. I would love to have that little time capsule. I didn't see my GeoCities account on archive.org and I'm not entirely sure of the address anyway.

This video also informed me of a neat project, a web server powered by solar energy that seems right up my alley. It's tech, sustainable, and DIY all in one site.

This is a cool website. Do you recall seeing the 1995 classic movie Hackers? This website mimics the UI that our hackers used to hack the Gibson.

All kinds of awesome.