2024-04-03 07:00
I mentioned not too far back that I'd finished migrating my wiki over to a new piece of software, but it was a little outside of what I'd been trying to accomplish in that post. It seemed a… Read More
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Antarctica Starts Here. Blog
drwho.virtadpt.net
Personal website of The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415]. He's into a little bit of everything.
2024-03-21 07:00
I'm still around and kicking, just taking it easy (or as easy as feasible right now). As I write this, we're well into March and I'm trying to be gentle with myself - not forcing writing if… Read More
2024-02-15 08:00
I find myself asking that question a lot these days.
Another question I've been asking myself a lot is, what the hell am I going to write in this post? I've tried a few things in the days l… Read More
2024-01-22 08:00
I guess I'm as back on my game as I'm likely to be for the forseeable future. I finished the run of paxlovid a couple of weeks back and things only recently stopped tasting like soap. I st… Read More
2024-01-04 08:00
As I write this, it's just shy of the end of 2023.ev. I'm now up and around and functional enough actually think about writing. Not because of any New Year's festivities, unfortunately.
If… Read More
2023-12-28 08:00
There is a conspiracy theory online called the Dead Internet Theory. So the story goes, some years ago people - actual, organic people sitting at keyboards or holding phones - stopped posti… Read More
2023-12-22 08:00
Welp, we're going on the end of 2023.ev, and... I'm tired. So fucking tired.
I've got some writing going on (and have for a few weeks) but it's not going as well as I had hoped. I've had t… Read More
2023-11-24 08:00
I don't have any good words right now. They're not eloquent or erudite. They're what has been running around in my head off and on for a few weeks. If you're expecting something that read… Read More
2023-10-23 07:00
It's been a while since the last time I wrote anything. It's been a bit longer than that since I routinely schedule blog posts days to weeks in advance. To put not too find a point on it… Read More
2023-09-11 07:00
A couple of weeks ago I found that I had to replace the wireless router upstairs because its radios were spiking to extemely high temperatures a couple of times a day. 1 When anything spike… Read More
2023-09-01 07:00
This is one of those really difficult posts to write. Not just because I've got a lot of stuff going on (when do I ever not, you're probably asking yourself) but because of the sheer volume… Read More
2023-08-16 07:00
From time to time lately I've been thinking about what Cory Doctorow called the enshittification of just about everything and peoples' reactions to it. Sometimes there are less shitty alter… Read More
2023-08-03 07:00
Some weeks ago when I was trying to get the bot that runs my weather station stable, I ran yet again into a problem that for various reasons I hadn't put forth the brainpower to come up with… Read More
2023-07-13 07:00
In an attempt to get myself writing again I'm doing a couple of low-effort posts, like this update to my .plan file. All of the usual warnings apply, so use discretion Read More
2023-07-05 07:00
Avocado toast (n): a cheap luxury, especially one which is perceived as being very expensive but is actually trivial; can also refer to the trivial cost thereof.
"Oh, hey, when can I drop of… Read More
2023-06-14 07:00
"Don't follow me, I don't know where I'm going either."
--Unknown
Since I got my last big project finished up I've been trying to figure out what to do with myself. A certain amount of de… Read More
2023-05-25 07:00
You pretty much have to have been living inside a farday cage with a stack of dead trees for company to have not heard anything about large language models taking the tech world by storm. W… Read More
2023-04-28 07:00
Note: There are some affiliate links in this post. You don't have to buy stuff with them if you don't want to.
One of the things I always wanted to build was a weather station. For some od… Read More
2023-04-04 07:00
Time and funds permitting, I try to go on retreat every year or two. I like driving someplace new, someplace I've never been before, and getting off the grid for a couple of days. I find t… Read More
2023-03-22 07:00
Early in October of 2022.ev, we paid a visit to an exhibit of artifacts at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco from the reign of Ramesses II, third ruler of the nineteenth dynasty of Egypt… Read More
2023-03-09 08:00
Warning: I'm going to be geeking about about science fiction to provide context for the rest of the post. Either skip to the bottom and page up a few times or close the tab. Also, the narr… Read More
2023-02-22 08:00
I'm back from Pittsburgh. I think everything's done. Somewhere in the back of my head I have things to write about and maybe some photographs to post. I don't have the brainpower to do th… Read More
2023-02-08 08:00
A very common problem one has if one has enough files stacked up in one place, is whether or not those files have been copied to another system already. Have they already been copied off?… Read More
2023-01-31 08:00
thousand meter stare - noun phrase - Watching multiple poorly designed dashboards jam packed with graphs, meters, gauges, and other barely useful metrics, day in and day out. If you imagine… Read More
2023-01-27 08:00
Fairly serious hardware hackers and makers like to post lists of all the gear they use for whatever it is they do (mostly the big-name Youtubers and bloggers who do a lot of retrotech work a… Read More
2023-01-23 08:00
If you've been following the news lately, undoubtedly you've heard one way or another that massive rounds of layoffs have been taking place. I got caught in one of them.1
If you're younger… Read More
2023-01-17 08:00
I try very hard not to pay too much attention to mercury in retrograde, mostly because I think it's a bad idea to name names too often because Things tend to hear them.
Who am I kidding. I… Read More
2023-01-06 08:00
A couple of years back, when we thought that the covid pandemic might actually be over someday I did some research on RFID blocking fabric to see if it was actually worth anything. Somewhat… Read More
2022-12-22 08:00
As I write this we're just a week or so shy of Christmas. It's been, to put it mildly, one hell of a year. Enough so that I've pretty much coasted into holiday break on fumes (again) and… Read More
2022-12-05 08:00
I apologize in advance for how disjointed this post seems. I've been tinkering with it off and on for a while, and I've come to the conclusion that there isn't strictly a linear narrative… Read More
2022-11-11 08:00
You might be wondering why I've been up on my bullshit about adblocking and web browsers lately. Privacy issues aside there's a story behind this (which, if you know me, should be entirely… Read More
2022-11-03 07:00
Note: As I wrote this article, I realized that there wasn't much in the way of actual tutorial documentation for some of this stuff. So, I'll be revisiting it in the near future to rewrite… Read More
2022-10-21 07:00
Over the summer of 2022.ev, scholar.social (a node of the Fediverse that has cultivated a community of teachers, instructors, librarians, and academics of all stripes) held their biannual on… Read More
2022-10-11 07:00
Note: I'm retraining on a new keyboard as I write this, so I apologize for any egregious typos in advance.
Over on birbsite a couple of weeks back a thread was spun up about your worst fucku… Read More
2022-09-06 07:00
Disclaimer: This blog post is not legal advice. Nothing in this post or my site in general are legal advice. I am not a lawyer. I just want to reassure folks who might be nervous about ju… Read More
2022-08-15 07:00
"The truth of the world is that is is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy, or the grey aliens, or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are… Read More
2022-07-14 07:00
"Well, my days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle."
--Mal Reynolds, Firefly
I've been relying heavily upon timed posts these last few weeks because my mental h… Read More
2022-07-07 07:00
Well, I've uploaded the latest version of my .plan file once again. All the usual warnings and advisories apply.
You know, at some point I'm going to run out of ways to signal that I've upd… Read More
2022-07-05 07:00
Yesterday M.Belanger mentioned over on birbsite putting together a 2022 GenX rage mixtape, which got me thinking along the same lines. Even though due to a number of factors, to be perfectl… Read More
2022-06-21 07:00
shark mode - noun phrase - The state in which a given piece of software is sufficiently developed that it doesn't really need any additional work, save to keep it working in more modern envi… Read More
2022-06-17 07:00
For reasons I don't quite understand I always equated growing up with situations where you can walk into someplace to do something, talk to someone, and immediately have a real conversation… Read More
2022-06-06 07:00
profit honeymoon - noun phrase - When the price of a barrel of oil goes up (or when something occurs that could eventually make it go up) the price at the pump goes up immediately. But when… Read More
2022-05-31 07:00
Strossian Nightmare - noun phrase - Where the Great Old Ones haven't taken control, but things have gotten so bad that you wish they had.
Source: @tautology Read More
2022-05-27 07:00
wad;dis - Working As Designed; Design Is Stupid
Source: Anonymous co-worker Read More
2022-05-18 07:00
follicular surveillance - when you use the "you are under surveillance" screens at self-service checkouts to check on the progress of your androgenic alopecia Read More
2022-05-13 07:00
Difficulty: Advanced.
One of these days I'll get around to doing a writeup of an indispensible part of my exocortex, Wallabag. I used it to replace my old paywall breaker program, largely b… Read More
2022-05-02 07:00
I flew back to Pennsylvania about two weeks ago to wrap up my mom's estate.
I'm really not sure how else to put it. It's short, to the point, but nothing at all like simple.
Lyssa and I fle… Read More
2022-04-20 07:00
I've been using Android phones for probably ten years now. Not because I have any particular loyalty to Google or the platform, but just because I can afford the phones. The last time I tr… Read More
2022-03-22 07:00
This might be a record. Two posts in a month.
Things seem to have calmed down a little so I've had more compute cycles free to do stuff. The last week at work was uncommonly... I don't wan… Read More
2022-03-08 08:00
This blog post best read while listening to this playlist.
I keep trying to figure out how to start this blog post. I've started, stopped, pondered, and taken a shower while thinking about… Read More
2022-02-08 08:00
Long time readers are probably familar with two things: Horror stories about my dental work, and my endless quest to find search software that'll let me make sense of my data hoard (because… Read More
2022-02-03 08:00
In the last couple of weeks, a meme has been going around the blogging community where people talk about the stuff they use on an everyday basis. So, I figured, why not. I write about ever… Read More
2022-01-27 08:00
Disclaimer: I'm not getting anything for these reviews. I haven't been asked to write them, I'm not being compensated for them, and I don't have an in with any of these companies. My Amazo… Read More
2022-01-12 08:00
As the title implies, my .plan file has broken the one megabyte barrier at long last:
{12:10:40 @ Thu Jan 06}
[drwho @ windbringer ~] () $ ls -alF .plan
.rw-r--r-- drwho drwho 1.0 MB Thu Jan… Read More
2022-01-07 08:00
pandemic fine - noun phrase - A state of being in which you are employed and healthy during a pandemic but you're also tired and depressed and feel like trash all the time.
Source: @sarahesm… Read More
2022-01-04 08:00
Note: The purpose of this post is mostly to document how to reconfigure laptops like my mom's to boot from a flash drive. The actual imaging process is only parenthetically laid out. If yo… Read More
2021-12-31 08:00
"Sometimes I think this whole 'growing up' thing is just pain management."
--The Maxx
Seems like a pretty cynical take on life, doesn't it? In a sense, it is; it comes across as somewhat… Read More
2021-12-21 08:00
This blog post is probably going to make less sense than usual. It's certainly going to be out of order semantically; I'll try to minimize the disjunctions as best I can and I apologize in… Read More
2021-12-06 08:00
I'm still here.
I have a post that hopefully doesn't suck too much in the works, but not enough compute cycles to work on it right now. Not a lot of hacking going on right now, either.
Thin… Read More
2021-11-03 07:00
Yesterday afternoon I took some time out to get a third vaccination, because I'm worried that the stress from everything going on, and all the travel I'm doing leaves me at greater risk of c… Read More
2021-10-15 07:00
The title pretty much says it all. If you want to punch out now, go right ahead.
There's no other way to put it. No polite way, no delicate way...
Cancer is neither polite nor delicate.
… Read More
2021-10-14 07:00
I've posted another update to my .plan file. As always, the usual warnings apply Read More
2021-10-12 07:00
Mom was moved to a hospice facility yesterday. Let's start there, because today's been a day.
Things were all over the place today. I had a good quote lined up to open this post with (it's… Read More
2021-10-11 07:00
Mom was moved to a hospice facility this afternoon. For how long, we don't know. We're supposed to meet with a social worker tomorrow morning to figure out what to do next. Technically sh… Read More
2021-10-10 07:00
Judy and I slept at mom's bedside in the hospital last night on recliners that the nursing staff was kind enough to bring in. Mom's fever spiked to 103 degrees Fahrenheit in the span of abo… Read More
2021-10-09 07:00
Someone asked me why these blog posts are always backdated. The reason is that I can't write about a day's that's happened until that day's... happened. Plus, if I wrote it up late at nigh… Read More
2021-10-08 07:00
Every time I sit down to work on this post, something else changes.
A long time ago, when my grandfather was taking care of my grandmother when she was in the hospital, he used to come home… Read More
2021-10-06 07:00
After things slowed down a bit at work over the summer, I finally took some advice given to me by a number of people in various capacities and took a vacation. When your boss orders you to… Read More
2021-10-03 07:00
Where was update #3? Right here.
As I write this, it's 1930 hours UTC-4 on 2 October 2021.
I am exhausted, fried, kind of in shock, and numb. My short term memory is shot to shit so I'm go… Read More
2021-10-01 07:00
I'm writing this after taking a nap on the 30th of September. Mom asked me to go home and get some rest because I was nodding off in my chair when visiting her, and it seemed prudent to do… Read More
2021-09-29 07:00
Yinz might want to block the tag "cancer" in my posts henceforth. I'll figure out later how to get Switchboard to add hashtags to my posts.
I really can't think of any other titles for thes… Read More
2021-09-29 07:00
I've spent the last couple of days trying to figure out how to write this post. And I'm not sure, even now if I know how to write this. I've been struggling with it for a couple of days an… Read More
2021-09-28 07:00
It is somewhat stereotypical that folks who didn't grow up with a lot of money or are considered lower class than whomever you happen to be tend to have bad teeth. Braces cost a lot; I don'… Read More
2021-09-16 07:00
Java was once the hottest thing since sliced bread. From the very beginning it was said to be platform independent (meaning, you could run it on Intel, Motorola, ARM, or whatever else you w… Read More
2021-09-07 07:00
It's been a while since I've written a technomancer tools article. In the intervening time some things have changed; I've discarded a few tools because they didn't really work for me, or I… Read More
2021-08-26 07:00
Not too long ago I got fed up with how good a job Duckduckgo's site search feature wasn't doing. No matter what I did I couldn't find dick around here. And, folksonomies being what they ar… Read More
2021-08-19 07:00
You might have seen on the news a couple of weeks ago a video of a guy on a bike sweeping a bunch of stuff off of a shelf into a garbage bag (local copy) (video.hackers.town) and exiting the… Read More
2021-08-05 07:00
If you've been to anyone's house in the last 20 years you've undoubtedly seen a bunch of stuff plugged into a power strip. Once found in office most of the time they've become as essential… Read More
2021-07-28 07:00
Some time ago I wrote up a minor project I'd done, rigging up Raspberry Pi OS to run on a Pi-Top. And then never revisited the post.
I think you can guess why. It didn't go very well.
Even… Read More
2021-07-15 07:00
Longtime readers have probably noticed that I have an interest in locksport, or picking locks for the fun of it. As you might imagine, this requires a good deal of buying locks to practice… Read More
2021-07-06 07:00
In monitoring the Searx Github repository because I'm a pretty heavy user of this software, I've noticed a common trend. Folks seem to have a hard time getting the automatic installation sc… Read More
2021-06-30 07:00
octopus mud wrestling - A situation where multiple conflicting problems and solutions come together to prevent anyone from accomplishing anything useful. Every possible step toward a soluti… Read More
2021-06-23 07:00
macgyver-sherlock effect - When it's far easier to improvise a solution to a problem than it is to find the people who're actually responsible for fixing it. A fairly normal state of affair… Read More
2021-06-15 07:00
It's been nearly a month since I've last had time to post anything here. Earlier I'd expressed hope that things would slow down and I'd have some compute cycles free to get my breath back… Read More
2021-05-17 07:00
Well, it's been a long couple of weeks since I've been able to post. Work has been eating me alive the entire time, but thankfully it's been leaving my wires alone so I at least have that m… Read More
2021-04-19 07:00
I'm still here. Still alive. No timed post this time.
Tired as hell because my work/life balance has gone to hell in a handbasket. I think over a year of covid has finally started to affe… Read More
2021-04-12 07:00
blank - noun - Someone who has scrubbed or never created any substantial presence on the Internet. No social media accounts (or deleted ones), no domains registered, no known e-mail address… Read More
2021-04-08 07:00
stop - adjective, humorous - Golang code written in a very un-Go-like style.
Example: "The data structure in the new protocol shim was written with a very stop design pattern." Read More
2021-04-05 07:00
For quite a few years I've written about strange and sundry things you can do with Huginn, but not a lot about what to do when you run into systemic limitations. The nice thing about Huginn… Read More
2021-03-24 07:00
A couple of jobs ago I worked in an electronics lab that had all the toys - from tool cabinets as tall as I am to anti-static gear all over the place (and ruthlessly enforced rules for makin… Read More
2021-03-10 08:00
I have updated my .plan file file for the first time in 2021.ev. The usual warnings and caveats apply Read More
2021-03-01 08:00
I used to joke that the day setting up a cross-compilation environment was easy we'd be one short step away from having true artificial general intelligence. For the most part neither has h… Read More
2021-02-25 08:00
Long time readers have probably read about some of the stuff I do with Searx and I hope that some of you have given some of them a try on your own. If you have you're probably wondering how… Read More
2021-02-15 08:00
Here we go again, this time 943 years.
This time, I got nothin'.
Many of the horrors of the last four years are over and not a few of us are sleeping much better, mostly because we have to s… Read More
2021-02-05 17:30
Note: The more I worked on this article, the most I realized that it needed to be split into two separate articles. There was more ground to cover here than I originally thought. This arti… Read More
2021-01-25 17:30
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the worst year in a long, long while was capped off by discovering that my car had been wrecked and towed without my knowing about it. I finally got th… Read More
2021-01-20 08:00
reality segmentation violation - noun phrase - A syndrome in which someone is so deep inside their own little world that any utterly mundane activity can provoke a combination of emotional u… Read More
2021-01-11 17:30
Note the first: I started working on this article last week, but didn't post it until now because I wanted to let all of the (usually astoundingly bad) hot takes die down. While I realize t… Read More
2021-01-05 17:00
Late last year I posted that I'd migrated my website to a new blogging package called Pelican, which is a static site generator. If you noticed that my site's been screamingly fast lately… Read More
2021-01-01 22:45
Well, happy friggin' new year, everyone. It's 2021.ev at last, the year when the Internet is supposed to look like this or something.
Of course it's never that easy. 2020.ev had one final… Read More
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